[CPProt.net] Theft Case Rattles Sedate World of Rare Maps

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

October 3, 2005
Theft Case Rattles Sedate World of Rare Maps 
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

NEW HAVEN, Oct. 2 - With his neat blazer and scholarly air, it was not hard
for E. Forbes Smiley III to blend in at the Yale rare-books library and make
himself at home among its atlases and maps.

But this visit to the Beinecke Library at Yale on June 8 by Mr. Smiley, a
49-year-old dealer in antiquities who plied his trade on both sides of the
Atlantic, took a turn that has jolted the closed and covetous world of map
dealers and collectors, as well as the serene if starchy institutions that
hold treasured maps.

According to the local police, a library worker's discovery of an X-Acto
knife blade on the reading room floor near Mr. Smiley was the first hint of
trouble. By early afternoon, they say, librarians had video images of Mr.
Smiley removing from a book an antique map valued by Yale at $150,000. Later
that day, the police say, they found in his jacket a fragile map that
appeared to have been taken from a 17th-century book; others that also
appeared to be stolen, worth more than $700,000, were in his briefcase. 

Now librarians and curators from New York to Chicago, alerted by the F.B.I.,
have been sent scurrying to their stacks to make sure their books are
intact. And in some cases, including the New York and Boston Public
Libraries, maps may have gone missing, though no one has accused Mr. Smiley
in those cases. 

Charged with larceny in the first degree in New Haven, Mr. Smiley pleaded
not guilty on Aug. 9 and has said little about the case beyond the
assurances he initially gave the police that the maps were his and that he
simply was comparing them to others at the library. His lawyer, Richard A.
Reeve, has declined all comment, as has Yale. 

With Mr. Smiley, who has been buying and selling rare North American maps
and atlases for more than a decade, scheduled to make another court
appearance here on Monday, the case is turning into an embarrassment for
prestigious libraries and elite collectors from Chicago to London. A field
marked by tweedy scholarship in quiet, climate-controlled vaults has been
rattled by disclosures of maps disappearing amid lax security and suspicions
that big-money deals were being made with too few questions asked.

Local prosecutors here brought the initial charges against Mr. Smiley. But
according to interviews with people who have been contacted by the
authorities, federal prosecutors in New Haven have been involved since this
summer, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked libraries that had
played host to Mr. Smiley to check their holdings. The United States
attorney's office here has declined to comment, as has the F.B.I.

Indeed, it seems that just about every library and university that ushered
Mr. Smiley into its cloistered precincts has been scouring its collections
for signs of tampering. The New York Public Library and the Boston Public
Library, two institutions that leveraged Mr. Smiley's rapport with
collectors to increase their rosters of map donations in the last decade,
have acknowledged that maps may be missing from their collections and that
Mr. Smiley's visits are being scrutinized for any possible link. The
reverberations have been felt far as the British Library. 

Meanwhile, many of the customers who bought his wares - a group that
includes some of the nation's most prestigious and most secretive collectors
- are cautiously reviewing their purchases. 

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," W. Graham Arader 3rd, a dealer
considered by many to be preeminent in the world of antiquarian maps, said
of the New Haven case. Map thefts are common enough to be monitored by
bloggers and are the focus of entire books. Still, Mr. Arader, a former
trustee of Yale's library system, said he had to nag the university to
install the cameras that ultimately helped nab Mr. Smiley. 

Greeting customers at his map-filled mansion on Madison Avenue - his
"$35-million spider web," as he calls it - Mr. Arader said he has been
warning clients for years that Mr. Smiley's prices were too good to be true.
"A lot of powerful people will have to return stuff, because it's stolen,"
he said, adding, "Some very rich, very powerful, very influential men,
against my judgment, against my written letters, against my e-mails, chose
to ignore my advice."

Mr. Smiley is a graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., according
to a lengthy profile in The Hartford Courant. His career began in the map
department of B. Altman & Company in New York before he went off on his own.
Competitors recall that he struggled financially in the early 1990's and
that he complained bitterly that a $250,000 map collection he had been
building was stolen. "He called everyone in the business to say they were
stolen, in case they were offered" for sale, said Murray Hudson, an
antiquarian book and map dealer in Halls, Tenn.

In pitches to customers and the introduction to his Web site, Mr. Smiley
hammered home the idea that he sought long-term relationships with clients -
citing, by way of example, work he did helping two prominent collectors,
Lawrence H. Slaughter and Norman B. Leventhal, build impressive map holdings
that now feature in the New York and Boston Public Libraries, respectively. 

"Once a relationship is established," he wrote, "I work to protect the
collector's interest, and to assure that the finest copies of relevant maps
and atlases are offered to them as soon as they appear on the market, and at
the lowest possible price." 

Mr. Smiley and his wife, Lisa Benson, a former colleague at B. Altman, live
in Chilmark, on Martha's Vineyard, but also own property in Maine, according
to the profile in The Hartford Courant. 

As the F.B.I. has made its rounds, not all those individuals asked to
surrender objects for inspection have been very good sports, say dealers who
have been caught in the middle. Among other considerations, collectors may
have to forfeit the maps - or the tax deductions, if it turns out they have
donated the documents to libraries or institutions. 

Robert Newman, a third-generation map dealer who, with his brother, Harry,
runs the Old Print Shop on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, said he was
complying with an F.B.I. demand that he produce for examination 19 items the
shop had purchased from Mr. Smiley.

Mr. Newman said he has offered to buy the items back from his own customers,
but added that some were still upset. "It's like your walking into their
house and stealing their children," Mr. Newman said.

Galling to him and others in the trade are what they consider to be the many
missed opportunities to curb dishonest activities years ago - a failure he
attributed to widespread misgivings among academic and cultural institutions
to admit when they have been sloppy or snookered. For instance, the most
valuable map that the F.B.I. asked Mr. Newman to produce for examination was
purchased by him from Mr. Smiley some five years ago. 

Mr. Newman said he had been told that a prior owner had suspected the map's
theft from the collection but never spread the word. Had the alarm been
raised then, Mr. Newman said, "there was a chance to stop this four years
ago." 

Charles T. Cullen, the president of Chicago's Newberry Library, an
independent research institution, acknowledges that the map world has some
explaining to do. Two maps are missing from books Mr. Smiley viewed at the
Newberry in March, he said. One is a 17th-century map of Virginia by Capt.
John Smith. Dr. Cullen finds the other - an 18th-century map of coastal
South Carolina - especially puzzling, since it has a limited market. 

"We're somewhat embarrassed we had something stolen from us, but it
happens," Dr. Cullen said. Donors, "know these things happen sometimes, and,
of course, it always looks bad," he said, adding, "But it's one of the
unfortunate aspects of being open." In any event, he said that neither map
was likely to end up as part of a criminal case against Mr. Smiley. "One, we
didn't see him steal them, and we couldn't say with absolute certainty that
the maps were in the books when we gave them to him," Dr. Cullen said.

Even police affidavit prepared by Detective Martin Buonfiglio of the Yale
police department, which was the basis for charging Mr. Smiley in June,
suggested that at Yale itself Mr. Smiley had been under suspicion once
before. But that apparently did not put him on any "watch" list at the
Beinecke Library. 

According to the affidavit, when the head of public services at the Beinecke
heard about the knife blade on the reading room floor, she consulted the
visitors' log to see who was inside the reading room, which is not open to
the general public.

Seeing Mr. Smiley's name, the affidavit notes, she called Yale's Sterling
Memorial Library to see if its staff knew him and was told that he "was a
suspect in a theft there on a prior occasion." 

But that incident, the affidavit says, was never reported or pursued for
lack of evidence.

http://www.nytimes.com/