His friends noticed the changes too. Whereas before Smiley would always be gracious and generous, he now seemed secretive and controlling. During the annual Columbus Day Boys’ Weekends in Sebec, he arranged every meal and activity, getting upset when anyone deviated from the schedule. The “Squire” nickname Slater had given him now seemed to apply in earnest. By the fall of 2002, the weekends didn’t seem the same anymore. The men divided into factions, with Slater, Fischer, and von Elgg hanging out together and only Paul Statt sticking by his oldest friend.
But even Statt noticed a change, especially since Smiley’s heart surgery in 1998. Smiley had become difficult, more guarded in conversations and less forthcoming with details about his life. The one thing Statt had always loved about Smiley was his ability to turn his life into a fascinating story—even if that meant straining a bit at the truth. Now he just seemed like he had something to hide. Sometimes he would hint darkly that if he told Statt the whole truth about his business, he’d never believe it—but Statt took that to refer to the crooked dealings of the trade, not anything criminal on Smiley’s part.
He became increasingly stubborn in his dealings in Sebec as well, putting more pressure on himself to “win.” Despite letter after letter from the town’s board of selectmen, Smiley refused to respond to requests to deal with the parking issue at his shops. The October deadline set by the town came and went, and another site visit by Murphy found that Smiley still hadn’t gotten rid of the extra parking spaces. In February 2004, he was issued an official violation. By March, selectman Buzz Small was visibly frustrated, sputtering at a meeting, “What can we do? Do we put them in jail for noncompliance? Can we shut them down?”
Even as the town waited for Smiley to act, he and his supporters were waiting to be vindicated by the ruling of the county court. Finally, on March 25, 2004, Superior Court Justice Nancy Mills handed down her decision. The Moriartys’ permit, she wrote, was “legal, supported by substantial evidence on the record and does not indicate any abuse of discretion.” Furthermore, she said, “there is no evidence of bad faith on the part of the Moriartys.” It was a complete victory for the town—and the Moriartys. “I would just like to express how pleased I am with the outcome,” Charlene Moriarty said publicly at the next selectmen’s meeting. “I hope that we can now try to work toward a positive goal in the village.”
The situation now was worse than ever for Smiley and his supporters. Not only would the Moriartys be able to operate their business, but the Sebec Village Shops were in danger of being shut down. Several of Smiley’s employees wrote an open letter to the local paper in his defense. “Through the vision of our employer and his countless dollars of investment, a little oasis has been created,” they wrote. “We are lucky to have one of the few folks in our midst that wants to do something right ‘just because.’ He thought that central Maine would be a good place for this venture because we are in need of jobs, and a sense of community spirit.”
Whatever his intentions in establishing that spirit, he’d done the opposite, turning the community into a morass of feuding neighbors and legal complaints. Smiley returned to Sebec for the summer of 2004 dejected, knowing he’d ruined the very paradise he’d hoped to protect. He spent the season struggling to find a way to win in what was clearly a hopeless cause, continuing to ignore the calls from selectmen to bring his property in line. They began issuing fines but allowed the stores to stay open out of respect for the jobs they created.
As for the Moriartys, despite their victory, they continued to look for ways to punish Smiley. They put plans in place to build a new garage on their property by the lake. When finished, it would perfectly block the view of the lake from the Sebec Village Café. Later, Charlene Moriarty joined the garden club, and one day in the middle of summer Smiley woke to the sounds of a bulldozer in front of his house. By rights, the town owned the boat landing in front of his property, which for years had been overgrown with smoke bush that screened Smiley’s house from the lake.
Now the town had voted to “beautify” the area, allowing the Sebec Garden Club to remove the shrubbery, plant new grass, and erect an American flag at the landing. Smiley stood at his kitchen window helplessly watching the bulldozers tear through the vegetation, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it. He grabbed a digital camera and took pictures through the window, one after another, all capturing the same image: the bulldozer by the lake, tearing up his land.
As soon as it was gone, Smiley packed his family into their car and drove away, leaving Sebec behind.
—
THOUGH HIS FIGHT in Maine was over, he only increased his pace of stealing in order to pay for his continuing debts. Among his targets now was the building where he’d first become a map lover, the New York Public Library. If he had any qualms about ransacking his onetime temple, he suppressed them. Access couldn’t have been easier. Readers in the map room were required to fill out a separate call slip for each item they wanted to view. But after all the hours Smiley had spent organizing the Slaughter Collection, Hudson and the other staff gave him the leeway they’d give a colleague.
As at Yale, Smiley requested an entire folder on one call slip, saying he had to compare several maps at once. Invariably, he took them to the same table he used to work on the Slaughter maps—the one farthest from the circulation desk. It was easy enough to find a moment when a staff member was answering the phone or helping another patron to fold up a sheet. No one asked him to present his belongings for inspection on the way out. Here he could easily fold up a map and put it in his briefcase with others he’d brought with him, and then walk out without suspicion.
He became increasingly brazen in the maps he stole, including some of enormous size. One, John Melish’s 1816 map of the United States, was nearly three feet high and five feet wide. The map shows the outline of a country recognizable as the United States, but with the West left practically blank, waiting for manifest destiny to fill in the details (Figure 14). It’s the kind of map that even a non–map lover might covet for his living room. The map is backed on linen squares, each one measuring about half the size of an eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch piece of paper, with small folds between them. Smiley could fold the map into a tight packet and conceal it in a stack of papers or his briefcase.
Another map—of North Carolina by John Collet—was nearly as large, but it was printed on two sheets without folds. Smiley must have had to create folds for himself, then iron them out later for mounting and sale. The library’s staff never suspected such large materials were missing. Smiley sold the Collet map to a dealer, who resold it to San Diego map dealer Barry Ruderman. At the Miami map fair that year, Ruderman displayed it framed in his booth, and Smiley and Alice Hudson stood admiring it together. Ruderman listened in as the two discussed how it was one of the rarest and most important maps of the region, done just before the Revolutionary War. “We have an excellent copy of that in our collection,” Hudson said, as Smiley nodded.
Unbeknownst to Hudson at the time, Smiley had also taken another map she treasured—the John Thornton map of “East and West New Jarsey” she had chosen for her contribution to the Mercator Society’s first book nearly two decades earlier. At the same time, he defaced some of the atlases he had used to learn about antiquarian mapmaking, tearing pages from Des Barres’s maritime atlas and William Faden’s Revolutionary War atlas. Not content with just stealing from the map room, he also made his way upstairs to the rare-books collection on the library’s third floor, where, among other books, he ransacked two editions of Samuel de Champlain’s Voyages for their maps.
Even as he was stealing, Smiley continued to compete on the auction floor. At one auction at Swann Galleries in New York on December 9, 2004, a rare copy of John Smith’s map of New England came up for sale. The copy was the fifth state of the map, circa 1626, and was expected to fetch between $15,000 and $25,000. Smiley bid hard for it, watching as the price climbed above $30
,000. Eventually, there were two bidders left, Smiley and a phone bidder. Finally, Smiley dropped out of the running, and the other bidder purchased the map for $36,000 plus 15 percent commission, for a total of $41,400. Though he didn’t know it at the time, the other bidder was Graham Arader—who had beaten him once again.
The victory was particularly sweet for Arader when he found out about it. Lately, he’d become strident in his criticisms of Smiley. In an e-mail to a client in January 2005, he railed against his rival. “Forbes doesn’t advertise, do shows, issue a catalogue, his checks bounce, he rarely buys at auction, no collectors I know will have anything to do with him,” he wrote. “He is a crook. A very bright guy with knowledge, but there is NO WAY that he can be getting these maps legally. He stinks.” The collector defended his decision to continue doing business with Smiley. “You need to get beyond your own ego on this and see that it is possible that every other dealer is not a crook or a thief and only you the safe harbor of true value.”
—
EVEN WHILE SMILEY was struggling to succeed, both legally and illegally, in the map business, he was looking for his own “safe harbor” to replace the one he’d lost in Sebec—a new statement project that could demonstrate his success and provide a refuge for his family. Lisa had long wanted to tear down their dark Vineyard cottage and build a modern home, and Smiley finally gave her his blessing. The Smileys demolished the home in the summer of 2004, moving into a small one-room studio on the property. That November, they signed a contract with local contractor David Pizzano to build a house designed by Resolution: 4 Architecture, a New York–based architectural firm that specializes in stylish modular homes.
Watching from afar, his friends Paul Statt and Scott Slater thought it seemed foolish, even for Smiley, to embark on such a big project so soon after the bruising fight in Sebec. But he threw himself into creating a new home on the Vineyard with all the energy he’d put into Maine. The up-island town of Chilmark was wealthy, but it also retained enough small-town atmosphere to make it feel like a real community, with a quaint general store on the corner and a clam shack down by the water for a local hangout.
One thing it lacked was other families with young children. Now that Smiley’s son was approaching school age, Smiley took new interest in the school, which was designed for one hundred students but had an enrollment of only forty-six. To increase enrollment, a group of residents proposed building a private preschool to act as a feeder into the elementary school and make the town more welcoming to young families. Smiley helped organize the group and signed on as its business agent and secretary, raising money for the school and contributing some himself.
Though he was only forty-eight years old, he began looking for an exit strategy from the high-stress world of map dealing. But he had to hold on a little longer, to finish the new home and establish himself in the community before planning his next move. He’d gotten too used to high-end living, too used to projecting the image of himself as a successful map dealer, to give it all up now. The pressure of maintaining that life, however, was taking its toll on his body. His back began seizing up on him, making it painful to move or even stand for long periods of time. He had trouble sleeping too, waking up with nightmares and finding himself unable to go back to bed.
Smiley’s new modular home arrived in nine parts in February 2005, hauled on a barge from Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Chilmark harbor. It was such an unusual sight, one of the local papers featured a photo on the front page. As construction began, Smiley wrote a letter to the editor apologizing for the unsightliness in a strangely passive voice. “Due to certain delays in the construction process, our new residence . . . has been left naked to the scrutiny of all passersby,” he wrote. “Please be assured that, as soon as possible, our plans to face this building in old stone and screen it heavily to the road will be accomplished.”
The truth was, however, that Smiley was overextended again. According to their contractor, Pizzano, the Smileys had ordered a $105,000 kitchen from Italy and spent $20,000 on flooring alone. When Pizzano suggested they cover the outside with fake stone, Smiley told him there was no way he was going to have imitation materials on his house—it would have to be real stone, a decision that added $250,000 to the construction cost. “Money was no object,” Pizzano later remembered. “I was billing him monthly for forty, eighty, ninety thousand dollars.” As Smiley struggled to keep up with the cost, the home remained a mess of tar-paper siding, with pallets full of construction materials strewn about the dirt driveway.
And even though he’d left Sebec, planning never to return, he was still supporting payroll up in Maine through the slow winter months, all the while paying tens of thousands for the new home on the Vineyard. That January, the government filed a tax lien for $57,063 on his property. The only way he could see to get out from under was to increase the pace of this thefts.
—
THAT PREVIOUS SUMMER, the Boston Public Library had officially launched the new Norman B. Leventhal Map Center. As its first curator, it appointed Ron Grim, who was previously a map history specialist at the Library of Congress. Short and genial with owlish spectacles, Grim was the perfect person for the job, displaying an infectious enthusiasm for cartographic history. When he first arrived in Boston, he began going through the shelves to familiarize himself with the collection, noting the call slips that provided a record of who had used each item. Smiley’s name came up over and over. Smiley knows this collection better than I do, he thought.
He had no idea at the time that Smiley had been using his knowledge to systematically dismantle it. Among the rarest of all the treasures in the new map center were several copies of The American Pilot, a collection of sea charts by John Norman and his son William that was the American answer to the The English Pilot, The Fourth Book. The sea atlas was continually updated in the decades after the Revolution, guiding the clipper ships from Boston and New York that finally led to the American dominance of Atlantic trade. As with any maritime atlas, however, the books were in constant use aboard the rolling decks of merchant vessels, leading to their rapid deterioration.
Only ten copies of The American Pilot were known to have survived, and Boston had four of them—one from 1794, two from 1798, and one from 1816. Smiley examined the last copy multiple times, including in December 2004 and January 2005. On one of those occasions, he tore out a chart of Florida and the Bahamas and took it down to New York to show his friend Harry Newman at the Old Print Shop. Even by 1816, Florida was still relatively uncharted territory. Smiley showed Newman where the mapmaker had copied from other English charts and where he had added new information from an American ship captain. Newman was happy to purchase it.
That fall, he went to Boston to view another sea atlas, The Atlantic Neptune of J.F.W. Des Barres. A few months later, in February 2005, he sold a chart of Charleston, South Carolina, from the book to Burden. Later that spring, Grim met Smiley for the first and only time. When one of his colleagues mentioned that Smiley was in the rare-book room, Grim went over to say hello and the two got into a spirited discussion about a map Smiley was viewing. Around the same time, Smiley sent Grim a check for $1,000 to preserve another map from the Des Barres volume, this one of Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps he sent it out of guilt, or simply to keep up the impression that he was a wealthy map dealer and benefactor—or maybe he was planning his next theft. Whatever his motive, the check bounced.
While he was up in Boston that spring, Smiley also headed across the Charles River to Harvard University. He avoided the Harvard Map Collection, the basement repository where Mapping Boston author David Cobb served as curator, and targeted Harvard’s rare-book library, Houghton Library, instead. Perhaps he felt the curators there would be less likely to know which maps they had tucked inside their books. Sitting beneath portraits of past Harvard presidents, he requested a copy of Champlain’s Voyages, along with travelogues from several other French explorers that also contain
ed maps of New France.
During one of his visits there, he took out a copy of Hubbard’s book about the New England Indian wars, containing John Foster’s map of New England. It’s this map that, in its London printing, famously includes the “Wine Hills” typo. Harvard, however, had two copies of the book with the rare Boston printing of the map with the correctly labeled “White Hills.” The library’s catalog, however, listed the map in only one of them, erroneously listing the other as missing. When Smiley found the map inside, he slipped it out, making the listing accurate. It was the same map that Bill Reese had suspected Smiley of stealing from the Beinecke back in the 1990s. It’s ironic then, that it was in his briefcase when he visited the Beinecke that spring.
Smiley had avoided going to the Beinecke for years—perhaps due to the bad taste left in his mouth after that incident with Reese. That May, however, he visited twice. On one trip, he requested a rare book by German geographer Johann Huttich dating all the way back to 1532. He opened the white vellum cover and turned stiff, crinkly pages filled with Latin text until he came to what he was looking for: an unusual “double-cordiform” map of the world by French cartographer Oronce Fine that represented each hemisphere in a unusual heart-shaped projection.
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