The Map Thief

by Michael Blanding

  The FBI also told Grim that there was one map of the Chesapeake they were not be able to recover—since the BPL was missing several maps of that region, Grim had no idea which one they were talking about. In a private e-mail to Tony Campbell, he expressed his frustration. “Throughout this whole process, we have gotten very sketchy information from the FBI,” he wrote.

  —

  WHILE MOST OF THE LIBRARIES were able to check their holdings fairly quickly, the Sterling Memorial Library had no records at all of what Smiley had examined there. Over the years, most of the map department’s rarest atlases had been shifted to the Beinecke—along with the funds to support them. Up until 2001, the department had only three employees—a curator, an assistant, and a part-time cataloger. As a result, only a quarter of its eleven thousand rare maps had been put into an electronic catalog. When news broke of Smiley’s arrest, all the Sterling had was the list of maps Margit Kaye had put together from Smiley’s website. In the months that followed, her boss, Fred Musto, continued to stall on conducting a more thorough inventory. Finally, the university transferred him to another department and promoted one of the assistants in the map room, Abe Parrish, to acting curator.

  Parrish had been hired in 2001 as a geographic information systems specialist, dealing with digital rather than paper maps. But prior to this position, he’d spent time in the army as an intelligence analyst and had experience in sifting through complex information. The university also brought in Bill Reese to help with the investigation. They started by going through Musto’s office, which they found stuffed with maps stacked on shelves and file cabinets. More disturbing, they found thirty card catalog cards in his desk drawer for maps that appeared to be missing. Had Musto been covering up missing maps? Or something worse? They alerted the administration of their finds. That November, the library fired Fred Musto, citing “gross mismanagement,” though he was never officially charged with any wrongdoing.

  Reese started the inventory by listing one hundred maps that Smiley was likely to steal based on his specialty of the early mapping of North America. It was then up to Margit Kaye, who knew the collection better than anyone else, to determine whether the library had ever had them. Knowing how unreliable the current card catalog was, she turned to the microfiche copy of the catalog from 1978 to check for the maps. And there was another record as well—a box of cards Vietor had kept of all the maps he had acquired for the collection until his retirement in 1978, organized by year. They remained locked in a cage on the seventh floor, organized chronologically by date purchased. Going through them one by one looking for the maps Reese specified, the Sterling’s staff was able to identify some fifty maps missing from the collection by August. There was only one way to truly determine everything that was missing, however—by examining all of the eleven thousand rare maps in the collection and comparing them to the record.

  To do the thorough inventory, the entire map department shut down, and for three months, Parrish, Kaye, Reese, and a team of a dozen other employees went through the collection map by map. Much of the work fell on Kaye, who stayed late each night comparing the contents of folders to printed microfiche cards. Whenever someone found a map missing, it was added to a master list. By the time the inventory was complete in mid-February, the initial list had grown to eighty-nine maps in all. Some seemed unlikely targets for Smiley—including a half-dozen nineteenth-century maps of Japan—but most were by English and American mapmakers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exactly the kind of maps Smiley traded in.

  When the FBI sent the Sterling its list of the maps Smiley admitted taking, however, it included only eleven. In all, the library had found eight times as many maps missing from its collection. The only problem was that it had no proof Smiley had taken them—and time was quickly running out to come up with it.

  —

  BY THE SPRING OF 2006, Kelleher was eager to wrap up his case. After a year of back-and-forth with the libraries, he was ready to put together a definitive list of maps Smiley had stolen. Federal judge Janet Bond Arterton set a judgment date for June 22, just over a year from the day after Smiley had been arrested. Smiley flew from the Vineyard to Providence, where Statt picked him up at the airport and drove him to New Haven. Smiley took the elevator up to the sixth floor and entered the courtroom at three P.M., wearing his favorite olive jacket over a blue oxford shirt and patterned navy-blue tie.

  Assistant US Attorney Kit Schmeisser stood up to announce that Smiley was ready to make a plea.

  “All right, Mr. Smiley, do you understand what is meant by a waiver of indictment?” Arterton asked.

  “I do,” said Smiley. This time, he answered correctly when asked his age—now fifty—and responded to a series of questions firmly, almost jauntily.

  Schmeisser added that in addition to waiving his right to trial, Smiley had also agreed to waive the statute of limitations on his crimes—so if any additional maps were to surface, even years later, he could be charged all over again. He then announced the plea agreement. Smiley would plead guilty to “theft of major artwork,” admitting to stealing ninety-seven maps—only eighteen of which the government would have otherwise been able to prove. By law, only those eighteen maps could be considered in determining his sentence, which the prosecutor recommended reducing for cooperation to a minimum of four years, nine months and a maximum of six years.

  The government formally charged him with stealing only one map, however—the Gerard de Jode map of the world. By law, that was the only map for which he was required to pay restitution, and since it had been recovered the day of his arrest, that meant he didn’t owe any money. Schmeisser announced, however, that Smiley had agreed to pay back the libraries and dealers for all the maps he admitted stealing, which authorities valued at more than $3 million.

  Finally, the judge asked, “Then would you please tell me in your own words what it is that you did that shows you are, in fact, guilty?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. On June 8, 2005, while conducting legitimate research at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, I did willingly and knowingly remove five printed maps belonging to Yale University and conceal them in my briefcase with the intention of removing them from the library,” Smiley said. “I very much regret my actions, and apologize to the Court and all people and institutions who were harmed by my conduct.”

  Schmeisser laid out the evidence the government had to prove this crime—the X-Acto knife blade on the floor, the videotape, the policeman who found the maps on his person. “There would also be potential testimony of experts on rare books that would reflect that there were wormholes in that particular map,” continued Schmeisser, “that would line up with wormholes that existed in the rare book.”

  The judge stopped him. “That’s an interesting piece of forensic evidence, isn’t it?” she asked to laughter from the gallery. She turned to Reeve. “Is there anything you disagree with?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” answered Smiley’s lawyer. “None of these maps were cut out of any books.” He went on, “The X-Acto knife fell from his pocket, but it was not involved in these or, to my knowledge, any of these maps.”

  “No disagreement on the map with the wormholes?” the judge asked.

  “None, Your Honor,” conceded Reeve. “The worms are very distinctive wormholes, I agree.”

  Finally, Arterton got around to the point of the hearing. The court clerk read out the charge again, asking, “What is your plea?”

  Smiley didn’t hestitate. “Guilty,” he said.

  —

  AS SMILEY walked out of the courthouse and into a throng of reporters, a man across the street on New Haven Green shouted at him, “Guilty! Guilty!” But his ordeal wasn’t over. After his appearance in federal court, he was required to walk two blocks down the street to plead again in state court, arriving at four forty-five in the afternoon. There the judge, Richard Damiani, ordered the clerk to read the thre
e charges for the other maps he’d stolen from the Beinecke. “Guilty,” Smiley said three more times. In all, those crimes held a maximum of sixty years in prison, said the judge, before adding that the state had agreed with the federal government to limit the sentence to five or less—to run concurrently with the federal sentence. Sentencing was scheduled for late September.

  As Smiley headed home with his friends, his lawyer, Dick Reeve, lingered outside the courtroom to finally comment about Smiley’s crimes. “We’re all a lot of mixed bags, all of us,” he said. “We have a tremendous capacity to hurt the people we love the most and hurt the institutions we care about the most.” He paused. “He feels terrible about that.”

  Not everyone was willing to let Smiley off that easily, however. “I think this is just the tip of the iceberg,” an agitated Graham Arader told the Hartford Courant. “He turned up much more stuff than this that was out-of-this-world!” Certainly not all the questions about Smiley’s crimes had been answered, including the question of when he began his theft. In initial interviews with the FBI, Smiley said he started stealing around 1998, which would have been around the time he was organizing the Slaughter Collection for the NYPL. But in later court filings, he amended that date to 2002, or around the time Margit Kaye first noticed the maps missing at the Sterling—a difference of four years.

  The libraries commended the job done by the FBI and US Attorney’s Office in recovering as many maps as they did. In private, however, they agreed with Arader that Smiley had not been as forthcoming as he could have been. All of the institutions were missing more maps than Smiley had admitted, including copies of the same maps he’d admitted stealing from other libraries. One of them was about to make those doubts public.

  Chapter 12

  MAP QUEST

  FIGURE 17 PETER APIAN. “TIPUS ORBIS UNIVERSALIS IUXTA PTOLOMEI COSMOGRAPHI TRADITIONEM ET AMERICA VESPUCCI.” ANTWERP, 1520.

  2006

  KING’S CROSS STATION sits at the geographical heart of London, right in the center of Harry Beck’s iconic London Underground map. Aboveground, Euston Road bustles with an endless clot of black cabs and red double-decker buses that pass by the modest home of the British Library. Set back from the road, the library is almost buried in the buildings around it, a four-story pile of brick and glass built in 1998 when it was spun off from the British Museum.

  Inside, however, it’s hard not to be impressed by the central tower of glass holding the once-private library owned by King George III. Like a grander version of the Beinecke’s aquarium of books, the tower soars upward with forty feet of leather- and vellum-bound volumes. Among them are Shakespeare’s plays—some in the original quarto versions that preceded the folios—a first edition of The Canterbury Tales, and dozens of medieval illuminated manuscripts. It’s fitting that this tower of knowledge should sit at the center of the library at the center of the city that was once the economic, political, and cartographic center of the world. But the tower isn’t just a monument to the past. Every so often, a case of shelves will disappear from the window as a librarian rolls it out to retrieve a volume to bring to a reader.

  I’m met at the base of the tower by map department head Peter Barber, a short man with a hawkish nose and wisps of white hair who is prone to Britishisms like “rather curious.” He leads me three flights up a stone spiral staircase to an office crammed with papers and books, including his own—The Map Book, one of the most popular general books about cartography. Barber remembers the day he first met Forbes Smiley: June 1, 2004. Map dealer Philip Burden brought him in for a meeting. As he wrote in his diary that night, Barber was puzzled by Smiley, who stood awkward and remote, seemingly uncomfortable to be there. His strange passivity made him stick in Barber’s mind more than if he’d been friendly and open.

  The next time he heard Smiley’s name was a year later, on May 27, 2005—less than two weeks before Smiley was arrested at the Beinecke. That day, a patron requested a digital image of William Alexander’s 1624 map of New Scotland from a small blue book titled Encouragement to the Colonies. When the photographer went to shoot the image, however, he discovered the map was missing. Barber went back over everyone who had requested the book, and the last one stood out: Forbes Smiley, who had looked at the book on June 5, 2004, four days after their awkward meeting.

  “I said ‘Aha,’” remembers Barber. “Well, this would sort of make things understandable.” Going back over the rest of the books Smiley requested, he discovered two other missing maps—a 1578 world map by George Best and the 1520 world map by Peter Apian from the volume owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Figure 17). Barber contacted Scotland Yard, which had just begun its investigation when news of Smiley’s arrest crossed the Atlantic. A few months later, Kelleher flew to England to pay a visit to the library, asking the staff to determine if any more maps were missing from volumes Smiley had used. That fall, it discovered one more—another Alexander map of New Scotland, this one missing from a copy of Purchas His Pilgrimes. The book had once been a part of the library of the British East India Company—in fact, it had been given to the company by Samuel Purchas himself and was instrumental in the corporation’s early voyages of colonization and trade.

  The library shared all the information with Kelleher. When the plea bargain came out in June 2006, however, Barber was surprised to find that Smiley had admitted taking one only of the four maps the library had accused him of taking—the Apian map. The head of the library’s collections, Clive Field, sent a stern letter to the FBI in protest, writing, “We continue to entertain serious doubts about the completeness of the investigation and the extent of Mr. Smiley’s co-operation with the authorities.”

  On its own, the library reached out to Burden, who had purchased an Alexander map from Smiley, and to Maine collector Harold Osher, who had bought a Best world map. But the margins on both maps had been trimmed down, and the library couldn’t match them up with the ripped edges in the book. The only way the library could prove which maps were theirs, it seemed, was to put more pressure on Smiley to admit more thefts.

  After Smiley’s plea, Barber contacted all the libraries, urging a more forceful approach. “Are your institutions minded to make common cause with the BL over this so as to maximize all of our chances of success?” he asked. The library’s former head, Tony Campbell, was even more insistent. In a posting on his MapHist Listserv, he described the FBI’s list of admitted maps as “cartographically semi-literate” and expressed shock that the bureau should take the word of Smiley, “a regular, and presumably accomplished liar,” over that of the libraries. Barber’s and Campbell’s entreaties, however, met with a resounding silence from the other curators. If the British Library was going to press its case in the United States, it would need to find someone across the Atlantic to represent it.

  —

  BOB GOLDMAN THINKS a lot about Theodore Roosevelt. He’s collected more than two hundred books about the former president, quotes him often, and even looks like a skinny T.R. himself. An attorney working in a small town north of Philadelphia, he sports small oval glasses and a thick droopy mustache that lends him a serious expression even when he smiles. When I met with him, he led me into an office in a brick town house dating to the 1870s. His own house was built in 1700s. “I told the British that, and they laughed at me,” he said. “To them, that’s a new house.”

  British Library staff contacted him in the summer of 2006, telling him about the disappointing plea bargain in the Smiley case and their concerns that Smiley had been less than forthcoming. A former prosecutor himself, Goldman knew only too well the importance of applying pressure to bring cases to a swift conclusion. As he listened to Clive Field talk, it sounded to him like the government had moved too quickly to reach an agreement with Smiley without pushing him hard enough on the missing maps.

  Goldman had worked in the US Attorney’s Office for nineteen years, spending much of that time tracking down
and prosecuting thieves looting and defacing cultural artifacts. He doggedly pursued his task, personally helping convict thirty-five smugglers and dealers, and recovering more than $150 million worth of art and heirlooms, including Geronimo’s war bonnet, an original copy of the Bill of Rights, and, particularly sweet to him, a .38-caliber revolver Theodore Roosevelt carried during the charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill.

  In 1996, Goldman was the first prosecutor to use the newly created Theft of Major Artwork statute, leading to the prosecution of a janitor at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania who stole, among other artifacts, a ceremonial sword presented to General George Meade after the battle of Gettysburg. In that case, he succeeded in doubling the janitor’s sentence to four years. Goldman’s particular specialty was in writing indictments that captured the sweep of history and showed the importance of these artifacts to the larger story of civilization. For the case involving Meade’s sword, he quoted prominent historians and Roosevelt himself to bring alive the sword’s connection to some of our country’s most heroic deeds.

  He left the US Attorney’s Office to start a private practice devoted to solving art crimes in 2006, the same year the British Library contacted him. If they were going to be successful, Goldman told Field and Barber, they’d need to act fast. “Your best shot on getting a defendant to fess up and disclose and cooperate is prior to sentencing,” he later told me. “Once a person is sentenced there is little incentive to come clean.” Since Smiley’s sentencing was scheduled for September, they had little time to come up with a strategy.

  It would be a two-pronged approach, they finally agreed. They’d urge federal prosecutors to take a stronger hand with Smiley, threatening him with serious jail time if he didn’t confess to taking more maps. At the same time, they’d entreat the other libraries to join them in a civil suit, in which they could take Smiley’s deposition under oath, subpoena dealers and collectors who had bought from him, and dig into his client base to track down more maps. “Working together, we might get the government to take a stronger stance with Smiley and develop evidence on where the other maps might be,” Goldman said.