The Map Thief (16 page)

And those are very rare maps with only a few copies—plenty of maps
worth thousands still exist in dozens or even hundreds of copies. Forget
Dr. No.
Someone could hang a stolen map in his house without anyone—including himself—knowing it was stolen. Outside of a giveaway such as a library marking stamp, it’s very difficult to tell which copy of a given map has come from where. And unlike art, maps aren’t hung in galleries or museums, off-limits to inspection. They are mostly kept in libraries, where they are meant to be handled. Gilbert Bland used a razor to slice out maps, but others have used a
wet string, balled up in their mouths and then placed in the binding of a book, to take maps. In a few minutes, saliva deteriorates the ancient paper to the point where the page can be easily removed.

No profile exists for those who steal maps. In most cases, the motive is simply the hope for a quick payday with little risk; in some cases, however, possession itself is the goal. In 1986, the curator of University of Georgia’s rare-books library,
Robert “Skeet” Willingham, was discovered with at least seventeen maps from the collection framed in his home. Arader helped in that case as well, providing the initial tip that led police to suspect Willingham. (Sentenced to fifteen years in prison, he was paroled in two and a half.) Such “
insider” theft accounts for some 75 percent of thefts from libraries and museums. The Beinecke Library had its own brush with it in 2001, when curators discovered that a twenty-two-year-old student volunteer named Benjamin Johnson was stealing from the stacks. In all, he stole $2 million worth of rare books and letters—though most were recovered from his dorm room, among other locations, before he could sell them.

“
It’s the same old story, a person recognizes libraries have the best material and don’t have the money to protect these things,” Travis McDade, a University of Illinois librarian and lawyer who has written extensively about map theft told me. “So people cut out two or three maps, go to a dealer, and say my uncle died or my grandfather died, are they worth anything?” The secrecy and competition among dealers, said McDade, aid thieves, who find the deals simply too good to pass up. “If they don’t buy it, he’ll sell it to a competitor. It’s a cutthroat business where ultimately it pays not to be as discerning a buyer as everyone else is,” he said. “If you have been in the business long enough, you have dealt in stolen items.”

No library is immune. Even the Library of Congress was vandalized
by a sixty-two-year-old Alexandria bookstore owner named
Fitzhugh Lee Opie, who raided the library’s stacks for ten years before he was finally caught in 1992 with two Pacific Railroad survey maps under his sweater. He received six months in prison. For years, such lenient prison sentences were the norm in book and map theft, with none of the thieves serving more than two and a half years. That was probably a combination of
who
was doing the stealing—mostly middle-aged white men without any criminal past—and
what
they stole—mere pieces of paper. Prosecutors and judges often failed to appreciate the inherent value of items known to only a small community of specialists. With another case that hit the courts the same time as Bland’s, however, that was about to change.

—

DANIEL SPIEGELMAN WAS
both cautious and daring in his thefts. Cautious, because unlike most map thieves, he didn’t try to sneak material out in front of onlooking guards. Daring, because instead he broke in to commit crimes at night, after the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University had closed. Spiegelman started stealing at the same time as Bland—the spring of 1994—by shimmying up an abandoned dumbwaiter from below the locked stacks where the rare books were kept.

He visited night after night for months, stealing
hundreds of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and dozens of letters written by US presidents from George Washington to Woodrow Wilson. Among his targets was one of Columbia’s gems: a nine-volume German
edition of Blaeu’s
Atlas Maior
from 1667—one of only a few copies in the world. One by one, Spiegelman razored more than two hundred maps out of the volumes. When he was done, one volume had only three maps left.

The
library didn’t discover the thefts until Fourth of July weekend, when a librarian realized a sixteenth-century liturgical manuscript was missing from its case. After a wider search revealed a dozen empty manuscript boxes, director Jean Ashton called in the FBI. Columbia broke with the discretion embraced by most libraries victimized by thieves, privately circulating a list of stolen items. It
caught the attention of a Dutch dealer the following spring, when a man approached to sell books and manuscripts, all of which were on the list.

Police set up a sting, surrounding Spiegelman at a Holiday Inn in
Utrecht as he tried to make the sale. Later they
raided a storage locker in New York, where they found dozens of letters, manuscripts, and, in the last locker, many of the maps severed from the Blaeu atlas. The ensuing legal case took years to unfold.
Spiegelman successfully fought extradition from the Netherlands for more than a year—in part, bizarrely, because he was for a time falsely rumored to be a suspect in the April 1995 Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, and the Dutch wouldn’t extradite him if he was facing the death penalty. He returned to the United States in November 1996 and made a
plea bargain in April 1997, a month before
Bland left prison.

As Travis McDade described in
The Book Thief,
the plea bargain started routinely. Spiegelman detailed his crimes, and prosecutors agreed to follow the sentencing guidelines. Since the 1980s, the federal system has followed a fairly straightforward
table to calculate sentences, with the level of severity of the offense on the horizontal access, and the degree of defendant’s criminal history on the vertical. To find the sentencing range, all the judge has to do is identify where they intersect.

The guidelines also give judges some leeway to take into account the particular details of the case and the defendant’s level of cooperation, allowing them in some circumstances to opt for a “downward departure” to decrease the sentence or an “upward departure” to increase it.
Downward departures were actually quite common in the Southern District of New York, where Spiegelman was prosecuted, used in 34 percent of cases at the time. Upward departures, meanwhile, were rare, used in only 1 percent of cases.

In Spiegelman’s case, the guidelines put the sentencing range at
between thirty and thirty-seven months, or about a year more than the twenty-two months he’d already served. When library director Jean Ashton heard about that range, she was appalled. Here was a man who had systematically desecrated Columbia’s rare-book holdings, forever altering and destroying documents that had survived for hundreds of years.

“The
very existence of rare books and manuscripts provides the basis for new discovery and interpretation in almost every area of study,” she wrote the judge. “[T]he destructive acts of one person can cause a piece of history to be lost to all future generations.” The argument had its effect. When the parties met again for the sentencing hearing in June, Judge Lewis Kaplan surprised the court by announcing he was
considering
an upward departure. Spiegelman’s defense attorneys protested, demanding hearing after hearing to argue against the move.

If anything, the strategy hurt their client by giving the library a forum in which to present its case. In the
final hearing in March 1998, Ashton brought several items, including two volumes of the Blaeu atlas. “They are considered the great glory of the golden age,” she began, as she held one of them up with a pair of white gloves. Opening the cover, she displayed row after row of page stubs that had once held maps. That afternoon, Kaplan granted an upward departure of five levels, increasing the sentence to sixty months in prison.

Since Spiegelman had now been in prison for three years, that added another two. But he had no intention of serving out the entire sentence. A year and a half into it, in September 1999,
Spiegelman escaped from a halfway house in Manhattan. Rather than go into hiding, he recovered a cache of stolen items and offered them to a rare-book dealer in Connecticut. Police
caught him in a sting almost identical to the one in the Netherlands, and the judge added another two years to his sentence. He finally
left prison on July 19, 2001, after serving more than six years.

The hefty sentence for Spiegelman in comparison to those given to other convicted map thieves was a victory for Columbia. But it was also a victory for the idea that the value of rare maps and books went beyond the dollar amount they commanded on the market. After the Supreme Court affirmed this idea in another case, the US
Sentencing Commission revised its guidelines in November 2002 to add a new category for “Theft of . . . Cultural Heritage Resources,” with a base level two steps higher than simple larceny, and even more steps added if the object was stolen from a library or museum or if it was taken for monetary gain.

—

THE BLAND AND SPIEGELMAN
thefts were a wake-up call to the cartographic community. Maps had never been stolen this brazenly, or on such a large scale. Conference panels were called, best practices shared on library Listservs. Starting in the late 1990s, some libraries began installing security cameras in their reading rooms; others began to make digital images of their most valuable maps in order to identify them in case of theft. There was only so much they could do, however. When a
recession hit a few years later, funds for additional security dried up, and many efforts were put on hold.

On the other side, map dealers started becoming more wary about where they bought material. One strident advocate of self-policing was Tony Campbell, a London map dealer and former librarian at the British Library, who sent out a call for dealers to band together against theft in 2001. “It is
essential that formal, international networks are established, to circulate immediately news about thefts and about the suspects involved,” he wrote. His pleas to set up a centralized list of stolen maps fell on deaf ears. But individual dealers began more closely scrutinizing where they got material and became more suspicious about those who sold them maps—if only to protect their own reputations.

One person who came under increasing attention was Forbes Smiley. His reputation for slow payment and bounced checks was well-known, but at least
one dealer suspected him of worse. Bill Reese, the New Haven dealer who’d been burned in the purchase of the Matthew Clark atlas, became suspicious of some of Smiley’s goods. As he told the story, he was doing some research on the map of New England made by
John Foster, the first map printed in America. Produced in Boston in 1677, the map is incredibly rare, with almost no private copies in existence. A slightly more common version, however, was printed in London the same year; it’s notable for a typo designating the White Hills of New Hampshire as the “Wine Hills” (
Figure 10
).

At some time in the 1990s, Reese acquired a London Foster and thought it would be fun to compare it to the Boston version, a copy of which was held down the block at the Beinecke Library. When he requested the book in which it ordinarily appeared, William Hubbard’s
Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England,
he found the map was missing. Immediately, Reese thought of Smiley—whom he remembered boasting of handling a Boston Foster a few years before. He shared his suspicions with the library and was later told the FBI investigated but nothing came of the tip.

He wasn’t the only one, however, who distrusted Smiley. Reese told Norman Fiering, the head of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and he in turn told his map department curator, Susan Danforth. The Brown library had lost several maps to Gilbert Bland, and
Danforth vowed not to lose any more. After hearing about Smiley’s poor reputation, she always made sure to sit next to him whenever he visited the library. “To be honest, I looked forward to it,” Danforth later told me. “He had great stories, and I learned a lot about maps from him.”

Eventually the rumors about Smiley subsided—and even started seeming foolish. Announcements came back to back that the two great collections Smiley had helped assemble were finding permanent homes. Rather than taking maps out of libraries, he was helping put maps into them.

THE BATTLE OF SEBEC

FIGURE 11
ANDREW ELLICOTT. “PLAN OF THE CITY OF WASHINGTON IN THE TERRITORY OF COLUMBIA.” PHILADELPHIA, 1792.

1996–2002

WHEN LARRY
SLAUGHTER
became sick with lung cancer and passed away on June 2, 1996, even his own family was astounded by the map collection he’d left behind. In the end, Smiley and Slaughter had together
assembled some six hundred maps, one hundred atlases, and fifty books. They included four of the earliest editions of
The English Pilot, The Fourth Book
—from 1689, 1706, 1713, and 1732; four copies of Thomas Jefferson’s
Notes on Virginia;
one of only a handful of copies of Ellicott’s
original map of Washington, DC (
Figure 11
); two rare wooden globes that were the oldest English globes in the country; and countless other rarities. Twenty-three maps in the collection were unique, with no other known copies in the world.

But the collection was much more than the sum of its parts—like Leventhal’s collection of New England, Slaughter’s assemblage of maps of the mid-Atlantic states was as close to a complete chronicle of the region as it was possible to make. “This
collection was built as a study collection so that the materials as a whole could be examined for comparative purposes and aid scholars in various historical fields,” Smiley explained to a Westchester County newspaper at the time.

Smiley and Slaughter had had many conversations about the value of keeping the collection together. After Slaughter’s death, his wife, Susan,
agreed to donate the collection to an institution where it could honor his memory. The obvious repository was the New York Public Library, where Slaughter had served as a devoted member of the Mercator Society. But the Library of Congress would be equally fitting given the collection’s heavy emphasis on Washington and the surrounding area.

Together Smiley and Susan Slaughter decided to tell both libraries of the potential donation and have them both make their case. Alice Hudson was thrilled to learn the news. “That suits us perfectly!” she wrote Smiley in a letter. “This gift would be extraordinarily exciting for the Library.” Hudson arranged a meeting with Smiley and the New York Public Library’s president, Paul LeClerc, to show that the library was serious. LeClerc told him the library was in the process of renovating its reading rooms, including Room 117, and starting a new scholar-in-residence program. This collection would be a perfect contender for more study.

He layered on other perks as well, including a major exhibition and a professional catalog of the collection. Smiley told him he would personally love to see the collection go to New York, but the library would have to show Slaughter’s widow that it could protect it and make it accessible to future generations. In a follow-up letter, Hudson assured him the library would do that, writing that “we are committed to protecting the collections” and that it would be “made secure in locked cases, away
from the reading room, in our own adjacent air conditioned, locked, non-public stack area.”

Of course,
that would take money, and Smiley pointed out that the donation wouldn’t come with an endowment. That wouldn’t be a problem, LeClerc assured him, since in addition to contributions from the library’s general fund, it would conduct a separate fund drive around the gift. That would be terrific, Smiley told them, but would they consider another idea: selling off maps in their collection that overlapped with Slaughter’s? If so, he’d be happy to facilitate the process—in exchange for his standard commission, of course.

A few days later, Smiley was impressed to receive a letter from LeClerc reiterating many of Hudson’s points, and adding a few new ones including the one he’d suggested. “To provide financial support for the maintenance of the Collection, the library will consider the sale of duplicates from the Map Division collections which are in poorer condition than the Collection’s equivalents,” LeClerc wrote. He added more personally: “Perhaps you and the donor would have tea with me one afternoon so that we can review the steps that must be taken to bring this great collection to the New York Public Library.”

—

SMILEY WAS THRILLED.
Just fifteen years earlier, he was sitting in the map room struggling to learn the names and dates of the major mapmakers. Now he would be sipping tea with the library’s president, discussing how to enshrine a decade of work. Though the collection would have Slaughter’s name on it, it would be covered with Smiley’s fingerprints. This was his legacy—and how fitting to think it might be permanently displayed in the very temple where he’d first fallen in love with maps. Then there was the fact that he could personally profit from the deal by earning a commission on the sale of the duplicates—no small consideration given the precarious state of his finances.

In addition to meeting with Hudson and LeClerc, he traveled to the Library of Congress and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown to hear them make their cases. In February 1997,
Smiley met again with Hudson and LeClerc as well as the director of the NYPL’s research libraries,
Bill Walker, who promised in another letter to catalog the
collection within twelve months and dedicating “in excess of $100K” to make it happen. Eventually, Brown dropped out of the running, and it was down to the two libraries. Smiley produced an “
analysis of need,” detailing the number of duplicate maps, atlases, and books in each of the collections, to show which library could benefit more.

New York’s collection overlapped with seven out of the forty-nine atlases in Slaughter’s collection, while the Library of Congress’s overlapped with twenty-two. As far as loose maps, New York had duplicates of 63 percent of Slaughter’s maps, while the Library of Congress had 74 percent. Clearly, Smiley concluded, the New York Public Library would benefit most from the collection. By March 14, 1997, the decision had been made. Smiley wrote Hudson a letter on his letterhead informing her that
Slaughter’s heirs had decided the collection would go to New York.

Two months later, on May 28, 1997, the
agreement was signed. About half the collection was donated as an outright gift, while the other half was given as an indefinite loan (a common way for donors to spread out their tax liability). The agreement included a passage stating that as an “inducement to the donor” LeClerc and Walker had “made certain commitments,” attaching the letters from the administrators with their promises of swift cataloging and an exhibition to be funded in part by the sale of duplicates from the collection.

As promised, LeClerc
invited Smiley and Susan Slaughter, along with Walker and Hudson, to tea in the president’s office to celebrate the acquisition. Soon after the acquisition, the
library publicized the gift with a front-page article on the library’s newsletter, mailed to the library’s many supporters. “The items that Mr. Slaughter assembled in this collection cannot be found together in any other repository in the world,” Hudson said. Smiley added what he had realized years ago in private moments with Leventhal and Slaughter. “A scholar can line up ten maps on one table and suddenly see a new connection,” Smiley said; “literally 100 new stories that have never been told will be told here.”

When the celebrations subsided, Hudson turned to the
gargantuan task of cataloging and conserving the materials in time for an exhibition the following year. The maps needed to be sorted into two groups—those donated directly and those on loan—before they could be cataloged for the collection. She drew up a plan estimating the cost at $88,422, including $43,638 for the cataloger. Nothing was included for
Smiley, despite the fact that he was the only one with the knowledge necessary to sort through Slaughter’s sixty ring-bound notebooks in order to identify the hundreds of maps that needed to be cataloged.

—

SMILEY SAID NOTHING
to protest the arrangement, even as he spent the fall
organizing the notes from Slaughter’s binders and matching them to maps in the collection. He set up materials at the long table farthest from the reference desk, coming in day after day to perform the work. Sometimes, Hudson and Smiley were the only ones left at the end of the day after all the patrons had left. They chatted about the various maps as they worked and shared frustrations over having to figure out which of the hundreds of maps belonged in the gift and which belonged in the loan.

Over time, Hudson began thinking of him less as a patron and more as a professional colleague—one who had done more in her tenure to improve the quality of the map collections than anyone else. She watched him diligently work to tease out discrepancies between the maps listed in the donation and those actually present in the collection. In some cases, maps were mistakenly listed twice, but in other cases, they were just entirely absent from where they were supposed to be. At one point, Slaughter’s widow, Susan, called Hudson to privately express her frustration over several dozen missing maps that didn’t seem to be present with others. “So where are they?” Hudson remembers her complaining. “I want this all to be in order.”

For Smiley, business was finally looking up after a decade of trouble. In January 1997, he had
paid off a federal tax lien for more than $25,000, and in February a
state tax warrant for more than $6,700. Now he and Lisa began
scoping out real estate outside the city. They had lived in New York for nearly two decades and had lately begun to tire of the fast pace of life there. Practically speaking, Smiley could work anywhere with a post office and a phone, and Lisa could practice interior decorating anywhere there were people rich and stylish enough to hire her. Recently, they had also been considering having a child and didn’t want to raise one in the city.

For a time, they considered settling in the Boston area, close to research libraries and plenty of educated clients. But Boston seemed like a
defeat to Smiley, looking as if he wasn’t able to play the game in New York. After exploring the Connecticut coast and Cape Cod, they finally settled on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the south coast of Massachusetts that came alive every summer with vacationing celebrities. It was the
perfect combination for the two of them—with enough history and New England charm to satisfy Forbes, and enough style and cachet to please his wife.

It would also be a perfect place to raise a child, with a small-town vibe Smiley had experienced in his own childhood. Moreover, no one could see this as a defeat for Smiley. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Dozens of wealthy businessmen and celebrities had homes there—including actors Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, newsmen Mike Wallace and Walter Cronkite, singers James Taylor and Carly Simon, and
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham. For the past several years, even President Bill Clinton himself had chosen the Vineyard for his annual summer vacations.

Yet, the prevailing attitude of islanders toward all the fame in their midst was a collective shrug. Locals were so used to running into faces they’d seen on TV while picking up butter at the local market that they seemed to barely notice. That sensibility fit perfectly with Smiley’s own peculiar mix of New York flash and New England reserve. The Smileys
rented the summer home of Scott Slater’s sister Wendy for two weeks in October before finding a home on the quieter, western side of the island—“up island” as the locals call it. The location on a road wooded with scrub oak was away from the summer tourists who crowded the population centers of Vineyard Haven and Edgartown.

The house itself wasn’t anything special—an ugly, oval-shaped cabin they nicknamed the “spaceship.” But the price was cheap for the Vineyard, and with the demand from summer visitors they could rent it out during summers while they lived in Sebec, and then in a few years tear it down to build a new home. In December 1997, Smiley
signed the purchase agreement for $265,000,
putting 20 percent down as he and Lisa made preparations to move in the following summer.

—

BEFORE THEY DID,
however, Smiley was in for a disappointment. When he
presented Hudson with his list of duplicates the library could sell, she passed it up the chain to Walker, who dismissed it out of hand. These
weren’t duplicates, he argued—differences in condition, color, paper, and a dozen other attributes made every one of Slaughter’s maps unique. Hudson contacted Smiley apologetically to tell him the news, but she had to agree with her boss. In fact, she was embarrassed she hadn’t seen the obvious differences herself.