The Map Thief

by Michael Blanding

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  THE BRITISH LIBRARY wasn’t alone in suspecting Smiley of taking more maps than he admitted taking. Soon after the verdict, Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library went public with its list of eighty-nine maps missing from its inventory, most of which Smiley had not admitted taking. Many were maps Margit Kaye had seen on Smiley’s website back in 2002, including the Pelham map of Boston. There were others too. On his site, Smiley had advertised a map of the District of Columbia by Andrew Ellicott for $32,000. It was the same rare diamond-shaped map that Smiley had once found for Larry Slaughter, showing the district’s original topography. Smiley mentioned the fact on his website, noting “the last copy that we are aware of was purchased by us on behalf of Mr. Lawrence Slaughter during the Howard Welsh Sale at Sotheby’s New York, in 1991.” Smiley sold the map to Harry Newman, who listed it on the cover of his map catalog that fall, asking $40,000. Despite such circumstantial evidence, however, Kaye had nothing to prove that the map was the same one that was missing from Yale.

  In the same catalog, Newman listed an even rarer map—a 1676 map of New England by Robert Morden and William Berry drawn from the same survey John Seller had used in his map of the region. “Of great rarity, the map is known in only three other examples, one on vellum,” Smiley wrote on his site. “This appears to be the only copy in private hands.” Newman copied that language verbatim for his catalog, with one correction, writing, “Of great rarity, his map is known in only four other examples, one of which is printed on vellum. . . . This impression appears to be the only copy in private hands” (emphasis added). As Newman could determine from carto-bibliographies, two copies were held at Brown, one at Osher Map Library, and one at the Sterling. If Smiley left that last library out of his calculations, it may be because he knew the Sterling no longer had its copy.

  In addition to the maps in Newman’s catalogs, Kaye found more than a half-dozen copies of its missing maps in Arkway’s catalogs, including De L’Isle’s 1718 map of Lousiane; a 1780 map of the Northeast by John Thornton and his apprentices Robert Morden and Philip Lea; and a map by William Faden of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Again, there was no evidence that any of these maps had come from Yale or even from Smiley, though all of them were rare.

  No matter what further suspicions the map department’s curators may have had about Smiley, Yale University’s official line was that the FBI had done everything it could do to identify the stolen maps. Smiley’s lawyer, Dick Reeve, readily agreed. “It’s really unfortunate that Yale has lost or misplaced or had stolen so many maps,” he told the press. “I don’t believe any of those maps are connected to Forbes Smiley.” Not all of the libraries were so publicly confident, however. Shortly after Yale released its list, Harvard released its own list of thirteen missing maps—only eight of which Smiley had admitted taking. Harvard didn’t go so far as to accuse Smiley of taking the maps, but they also didn’t rule it out. “We have some missing maps, and we know that he looked at them, so that’s very interesting to us,” said a spokesperson.

  The BPL was more explicit. “I think all of the affected institutions believe he took other maps,” BPL’s president, Bernard Margolis, bluntly told The Boston Globe. In all, curator Ron Grim had identified thirty-five maps he suspected Smiley of taking beyond those he had admitted. Nine of them had particularly troubling chronologies. Smiley examined de Bry’s Voyages on January 28, 2003, and less than a month later he sold Le Moyne’s map of Florida to Philip Burden. He looked at the book again in September 2004, and just ten days later, he sold a copy of John White’s map of Virginia to an unidentified buyer. He examined Boston’s copy of Seller’s Atlas Maritimus in May 2004, and six days later, he sold a map by Seller of the West Indies to Arkway. And three days after he examined Herman Moll’s The World Described, he sold a copy of Moll’s influential map of the Colonies to Arkway.

  As the libraries each in turn published their lists, many of them listed the same maps—despite Smiley never admitting to stealing the same map twice. Harvard and Yale were both missing Hernán Cortés’s map of Tenochtitlán, for example, while Boston and Harvard were both missing Samuel de Champlain’s map of New France. (New York, which hadn’t yet released its list, was missing both.) In addition to suspecting that he’d stolen more maps, many of the libraries questioned whether all the recovered maps had gone back to the right places.

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  IN ORDER TO FIND OUT, the curators from all the affected libraries assembled at ten thirty in the morning on August 7, 2006, at the office of Yale’s lawyer in New Haven. They walked the several blocks to the FBI headquarters, which occupied a block by itself near the highway. There they met Steve Kelleher—many of them for the first time in person. As he led them into a large conference room with several tables, Harvard map collection curator David Cobb tried to contain his excitement.

  The maps from Harvard had been stolen from the Houghton Library, not the map collection, but Cobb had been called down to help identify—and defend, if necessary—Harvard’s maps. In particular, he hoped that he might be able to identify the map by Samuel de Champlain of New France, one of the most valuable of all the maps Smiley had stolen from Harvard. The copy that had been recovered, however, had been attributed to the New York Public Library. All the curators tried to appear calm—they didn’t want to seem like they were gunning for one another’s maps.

  Kelleher and several other agents emerged with a few large cardboard boxes wrapped in packing tape. Just as Cobb was thinking that there was no way they would be keeping the maps in there, Kelleher brandished a large folding tactical knife and sliced open the first package to the collective intake of breath of all the librarians in the room. He began to lift individual maps out of the package and put them in piles on the table as the stunned librarians looked on. Each group took a selection of maps to a table and pored over them, comparing them to photographs and trying to fit them into books they’d brought with them.

  Almost immediately, Cobb saw that the Champlain map’s folds were all wrong for the way the map fit into Harvard’s book. He tried to hide his disappointment, even as Harvard was able to pick up another map of New France by French missionary Claude Dablon that had been attributed to Yale. He watched anxiously as other curators examined maps that had been attributed to Harvard. None of them were able to make a match with any of Harvard’s maps with the evidence they’d brought. Boston, however, was able to claim from the NYPL the map of Charleston from Des Barres’s Atlantic Neptune, when Grim identified a stain in the upper right corner that matched a similar stain on the next page of the atlas in Boston. In return, New York was able to claim from the BPL a map of New York by John Montresor from Jefferys’s atlas.

  Goldman was unable to identify any of the British Library’s other three missing maps from the boxes. The bigger disappointment for Goldman came, however, when the curators headed back to Yale for a working buffet lunch to craft their “victim impact statements” to share with the judge. Goldman urged them to go further by pursing a civil lawsuit against Smiley that would allow them to dig into Smiley’s records and put him on the stand to testify under oath. None of the other libraries were willing to go along. It seemed too risky to expose themselves in court and open themselves up to cross-examination by Smiley’s lawyers about their security procedures and the extent of their losses. Such a public display could alienate donors, who relied upon institutions to safeguard their generous gifts. One by one, they told Goldman that they wouldn’t be participating.

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  GOLDMAN FAILED IN his efforts to urge the prosecutors to take a tougher stance as well. When he contacted Schmeisser, he was even rebuffed in his requests for copies of Smiley’s business records so the library could pursue its own investigations. Unable to get the government or the other libraries to go along, he decided along with Field and Barber that the British Library would have to go it alone, making its own case in criminal court for a harsher sentence.

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bsp; Congress had given victims the right to argue separately from the government only in 2004, and that right had almost never been exercised. On September 21, 2006, a week before Smiley was scheduled for sentencing, the British Library filed its own sentencing memorandum with the court. With a former prosecutor’s zeal, Goldman argued that Smiley had taken four maps, not one, and that the government had grossly underestimated the seriousness of Smiley’s crimes.

  “The maps stolen by Smiley created the dreams of the explorer, merchant and powerful,” he wrote. “They charted the paths of national expansion and empire building. They marked the rise of British dominance, the origins of a new nation and the demise of a native population. The maps drew the lines between where knowledge ended and imagination began. They represented man’s timeless drive to explore the unknown and bring definition to the void.” Because of the incalculable loss to history, Goldman argued, Smiley’s offenses warranted an upward departure from the guidelines that would add years to the sentence—both as a punishment and as an example to others.

  He took the Apian world map as an example, detailing how the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer had married Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn in 1533, only to later be burned at the stake for heresy. “The volume and map remained intact surviving catastrophic events: the execution of its owner and the disbursement of his property; Civil War and the ascendance of Oliver Cromwell; royal intrigue; times of economic depression; and the Nazi bombing of London. The volume remained intact until visited by Smiley.”

  Each of the maps Smiley stole, he argued, had similarly improbable stories of survival over the centuries. “Like a drop of oil on a still pond,” he wrote, “the number of his victims spreads with time. Smiley’s victims include students, scholars, academics, the general public, and individuals yet to be born who will not have the opportunity to sit at a desk, open a leather-bound volume and see the world as Archbishop Cranmer and others saw it in the 16th century.”

  Smiley’s lawyer, Dick Reeve, shot back, lambasting the British Library for spreading false rumors about how many maps Smiley had stolen. He should be sentenced on “the basis of what he has in fact done, including his cooperation, and not on the basis of what some speculate he might have done,” he wrote. After all, what incentive did Smiley have to hold back? If it hadn’t have been for his cooperation, the libraries would have gotten back only the eighteen maps the government was able to prove Smiley took, not the close to one hundred that he had admitted to stealing.

  “The British Library’s rhetoric neglects an important and fundamental truth,” he continued. “The Apian World Map will soon be back in its collection. All ‘students, scholars, academics, the general public, and individuals yet to be born’ will then be able to utilize the map.” He went on to argue that rather than harming the libraries, Smiley may have inadvertently helped them. “If the institutions now do what is needed to improve overall security, it is possible that the positive side effects of this tragic case will benefit future generations of scholars and explorers ‘like a drop of oil on a still pond.’”

  Most important, he wrote, the call for an upward departure, was completely unwarranted, since changes to the sentencing guidelines after the Spiegelman case had already taken into account the cultural harm done through thefts of historical items. “To the degree that the sentence here is a potential deterrent to others, no sane person would look at all the ramifications of this proposed sentence and conclude that stealing maps should be the next activity to try,” Reeve wrote.

  The next day, the government submitted its own memo, siding with Reeve in praising Smiley’s decision to cooperate with authorities. In fact, prosecutors wrote in an accompanying motion, his extraordinary cooperation actually warranted a downward departure to reduce Smiley’s sentence even below the four-and-a-half-year minimum they had previously urged.

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  FORBES SMILEY ARRIVED for sentencing at the federal courthouse in New Haven on the morning of September 27, 2006, looking sharp in a dark suit and patterned green tie (Figure P). He had undergone back surgery in Boston a few days earlier and was able to stand up straight without pain for the first time in years. Smiley took a seat at the defense table with his attorney, Dick Reeve, while agent Steve Kelleher and US attorneys Kit Schmeisser and Kevin O’Connor took seats at the prosecution table.

  Behind them in the front row sat Smiley’s friends Paul Statt, Scott Slater, and Bennett Fischer, veterans of so many Sebec Boys’ Weekends. The rest of the courtroom was taken up with media and representatives of all six libraries Smiley had harmed. Only Alice Hudson was absent—though she had planned to go until the last minute, in the end she found herself too upset to attend.

  Calling the hearing to order, Judge Arterton explained how the sentencing would work. Under the guidelines, a charge of art theft for the dollar value of the maps the government could prove carried a level 22. Add 2 points for stealing from a museum, 2 more for stealing “cultural property,” and 2 more for stealing for “pecuniary gain,” and that brought the total to 28. On the other hand, the assistance Smiley had provided knocked the level down by 3 points to 25. That meant a minimum sentence of four years, nine months, and a maximum of five years, eleven months. Even though that range was agreed upon by both sides, the British Library was still arguing for an upward departure to as much as eight years, while the US attorney was arguing for a downward departure to as little as three years. It was Arterton’s job to decide where within that range the sentence should fall.

  One by one, the representatives from the libraries stood up to detail the impact of the thefts. First Beinecke head Frank Turner spoke for several minutes about the damage Smiley had done to Yale’s libraries, the “tens of thousands of dollars” the university would have to spend on new security systems, and the “negative impact on the lives, morale, and self-esteem” to staff. David Ferriero, head of the research libraries at New York Public Library, took up a similar theme. “I’m here today to talk about the actions of a thief, a thief who assaulted history, betrayed personal trust, and caused irreparable loss of treasures whose value to future scholarship will never now be known,” he said.

  Boston Public Library president Bernie Margolis took a lighter tack, saying, “I could of course invoke the old library line and urge you to throw the book at him.”

  “It would be an atlas in this case,” the judge deadpanned.

  “It would be a big one,” agreed Margolis, before turning serious. “It is my clear opinion, and I believe there is no lack of evidence to suggest, that Mr. Smiley may have stolen additional maps,” he said. “I hope that the Court will see it appropriate to impose restrictions so that he is never in a place to profit in any manner, shape, or form from the sale of these kinds of maps.” Next, the British Library’s Clive Field reiterated the points that Goldman had made in his sentencing memo, stressing the open question of what additional maps Smiley may have stolen. “Mr. Smiley will doubtless not be the last thief of cultural property,” he told the judge. A strong sentence “would serve as a powerful deterrent and firm evidence that the free world will not tolerate such assaults on our global cultural patrimony.”

  The last speaker was Bob Karrow of the Newberry Library, which had suffered the least from Smiley’s crimes. It was missing only two maps. Karrow’s testimony, however, was arguably the most powerful. “Now we arrive on the day of reckoning,” he said, addressing Judge Arterton. “A day on which you, your Honor, must decide on the penalty Mr. Smiley owes society. And what, after all, are Mr. Smiley’s crimes? He did no physical harm to anyone. He stole some elaborately printed sheets of paper from old books and sold them for profit to willing buyers. Imprisonment will protect society from Mr. Smiley, but I’m not sure that he’s much of a threat anymore.

  “So what is the point of this hearing today and of your decision? It seems to me the point is that Mr. Smiley, through his systemic plundering of libraries, stealing some 100 ma
ps over the course of eight years, has managed to transcend himself. He has become—actually he has made himself—a symbol, a symbol of the vulnerability of libraries, a symbol of the fragility of the public trust that is required for the operation of our cultural institutions, a symbol of the commodification of historical artifacts, a symbol of the erosion of civility, and his status as a symbol must be weighed in his sentence.

  “Research libraries are not like other businesses. At the end of our business day we cannot put a value on the day’s acquisitions or transactions, nor do we even try to do so, at least in monetary terms. As non-profits, we use a different calculus. We count readers served, books, maps, and manuscripts paged, the numbers of rare documents of all kinds added to our collections and made available to our public.

  “This is the kind of business that Mr. Smiley chose to ransack for his personal gain. In doing so, he not only robbed his and our contemporaries of the ability to study these documents, he also robbed all those who will come after us. If Mr. Smiley never steals again, his fame and the monetary value of the objects he pillaged almost guarantee that he will have imitators, and some of them will learn from his mistakes and outwit us again. We have taken extraordinary precautions to guard our capital, and we will take others in the future. That is all we can do, for we must continue to make these materials available, that is our business.

  “Respectfully, I request that you, Your Honor, craft a sentence that will serve to tell Mr. Smiley’s successors that the stakes in this game of cultural hijacking have been raised.”