The Map Thief (24 page)

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, the 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.

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 three 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.