The Map Thief (15 page)

As much as Smiley worked to create a magical realm for the children, he also worked to conjure a carefree refuge for adults. Having a good time wasn’t enough; he wanted his guests’ time to be exceptional—always stressing the importance of “becoming relaxed,” though he
seemed so little capable of it himself. When he wasn’t cooking or shopping, he was puttering around the house, building a fence or working on a project in his study or workshop when the others were out taking a hike.

He almost never talked about his work—in fact, none of the men did. Sebec was a place apart from all that, where Smiley could get away from all the stresses of the competitive New York map trade. None of his friends knew just how much he was struggling in that world.

—

THE TRUTH IS
that even as Smiley was working hard to build collections, he was still finding it difficult to keep up with a changing marketplace. As the prices of maps continued to soar, new dealers entered the business, competing with established players to find a small number of rare items for a limited number of high-end clients. “In the old days, you’d go to auctions and pick out
diamonds from piles of coal,” Harry Newman told me. “It has gotten a lot more cutthroat.”

In such a small circle, dealers had to be friendly with one another, since they were often one another’s best sources. But as supply tightened, they frequently found themselves squaring off over rare material at auctions in London and New York—the same dozen or two dozen dealers chasing the same items. “
At an auction, it’s fifty-fifty whether I’m going to bang someone over the head or get out of the way and let you have it,” I was told by Barry Ruderman, a San Diego map dealer who entered the trade in the mid-1990s.

In private sales, cooperation was everything. When an estate was broken up, a dealer would often get on his cell phone to call colleagues and competitors, selling off the whole collection on an IOU basis before he’d left the house. “There is
a lot of money out there, and it is all based on trust,” said Ruderman. Since Smiley had gotten the reputation as a “slow pay or no pay,” he was locked out of that circle—not that he wanted to be a part of it anyway. He preferred to go it alone, seeking out auctions in hidden corners of the trade and using his knowledge to beat competitors.

But such tactics began to fail in the face of the new aggressiveness of the trade. While up front auctions may appear democratic, with a set number of bidders fighting one another over prices, behind the scenes
deals are being made; alliances are formed and broken before the first blow of the auctioneer’s hammer. Some dealers began banding together in mini-syndicates to bid on expensive atlases, breaking them up and dividing the spoils.

“With more people you make less profit, but you
take out some of the competition,” said Newman, adding that he generally stayed out of such alliances. Other times, dealers made mutually beneficial agreements to stay out of each others’ way. “Someone else has a client, and unless I really want it, I’ll back off; it’s an honorable thing,” said Newman. “Unless it’s going for absolutely nothing, in which case I’ll kick it a couple of times.”

While wheeling and dealing on the sidelines had always been a part of auctions, it seemed to Smiley that the gentility and sense of honor that characterized the trade in the early days had completely broken down. “When I was in New York, we played hardball,” he told me, sitting at the picnic table in Martha’s Vineyard. “You are swimming with sharks, and it is seriously cutthroat.” Smiley faulted himself for the go-it-alone attitude that caused him to resist cutting deals with people on the one hand, and then resenting other dealers when they outbid him on the other.

“If I had taken the time to really talk to people and work with people instead of not trusting anyone, I would have done better,” he said. “It was business first and maps and atlases second. With the old-timers, they struck a deal and shook hands and stuck to it. In New York, people would do anything, say anything, to win.” The new aggressiveness frustrated Smiley, who constantly worried about getting played by fellow dealers.

“You have people approaching you ten minutes before the auction, offering you ten thousand dollars to stay off the lot. I’m pretty savvy about wheeling and dealing, but not savvy about knowing when it’s real, or when I’m being screwed, and it’s very stressful. There are guys who are good at this, who shook hands with each other and walked away knowing the other guy was full of shit. They just had a feel for it. Now imagine, you’ve got five good clients depending on you to manage that shark pond; that’s why they are paying you all that money, to win.

“I just wanted to do it the old way of targeting certain things and going after them and having a reputation that once this guy goes after
something, he can’t be bought off. But I’m sure people ran the price up on me all the time, and I didn’t know how to get that worked out. I did it because I wanted to build with these clients, I wanted to handle the material, I loved the material, and I wanted to do well and make money—because I wanted to win as much as anyone.”

The obsession with “winning” often caused Smiley to overextend himself. In the mid-1990s, he began
bidding more on behalf of Barry MacLean, the Chicago collector who had once been Arader’s client. By his own admission, Arader began “running” Smiley at auction, bidding up the price to force Smiley to pay out more than he was prepared to pay. “
Forbes didn’t like going to auctions, because I don’t care about the money,” he told me. “So I go to an auction and I didn’t care what I was paying. So I kicked his ass. And yes, if I saw Forbes bidding, I’d give it an extra two or three.” At one auction, he remembers Smiley leaving the room and continuing to bid by phone so Arader wouldn’t know it was him. “But I could see him.”

Unlike other dealers who had retail businesses and could make up for times they overpaid at auction by charging more to customers, Smiley was usually buying on commission for clients who depended on him to get the best prices. If he went above what they expected, he often had to take the difference out of his own commission or kick in money of his own to keep them happy.

Smiley kept this to himself, even as his resentments against other dealers continued to grow. A certain amount of secrecy was always built into the map profession. Dealers played their cards close to the vest—rarely letting rivals know what maps they had acquired and how much they’d paid. On the one hand, clients could get upset if they knew you’d sold a map they wanted to another collector. On the other, rival dealers could undersell you if they knew how much you’d paid. To some extent, that secrecy was necessary, but it also led to unintended consequences. That became suddenly apparent in 1995, when the profession was rocked by scandal involving one of their
own.

UPWARD DEPARTURE

FIGURE 10
JOHN FOSTER. “A MAP OF NEW ENGLAND.” BOSTON, 1677.

1502–2001

GILBERT BLAND WAS
no map scholar. A computer programmer from Florida, he got into the map trade in 1994 after apparently stumbling across a cache of antique maps in a storage center. He set up a small-time business out of his home,
selling to other dealers, and was surprised by how much he was able to earn. Once he ran out of his initial stash, however, he had no idea how to get more maps.

He soon found a solution: theft. Bland’s tool of choice was a
single-edged razor blade, which he concealed beneath his fingers and casually ran down the pages of books while he pretended to be scanning text. In
reality, he was separating the map from its binding. Bland targeted the libraries of out-of-the-way universities, including the University of Delaware, the University of Florida, and the University of Rochester. Most of his thefts were of fairly common maps by
Ortelius, Hondius, and Mercator, and more recent nineteenth-century American maps—the kind that might sell for at most a few thousand apiece.

He got away with the racket for nearly two years, until the
day in December 1995 he decided to steal from the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. That day, a bored librarian began watching one of the patrons, a fortyish man with light-brown hair and a slight mustache, when she thought she saw him tear a page out of one of the books he was examining. She called security, who followed him out the door and apprehended him in the doorway of a nearby museum.

Along the way, Bland threw a red spiral-bound notebook into the bushes; when the guards retrieved it, they found two maps from a 1763 book about the French and Indian War folded into its pages. Together they were probably worth around $2,000. Rather than press charges, the
library let him off with a payment of $700 in cash for the damage. It was only after they let him go, however, that they noticed that the notebook
contained page after page of the names of antique maps along with the libraries where they could be found.

As magazine writer Miles Harvey chronicled in the book
The Island of Lost Maps,
that was just the beginning of a case that eventually included
seventeen university libraries around the country and two in Canada. Authorities caught up with Bland again a few months later, when a
campus cop at the University of Virginia began investigating the theft of several maps, including those of Herman Moll and Andrew Ellicott. After getting an address for Bland from a local Howard Johnson where he’d stayed, police tracked him to his home in Florida, where he
turned himself in. Eventually, he led the FBI to a
storage locker in Boca Raton filled with 150 rare maps. Over the next few months, he’d help them recover about
a hundred more. All told, the FBI figured their value at around a half million dollars.

Librarians around the country were outraged. “I feel like
I was a real victim, like it was a personal assault,” one told Harvey. “If Bland gets in front of my car,
I’ll run over him—but in a nice way,” said another. “Oh,
and then I’ll back over him again.” Only
four of the affected institutions pressed charges, however. In the end, Bland served just seventeen months in prison and was required to pay $100,000 in restitution. The reason more libraries declined to press charges was simple: embarrassment. By coming forward, they were essentially admitting to the public—and to potential donors—that they couldn’t protect their collections. As the FBI began to return maps to libraries, some of them refused to even admit that items had been taken.
Some seventy of the maps were never claimed.

In his book, Harvey described Bland as a cipher who had gotten away with his crimes by avoiding notice. “Bland was
less of a con man than an un man . . . lulling people into believing he was simply not worth much thought one way or another.” Even the dealers who bought from him found him unremarkable: “
Mr. Bland was bland,” one said. “He looked bland, he sounded bland, he acted bland. There was no personality: nothing there.”

The scope of his crimes put the map community on notice—warning that they would have to be more wary about whom they bought from. But Bland was hardly the first person to ever steal a map.

—

MAP THEFT HAS
always been a shadowy twin to the map trade. As John Smith knew when he named New England, and the French and English learned when they played out their coming war on paper, mapping an area is tantamount to possessing it. From cartography’s earliest days,
maps were closely guarded secrets. The Roman emperor Augustus locked his maps in the most protected chambers of his palace. A Carthaginian general purportedly ran his ship aground and drowned his crew to keep sea charts from falling into Roman hands.

During the Age of Exploration, the kings of Portugal decreed that copying that country’s charts would be punishable by death. That didn’t stop Alberto Cantino, an ersatz horse trader in the secret employ of an Italian duke, from smuggling one out of Lisbon in 1502. The
Cantino chart, beautifully illustrated on vellum, is now the oldest surviving Portuguese sea chart. Among other features, it shows a colossal new southern continent in the Western Hemisphere that had recently been “discovered”
by Amerigo Vespucci. The map eventually came into the hands of German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller, who used it in part to create his famous 1507 map naming America.

Theft continued to be important to the history of mapmaking for centuries. When the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the dominant trading power with the East, they did so with the help of the
Dutch East India Company’s “Secret Atlas”—a volume containing 180 maps showing the quickest passage to the East. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the French and English Crowns
handsomely rewarded privateers for capturing maps held by Dutch, Portuguese, or Spanish sea captains. One of the reasons few Spanish charts remain today is that ships’ captains frequently weighted them with lead and threw them overboard when captured, lest they fall into enemy hands.

Mapmakers and
map dealers stole from one another as well—often without attribution or shame, reworking one another’s copper plates and passing them off as their own. Blaeu stole from Mercator, Jansson stole from Blaeu, Seller stole from Jansson, and so on. As the French and English fought over North America, Moll, De L’Isle, and Popple all stole from one another’s geography to create their propaganda. And after the outbreak of the American Revolution, it was the theft of a map from West Point that exposed Benedict Arnold as a traitor.

In modern times, libraries have been targeted by map thieves at least since 1972, the same year Graham Arader began dealing out of his Yale dorm room. Another dealer offered Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library a copy of a rare Dutch Atlas the library thought it already had. But when curators checked, they discovered it had actually gone missing—and that in fact, the atlas offered for sale had been taken from its shelves. The FBI traced it back to an unlikely pair of thieves—two Byzantine priests named
Michael Huback and Stephen Chapo, who had apparently smuggled that book and others out of the library under their robes. When authorities searched their monastery in Queens, they found hundreds of other rare books taken from not only Yale, but also Dartmouth, Harvard, Notre Dame, and other universities. The priests were defrocked and sentenced to a year and a half in prison.

New to the business, Arader was angered by the injustice done to the Sterling, where he’d first learned about maps. He took it upon himself to police the trade, keeping a lookout for other thieves. He soon found
one in
Charles Lynn Glaser, a map dealer based in Arader’s hometown of Philadelphia. In 1974, security guards at Dartmouth College had found eight antique atlases, including a rare copy of Thomas Jefferys’s
American Atlas,
in the trunk of his car. Convicted of stealing the books from the Dartmouth library map room, he was sentenced to three to seven years in prison but was paroled after serving only seven months.

A few years later, in 1978, he called Arader offering to sell him two maps of New France by Samuel de Champlain. Knowing how rare those maps were, Arader called the FBI and then wore a wire to negotiate the deal. The evidence he gathered, in part, led authorities to determine that Glaser had stolen the maps from the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. Glaser pled guilty and spent six months in prison. But that wasn’t enough to stop him—in 1992, he again pled guilty to stealing a map from the Free Library of Philadelphia. This time, he received only probation.

Arader also played a role in apprehending another thief,
Andy Antippas, a thirty-seven-year-old Tulane English professor. Arader bought five maps from Antippas at a New Orleans antiques fair in 1978, including a copy of John Seller’s seminal 1675 map of New England. As he was cleaning the maps for resale, he noticed that one had a faint Yale University stamp of ownership on it. When he called the college, it turned out that all five were missing from the Sterling.

Faced with the evidence, Antippas pled guilty to charges carrying a maximum sentence of ten years. “I can only ask for compassion,” Antippas said at sentencing, and the judge showed it, giving him only one year in prison. “We were amazed he got so little,” Yale assistant librarian Margit Kaye said at the time. “Everyone seemed shocked.” (Though Antippas lost his job at Tulane, he was soon back on his feet, opening a folk art gallery in New Orleans; later he was suspected of but never prosecuted for taking part in a bizarre grave-robbing ring.)

As part of the case, Yale completed an inventory of its collection in April 1978, finding that sixteen sheet maps and seventy-one maps from books were missing in addition to the five that Antippas had admitted stealing. Even so, it declined to release a list of the missing maps. Writing that June in
AB Bookman’s Weekly,
the president of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America and Yale alumnus, Laurence Witten, blasted Yale for not reporting the theft earlier. “
The stolen items can be
moved very quickly to remote places where they may not be recognized; and booksellers are likely to be deceived,” he wrote. After the case, the library did report to
The New York Times
that it was
tightening its security procedures and moving most of its precious atlases to the Beinecke. The flat sheet maps, including Seller’s map of New England, however, stayed at the Sterling.

—

ARADER FELT VINDICATED
by his work bringing down two thieves, and he vowed to bring down more. “What I have always practiced is
relentless, unyielding due diligence,” he told me in New York. “It’s almost a giveaway if someone says, ‘I got this from my grandmother.’ I mean, the direct translation of ‘I got this from my grandmother’ is they stole it.” The difficulty in prosecuting map theft, however, is that it is so hard to prove provenance. It’s not like dealing with art theft, where each item is a one-of-a-kind work or numbered edition that can usually be easily identified.

A
common myth about theft of paintings is that they are taken on behalf of eccentric billionaires, who put them privately on display—an urban legend first popularized by the James Bond film
Dr. No.
(In one scene, Bond passes a recently stolen portrait by Goya in the titular villain’s underground lair and shrugs, saying, “So that’s where that went.”) In reality, most art thieves steal with only a vague idea of where they’ll sell their paintings and are unable to fence them. That’s why many art thieves are either caught within days of their crimes, or else their stolen artworks go underground for decades.

Maps are different. No one can know with certainty how many copies of a particular map have survived over the centuries. Like the Waldseemüller map found in Wolfegg Castle, extremely valuable maps in fact do turn up in strange places. At the Miami map fair,
Harry Newman told the story of how in the 1950s or 1960s his grandfather took a house call in Brooklyn from Newman’s Sunday school teacher that led to the discovery of the original manuscript maps from Lewis and Clark’s expedition in a trunk in the attic. He had them authenticated and then sold them to Yale for $7,500. “They’d be worth millions today,” he said.