The Map Thief (27 page)

—

OVER THE NEXT FEW MINUTES,
Reeve tried to undo the damage, starting by attacking the libraries’ contention that Smiley hadn’t admitted everything. “It does disturb me again and again,” he said, “they still come before the Court and say, do you know, Judge, you ought to take into account other thefts. It’s wrong, it’s inappropriate, and I know that it won’t happen.”

There was no question that Smiley had done indelible damage to cultural heritage, he continued, but he had also done everything he could to undo that damage. “For institutions to come into the courtroom and say ‘Impose the maximum sentence on Forbes Smiley’ seems to me, with all respect to the institutions and the emotions and difficulties they are having, not in their interest,” Reeve continued. The British Library’s Clive Field himself admitted that Smiley wouldn’t be the last thief the libraries would see. What kind of message would it send if the judge didn’t reward cooperation? “The message that is sent is it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s just so bad, we’re just going to sentence you, we are not going to take into account your cooperation, the libraries won’t get their materials back, the government won’t be assisted in their investigation, and I don’t think that anyone, any of the institutional representatives here or elsewhere would say that that’s the result they want.”

Next, it was Smiley’s turn to speak. Standing up at the podium, he cleared his throat and took a deep breath before talking. “Your honor, I have hurt many people,” he began. “I stole very valuable research materials from institutions that made it their business to provide those materials to the public for valuable research. I am deeply ashamed of having done that. It was wrong. I have also caused great financial loss both within the institutions and to the dealers. I am very anxious to meet my obligations and pay back the money that those institutions and dealers both need and deserve.

“Within that group of institutions and dealers, there are individuals
with whom I’ve worked closely for many years and whom I once called friends. I cannot imagine the pain and anger that I have made them suffer, the betrayal of trust, not only of our professional relationships, but of our friendship. I am very, very deeply sorry and distressed that I allowed myself to get into a place of such selfishness that I was able to put their well-being at risk. I am deeply sorry.”

Finally, it was time for the judge to hand down the sentence. She started with the maps themselves, which the FBI agents had delivered to her before the hearing. She and her staff had spent several hours looking through them, and they now sat behind her in three cardboard cartons. “I wanted firsthand to have that experience, and have therefore, had the privilege of handling these maps of such antiquity,” she said, before coming to the point of the hearing. “The enormity of the theft and the thievery is hardly capable of being [overstated],” she said. “In contrast, the enormity of the assistance of the repatriation, if you will, of these cultural heritage resources back to where they belong stands in counterpoise.” The case contained many contradictions, she continued. Here was a man who loved maps and history and yet “stole and defaced or compromised and lost historic treasures.” Here was someone who had been generous to a fault with friends but “betrayed those who trusted him.”

Despite the seriousness of that betrayal, however, she said it was important to honor his cooperation. “To use the product of Mr. Smiley’s cooperation and assistance, to then punish him in excess of what he would have been punished were he to have remained silent, seems counterproductive, to say nothing of patently unfair,” she said. The justice system had a dual message to send: “If you steal humankind’s treasures, you will go to prison, but if you help recover them, that will be taken into account and weighed in the balance.”

Because of all that, said the judge, she was denying the British Library’s request for an upward departure and granting the prosecution’s request for a downward departure. His sentence, she announced, would be forty-two months—three and a half years. She noted a certain poetic justice in the time, which was “approximately the length of time that you report having been engaged in the stealing of these artifacts.” Furthermore, he would be required to pay back $1,926,160 in restitution—or whatever final amount prosecutors determined when they sorted out all the recovered maps.

At that, Schmeisser asked that Smiley be allowed to remain free for several months so they could continue to rely on his cooperation to resolve final questions about where maps belonged. The judge agreed, setting Thursday, January 4, 2007, as the date for him to report to prison at the satellite camp at Fort Devens, in Massachusetts, a minimum-security medical facility. Smiley smiled with relief as the judge announced the sentence. After court adjourned, he hugged his three friends who had accompanied him. As he left the courtroom, Reeve spoke with reporters, praising the fairness of the sentence. After everyone else had left, Steve Kelleher and several other FBI agents emerged, carrying the three cardboard boxes full of maps. They
placed them in the backseat of a black Pontiac Bonneville sedan and drove
away.

TERRA INCOGNITA

FIGURE 18
HERNÁN CORTÉS. “UNTITLED” (MAP OF TENOCHTITLÁN AND THE GULF OF MEXICO). NUREMBURG, 1524.

2007–2013

THE RESPONSE TO
Arteron’s sentence was swift and almost uniformly critical. “
Obviously we are disappointed in the leniency of the sentence, which amounts to about 12 days’ imprisonment for every map that he has stolen,” Clive Field told the press. “It
doesn’t send any message of deterrence at all,” said Bill Reese, speaking to the
Hartford Courant.
An editoral in the same paper went much further, criticizing the leniency shown Smiley for cooperating: “Should a
judge forgive a car thief because he returned the vehicle? Should a mass murderer get a lighter sentence because he led police to more bodies?”

Librarians and newspaper editors weren’t the only ones who disapproved. A few weeks after his federal sentencing hearing,
Smiley appeared at a near-empty courtroom at New Haven Superior Court to face the state charges for his crimes. Unlike federal prosecutors, State’s Attorney Mike Dearington wasn’t impressed with Smiley’s contrition. “I think he really is just a crook and a thief,” he said in court.

Judge Richard Damiani seemed to agree, criticizing the length of the federal sentence. “I have young people coming in here who rob convenience stores at knife point and gun point. I’m giving them four or five years,” he said from the bench. “But here I’ve got a man who stole two million dollars and now he gets three and a half.” But he’d already agreed to a maximum state sentence of five years—with eligibility for parole after two and a half. Since that sentence would run concurrently with the federal sentence, that most likely meant no additional jail time.

In the aftermath of the sentence, the dealers fared the worst. The recovered maps went back to the libraries, and the dealers paid back their clients for selling them stolen property. Smiley was responsible for paying back the dealers. In the
restitution order delivered by the court, he owed $263,520 to Philip Burden, $425,740 to Harry and Robert Newman at the Old Print Shop, and $886,400 to Paul Cohen and Henry Taliaferro, who had assumed Arkway’s company. (Technically,
Cohen and Taliaferro never merged with Arkway and never took on Arkway’s debt, which accounted for the lion’s share of what Smiley owed the two firms. For convenience, however, prosecutors lumped the two companies together in the restitution order.) A handful of collectors to whom Smiley had sold directly were also on the hook, including Bob Gordon, who was owed $115,000 for maps including the Dudley chart of the Chesapeake, and Harold Osher, who was owed $69,500 for the John Seller map of New England.

To make their payments, the Newmans were
forced to sell a valuable painting they had put aside for a “rainy day.” Paul Cohen struggled to keep his new business afloat. “To have that kind of loss early in our career, you are
lucky to still be talking to me,” he said. Smiley’s assets covered a fraction of the money he owed the dealers. Most of his money had disappeared—into plane tickets, construction costs on the Vineyard, payroll up in Maine. After the sentence, Smiley
sold his Sebec farmhouse and shops for a combined $125,000. He kept the Vineyard
home, however. By Massachusetts law, the government is
forbidden from seizing a person’s home if it is a primary residence, so while the government could put a lien on Smiley’s half of the property (his wife owned the other half), it could not take it outright.

This incensed Philip Burden, whom I met at the Miami map fair. “Let me get this straight: Someone steals millions of dollars and
he gets to keep his house?” he asked with an agitated public school accent. “The British system would have nailed him to the wall.” Even more frustrating to the dealers, the restitution order was written so creditors would receive what money Smiley did pay in equal shares, rather than shares proportional to how much they’d lost.” The proper way to do it would be to divide it up as a percentage,” Burden said. “This way the person owed the least gets paid off first.”

—

EVEN AS THE DEALERS
struggled to pay their debts, the libraries fought to recover as many of their maps as they could—both those Smiley had admitted stealing and those he hadn’t. Last among the libraries, the
NYPL finally released its list of missing maps after sentencing. Of the sixty listed, Smiley had admitted taking only thirty-four of them. Even those would not all be coming back. The FBI told Alice Hudson that despite their best efforts, they’d
never be able to recover three of New York’s maps, including John Seller’s “Map of East and West New Jarsey,” the one she’d written about in the first Mercator Society book. She’d been hurt when she discovered that Smiley had taken the map; now she was doubly hurt that it would not be returned.

She blamed the FBI for not trying hard enough. “The FBI agent said, ‘I think a lot of them are in England and they are not coming back,’” she told me. “Meaning we are not going to go after them. They weren’t diamonds; they weren’t jewelry. So who cares?” When I told Kelleher, he said he understood Hudson’s frustration, but without any physical evidence to prove the map belonged to the NYPL, he couldn’t demand the collector return it. “It was one person who was not cooperative, very, very much so uncooperative,” he said of the collector, whom he declined to name.

At the BPL, Grim faced his own challenges. The FBI told him that it was unable to recover one map—a
chart of Carolina from
The American
Pilot
that Smiley had sold to the Old Print Shop, which had then sold it to a collector named Jim Curtis. Another collector, Bob Gordon, was still dragging his feet on returning the
Dudley map of the Chesapeake, the middle map of the three Smiley had sliced out of
Dell’Arcano della Mare.
When he finally did send it back, Grim took one look before realizing it wasn’t Boston’s map. Not only was it the wrong size, but it also had fold marks that the BPL’s atlas didn’t have. Grim called Hudson at the NYPL, which was missing the same map, and it matched their description perfectly.

That begged the question, however: If Smiley hadn’t sold the BPL’s Chesapeake chart to Gordon, where had he sold it? Because the razor mark had sliced through all three maps together, this was the first definitive proof that Smiley had stolen at least one map that he hadn’t admitted to. And it wasn’t the only one Grim suspected Smiley of failing to admit to. There were still six maps with suspicious chronologies, in which he’d sold a map to a dealer soon after viewing a book at the BPL that should have contained it. After sentencing, Grim repeatedly called Kelleher and Schmeisser to ask them to view those maps, finally getting them
both on the phone for a conference call on November 22, 2006—the day before Thanksgiving. They told him he’d have to deal with the dealers directly—clearing up any outstanding issues by December 21, ninety days after sentencing.

Grim scheduled a meeting with Arkway in New York for December 7 to examine the Herman
Moll map of the colonies and the John
Seller chart of the West Indies, taking the train from Boston along with his conservator. Even as they were examining maps worth tens of thousands of dollars, they
paid $12.87 for lunch between the two of them and were back on the train before dinner. Viewing the maps immediately
confirmed Grim’s suspicions—the Moll map had folds that lined up perfectly with others in the atlas, and the Seller map had a telltale number stamp in the corner. A month later, Arkway’s Paul Cohen and Henry Taliaferro sent another map to Boston—
the John White map of Virginia from the book by de Bry. Not only did the map match the book’s dimensions, but several creases in the map matched creases on the preceding page—all signs that it was Boston’s map. Cohen and Taliaferro
agreed to return all three maps, adding to the list of maps Smiley had taken but not admitted to.

There were more as well. Harvard spotted a copy of the world map by George Best posted on the website of a private collector that matched a digital photo made by the university. When Cobb contacted the collector, he agreed to return it. At Yale, Margit Kaye struggled to find evidence to link the maps she found in the Arkway and Old Print Shop catalogs with those missing from the Sterling. She had a digital photograph of only one of them—a map of New France by Jean
Boisseau, which matched the coloring of the map in Arkway’s catalog. They returned that one as well.

After the sentencing, the Beinecke posted its own digital photographs of its missing maps. Looking at them in his office one morning,
Harry Newman closely examined the image of the map of Tenochtitlán by Hernán Cortés. Smiley had sold him a copy of the map, and he’d recently resold it but hadn’t yet shipped it to the buyer. Newman shook his head when he looked at the image, which had a hole punched in the fold. Who would do that to a map that rare? No matter, since he was sure his map didn’t have such a hole.

Something about the photo bothered him, however, and that afternoon he pulled out the map to compare it to the image. Both maps had been left untrimmed, and the pattern of feathered paper fibers seemed to match. Now as he bent his face down to the paper to the spot where the hole punch should have been, he saw a small circular indentation where someone had added wet fibers to fill in the gap.
Shit,
he thought. There was no doubt this was Yale’s map. He picked up the phone to return it.

Most of the maps that had surfaced since sentencing were rare, but not incredibly so. The Cortés map, however, hadn’t shown up at auction for thirty years. It wasn’t the kind of map a major dealer was likely to forget. “He doesn’t have a photographic memory for each theft,” lawyer Dick Reeve told the
Hartford Courant
in Smiley’s defense.

The last map to be recovered before the FBI closed the case was the
Norman chart of Carolina, which Smiley had also sold to Harry Newman. Finally recovering it from collector Jim Curtis that spring, Newman brought it up to Boston to examine the BPL’s 1816 edition of
The American Pilot.
Not only was the chart the same version that occurred in that edition, it also had evidence of abrasion in the upper-right corner where the other charts from the atlas had a purple number stamped on
them. Newman
agreed it was Boston’s map and agreed to leave it with Grim.

In all, libraries were able to prove that Smiley had stolen at least a dozen maps he hadn’t admitted to taking. Prosecutors didn’t see any evidence that he was deliberately withholding information—after all, he had admitted taking almost a hundred maps, including some the libraries didn’t know were missing. While Kelleher was sympathetic to the libraries’ claims that Smiley had stolen more maps than he’d admitted to, he also had to be careful not to take maps away from dealers and collectors without solid evidence. “There was a constant worry in this case that I wasn’t getting enough back for the libraries,” Kelleher told me. “[But] we were taking maps from people that, if we had to prove it in court, we wouldn’t have gotten them back. And there were more that we couldn’t prove than we could. If he says, ‘I don’t remember,’ we couldn’t go to a dealer and say you know, we think [it’s stolen], can you shell out this money that you gave to this person and bring the map back?’ There has to be an endpoint.”

That point came on May 8, 2007, when prosecutors submitted a
new order for restitution to reflect the new maps that had been recovered. Almost all the dealers saw their losses increase—Burden to $357,520; The Old Print Shop to $567,639; and Cohen and Taliaferro to $938,400. The total value of the maps Smiley stole increased as well, to a final tally of $2,295,209.

—

NOW SITTING WITH
with me at the picnic table in Martha’s Vineyard five years later, Forbes Smiley seemed contrite and subdued as he talked about his past as a map dealer. “I was playing at it,” he said. “I never took it seriously. I’ve had to look back on these things and, you know, ask myself the question why someone with all of those opportunities, and someone who really, really, really wanted to do well, why in a sense couldn’t I get that to go well.” The burglary of his studio in 1989 was the beginning of his problems, he told me, followed by his heart difficulties and the bypass surgery. Then came Sebec. “The hole that I dug in Sebec was much more insidious, and I was really blind to it,” he said. “You don’t buy the town and force your vision on everybody else—because you are going to get a backlash. And the backlash on me cost me
an enormous amount of money, but more important it destroyed the safe haven and refuge of that farmhouse, not only for me, but for everybody.”