[CPProt.net] Map of a Crime

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Map of a Crime
July 17, 2005
By KIM MARTINEAU Courant Staff Writer

      Those who thought they knew E. Forbes Smiley III now wonder if they
knew him at all. All it took to start unraveling his image was a small knife
blade, dropped on the floor of a library reading room at Yale. The
well-known map dealer -- once held in great esteem by those who study,
collect and trade in old maps -- is now in disfavor. The impact of his
alleged actions on the individuals and institutions that trusted him remains
in question, but it could be devastating.

      Smiley was arrested last month at Yale University and charged with
taking several antique maps from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library. A librarian's suspicion was aroused after she discovered an X-Acto
blade on the floor. Later, a security camera caught Smiley removing a map
from one of the books he was examining. When police confronted Smiley later,
they found a rare map in his blazer pocket and several more in his briefcase
- an assortment of antique documents valued at $900,000.

      He was charged with three counts of larceny and is free on $175,000
bail. He is scheduled to appear in Superior Court in New Haven on Aug. 9.

      The 49-year old Martha's Vineyard resident is now the subject of a
wide-ranging federal investigation. And the scholarly institutions Smiley
was known to frequent - among them the New York Public Library, the Boston
Public Library, the Newberry Library in Chicago and both Harvard and Yale
universities - are taking inventory of their collections. The libraries are
home to troves of Age of Discovery maps, relics that recount the early days
of human exploration and navigation around the globe.

      "You're talking about Da Vinci with a carving knife," said Barry
Ruderman, a bankruptcy lawyer and California map dealer. "You're talking
about a person who defiled the institutions that defined his existence."

      By the time the dust has settled, several map dealers predict, the
investigation could embarrass some of America's premier scholarly
institutions - and leave their collections in considerable turmoil as the
rightful owners of the maps are located.

      The problem has two parts, if it turns out Smiley was trading
extensively in stolen maps. The libraries may have lost priceless treasures
donated to them by patrons who believed their bequests would be in safe
hands in perpetuity for scholarly research. But the institutions also may be
the unwitting custodians of stolen maps donated to them by private
collectors.

      In the small and clubby world of the rare-map trade, people are
reluctant to discuss their dealings with Smiley. But privately, they paint
the picture of a map aficionado who used his charm and erudite manner to
secure the trust of some of the top scholars and collectors in his
profession.

      Now they wonder if they were taken by a con man.

      Smiley projected the image of a blue blood with powerful social ties.
He is a longtime member of the New York Public Library's Mercator Society, a
charitable organization that raises money to restore the library's old maps
and buy new ones.

      He also helped two prominent collectors build extensive cartographic
collections that were later donated to the New York and Boston public
libraries.

      Unlike Gilbert Bland, the nondescript map thief portrayed in Miles
Harvey's cartographic crime tale "The Island of Lost Maps," Smiley often
came across as arrogant, according to those who know him. At yet at the same
time he seemed insecure and eager to be liked. He has an encyclopedic memory
and passion for maps, but some dealers who sold him maps say he was
maddeningly slow to pay for them.

      Smiley received his training in the map section of the all-purpose New
York department store, B. Altman and Co. When the store closed in 1989,
Smiley went into private business in Manhattan and told customers he had
acquired most of his supply from his previous employer and from Altman
customers, according to W. Graham Arader III, a top New York map dealer.

      But that story was false, Arader said: Arader himself bought most of
Altman's map inventory at auction and purchased the private collection of
the woman who had run the map department for two decades.

      Arader started selling maps out of his dorm room at Yale and now
presides over an antique map and atlas empire. He runs one gallery out of
his five-story townhouse on Madison Avenue and has another gallery nearby.
He also has offices in Philadelphia, Houston and San Francisco.

      On a recent tour of his Madison Avenue mansion, Arader waved at the
priceless, sometimes musty, antiquities that line the floors and walls and
fill his closets.

      "You can see I like maps," he said. "This is my bedroom. You can
barely see the walls."

      One of the framed prints on his walls is a 1614 map of New England
drawn by Capt. John Smith, the founder of Virginia's Jamestown colony. The
map is the first accurate representation of New England and the first to
give that name to the land mass. Between 300 and 500 copies of that map were
printed from a copper plate engraving. One of those prints, stolen from
Beinecke, was found in Smiley's pocket last month, Yale police say.

      Arader said he's been warning people in the business about Smiley for
the past 15 years. He's the first to admit his grudge is personal: Smiley is
accused of stealing from Yale, Arader's alma mater. But, more importantly,
Smiley picked off Arader's richest customers, one by one, Arader charged.

      "It made me crazy," Arader fumed. "How can I compete with map dealers
whose costs are zero?"

      Arader likes to boast that he helped put several major map thieves out
of business, including Andrew Antippas, a former English professor at Tulane
University convicted in 1978 of stealing five antique maps from Yale's
Sterling Memorial Library.

      A brash, larger-than-life character, Arader has been profiled in The
New Yorker magazine and fills an entire chapter, and then some, in "The
Island of Lost Maps."

      "The thieves don't come to me anymore because I've put them in
prison," he bragged.

      Arader said he has shipped the FBI some key reference books in
cartography and forwarded them several tips to help in their investigation
of Smiley.

      He says that a chief competitor, The Old Print Shop, a longtime family
business in Manhattan, has been buying from Smiley for years. He also says
that a French map of the world grabbed off the wall of the Franklin &
Marshall College Library in Lancaster, Pa., turned up on Smiley's website
(www.efsmaps.com), then at the National Museum of Australia.

      "I can't comment on any of that," said FBI Special Agent Steven
Kelleher, who is handling the map investigation.

      Harry Newman, who runs The Old Print Shop with his brother, declined
to discuss Arader's allegations. His shop, on Manhattan's Lexington Avenue,
is a dusty but cheerful place, full of old maps spilling off the tops of
wooden drawers and cabinets.

      A Franklin & Marshall official confirmed that the school has contacted
the FBI in the wake of Smiley's arrest in New Haven. "Le Globe Terrestre," a
1740 map drawn by the French engraver Jean Baptiste Nolin, disappeared from
the library's atrium sometime during the evening of Nov. 7, 2000.

      It's unlikely, however, that the map ended up in Australia. In an
e-mail Friday, a National Museum official said the map in the museum's
possession is dated 1700, 40 years earlier than the map stolen from Franklin
& Marshall.

      Libraries across the country have been reviewing their logs nervously
to see if Smiley paid them a visit. An official at The John Carter Brown
Library at Brown University in Providence said Smiley visited periodically
but was closely supervised while he was there.

      "He was never left alone with anything," said Susan Danforth, the
library's curator of maps and prints. "I sat next to him every time he
looked at something in this library."

      Smiley also visited the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester,
Mass., and the Library of the Boston Athenaeum, but both institutions say
they've checked their records and determined that items Smiley reviewed are
still there, officials said. Smiley has visited the Library of Congress in
Washington, which is home to arguably the best map collection in the world,
but records show the last time he was there was at least four to five years
ago.

      "We're continuing to check our records," said Helen Dalrymple, a
Library of Congress spokeswoman.

      A source at the Newberry Library in Chicago, also a renowned
repository of antique maps, confirmed that Smiley had visited and that the
library is now taking a close look at its collections.

      The picture is murkier at Harvard, Yale and the New York Public
Library, where media handlers are taking all calls related to their map
collections. All three institutions said they are "assessing" their stock of
material.

      "We're aware of what happened at Yale, so we are looking into the
whole business. That's all I can tell you," said Beth Brainard, a
spokeswoman at Harvard. She declined to say whether Smiley had been to
Harvard to look at maps, or whether the university has been in touch with
the FBI.

      A spokeswoman for the New York Public Library, Anne Canty, repeated
the same line, without elaborating. "We're assessing the situation," she
said.

      The Boston Public Library confirmed that Smiley was a frequent patron
there and well-known to the staff.

      "We're in the midst of doing an investigation, under the FBI's
instructions," said Ruth Kowal, chief of operations. "Obviously, anytime
anything like this happens, you're shocked, but we have no evidence to
suggest anything happened."

      Though Smiley did not provide the Boston library with any maps
directly, he was a major supplier to a Boston real estate developer, Norman
Leventhal, who donated his map collection to the library in 2003. The family
of another customer of Smiley's, Lawrence Slaughter, donated his map
collection to the New York Public Library in 1997.

      In the past week, after news of Smiley's arrest was first reported by
The Courant, the story ran in newspapers across the country, including The
Martha's Vineyard Times. Smiley is apparently known in the area for hauling
his modern home, in nine parts, by barge from Port Elizabeth, N.J., to
Chilmark, Mass. In a letter published in the same paper earlier this year,
Smiley apologized for the unsightliness of the construction and promised to
screen his house from the road.

      Smiley did not return messages left on his home answering machine,
which still greets callers with the friendly salutation: "Hi. Forbes Smiley
on the Vineyard. Please leave a message and we'll get right back to you.
Take care."

      The thefts at Yale follow a series of map robberies across mainland
Europe and Scandinavia.

      Maps are a favorite target of thieves because collectors find them
irresistible, said Anthony Bliss, a curator at The Bancroft Library at the
University of California, Berkeley.

      "It's a work of art. It's a work of science," he said. "I can sit and
look at a map for hours."

      --Courant Staff Writer Lisa Chedekel contributed to this story.