The Shakespeare Thefts (14 page)

The state police were notified, and Captain John F. Stokes suggested publicizing the theft as widely as possible, even
internationally. “We must inform the English authorities,” he warned. “Otherwise, all the thief would have to do would be to tear off the binding and show up in England with the bare folio, along with some story about finding it in his great-grandmother’s attic—a newly discovered first folio of Shakespeare.”
¹¹
(Stokes’s prescience was confirmed more than half a century later when Raymond Scott appeared at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, with the stolen Durham University First Folio, from which the binding had been torn off, and Scott claimed that it was a newly discovered copy.)

The college offered a $1,000 reward and sent out five thousand circulars to police departments, book collectors, colleges, Shakespeare societies, and libraries. The theft was featured in major media outlets, including Walter Winchell’s syndicated “On Broadway” column: “The Chapin Library of Williams College has Mass. and N.Y. cops looking for the thief who took a first folio of Shakespeare. Worth between 50 and 80 Gs.”
¹²
The
New York Herald Tribune
lamented: “It helps not at all to express moral indignation when a great book is stolen from an institution where pride lies in the extent and generous spirit of its service to scholars.”
¹³
Four days after the theft, news came of an abandoned taxicab that had been recovered near Boston with two volumes of Shakespeare in the backseat.
Teletype messages flashed back and forth excitedly until the Boston police determined that the volumes were college textbooks.

Two days after the theft, Biernat met up with Lynch in Albany and gave him $150, promising to deliver the rest of his share as soon as the book was sold. Kwiatkowski had planned to sell the First Folio in Europe, but the flare-up of the war in early 1940 had made that a less tenable option. Having spent a month unsuccessfully trying to find a buyer, he decided to change tactics by responding to the reward offer. In March, Kwiatkowski sent a telegram to the New York City office of Shaw, Veitch & Clemsen, the firm that had insured the Chapin folio for $24,000. It read:

INTERESTED CIRCULAR. HAVE INFORMATION. ARRANGE SOME ONE STAY QUEENS HOTEL, MONTREAL, UNDER NAME CHAPIN. ARRIVE TOMORROW NIGHT. AWAIT CALL. DEALER.
¹⁴

The insurance company sent an investigator to Montreal, who registered at the Queens Hotel under the name John Chapin. Kwiatkowski phoned the next morning: “This is Reader calling. We’re glad to see that you’re interested in the return of the book. But you’ll have to increase the reward fivefold.”

The investigator replied, “That’s not a reward you’re asking. That’s a ransom. Anyway, I’ll have to contact my office to see if they’ll go that high.”

Kwiatkowski responded, “All right. But quickly. Put your answer in the Personals column of the
Montreal Gazette
.”
¹⁵

The following day, the investigator placed an ad in the
Gazette:
“Willing to increase. Please arrange for personal interview—Chapin.”

Kwiatkowski responded, somewhat cryptically, by special delivery letter:

Pardon my not keeping telephone appointment. With respect to the Gazette notice, some doubt in mind of counsel as to legitimacy of your mission. Will you vouchsafe payment in absence of personal risk if counsel shall mediate negotiations. Use Gazette again for response. Should you get no other message by March 23rd, will mean endeavors here abandoned
.
¹⁶

Because the following day was a Canadian holiday on which the newspaper did not publish, “Chapin” had to wait until March 23 to reply: “Mission friendly. Willing to meet counsel but definitely will leave tonight—Chapin.”
¹⁷

Unaccountably, Kwiatkowski did not respond.

Meanwhile, Biernat was arrested for bootlegging and sent to prison. He had been sending Lynch periodic payments of $10 or $60 to string him along, but these payments stopped when Biernat was incarcerated. Lynch wired Kwiatkowski for money but was told, he later reported, “that there was no more and I’d stay healthy if I stayed away from Buffalo.” Despairing that he would ever receive his share, Lynch began to drink heavily, so much so that he put on twenty or thirty pounds in just a few months.

On June 30, Lynch wandered into the Albany police headquarters and gave himself up. The next morning, Detective John Murray reported to his chief that

I’ve just been questioning a fellow named Lynch, a rummy who was locked up last night after claiming he was wanted for that Shakespeare book theft over at Williamstown—you remember it happened about five months ago. He gave a pretty screwy story. But I’m not so sure it’s all screwy. He seems to know a lot about it. He tried to wriggle out of what he’d confessed last night. But when I reminded him of some of the things he had said, he saw he was in hot water, and admitted he’s the thief all right. He claims that a fellow offered him a thousand bucks to swipe the book but he says that all he ever got was $160 and a lot of headaches and that’s why he thought up the double-cross idea while he was drunk last night.
¹⁸

Lynch was subsequently taken to Williams College so that Lucy Osborne could make a positive identification. But the effects of months of alcohol abuse had so transformed Lynch that the librarian told the police, “I just don’t think this is the man. The other was slender and willowy.”
¹⁹
Only after Lynch reenacted the sequence of events that he’d undertaken as Professor Gillingham did Osborne finally recognize him.

When Assistant U.S. District Attorney Robert M. Hitchcock was assigned to the case, he asked Lynch why he’d confessed: “Just why did you go to the police station at Albany and give yourself up? Was it because they didn’t pay you what they promised?”

“No, I wasn’t thinking of that,” Lynch responded after a moment. “I didn’t want Hitler to get the book.”

“Hitler?” Hitchcock replied. “What does he have to do with this?”

“It’s like this,” Lynch explained:

Ever since that night at Albany when those fellows let me in on this deal, I’ve been wondering what they were going to do with that book. Perhaps you’ve been reading that series of articles in
Liberty
magazine about Hitler’s household, written by a girl who used to be a maid there. Well, I’ve been reading them and in the article I read the week I surrendered, she told how Hitler and Goebbels collect rare books and send their agents to foreign countries to buy
old editions. I wondered if Bill intended to sell the folio to them.
²⁰

This, true or not, seems an inspired answer to me. And it harkens back to those patriotic Oxford men who pitched in to keep their book in Britain rather than seeing it move to America. The need to keep the First Folio away from Hitler continues to this day: In the popular video game
Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich
(distributed by GameSpy), the objective is to stop the Nazis from destroying a Gutenberg Bible, Thomas Aquinas’s
Summa Theologica
, and a Shakespeare First Folio.

At 6:30 a.m. on July 7, FBI agents simultaneously raided Biernat’s house and the home of the Kwiatkowskis’ parents. Biernat answered the door and submitted to arrest; Eddie was listening to the radio in his parents’ living room and was arrested, but there was no sign of Bill. Searching the house, the agents discovered him hiding under a pile of laundry in the corner of a bedroom; they also found piles of rare books in the attic, including
The Actor: A Treatise on the Art of Playing
(1750).

They did not find the First Folio.

Lynch, Biernat, and the Kwiatkowski brothers were charged with violating the National Stolen Property Act. Lynch had already confessed his crime, but the others maintained their innocence. “The charge is perfectly absurd,” Bill told the FBI. “You are being misled by the
fantasies of a drunkard.”
²¹
On September 12, all four men were indicted by a federal grand jury.

As the trial date approached, Hitchcock received a call from an informant whom he characterized as “a highly reputable gentleman of my acquaintance who, I believe, knows more underworld characters than any other man in Western New York.”
²²
The caller said:

The First Folio will be returned in perfect condition if the trial is held in the Federal Court here instead of state court in Massachusetts. I’ll call you again in two days to learn your answer.
²³

Hitchcock determined that the caller was acting as an intermediary for Kwiatkowski, who clearly was attempting to use the folio as a bargaining chip, apparently assuming that the federal law against transporting stolen property across state lines would carry a lesser sentence than the Massachusetts law against grand larceny. Hitchcock agreed to the deal—he wanted to recover the folio for Williams and needed the stolen property as evidence to bolster his case—and relayed this information to the shady caller, who promised to return the book within three days.

Three days went by and no book.

The mystery caller phoned again, asking for more time. Ten days later, on a Sunday night, he called
Hitchcock at home. The district attorney’s frustration boiled over:

Don’t call me again. Bill Kwiatkowski is lying, and has no intention of returning that folio. You tell all of those fellows that I’m sending Lynch to Massachusetts to testify against the other three. When we get through with them they’ll have plenty of time to think things over.
²⁴

Three days later, a bulky package wrapped in newspaper arrived at Hitchcock’s office. It contained the long-lost Williams First Folio.

Fortunately, the First Folio was not damaged. At the October 8 trial in federal court in Rochester, all four men were found guilty. Lynch, because of his assistance as a government witness, was given a three-month sentence and released in recognition of time served. (Unable to make bail, he had already spent three months in jail awaiting trial.) Eddie Kwiatkowski was sentenced to two years’ probation; Biernot was sent to prison for a year and a half. Bill Kwiatkowski—the mastermind behind the theft—got two years. In a plea for leniency, he provided the sentencing judge with a letter from his employer asserting that his work as an aircraft designer was vital for national defense.

The letter was, of course, a forgery.

On October 21, 1940, the First Folio was returned to the Chapin Library. Shortly thereafter, an account of the theft and recovery—with the sensationalized title “They’ve Kidnapped Shakespeare!”—appeared in the pulp magazine
True Detective Mysteries
. Robert Hitchcock capitalized on his connection to the case by publishing his story in the December 1941 issue of
Esquire
magazine. I don’t know how many eyes it attracted because it appeared on the newsstands the week that Pearl Harbor was attacked.

The librarian on duty during this fiasco was not dismissed; she stayed at her post until 1947. I imagine she became a bit more hands-on supervising visiting scholars.

I hope good luck lies in odd numbers
.

—Shakespeare’s
Merry Wives of Windsor

The magician Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) is an avid book collector. He spent his early career as a high school Latin teacher and had long been searching for an original copy of
The Discovery of Witchcraft
, an exposé of medieval witchcraft published in London in 1584 that is venerated by magicians as their holy grail. Its author, Reginald Scot, had set out to prove that witches did not and could not exist. King James found Scot’s opinion
so heretical that he ordered all copies of the book to be burned. He wasn’t successful, but it certainly made copies hard to come by.

On a private visit to the vaults of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, Teller asked to see the rare copy of the first edition of
The Discovery of Witchcraft
. In its presence the impeccably suave and sophisticated magician was visibly trembling. (After Gail Kern Paster, then director of the Folger, told me about this incident, I was able, through my connections in the rare book world, to locate a copy of the 1584
Discovery of Witchcraft
for Teller, which he instantly bought.)

I mention this because after my experience with “the portrait,” I now more fully understand the mania that can overcome you when you think you are near to something that is rare and dear to you. Accepting that my Shakespeare painting was a fake made me acknowledge that I can’t have all of the answers. I think back on the time that I was at Petworth, the ancestral home of the Percy family, and they were so kind in setting me up to examine their early Shakespeare editions in the best way they knew how. They have an
amazing
home. J. M. W. Turner, the renowned Romantic landscape painter and watercolorist, spent his summers there, gazing at the gardens that Lancelot “Capability” Brown, the famed landscape architect, had designed. Turner painted murals on the walls, and you can still
see them today. It was a heady experience, being in that home. And the family was so thrilled to have a scholar in the house that they brought out other works from the period, hoping I could give an expert opinion or reveal tantalizing anecdotes. Because Chaucer’s niece was in the family, they have an early manuscript of
The Canterbury Tales
. What they really wanted me to give an opinion on was a work by Thomas Dekker. They had a first edition of his play,
The Whore of Babylon—
an anti-Catholic drama written in 1607 that had been a failure in the theater—bound together with several other plays, but their pressing question was why was the Dekker play so well thumbed.

I didn’t have an answer. Standing there, wearing gardening gloves—did I mention that they gave me gardening gloves to wear while examining their Shakespeare volumes? They meant well—and faced with people passionate about their books, who were asking for the help of a scholar, I didn’t have a clue.