The Map Thief (25 page)

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 was 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 led 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 remembered 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
An Encouragement to 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,’ ” remembered 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 only one 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 the 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.

—

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.