The Map Thief (28 page)

Recently, he said, he was looking for old photographs and came across a box full of picture after picture of the bulldozer destroying the shore in front of his home—two hundred of them in all. “It was as fast as I could take the pictures, in a complete and absolute panic,” he said. “And that’s probably not a bad image of who I was at the time and how I dealt with stress.” From there it was only a small leap to justify stealing given the resentments he had developed over the years toward the other dealers and libraries. “You talk yourself into a place that the reasons you are feeling so alone and so upset and have these resentments is because people aren’t treating you as well as they should treat you, and they aren’t as appreciative and you are not getting paid the way you should,” he said. “So it festers.”

Once he started stealing, he said, he couldn’t see any other way out of his predicament. “Why did I steal? I stole for the money. You could write that in one sentence. The question I have to ask myself is, Why did I think I needed the money so much? I worked for many years and was very successful, but you couldn’t have put enough money into my pocket to cover that level of mismanagement.” Stealing became his way of trying to control an increasingly unmanageable life. “I never took pleasure in stealing,” he said. “I stole because I was trying to relieve myself from this feeling of desperation, and that’s a word I never understood until it happened to me.”

Smiley justified the thefts by telling himself that at least the items he sold would be cared for by collectors. “That’s not an observation, that’s a confession, because that is really fucked up,” he said. “That state of mind feels like a different movie.” After his arrest in June 2005, he joined a twelve-step program on the Vineyard, in part to deal with the heavy drinking he’d begun doing in the previous few years. At the beginning of each meeting, the facilitator read a passage that mentioned the importance of “rigorous honesty.”

“I used to hear those words in despair and fear that I couldn’t do this,” he told me. He began by telling his seven-year-old son what he’d done. “I didn’t want to do it, man!” he said, finally letting go with a belly laugh. “I thought he was going to be devastated by this. I thought this
little boy was going to get his life destroyed.” In the end, he rose to the challenge, telling his son, “I made terrible mistakes and I hurt people and I was going to have to go away and work very, very hard to make that better.” Not only did his son understand, he said, but going through that ordeal allowed him to start opening up to other family members and friends and finally be honest about what he’d kept hidden.

As for how he stole the maps, he would only say: “They fall out. I mean, three-hundred-year-old glue, they are not bound in. Some of them tear but the paper is so fragile. They fall out.” Despite the evidence, he was adamant he never removed a map with a blade. “I always had a razor blade—I wouldn’t expect anyone to believe that, but I’m a print dealer,” he said. “I don’t believe that I ever cut a map out of a book.” He also continued to insist that he has admitted the full extent of his crimes. “I was honest and straightforward and worked hard, and where we left it was, if not perfect, then extraordinarily close,” he said. “There were no Swiss bank accounts.” The Boston Foster map stolen from Yale in the 1980s? “I did not take it.” The Alexander map the British Library accused him of stealing? “I have no recollection whatsoever of taking that map.” After all, he said, if he had a cache of maps hidden somewhere, would he even be talking to me? “There is not a single map,” he said definitively. “I do not know of one.”

—

SMILEY ARRIVED AT
Fort Devens Federal Medical Center to report to its minimum-security “satellite camp” on
January 4, 2007. There, he was given an orange jumpsuit and a new identity: prisoner 15867-014. Smiley tried to make the best of the situation, telling himself at least he’d be in with other white-collar criminals and not hardened offenders. Upon arrival, he was put into solitary confinement for what he was told would be two days. He didn’t get out for several months.

According to Smiley (and corroborated by letters and interviews with people he spoke with at the time), he was
locked in a cell for twenty-three hours a day. In the mornings he was woken by the loud banter of other inmates echoing off the prison walls. He was allowed to exercise in the yard for an hour a day with other inmates. Twice a week, he was given a toothbrush. Smiley was outraged at first at the injustice—but eventually, he said, he just gave up any pretense of having control over his
life. All of his notions about managing his time in prison disappeared, as he dealt with the reality of his new situation. “You are in an orange suit and you are in shackles. You are on your knees to make a telephone call once a month and the phone doesn’t work. You are getting screamed at, and the guy next door is losing it, I mean, getting taken away in straitjackets. I mean, this is happening.”

Finally, after three months, he said, he was let out of solitary on the condition that he agree to spend the rest of his time in a medium-security prison. In those first moments walking out into the yard, he was terrified, not knowing where to turn for support. Eventually, he found his footing, however, continuing AA meetings and taking classes in web design and watercolor painting. He began teaching English classes to fellow inmates along with life skills such as—ironically—how to balance a checkbook.

During his time in prison, he clung to letters from friends and family, opening up emotionally to them for the first time. “It is impossible to explain how I held on to those letters,” he said. “I cried when I saw the return addresses.” When fall came, the “boys”
gathered for their annual weekend at Bob von Elgg’s home in Santa Cruz rather than Sebec. Scott Slater read a long “Lament for Sebec,” describing to his friends the painful effect of watching their clubhouse “
stripped of all the furnishings, artwork, books, memorabilia . . . maps, photographs, moose antlers, beds, French cookware, his beloved cookbooks, his billards table, his tube amp, and the front porch table and chairs. . . . No music or laughter emanates from his once beautiful house,” he concluded, before proposing a toast to “The Squire!”

Then von Elgg performed, a parody of Johnny Cash's "Folson Prison Blues" that he had composed in Smiley's honor, sending the rest of the crew into fits of laughter.

I hear the boys a drinkin’

Drinkin’ up again

And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when,

I’m stuck in Devens prison, and time keeps draggin’ on

But those bastards keep a pourin’

While I sit here all alone

When I was just a baby my mama told me. Son

Always be a good boy, don’t steal antiques for fun

But I stole a map at Yale-O and left the blade behind

Now every time I hear the boys a drinkin’ I hang my head and cry . . .

Following the song, Smiley’s friends sang a rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as the whiskey continued to pour.

After two and a half years of good behavior, Smiley was transferred to spend a final six months in a
work-release program at a halfway house on Cape Cod. Finally, the prison released him on a
furlough on December 23, 2009, allowing him to go home with an electronic bracelet to spend the holidays with his family. On January 17, 2010, he
officially earned parole, being released from his sentence six months earlier than the forty-two months he’d been given. In all, he served a total of three years and six days—or about eleven days for each of the ninety-seven maps he’d admitted stealing.

—

OF COURSE, IF
you add all the maps libraries accuse Smiley of stealing, his time spent in prison for each map is considerably less. Adding the twelve maps recovered by libraries after sentencing brings the total number of maps attributed to Smiley to 108. But the total number of maps libraries are missing is 257, more than double what’s been accounted for. And there are those who believe he stole many, many more. “My guess is that
five percent have been returned,” said Graham Arader. “My feeling has always been that he went to the big places after he cleaned out the little places,” he said, referring to historical societies up and down the East Coast where security is more lax than at the libraries. He isn’t the only one who thinks so. One of the librarians victimized by Smiley claims that other institutions have admitted privately that Smiley stole from them, but they’ve never publicized the fact.

Despite the circumstantial evidence linking some of the missing maps to Smiley, however, some libraries have discovered evidence to prove the opposite—that he didn’t take particular maps. Such was the case when two curators at the British Library were conducting a routine office move in January 2012 and came across the missing George Best
map of the world that the library had accused Smiley of taking during the court trial. “We now know that our assessment of the probable
cause of the loss was incorrect,” a library representative wrote me in an e-mail, “but in our view it was not an unreasonable assessment, given the context.”

If Smiley did steal more maps, it begs the obvious question: Where are they? Arader thinks he knows. “
He turned in the dealers, but he didn’t turn in the clients,” he said, speculating that they are still hanging on the walls of some collectors’ houses today. Bob Goldman agrees. “There are collectors out there who think that there is
no better protector of items than themselves,” he says. “It is such a passion they come to believe that nobody appreciates them and nobody is in a better position to possess or protect them than they are.” It’s the
Dr. No
theory of art theft—only in the case of maps, it could actually be true. Unlike a one-of-a-kind work of art, a rare map could be displayed openly by its owner without anyone even knowing it was stolen.

Harvard’s David Cobb will never forget a map conference he attended in Guatemala a few years after Smiley’s thefts. Giving a talk about security to a few dozen map collectors, he asked, “Do any of you think you
have stolen maps in your collection?” None of the collectors raised their hands. Next he asked, “Would any of you refuse to purchase a map for which a dealer had not provided you a known provenance?” Again, none of them raised their hands. “I’m like, you can’t have it both ways, guys,” he told me. “The four maps Harvard is still missing are in somebody’s collection. And those people know they are in their collection.”

In October 2008, Cobb and others at Harvard were hopeful that one of their maps had turned up when
Sotheby’s announced it was auctioning a copy of Samuel de Champlain’s map of “Nouvelle Franse” from
Les Voyages
, billing it as “perhaps the most important single map” in Canadian history. Harvard immediately contacted the auction in hopes that this might be its lost map. After a flurry of initial excitement, however, the university confirmed that the map did not match a digital copy and cleared it for auction. (The map eventually went for a record $250,000.)

Whether or not Smiley took them, the maps missing from the libraries are out there somewhere—and despite the efforts of people like Tony Campbell, libraries and dealers have never gotten together to create
a comprehensive list of stolen maps that could be used to recover these materials. After Smiley’s thefts, a New York Map Society member named John Woram took it upon himself to create a
master list of all the missing maps attributed to Smiley by combining all the lists released by the victimized libraries. None of the libraries, however, were willing to give him pictures that he could post, which are essential to identification of particular maps. “When a kid goes missing or something like that,
you have to put a photo out,” he told me. “Unfortunately none of the institutions were willing to cooperate,” he told me. “After about a year or so, I gave up.”

Campbell put the blame on the institutions for not being more open about their missing material. “It’s
not the map librarians who are the problem; it’s the people up there, it’s the PR people,” he told me over pints at a London pub. “What they don’t realize is that the policy of trying to keep a lid on it has helped the thieves.” It’s for that reason Smiley was able to commit his thefts a decade after Gilbert Bland had done the same thing, Campbell insisted, and it’s for that reason another thief will be able to do it in the future if libraries don’t change their ways. “The best time to have done something was shortly after Smiley. When the next Smiley comes, people will say, why didn’t we do that?”

Other map thieves
have
already struck since Smiley’s arrest. Even while Smiley was awaiting sentencing in the fall of 2006, librarians at Western Washington University found more than one hundred maps and prints ripped out of its government documents department. The trail led to
James Brubaker, a seventy-three-year-old man living in Great Falls, Montana, who had stashed more than a thousand books and twenty thousand pages of documents, selling them for cash on eBay. All told, his thefts totaled $220,000, enough to earn him two years in prison.

Since Brubaker, no major map thieves have targeted US institutions—though many have struck in Europe. In August 2008, sixty-year-old
César Gómez Rivero stole sixteen items from Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional, including a 1482 world map from the Ulm Ptolemy and a 1507 world map by Johann Ruysch. Around the same time, electrician and heroin addict
Richard Delaney stole £89,000 worth of historic maps and books from England’s Birmingham University while performing electrical work on the library. In November 2008, the British Library discovered that a wealthy Iranian-born scholar,
Farhad Hakimzadeh,
had sliced maps and other pages from 150 rare volumes, totaling £400,000. In 2009, a
Hungarian thief stole some seventy maps from libraries in Spain; and in the
Czech Republic, a thief stole two maps, including Peter Apian’s 1520 world map, from the Scientific Library in Olomouc.

Even though the libraries haven’t banded together systematically to track map thefts, some have individually gone to extraordinary lengths to improve their security. In addition to its new state-of-the-art control room, the Beinecke launched a project to recatalog all its rare books with detailed information on the maps they include. The
British Library, too, began recataloging its rare books, requiring readers to view the rarest in a specially designated area under the close watch of a monitoring desk. The BL’s map department also spearheaded an innovative project to take digital photos of its rarest sheet maps—photographing each map while backlit to show a unique pattern of paper fibers that can identify it as certainly as a fingerprint.