More walls were filled with maps at the Boston Public Library after the official opening of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center in a new space on October 22, 2011. Visitors to the long-awaited center find exhibits on geography, a room for kids to learn about maps, and, in the back, a glassed-in reading room where patrons can view the two hundred thousand maps in the library’s collection.
The maps Smiley helped Norman Leventhal acquire, however, are not among them. While technically on loan to the BPL, most of Leventhal’s maps still hang in the Boston Harbor Hotel along Boston’s waterfront. There, tourists circulate among them in a lobby filled with plush couches and the smell of the harbor and the restaurant next door. If they stop and look, they can trace the chronological history of the city laid out on three walls—starting with John Smith’s map of New England.
—
WHEN SMILEY FIRST got out of prison, he had no idea what he was going to do. He’d spent his entire career in the map business—and now was expressly forbidden from handling these objects again. Not that he’d want to anyway. Even reading about maps now was painful for him. He returned to the Vineyard worried that he would no longer be accepted by the island community. Through his AA meetings and parents of his son’s friends, however, he began meeting other high-powered businesspeople who had crashed and burned in their careers. “There are a lot of broken toys on this island,” he told me.
A friend helped get him a job that first summer working at a catering company for $9 an hour. Eventually, he was able to use his skill in working with his hands to find employment as a landscaper and laborer on building sites for $12 an hour. With the computer skills he picked up in prison, he began building websites on the side for extra cash. His life is simpler now than it was around the wealthy world of map collectors, when he was flying off to London and Paris and dining at top restaurants. He now eats out with his family at the neighborhood clam shack and attends Ned’s Little League games, watching the teams rather than pacing the sidelines with a cell phone to his ear.
As if to signal the change, he stopped calling himself Forbes and began calling himself Ed—or even Eddie among close friends. “I am on the road to being well,” he told me cautiously. “I’ve taken the time to learn how the world actually works, instead of having a childish idea in my head of how it works and trying to force it.” One day, he said, he hopes to pay back the money he owes and make it up to those he hurt. “At the end of the day, I stole people’s money as much as anything, even though I never looked at it that way. But the final effect is these were people I was genuinely fond of, and who entrusted me with their expectation that I would never hurt them or their institutions. They put their good faith and trust in me and I let them down.”
It wasn’t just librarians and dealers who Smiley let down; some of his best friends also felt betrayed by his actions—if only because he wasn’t the person he’d always presented himself to be. “It was quite a revelation to realize there was something wrong with the guy who was paying for all the drinks all those years,” said Paul Statt. “And there were a lot of free drinks over the years.” It felt good to be the one helping Forbes for a change, but he also felt like his life was diminished somehow from the deception. “It’s a little hard for some of us for whom he represented boundlessness over the years to accept the boundedness.”
Scott Slater had the opposite feeling—like he could finally talk to Forbes the way he always wanted him to be, absent the pretentions of “the Squire.” In long letters from prison, Smiley opened up about his childhood and the mistakes he made; about how much he missed his son and what it meant to be a man. As much as Slater was grateful for this new honesty and openness, however, he, too, sometimes missed some of the larger parts of Smiley’s personality that had disappeared since his arrest—telling stories over beers and his big belly laugh. “I miss the parts of Forbes where there was never a problem about anything,” he told me, sighing.
Above the couch in Slater’s living room is the only map Smiley had left before he went to prison, the map of Sebec Lake that hung in the house up in Maine. Slater has all of Smiley’s jazz and blues records, too, neatly stacked on cinder blocks in his dining room. Smiley has yet to pick them up, perhaps because they remind him of a time in his life when he was too out of control. “My wife keeps telling me we should sell them,” Slater said. “We need money for our roof. But if I did that, it would be stealing.”
Slater also has several watercolor paintings Smiley sent him from prison. When he began taking painting classes, he and his fellow prisoners were forbidden from looking at art books because of the frequent paintings of nudes they contained. So he began copying pictures from magazines and catalogs, painting farmhouses and snowy landscapes he sent to his friends for Christmas. Once he sent a painting to Slater’s disabled son, Gordon, depicting The Dying Gaul, a famous Roman marble statue of a fallen warrior, lying slumped and defeated on his shield.
Months after I spoke with Smiley, I again took the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, this time in the middle of December. A stiff wind was blowing off the ocean and shaking the leafless trees as I took a cab out to a farmhouse a few miles from Vineyard Haven. The building is home to the Featherstone Center for the Arts, a small gallery that was putting on a Christmas craft fair and art show. A local nonprofit had given grants of $200 to $5,000 to various island artists to present their work, which ranged from paintings of Revolutionary War generals to circus costumes for kids.
Tucked in one corner were three small watercolors, accompanied by a short artist statement from Edward Smiley. It read: “During a difficult period of my life (including prison) I turned to painting as a way of regaining my balance, and beginning a period of renewal of mind and spirit. Self-taught, I found an ability to see the world with fresh eyes and express myself and my feelings in watercolors.”
One of the paintings showed a village scene, with a small figure emerging from a cottage to walk across a peaceful snowy square. Another depicted a moody snow-colored field with a single, bare tree rising into a cloudy sky. The last, and most accomplished, painting showed a seascape with a gauzy light descending from a break in the clouds. In the foreground, a thicket of black and green brambles choked the shoreline.
The painting calls to mind a letter Smiley sent his friends Statt and Slater from prison, in which he wrote:
When painters paint, it is often the case that light is their primary interest. . . . What painters like Rembrandt discovered, is that you “paint” light by painting very dark areas in contrast. Painting “darks” proves to be much easier with pigment, and the only way to express light.
I love to paint the light. For me and others learning to paint, the challenge has been to risk getting comfortable with adding very dark areas to the painting, not just in the shadows but in the unexpected places. But it works—very dark areas do not wreck the painting as one might expect, but rather tend to [recede] in the brilliant expression of sunlight or the subtle silver light of the moon. What the brain notices and is the primary effect, is that of lightness.
As often as I examine good paintings and notice all the “darks,” it still feels very uncomfortable to drop black or dark blue into a perfectly clean watercolor. Maybe it will always feel uncomfortable. But I am told that my paintings are now more realistic and I am beginning to like them myself.
Reading that, I couldn’t help but think of the terra incognita found on antique maps, those blank spaces that represented endless possibility to early explorers—an ancient city of gold or a blue-water passage to the Orient waiting to be discovered. But those spaces could also be dangerous, as early mapmakers reminded us when they filled in the blanks with savage beasts and sea monsters. Other times, in the absence of real knowledge, those mapmakers filled in those dark spaces with their own desires, the way John Smith inserted his fictitious English cities in the middle of hostile wilderness. Perhaps what Smiley was groping toward in his letter was a
comfort in finally leaving the imperfections in place, resisting the impulse to fill in the dark spots with a desired geography, and allowing them to simply exist. His life now may not be as grandiose or imaginative as the one he created while he was selling and stealing maps, but in that sense at least it is truer.
EPILOGUE
ON JULY 13, 2013—more than eight years after Smiley had been arrested, and three and a half years after he’d been released from prison—the FBI made an unexpected announcement. “After a well-known dealer of rare maps was caught stealing from a Yale University library in [2005], a subsequent FBI investigation revealed that the man had stolen antique maps and other valuable items from institutions around the world,” read the agency’s press release. “Most of the pilfered material was eventually returned to its rightful owners—but not all of it.”
The bureau went on to reveal that it was still in possession of twenty-eight rare maps and books that had been recovered from Smiley at the time of his arrest but had never been identified or returned. Some of them were quite familiar, matching maps that Smiley had stolen from libraries, including Thomas Holme’s map of Philadelphia (which he’d stolen from the BPL but was still missing from Yale); Hernán Cortés’ map of Tenochtitlán (which he’d stolen from Harvard and the Beinecke but was still missing from New York); George Best’s map of the Northwest Passage (which he’d stolen from the NYPL); and several sea charts from John Thornton, Mount and Page, and J.F.W. Des Barres. Others seem strange—like a mix of nineteenth-century state maps and US Coast Guard surveys.
What’s more strange is that the FBI should choose to release the list so long after Smiley had been arrested and sentenced. The case has since passed from Steve Kelleher to another agent in the New Haven office, Special Agent Lisa MacNamara. When I called to ask her where the items came from, she said they were “acquired in August 2005 as a result of a search warrant.” Smiley said he didn’t recall where he’d gotten them, and so the FBI had no idea whether they had been stolen or had been legitimately acquired. So far, MacNamara told me, no one had come forward to claim any of them. In fact, in the weeks after the release, she received only one call—from a dealer who said he legitimately sold Smiley one of the maps.
The rest of them sit at the New Haven field office, each item individually packaged in a box or tube. If no one comes to claim them, they may eventually be donated to the Library of Congress. Until then, they sit in evidence, one more mystery in a case full of mysteries.
FIGURE A. GERARD DE JODE. “UNIVERSI ORBIS SEV TERRINI GLOBI,” FROM SPECULUM ORBIS TERRARUM. ANTWERP, 1578.
FIGURE B. CLADIUS PTOLEMY. “UNTITLED (MAP OF THE WORLD).” ULM, 1482.
FIGURE C. HENRICUS MARTELLUS GERMANUS. “UNTITLED (MAP OF THE WORLD OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS).” MANUSCRIPT MAP, C. 1489.
FIGURE D. GERARD MERCATOR. “NOVA ET AUCTA ORBIS TERRAE DESCRIPTIO.” DUISBURG, 1569.
FIGURE E. CORNELIUS DE JODE. “HEMISPHERI U[M] AB AEQUINOCTIALI LINEA, AD CIRCULU[M] POLI ARCTICI . . . AD CIRCULU[M] POLI ATARCTICI.” ANTWERP, 1593.
FIGURE F. JOAN BLAEU. “NOVA ET ACCURATISSIMA TOTIUS TERRARUM ORBIS TABULA.” AMSTERDAM, 1664.
FIGURE G. JAN JANSSON. “BELGII NOVI, ANGLIAE NOVAE, ET PARTIS VIRGINIAE NOVISSIMA DELINEATIO.” AMSTERDAM, 1651.
FIGURE H. JOHN SPEED. “A MAP OF NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK.” LONDON, 1676.
FIGURE I. JOHN SELLER. “A MAPP OF NEW ENGLAND.” LONDON, C. 1675.
FIGURE J. HERMAN MOLL. “A NEW AND EXACT MAP OF THE DOMINIONS OF THE KING OF GREAT BRITAIN ON YE CONTINENT OF NORTH AMERICA.” LONDON, 1715.
FIGURE K. GUILLIAME DE L’ISLE. “CARTE DE LA LOUISIANE ET DU COURS DU MISSISSIPI.” PARIS, 1718.
FIGURE L. JOSEPH F. W. DES BARRES. “A SKETCH OF THE OPERATIONS BEFORE CHARLESTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA.” LONDON, 1780.
FIGURE M. SHIPYARD BREWERY SUMMER ALE, LIMITED EDITION LABEL SHOWING JOHN SELLER’S “A MAPP OF NEW ENGLAND,” 2003.
FIGURE N. HENRY BRIGGS. “THE NORTH PART OF AMERICA CONTEYNING . . . THE LARGE AND GOODLY ILAND OF CALIFORNIA.” LONDON, 1625.
FIGURE O. E. FORBES SMILEY III, MUGSHOT. JULY 8, 2005.
FIGURE P. SMILEY LEAVING COURT AFTER HIS SENTENCE HEARING. SEPTEMBER 28, 2006.
Appendix A
MAPS SMILEY ADMITTED STEALING
KEY:
Boston/M = Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library
Boston/B = Boston Public Library, Rare Books Department
British Library = British Library, Map Library
Harvard = Harvard University, Houghton Library
Newberry = Newberry Library
New York/M = New York Public Library, Map Division
New York/B = New York Public Library, Rare Book Division
Yale/B = Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale/M = Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library Map Collection
Date
Creator
Title
Owner
Status
1520
Peter Apian
Tipus Orbis Universalis (world)
British Library
Recovered
1524
Hernán Cortés
Untitled (Tenochtitlán/Gulf of Mexico)
Harvard
Recovered
1532
Oronce Fine
Nova et Integra Vniversi Orbis Descriptio (double-cordiform world)
Yale/B
Unrecovered
1535
Gregorius Reisch
Typus Universalis Terrae (world)
New York/M
Recovered
1572
Antonio Lafreri
Untitled (Salamanca world map)
New York/B
Recovered
1577
Pietro Martire d’Anghiera
Untitled (West Indies)
New York/B
Recovered
1578
George Best
Untitled (Northwest Passage)
New York/B
Recovered
1578
Gerard de Jode
Vniversi Orbis Sev Terreni Globi (world)
Yale/B
Recovered
1581
Nicola van Sype
La Herdike Enterprinse Faict (world/Drake circumnavigation)
New York/B
Recovered
1582
Richard Hakluyt and Robert Thorne
Untitled (world)
New York/B
Recovered
1587
Richard Hakluyt and Pietro Martire d’Anghiera
De Orbe Novo (America)
Yale/B
Recovered
1589
Richard Hakluyt
Typus Orbis Terrarum (world)
Yale/B
Recovered
1593
Cornelius de Jode
Hemisphaerium Ab Aequinoctiali Linea (double-hemisphere world)
Boston/M
Recovered
1593
Cornelius de Jode
Americae Pars Borealis
Boston/M
Recovered
1596
Theodor de Bry
The Map Thief Page 26