The Map Thief (29 page)

The Leventhal Map Center in Boston also began an
ambitious digitization project with a half-million-dollar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to photograph its rarest atlases. In order to do that, however, each must be taken apart and put back together, at a cost of more than $10,000 apiece. It would take twice the grant to photograph all the library’s one hundred pre-1800 atlases, to say nothing of its three thousand later atlases. The BPL recently spent some $200,000 in security upgrades for its rare-book room to improve sightlines and install cameras.

Thanks to a $100,000 donation from Bill Reese, the Sterling Memorial Library has been able to finally catalog its map collection
; it also
installed a new camera for its map department reading room. New director Abe Parrish, however, sees that as only the last line of defense. As a former military intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, Parrish knows the importance of establishing a “chain of custody” for classified documents. He applied the same logic to maps at the Sterling, installing bar codes on the sleeves of all of its rarest sheet maps, which are scanned in and out after each use.

Not all libraries seemed to have learned their lessons, however. At the New York Public Library, a sign just inside the doorway at Room 117 states that all patrons must check bags and coats downstairs. In each of the half-dozen times I visited the department, however, the tables and
chairs were strewn with
numerous bags and coats. During days of research, I was never asked to check my bag, despite working with some of the rarest maps in the collection.

—

HARRY NEWMAN AND
his brother Robert
still get checks in the mail to cover Smiley’s restitution costs—$25 or $50 every few months, Harry Newman told me. The biggest portion came after
Smiley’s mother passed away in February 2009, leaving equal amounts of family money to each of her children. Smiley’s share came to $165,000—of which $32,000 went to taxes and $40,000 went to his lawyers; he was allowed to keep $28,500. That left $65,000 to pay the victims of his crimes, a fraction of the more than $1 million he still owed. At least this time, the money was paid out as a percentage of what he owed each one, rather than being proportioned in even shares.

When Newman sees one of the other affected dealers now, they joke about Smiley’s home on the Vineyard, saying they should be able to use it as a time-share in the summer. But the thefts seriously affected Newman, who spent months in therapy to recover from Smiley’s betrayal.

Alice Hudson was hit even harder. Though her fears of being fired were unfounded, her work in Room 117 was never the same. She
withdrew from the map community for a time, declining invitations to conferences and even making excuses not to research the antiquarian maps that had been Smiley’s specialty. She had always hoped to work at least forty years in the Map Division. But when the opportunity came in 2008 for a buyout, she took it, one year short at thirty-nine. “It was
the end of the world—not the end of the map world—but the end of it for me,” she later said. “There was just this sense of loss, of sadness, you know, responsibility. It hit me so hard.”

Little remains to show for all the money Smiley earned off the maps he stole. In Sebec, a new public boat launch sits along the shore in front of the Smileys’ old home, which they sold in 2007. A rock garden with flowers and birch trees sits before a tall flagpole flying the American flag. Across the bridge, however, the Sebec Village Shops are again derelict. White paint blisters and peels on the side of the building, and unused Christmas lights dangle year-round from the ceiling of the wraparound porch. Inside, all the fixtures are still in place, and all the tables for the
café are still set six years after it closed, as if it might open for breakfast in the morning. Across the street, the Sebec Village Marina looks dilapidated as well. Three small docks bob in the water, but the Moriartys never achieved their dream of a takeout restaurant. The paint on the storefront is peeling here too, and half the windows are boarded up, even though the marina still operates and the Moriartys still live there.

With Smiley out of the business, Graham Arader has continued to prosper—finally announcing in 2009 that he would be
donating all his wealth to philanthropic causes at the rate of $2 million a year. In 2013, he announced a
gift of fifteen thousand antique maps and prints to the University of South Carolina to establish the W. Graham Arader III Collection—a total value of $30 million. He’s made smaller gifts over the past few years to the University of Florida, the University of California–Irvine, and Northeastern University to establish programs to teach college students using real antique maps. “Rich kids grow up in houses with things like these in them,” he told me. “Well, why can’t poor kids have this? So there are all these empty walls in American universities and they’re begging for a chance to put something there.”

More walls were filled with maps at the Boston Public Library after the
official opening of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center in a new space on October 22, 2011. Visitors to the long-awaited center find exhibits on geography, a room for kids to learn about maps, and, in the back, a glassed-in reading room where patrons can view the two hundred thousand maps in the library’s collection.

The maps Smiley helped Norman Leventhal acquire, however, are not among them. While technically on loan to the BPL, most of Leventhal’s maps still hang in the Boston Harbor Hotel along Boston’s waterfront. There, tourists circulate among them in a lobby filled with plush couches and the smell of the harbor and the restaurant next door. If they stop and look, they can trace the chronological history of the city laid out on three walls—starting with John Smith’s map of New England.

—

WHEN SMILEY FIRST
got out of prison, he had no idea what he was going to do. He’d spent his entire career in the map business—and now was expressly forbidden from handling these objects again. Not that he’d want to anyway. Even reading about maps now was painful for him. He
returned to the Vineyard worried that he would no longer be accepted by the island community. Through his AA meetings and parents of his son’s friends, however, he began meeting other high-powered businesspeople who had crashed and burned in their careers. “There are a lot of broken toys on this island,” he told me.

A friend helped get him a job that first summer working at a catering company for $9 an hour. Eventually, he was able to use his skill in working with his hands to find employment as a landscaper and laborer on building sites for $12 an hour. With the computer skills he picked up in prison, he began building websites on the side for extra cash. His life is simpler now than it was around the wealthy world of map collectors, when he was flying off to London and Paris and dining at top restaurants. He now eats out with his family at the neighborhood clam shack and attends Ned’s Little League games, watching the teams rather than pacing the sidelines with a cell phone to his ear.

As if to signal the change, he stopped calling himself Forbes and began calling himself Ed—or even Eddie among close friends. “I am on the road to being well,” he told me cautiously. “I’ve taken the time to learn how the world actually works, instead of having a childish idea in my head of how it works and trying to force it.” One day, he said, he hopes to pay back the money he owes and make it up to those he hurt. “At the end of the day, I stole people’s money as much as anything, even though I never looked at it that way. But the final effect is these were people I was genuinely fond of, and who entrusted me with their expectation that I would never hurt them or their institutions. They put their good faith and trust in me and I let them down.”

It wasn’t just librarians and dealers who Smiley let down; some of his best friends also felt betrayed by his actions—if only because he wasn’t the person he’d always presented himself to be. “It was quite a revelation to realize there was
something wrong with the guy who was paying for all the drinks all those years,” said Paul Statt. “And there were a lot of free drinks over the years.” It felt good to be the one helping Forbes for a change, but he also felt like his life was diminished somehow from the deception. “It’s a little hard for some of us for whom he represented boundlessness over the years to accept the boundedness.”

Scott Slater had the
opposite feeling—like he could finally talk to Forbes the way he always wanted him to be, absent the pretentions of
“the Squire.” In long letters from prison, Smiley opened up about his childhood and the mistakes he made; about how much he missed his son and what it meant to be a man. As much as Slater was grateful for this new honesty and openness, however, he, too, sometimes missed some of the larger parts of Smiley’s personality that had disappeared since his arrest—telling stories over beers and his big belly laugh. “I miss the parts of Forbes where there was never a problem about anything,” he told me, sighing.

Above the couch in Slater’s living room is the only map Smiley had left before he went to prison, the map of Sebec Lake that hung in the house up in Maine. Slater has all of Smiley’s jazz and blues records, too, neatly stacked on cinder blocks in his dining room. Smiley has yet to pick them up, perhaps because they remind him of a time in his life when he was too out of control. “My wife keeps telling me we should sell them,” Slater said. “We need money for our roof. But if I did that, it would be stealing.”

Slater also has several watercolor paintings Smiley sent him from prison. When he began taking painting classes, he and his fellow prisoners were forbidden from looking at art books because of the frequent paintings of nudes they contained. So he began copying pictures from magazines and catalogs, painting farmhouses and snowy landscapes he sent to his friends for Christmas. Once he sent a painting to Slater’s disabled son, Gordon, depicting
The Dying Gaul,
a famous Roman marble statue of a fallen warrior, lying slumped and defeated on his shield.

Months after I spoke with Smiley, I again took the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, this time in the middle of December. A stiff wind was blowing off the ocean and shaking the leafless trees as I took a cab out to a farmhouse a few miles from Vineyard Haven. The building is home to the Featherstone Center for the Arts, a small gallery that was putting on a Christmas craft fair and art show. A local nonprofit had given
grants of $200 to $5,000 to various island artists to present their work, which ranged from paintings of Revolutionary War generals to circus costumes for kids.

Tucked in one corner were three small watercolors, accompanied by a short artist statement from Edward Smiley. It read: “During a difficult period of my life (including prison) I turned to painting as a way of regaining my balance, and beginning a period of renewal of mind and
spirit. Self-taught, I found an ability to see the world with fresh eyes and express myself and my feelings in watercolors.”

One of the paintings showed a village scene, with a small figure emerging from a cottage to walk across a peaceful snowy square. Another depicted a moody snow-colored field with a single, bare tree rising into a cloudy sky. The last, and most accomplished, painting showed a seascape with a gauzy light descending from a break in the clouds. In the foreground, a thicket of black and green brambles choked the shoreline.

The painting calls to mind a letter Smiley sent his friends Statt and Slater from prison, in which he wrote:

When painters paint, it is often the case that light is their primary interest. . . . What painters like Rembrandt discovered, is that you “paint” light by painting very dark areas in contrast. Painting “darks” proves to be much easier with pigment, and the only way to express light.

I love to paint the light. For me and others learning to paint, the challenge has been to risk getting comfortable with adding very dark areas to the painting, not just in the shadows but in the unexpected places. But it works—very dark areas do not wreck the painting as one might expect, but rather tend to [recede] in the brilliant expression of sunlight or the subtle silver light of the moon. What the brain notices and is the primary effect, is that of lightness.

As often as I examine good paintings and notice all the “darks,” it still feels very uncomfortable to drop black or dark blue into a perfectly clean watercolor. Maybe it will always feel uncomfortable. But I am told that my paintings are now more realistic and I am beginning to like them myself.

Reading that, I couldn’t help but think of the terra incognita found on antique maps, those blank spaces that represented endless possibility to early explorers—an ancient city of gold or a blue-water passage to the Orient waiting to be discovered. But those spaces could also be dangerous, as early mapmakers reminded us when they filled in the blanks with savage beasts and sea monsters. Other times, in the absence of real knowledge, those mapmakers filled in those dark spaces with their own desires, the way John Smith inserted his fictitious English cities in the
middle of hostile wilderness. Perhaps what Smiley was groping toward in his letter was a comfort in finally leaving the imperfections in place, resisting the impulse to fill in the dark spots with a desired geography, and allowing them to simply exist. His life now may not be as grandiose or imaginative as the one he created while he was selling and stealing maps, but in that sense at least it is
truer.

EPILOGUE

ON JULY 13, 2013
—more than eight years after Smiley had been arrested, and three and a half years after he’d been released from prison—the FBI made an unexpected announcement. “
After a well-known dealer of rare maps was caught stealing from a Yale University library in [2005], a subsequent FBI investigation revealed that the man had stolen antique maps and other valuable items from institutions around the world,” read the agency’s press release. “Most of the pilfered material was eventually returned to its rightful owners—but not all of it.”

The bureau went on to reveal that it was still in possession of twenty-eight rare maps and books that had been recovered from Smiley at the time of his arrest but had never been identified or returned. Some of them were quite familiar, matching maps that Smiley had stolen from libraries, including Thomas Holme’s map of Philadelphia (which he’d stolen from the BPL but was still missing from Yale); Hernán Cortés’ map of Tenochtitlán (which he’d stolen from Harvard and the Beinecke but was still missing from New York); George Best’s map of the Northwest Passage (which he’d stolen from the NYPL); and several sea charts from John Thornton, Mount and Page, and J.F.W. Des Barres. Others seem strange—like a mix of nineteenth-century state maps and US Coast Guard surveys.

What’s more strange is that the FBI should choose to release the list so long after Smiley had been arrested and sentenced. The
case has since passed from Steve Kelleher to another agent in the New Haven office, Special Agent Lisa MacNamara. When I called to ask her where the items came from, she said they were “acquired in August 2005 as a result of a
search warrant.” Smiley said he didn’t recall where he’d gotten them, and so the FBI had no idea whether they had been stolen or had been legitimately acquired. So far, MacNamara told me, no one had come forward to claim any of them. In fact, in the weeks after the release, she received only one call—from a dealer who said he legitimately sold Smiley one of the maps.

The rest of them sit at the New Haven field office, each item individually packaged in a box or tube. If no one comes to claim them, they may eventually be donated to the Library of Congress. Until then, they sit in evidence, one more mystery in a case full of mysteries.