Shortly after looking at it in the library, he brought it to Paul Cohen at the Arkway in New York, but Cohen wasn’t interested in buying it. Smiley then called Harry Newman, telling him he was up the street and asking if he was interested in taking a look. Newman was excited—he’d never seen a copy of Fine’s map. “I’m going to take a cab,” said Smiley. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” When he got to the Old Print Shop and opened his portfolio, however, it was empty. In a panic, Smiley ran back outside to the street to see if the map had fallen out. It had started raining outside, and water sloshed in the gutter of Lexington Avenue as he searched, but there was no map to be found. He called Arkway, but Cohen told him the map wasn’t there either. Newman put out a call on the Internet for the map, asking anyone to contact him if it turned up somewhere at another dealer’s shop, but it never did. The map, valued at more than $40,000, was simply lost.
On his second trip to the Beinecke, he requested an even older book, by Hernán Cortés, the Spanish explorer who had led the conquest of Mexico. The book, published in 1524, had a map of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which has the distinction of being the first map made of any North American city. It is also the last map of Tenochtitlán. After Cortés completed his sketch, he burned the city to the ground. (The location is now the site of Mexico City.) Again, Smiley called Newman, who agreed to purchase the map. Even as Newman marveled over the rare find, he couldn’t help but notice the change that had come over Smiley. Gone was the enthusiastic, bombastic Smiley he had known. Now he seemed tired, beaten down, and distracted. Newman was concerned for his friend, but he never put together his appearance with the rare finds he was coming up with on a regular basis—assuming he was suffering from stress and poor health.
The truth was, no matter how much Smiley stole, he never seemed to have enough to cover his debts or alleviate the stress he felt. When he arrived at the Beinecke on June 8, 2005, he was in a virtual state of panic. He had already paid out more than $500,000 on the Vineyard house and owed at least $200,000 more. In order to make up that kind of money, he’d need a big score. The John Smith map of New England was an obvious choice. He could sell it easily and make up for the one he’d missed out on at Swann a few months before. But that map was probably worth only $50,000 to $60,000 at most.
To make a real dent in his debts, he’d need something truly rare. A few years earlier, Arkway had sold a copy of the world map from Speculum Orbis Terrarum by Gerard de Jode for $85,000. A pristine copy like the one in the Beinecke’s collection could fetch as much as $125,000. The day Smiley decided to take it, however, was also the day he dropped his razor on the floor—and the Beinecke’s staff already had him under surveillance.
—
WHEN I VISITED the Beinecke eight years later, in the summer of 2013, the guard opened a door labeled “Staff Only” and led me through a maze of corridors. This was the side of the library few patrons see—gone were the polished tables and glass cases full of books, replaced with metal lockers and drab walls. The guard led me into a control room outfitted with five huge flat-screen TVs on one wall, and a half-dozen computers beneath them. The screens were split into multiple camera shots; each table had a feed from directly overhead, and the guard showed me how she could zoom in close enough to practically read over a patron’s shoulder.
“None of this was here back then,” she said, referring to the day Smiley was caught stealing the de Jode map. “If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have this nice control room and we all wouldn’t have jobs,” she said jokingly. At that time, the library’s security cameras were pretty basic, pointed from a fixed position with no capacity to zoom. The guard cued up a tape on one of the monitors—the only one that will still play the old format—and there was Forbes Smiley sitting at the end of the table farthest from the circulation desk, with light streaming in through the courtyard windows. His white hair was cut short and thinning on top, and he was wearing a white shirt, skinny black tie, and silver wire-rimmed glasses.
As the tape started, Smiley was flipping rapidly through a weatherbeaten atlas propped on a foam support. After a few minutes, he closed the book and tied it up quickly and almost carelessly with string. He left for a few minutes before returning with another large book in a case. As the counter on the monitor read 50:00, he unfolded the case to reveal a heavy brown leather volume. He put both case and book down on the foam and flipped the pages one by one for twenty-seven seconds.
Finally, he arrived at the page he was looking for. In the corner was a “wind face”—one of the puffy-faced cherubs de Jode placed around the margins of his world map to label the names and directions of the winds. Smiley paused a moment, and then, so quickly as to be nearly imperceptible, he flicked his wrist to fold two pages of the map down in half. He closed the book immediately, holding it tight with one hand as he placed it spine-down on the table. With the other hand, he took the case off the foam supports.
For nearly a minute, the camera’s view was obscured by the back of a blond woman wearing a white tank top who seemed barely aware of Smiley. Then, at 51:06, he sighed and opened the book again to the title page, staring at it intently. At 51:21, his right hand slowly slipped under the pages to find the ones he had folded down before. At 51:36, he began to look around and make notes with his left hand, all the while his right was working beneath the page. This activity went on for nearly a minute, before, at 52:20, his right hand suddenly darted from beneath the page.
“See that! He’s got it now!” shouted one of several security guards who had gathered around the monitor to watch with me. But I had to rewind and play the tape several times to even see his hand move—never mind see the map, which was presumably now in his lap. At 52:45, he reached back over with his right hand as if to put his pencil in his blazer pocket. It was at that moment, perhaps, that he transferred the map to his pocket—though it remained invisible on the monitor.
From there, he only had to clean up. At 52:57, he began to intently pull little pieces of paper out of the center of the binding, making no attempt to hide his actions. He put a small pile of the paper pieces to the left side of the book, his hand shaking slightly. By this time, the curators and guards who had been watching him from the reader services desk must have seen his suspicious actions. At 54:00, a staff member walked by, and Smiley glanced up at her, then down again. After she passed, he furtively glanced back again before blowing his nose on his handkerchief and coughing.
At 54:27, his eyes darted again to the staff member, before he again wiped his nose with the handkerchief. Finally, at 55:05, he began turning the pages rapidly for several minutes as his hands continued to shake. At 57:10, he took the little pile of paper and put it in his left outside blazer pocket. Another staff member walked by; then at 1:00:00, he looked around, unfolded the case, and put the book back inside. He folded it up, then unfolded it again, checking again to make sure all remnants of paper were gone. He folded it again, then at 1:00:58, unfolded it one last time to check, before finally walking out of the monitor frame to return the book and leave the library.
Of course, he didn’t leave alone. Following close behind, Yale policeman Martin Buonfiglio was on his tail, finally catching up with him at the Yale Center for British Art and bringing him back to the Beinecke. Within a few hours, it was all over. Library staff had identified its map, and the Yale police had led Smiley off in handcuffs to be processed.
After feeling numb thoughout the arrest, thoughts finally began to filter back into Smiley’s consciousness as he sat in the cell that night. He could still get away with it, they said. Even if they found the one map, he could talk his way out of the others. He’d get a warning, maybe probation. And then he’d get out of the map business for good. Even as he considered those possibilities, however, darker thoughts crashed in. This could be very bad, they said. He could go to jail for a long time. He could owe people a lot of money. He could lose his reputation, his family, all the wo
rk he’d put into growing his business for twenty years. Then his mind would go numb again, and he’d stop thinking of anything at all.
Chapter 11
THE PLEA
FIGURE 15 SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN. “CARTE GÉOGRAPHIQUE DE LA NOUVELLE FRANSE.” PARIS, 1613.
2005–2006
THE DIRECTORY ON the building across from Boston’s City Hall had no listing to indicate it was home to the Boston Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, overseeing agency operations in four states. I rode the elevator up to the sixth floor, where two bored-looking officers led me through a metal detector, and a woman behind glass made me surrender my driver’s license and cell phone. Another agent took me into a cramped law library, where I met Special Agent Stephen J. Kelleher. He hardly seemed movie-stock G-man material. Short and gangly, with a shaved head, he wore jeans and a black polo with a shamrock-shaped badge reading “Boston FBI SWAT” on the chest.
“My supervisor came over one day and dropped a file on my desk—Yale has this thing and this guy stole some maps,” he recounted in a Boston accent. “Can you go check it out?”
The case hardly excited him. Prior to joining the FBI, Kelleher had worked as a patrolman in a working-class suburb of Providence, Rhode Island. He had his share of war stories—like the time a guy high on coke had gunned a Ford Explorer into him during a traffic stop and he had to fire a bullet at his assailant, hitting the hood of the car instead. Or the time during a domestic disturbance call, when he tackled a man holding a woman down on the ground with a knife at her throat—he earned a special award for that one.
Compared to those cases, this seemed routine. He drove from the New Haven field office to the Yale Police Department headquarters, and from there walked over to the Beinecke with Detective Martin Buonfiglio. There, they watched the videotape showing Smiley stealing the de Jode map, and looked at the maps Buonfiglio had recovered.
Despite the persuasive evidence, Kelleher saw a problem—there was a difference between Smiley having copies of maps the library was missing and proving Smiley had the missing maps. “You know, they weren’t cars with VIN numbers,” he told me. “Who knows how many copies there were, and when the last time was someone saw it in a book.” He couldn’t even use fingerprints from the crime scene, since Smiley had been given permission to handle the books. He explained all this to library staff as they looked together at de Jode’s world map and his atlas spread out on the table. “Is there anything you can show me to prove that this map came from this book?” he asked.
There was one thing, they said: wormholes. For centuries libraries had been plagued with wood-boring insects that laid their eggs in the stacks. When the larvae hatched, they used the digestive enzymes in their alimentary canals to chew through wood and paper, leaving behind a tiny trail. Somewhere in its 427-year history, the Beinecke’s copy of the Speculum had contracted its own case of pests. In the front of the book, a dozen pages sported a small constellation of three pin-sized holes near the bottom and another hole three inches up. Now, as the librarians laid the map carefully back into the volume, those holes matched identical holes in the edge of the map where it had been held in place (Figure 16). “That’s the first time I realized there were actually bookworms,” Kelleher told me. “Because I was never called a bookworm as a kid.”
FIGURE 16 WORMHOLES IN GERARD DE JODE’S SPECULUM ORBIS TERRARUM.
Those wormholes were as good as a fingerprint to Kelleher, proving the map came from that volume and making the theft a federal offense. Under the Theft of Major Artwork Act, passed a decade earlier, any cultural item stolen from a museum that was more than one hundred years old or worth more than $100,000 was a felony. The definition of “museum” was intentionally kept vague; with its display of a Gutenberg Bible in the mezzanine, the Beinecke qualified.
But the de Jode map was only one of eight maps recovered from Smiley that day—and the Beinecke claimed only four. Where did the other maps come from? Kelleher swore the staff to secrecy as he began to work the case, asking them to involve only those they needed to to identify the other maps. The librarians referred him to dealer Bill Reese, who had already been notified about the case and knew as much about the Beinecke’s collection as anyone. As Kelleher sat down to talk with him, Reese told him about his suspicions about Smiley dating back more than a decade.
Kelleher listened with rising concern. There was no telling how long Smiley had been stealing—and eight years as a beat cop had taught him that an offender rarely stopped after one crime. If Smiley stole from the Beinecke, he probably stole from other libraries too. On July 6, a month after Smiley’s arrest, Kelleher wrote a post to ExLibris, an e-mail Listserv dedicated to rare books, requesting that librarians examine their collections to determine if Smiley had been there and whether they were missing maps. If so, he wrote, they should contact him.
—
TWO DAYS LATER, on July 8, Smiley showed up at New Haven Superior Court for his first appearance, wearing khaki pants, a yellow tie, and his olive-checked blazer. On his way into the court, police surrounded him and announced that he was under arrest again. They took him to the station and formally charged him with larceny in the first degree for the theft of three of the four maps the Beinecke had identified as its own: the John Smith map of New England, a world map from Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, and a 1635 map of the Northwest Passage by Luke Foxe. Noticeably absent was the most valuable map stolen from the Beinecke that day, the de Jode map of the world. Kelleher was saving that for the feds.
After taking Smiley’s mug shot (Figure O), they brought him back to the courthouse, where Connecticut judge Richard Damiani set his bail at $175,000 and ordered his passport confiscated. Reporting a story a half hour from the courthouse, Hartford Courant reporter Kim Martineau got a call from her editor—a map collector himself who had heard about Smiley’s arrest from one of his dealers—sending her to the courthouse. She arrived just as Smiley was being led into the room, and filed an article that appeared in dozens of papers around the country.
Map dealers throughout the profession weighed in on the revelations. “You’re talking about Da Vinci with a carving knife,” said San Diego dealer Barry Ruderman. “You’re talking about a person who defiled the institutions that defined his existence.” Graham Arader gloated, telling the paper that he’d been warning people about Smiley since he started undercutting his prices in the early 1990s. “It made me crazy,” he said. “How can I compete with map dealers whose costs are zero?”
Smiley’s friend Scott Slater heard the news on National Public Radio. He was shocked by the allegations—but at least there was an explanation for his friend’s strange and controlling behavior of late. He began making calls to rally old friends from Derryfield and Hampshire, many of whom asked what they could do to help. Finally, he told his daughter Felicity. Now fifteen, she was hard hit by the truth about those magical summers in Sebec—that the gauzy fantasy “Uncle Forbes” created had been supported by crime.
Many of the residents in Sebec were similarly sent reeling by the unmasking of their Robin Hood; the employees of his shops began worrying what would happen to their jobs and the community he’d helped create. The Moriartys, on the other hand, celebrated—buying extra copies of the Hartford Courant to distribute to their neighbors and posting a copy of the article in the window of their marina, along with a copy of Smiley’s mug shot.
Alice Hudson was at her desk at the New York Public Library when she got a call with the news. She sat stunned, unable to breathe. If he was stealing from Yale, then she knew he must have also stolen from New York—from her. She thought of all the late nights he’d spent in the division organizing the Slaughter material. At the time, the long-planned renovations to Room 117 had finally begun, and for the past nine months Hudson’s division had been temporarily located in the genealogy department. Maps were everywhere, filed in unfamiliar cabinets and piled on unfa
miliar shelves—Smiley could have easily taken advantage of their vulnerabilities to steal any number of maps. She was going to have to resign, she thought. Either that, or any day she would get the call from her supervisor asking her to gather her things and leave the building.
At the Boston Public Library, the Leventhal Map Center’s new curator, Ron Grim, thought back to his experience when he had first arrived and seen so many call slips with Smiley’s name on the shelves. He called Kelleher immediately, speaking to him on July 8 as Smiley was appearing in court. Kelleher told him that it would be up to the libraries to determine what he stole—the bureau didn’t have the manpower. “Was he allowed to wear a sports jacket?” Kelleher asked. “Yes,” said Grim. Kelleher tried to console him. “He was just as friendly with the staff at other libraries as he was with you,” he said. “You shouldn’t consider yourself at fault.”
Kelleher began fielding calls from other libraries—including the New York Public Library, Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. As he spoke with each librarian, he began to realize how difficult the case could be. Some of the libraries, like the Beinecke, had electronic records of every item viewed. Others, like the Sterling, kept no records at all. To each curator, Kelleher explained that prosecutors would need hard evidence to prove their case—including catalog records, digital images, distinguishing marks—anything that could be used to prove that a specific copy of a map had come from their collection.
He wondered how many hours he’d have to spend in the next few months chasing leads that went nowhere. Just as he’d begun to worry, he got an unexpected call from Smiley’s attorney: Smiley, he said, wanted to cooperate.
—
WHEN SMILEY WAS first charged with theft, he was appointed a public defender, who optimistically told him he might be able to beat the charges. His friend Paul Statt, however, insisted he hire a private attorney—referring him to New Haven lawyer Dick Reeve. At their first meeting, according to Smiley, Reeve sat him down in his office and said two words: “You’re cooked.” The evidence against him was overwhelming, Reeve continued—maps in his briefcase, a surveillance tape of him stealing—and now the FBI was poking around with the probability of federal charges. “Now, what do you want me to do?” Reeve asked.
The Map Thief Page 20