The Map Thief

by Michael Blanding

  He laid out the options: Smiley could plead not guilty and make the FBI and US attorney prove each theft beyond a reasaonble doubt. They’d miss many of them, to be sure, but they were also sure to succeed in proving some of them. Or he could cooperate fully and hope that cooperation would win him some leniency from the feds at sentencing. “I want to make good on the harm that I’ve caused, and I don’t care what happens to me,” Smiley said, according to his later recollection. “I want the least possible harm to come to my family.”

  That meant cooperating fully and completely, warned his lawyer. If he held back any information, it could invalidate the entire deal. “Each and every time you talk to them, listen very carefully to what they are asking,” Reeve told him. “And try your best to answer.” The advice made Smiley nervous. For years, he’d been lying out of habit to nearly everyone, telling them what he thought they wanted to hear. How could he tell the truth now?

  For Kelleher, sitting down with Smiley was a devil’s bargain, but one he was willing to accept. He discussed it with the assistant US attorney on the case, Christopher “Kit” Schmeisser, who agreed that getting back more maps at the end of the day would be better than putting Smiley in prison for a long sentence while maps disappeared forever in some collection overseas. Schmeisser and Reeve drew up the outlines of a cooperation agreement—if Smiley provided substantial information to recover the maps, the government would argue for leniency.

  Kelleher began by sitting down with Smiley to construct a list of what he’d stolen, detailing the maps, the libraries from which he’d taken them, and the dealers to whom he’d sold them. From years of dealing with criminals, Kelleher knew that even when they cooperated, they rarely confessed everything—at least at first. The game was to convince them that you already knew more than they realized. As Smiley sat across the table, he poured out details about how he got into the profession, how he’d built up the Leventhal and Slaughter Collections, and how he harbored resentments against other dealers and libraries that never gave him the credit he deserved.

  Kelleher listened patiently but kept steering him back to the real issue—what had he stolen? Everything else to him was just noise. Early on in the investigation, Smiley turned over his computer, and the agents pored over his records and e-mails but found little solid evidence there. He worked alone, Smiley insisted, keeping no records of his sales. In most cases, he told them, the maps just fell out of the books; in others, he ripped them out or used a razor blade. After he brought the maps home, he often trimmed margins and scraped off library marks to obscure their origins.

  Kelleher decided not to subject Smiley to a polygraph test; they have been shown in studies to have mixed effectiveness. (The US Supreme Court has invalidated their use in criminal investigations; now they are often used to compel subjects to confess rather than measure whether someone is telling the truth.) As he looked at the list Smiley had put together, he realized that his task would be even more difficult than he’d anticipated. Many of the maps had obscure names or could be attributed to more than one author. Some came from books or atlases, while others were single sheets. And while Smiley had total recall of some, for others he could only remember partial information—from where he stole them or to whom he’d sold them, but not both.

  At least Smiley appeared to Kelleher to be genuinely remorseful for what he had done. He seemed committed to making this list his last great collection—one he’d be building for the federal government.

  —

  AT THE SAME TIME Smiley was putting together his list for Kelleher, the libraries were putting together their own lists, combing through what records they had to determine which maps Smiley had looked at and which ones were now missing. At the BPL, which had no computerized records of requests, Ron Grim and his staff had to page through thousands of call slips, organized by date, in order to find those with Smiley’s name on them. Then they had to go to the card catalog to determine which maps should be in a given book and which ones actually were. For single-sheet maps, the librarians had to go through whole drawers of dozens of maps in order to determine what was missing.

  “On the positive side, I always said it forced me to learn the collection a lot sooner than I would have,” Grim later joked. The process took two months and one hundred hours of staff members’ time. After the first month, the staff had found ten items missing from six volumes, including three maps from Purchas His Pilgrimes and two from Theodor de Bry’s Voyages. The Beinecke, which had recently moved to a computerized system, found a dozen missing maps.

  The Newberry Library in Chicago, which Smiley had visited twice in the last five years, identified four books he’d checked out, two of which were missing maps. One, torn from an English edition of Mercator’s Atlas, was a bad copy of John Smith’s map of Virginia by Englishman Ralph Hall, who had decorated it freely with animals and sea monsters. The other was a 1695 map of the South Carolina coast by John Thornton. The library went public with its findings to the Chicago Tribune. “He’s the lowest of the low,” the Newberry’s president, Charles Cullen, said of Smiley. “He deserves to have the book thrown at him.”

  The Newberry’s head curator, Bob Karrow, made a plea for other libraries to be similarly forthcoming about their missing items. “Full disclosure will be embarrassing, perhaps highly embarrassing for institutions and individuals, but in our hearts we all know that the world of antiquarian dealers, libraries, and collectors, like the larger world of scholarship to which it directly contributes, is a world ultimately sustained by trust,” he wrote on a map community Listserv. “We must begin now to restore that trust by telling what we know when we know it and letting the chips fall where they may.”

  One institution that gladly took up the call was the British Library in London, which released a list of three maps that it suspected Smiley of taking, including a 1624 map of maritime Canada by Sir William Alexander and a 1578 woodcut map of the world by George Best. The last map the library reported missing was by far the most valuable. A 1520 world map by Peter Apian, it had been copied from Martin Waldseemüller’s famous world map of 1507 and could be worth more than $100,000.

  But the provenance of this map made it more valuable still—it originally came from a book owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who was burned at the stake by Henry VIII. The volume had the initials “T.C.” lightly written inside its vellum-bound cover, and two copies of the Apian map—one folding out a few pages after the title page, and another, lighter impression about halfway through the book. Now the second copy was gone. The only person who had looked at all these books was Smiley, who had checked out the Best book on June 4, 2004; the Alexander book the following day, June 5, 2004; and the Apian book on March 5, 2005.

  Boston Public also went public with its findings in early August. The other three libraries—New York, Harvard, and Yale—all maintained their silence. Except for talking privately with the feds, Smiley, too, kept quiet, refusing to respond to newspaper requests for comment. His home on the Vineyard sat half-finished behind a screen of trees, with piles of dirt still in the driveway left from the workmen. By that point, Pizzano figured he was owed more than $200,000 on the work. He left the power and water on in the house so Smiley, Lisa, and their five-year-old son, Ned, could move in.

  The only time Smiley spoke publicly was on August 9, 2005, when he appeared in state court in New Haven to finally respond to the charges against him. He stood at the defendant stand, nervously stating his age as fifty before the clerk corrected him, saying he was still forty-nine. Finally, he was asked to respond to three charges of theft. When asked for his plea, he hesitated and looked over at Reeve before quietly saying, “Not guilty.” After the arraignment, he and Reeve walked briskly to an elevator, trailed by a pack of reporters from publications ranging from The New Yorker to the Cape Cod Times. Smiley couldn’t help grinning as Reeve kept repeating, “No comment,” to their questions.

 
—

  IN MID-JULY, most of the major map dealers, curators, and collectors convened in Budapest for the biannual International Conference on the History of Cartography. Smiley was the main topic, with conference-goers trading scant scraps of information and speculating on how far his crimes went. This was no petty thief like Gilbert Bland, pillaging historical societies for $100 maps; this was a known and trusted member of their own community. Rumors swirled about why he had snapped. One going around was that his son had heart trouble, and because Smiley didn’t have insurance, he turned to stealing out of desperation.

  Another rumor was that Smiley had gotten into a bind with one of his clients, Barry MacLean. Instead of selling him authentic antiquarian maps, he had sold him several nineteenth-century facsimiles. When MacLean found out, he told Smiley that he wouldn’t press charges if he returned his money—or gave him the authentic maps. Somehow, Smiley came up with the real maps. I personally heard several versions of this story from different dealers, most of whom trace it back to Smiley’s former assistant, Ashley Baynton-Williams. But he won’t comment on it, and neither will MacLean, who declined to speak with me.

  Some dealers were harder hit than others. Most affected of all was Harry Newman, who had looked up to Smiley professionally, considered him a friend, and even vacationed with him once in Sebec. “The professional betrayal was one thing, but the personal betrayal was worse,” he told me. “It just shook my soul.” As dealers started comparing notes, they realized how many rare maps Smiley had been coming up with in past years—had they shared information earlier, they might have connected the dots.

  As news began to trickle out that more libraries were affected, some collectors cried out publicly for all the libraries and dealers to come clean. The loudest cries came from Tony Campbell, the former head librarian at the British Library, who had called for a central database of stolen maps after the Gilbert Bland case. Now he facilitated the web page and discussion list MapHist, the unofficial clearinghouse for the trade, and used his bully pulpit to push for change.

  In a long open letter to the community called “Issues Arising out of the Smiley Affair,” he chastised his colleagues for not learning the lessons from Gilbert Bland and other thieves. The very nature of books with maps in them made them vulnerable to theft, he wrote. “Steal one page from a first folio of Shakespeare, and you have nothing of value; slip into your jacket pocket a single sheet from a book with an early map of North America on it and you may have a readily saleable, broadly untraceable, artifact worth up to six figures.”

  The only way libraries could prevent this from happening in the future was sharing information—their reflexive silence about missing materials made them vulnerable to a thief who knew what to target. They needed to work together to identify the most valuable materials and make sure they were cataloged before a theft could occur. And after thefts did occur, they needed to circulate the missing items in a master list so dealers could know what to watch out for. Publicly, libraries protested Campbell’s post, arguing they didn’t have the resources for the kind of intensive cataloging that would be required. Privately, however, the librarians at all of the institutions had been frantically searching through their collections during the summer and now were ready to share with one another.

  On August 28, 2005, representatives of nearly all the affected libraries filed into the third-floor trustees’ room at the Boston Public Library for the first meeting of what Grim, with gallows humor, called the “Smiley Victims Support Group.” Calling the meeting to order, he introduced Norman Leventhal, who now served as the honorary chair of the Leventhal Map Center. “I want to personally thank everyone for coming to this meeting,” he said. “I’m delighted to see so many of the curators with whom I’ve had such wonderful relationships and associations in the world of maps over the past twenty years.”

  After that, he turned the floor over to Kit Schmeisser, the assistant US attorney who was heading up the investigation. “I am authorized to state that Mr. Smiley is cooperating fully with the investigation, and is providing information on what items he has taken,” he said, adding sternly, “Mr. Smiley is providing information on items that the various institutions would not be able to establish he has taken because of record-keeping problems.” It was important in the meantime, he said, that the libraries not talk to the press, warning it could hamper their ability to recover maps if they did.

  After Schmeisser sat down, each of the librarians stood up in turn to share their experiences. By now, Grim had completed his own review of the materials Smiley had viewed at the BPL, and the results were worse than he could have imagined. In all, more than sixty maps were found to be missing from twenty-five books that Smiley had examined—and some of the losses were devastating. Among the worst was a 1613 edition of Samuel de Champlain’s Voyages that was missing both of the crucial maps of Canada (Figure 15). Almost as heartbreaking were four maps pillaged from Thomas Jefferys’s American Atlas—the volume that contained many of the foundational maps of America after the French and Indian War. There were the three maps from Sir Robert Dudley’s Dell’Arcano del Mare, sliced through with a single cut. There were the four editions of The American Pilot by John and William Norman, missing seven charts among them.

  Smiley had looked at all of the books—sometimes multiple times—between the late 1990s and 2005. What’s more, few other people had looked at them. Only fourteen people combined had looked at all twenty-five of the books, mostly only once per book. With some books, including the Champlain and the Dudley, Smiley was the only reader during that period. Grim sent the list to the FBI and awaited a response.

  —

  IN THE FOUR MONTHS since Kelleher had started his investigation, he had received quite a cartographic education. After receiving the list of stolen maps from Smiley, he contacted the dealers he’d mentioned, including Arkway, Newman, and Burden, and asked them to provide a record of any maps Smiley had sold them. By law, it is illegal to pass on stolen goods, if it can be proven they are stolen. But with scant hard evidence in this case, he’d have to rely on the dealers’ cooperation for any hope of recovering the maps Smiley had sold.

  This request put the dealers in a bind. They had paid Smiley for the maps and resold them to collectors. If they were going to get them back, they would have to pay back the collectors, swallowing the loss. Kelleher promised that in return for their cooperation, he wouldn’t contact any collectors directly or publicly name the dealers themselves. Implicit in that promise was a threat: If they didn’t cooperate, the FBI would identify them, associating them with stolen goods. All three dealers—as well as a handful of smaller dealers—acquiesced, providing the agent with records of everything they had bought from Smiley for the last five years.

  Comparing it against Smiley’s list, Kelleher asked the dealers to recover particular maps for examination. Newman was asked to supply nineteen, including the Bonner plan of Boston from 1743, which he’d bought from Smiley back in 2002 and then advertised prominently in his catalog. He couldn’t believe it. There were only five copies of that state in the world. How could Yale not have known its copy was missing?

  As much as some dealers blamed the libraries, others in the map community blamed dealers for not being more diligent in determining provenance. By now, Arader was loudly asserting that he’d been alerting the map trade to Smiley’s thefts ever since Smiley started in the business in 1985. “I’ve been telling everybody that Forbes is a crook for 20 years, and everybody says to me, ‘You just think the only good maps are the ones you have,’” Graham Arader told The New York Times. “I’m not a bag lady walking down Madison Avenue with a grocery cart filled with bottles. I’m the oracle that was ignored.”

  On October 26, 2005, the US Attorney’s Office faxed a list of maps to the Boston Police that Smiley had admitted taking from the BPL. When Grim saw it, his heart sank. Despite the sixty or so maps that the library’s review had identified, t
he FBI list included only twenty-seven. Many of them were familiar—the two maps from de Jode’s Speculum Orbis Terrae, the three Dudley charts, four of the seven Norman charts. But there were some noticeable—and devastating—omissions. The Champlain maps were absent, as were the maps from de Bry and Purchas. And some books, including the Jefferys atlas and the copies of The American Pilot, were missing many more maps than Smiley admitted stealing.

  On the other hand, Smiley identified maps the libraries didn’t even know they were missing. One from the BPL he listed only as a portolan chart of the Atlantic from 1670. Grim was confused. Most portolan charts dated from centuries earlier and covered only small areas of the Mediterranean. Seeing that Smiley said he’d sold it to Arkway, Grim scanned the dealer’s catalogs, immediately seeing a map of the Atlantic on the cover of his catalog from 2003. It was crisscrossed with rhumb lines emanating from a central wind rose, just like a portolan chart. The catalog identified it as a “legendary sea chart on vellum” printed by Hendrick Doncker in 1657, with an asking price of $115,000.

  Thinking this might be the “portolan chart,” Grim went searching for any record that the library might have once had the map in its collection. Neither the card catalog nor the shelf list kept in the back room contained any mention of the map. Finally, he dug up a copy of the shelf list on microfiche and found a card listing “Doncker, H. West-Indische paskaert” from 1655. Returning to Smiley’s call slips, he found a single slip dated September 13, 2003, for the range of maps including the chart—it must have been then that Smiley took it.