[CPProt.net] Forbes Smiley map thefts: From Life Among The Elite To Charges Of Theft

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>From Life Among The Elite To Charges Of Theft 

By KIM MARTINEAU
Courant Staff Writer

September 25 2005

SEBEC, Maine -- It was always a jolly time. Forbes Smiley and his closest
friends would gather around the fire to read the amusing news stories they
had clipped over the last year. The blues would fill the room as a turkey
roasted in the brick oven and the beef stew simmered on the stove.

For years, the friends have gathered here, in the heart of Maine, to shut
down Smiley's old farmhouse for winter. But this year, a tradition has been
upended. If "boys weekend" takes place at all, it will be a somber affair.
No one knows quite when the old times will return - if ever.

The farmhouse overlooks Sebec Lake and a row of apple trees, on the edge of
timberlands double the size of Rhode Island. You won't find Sebec in most
guidebooks. The nearest mall is an hour by car. The last stop on the
Appalachian Trail, Mount Katahdin, is a few days by foot.

For more than a decade, this farmhouse squarely in the middle of nowhere has
been at the center of Smiley's life. Although educated at distinguished
Northeast schools and comfortable in the cosmopolitan worlds of New York and
Martha's Vineyard, Smiley felt most at home here, in an old New England
town.

Like the antique maps Smiley traded in, Sebec is a throwback to another
time. His house - and the general store, which he bought four years ago -
stand at the village center, where sawmills and woolen mills once harnessed
the power of Sebec Lake as it drops over a dam and charges into the Sebec
River. When the sun sets over the lake, the slap of a beaver's tail shatters
the silence. On nights with no moon, darkness presses in on the town's one
blinking traffic light.

This summer, Smiley didn't make it to Sebec. But a bewildering piece of
news, worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, did. In June, Smiley, 49, was
charged with slicing several precious maps from books inside Yale
University's renowned rare books library using an X-Acto blade. The booty
consisted of priceless material chronicling the early days of exploration in
the New World. Once a member of an elite circle of map dealers, collectors
and scholars, Smiley was accused of being a fraud.

As the FBI investigates a potentially massive web of thefts at some of the
world's premier cultural institutions, Smiley has declined to discuss his
side of events. Both he and his lawyer, Richard Reeve of New Haven, declined
requests to be interviewed for this story.

Smiley's closest friends describe a deeply caring man with a lively
intellect and a great reverence for the past. But the friends are either
unwilling or unable to speculate about the mystery before them. Why would
someone who loved old things be driven to defile them?

Outwardly, Smiley was a man settling comfortably into middle age. In 1997,
he and his wife, Lisa, had moved from Manhattan to Martha's Vineyard to
start a family and lead a quieter life. They bought a modest home "Up
Island," a sailing term that aptly describes the Vineyard's exclusive
western end.

For several years, they did the "Vineyard Shuffle," renting out the house in
summer to pay the mortgage and escaping to their refuge in Maine. Last year,
they tore down the Vineyard house and hired a New York architectural firm to
build a modern one. The modular units were shipped by barge from New Jersey
last winter. A photo shot from the Brooklyn Bridge ran on the front page of
the weekly Martha's Vineyard Times. Everything seemed to be going right.

Smiley and his wife did not live extravagantly, their friends say, though
extravagance is often a relative term. They do seem to have lived beyond
their means and, in the past few years, their money problems spiraled.

A few months after moving to the Vineyard, Smiley had open-heart surgery.
His wife later stopped working and they had a child. Meanwhile, his general
store in Sebec was hemorrhaging money and legal bills from a zoning battle
he initiated there were piling up. In recent years, the IRS had filed nearly
$100,000 in tax liens against their Vineyard home.

Ashley Baynton-Williams, a third-generation map dealer in London who used to
work for Smiley in Manhattan, calls his former boss a big picture man who
was practically incapable of balancing a checkbook.

"Forbes was the worst person with money I've ever seen," he said. "If Forbes
had had a financial controller he would have been one of the biggest map
dealers in North America."

`Master Of Arcana'

None of Smiley's friends are surprised that he became an authority in
something as esoteric as early North American maps. As a student at
Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., he took up juggling and the baritone
sax, drove around in a Checker cab and once shed some serious weight by
eating nothing but popcorn for a month.

"Master of arcana" is how a college friend, Dick Cantwell, describes him.

Smiley grew up in a farmhouse outside of Manchester, N.H., in suburban
Bedford. His father, E. Forbes Smiley II, a physicist and engineer, worked
for Sanders Associates, a defense contractor in Nashua. The elder Smiley
also collected antique gardening books and dealt in them after retiring. His
mother, at one time, was a Brownie Scout leader.

The Smileys came from an old Yankee line in Connecticut, dotted with
Congregational ministers. The younger Smiley thought of following in his
grandfather's footsteps to become a minister. But he decided against it
after spending a semester at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.

Early on, Smiley established himself as a thinker on the fringe, who kept
company with other artists and writers. In seventh grade, he and his twin
sister, Susan, followed their older sister to Derryfield School, in
Manchester, an experimental school their parents helped found.

At Derryfield, he and a friend, Paul Statt, and two others started "The
Literary Guild," a sort of Dead Poet's Society involving beer and letters.
They modeled themselves after the Literary Club, founded by Samuel Johnson,
the writer who gave voice to England's Augustan Age. Only later did they
realize they'd gotten the name wrong.

In high school, Smiley had a crush on a longtime Bedford friend, Hilary
Chaplain, who also went to Derryfield and later, Hampshire. She would become
an actress who played a small role in "Forrest Gump" and now tours New York
City hospitals as "Miss Nice" for the Big Apple Circus Hospital Clown
Program.

During an interview in the garden of her Park Slope apartment, Chaplain
pulled a black and white photo of Yvette Guilbert from its plastic sleeve.
The French chanteuse is wearing a gown and black gloves that stretch to her
elbows, an outfit immortalized in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's famous
lithograph. Smiley gave Chaplain the photo, and one of Guilbert's signed
letters, after Chaplain played Guilbert in a performance at Hampshire.

"Forbes was someone I could really trust," Chaplain said. "He would never
talk behind my back, never betray me. I always think of him as a man with
high moral values and a sense of justice."

Chaplain pulled out her 1974 yearbook. Smiley included no photograph of
himself on his senior page. He was overweight at the time but that didn't
stop him from poking fun at himself. Sprawling across the page is a line
drawing of a hippopotamus - above a Garry Trudeau cartoon and caption:
"Sometimes a man has to resort to sarcasm."

At Hampshire, he studied history, classics and philosophy - time-tested
topics at a school that valued unconventional thinking. He wore his hair
long, in a ponytail, but that was his only nod to the times. He willfully
ignored popular music, his literary tastes favored John Donne over Kurt
Vonnegut, and he dressed conservatively, in dark pants and button-down
shirts, his friends say. He once famously proclaimed that the only proper
color for a house was white.

"He enjoyed being contrary - I think it was part of his charm," said Chiyo
Ishikawa, a friend from Hampshire who is now deputy director of art at the
Seattle Art Museum.

Smiley built an intricate Victorian dollhouse the summer he graduated, for a
toy store in Northampton, Mass. He carved the architectural details and
furniture by hand and for years the masterpiece sat in the store window, the
owner apparently unwilling to sell.

If he upstaged his friends, he did so quietly. His first friend at
Hampshire, Cantwell, now runs Elysian Brewing Co. in Seattle. Back then,
Cantwell wore a pin on his bathrobe commending his perfect attendance at
church for three years in a row. Rummaging through a drawer one day, Smiley
produced a pin of his own, Cantwell remembers. Five years' perfect
attendance, it read.

In New York

Smiley first laid eyes on New York City during college. But shortly after
graduating he moved there and became the quintessential New Yorker, taking
his friends to obscure museums and befriending artists squatting on the
Lower East Side.

He fell into maps at B. Altman & Co., while working in the rare books
department, and met his wife, Lisa Benson, there. She would go on to design
interior department store displays.

They were engaged when Smiley's oldest friend, Statt, went through a painful
romantic break-up. The couple invited him to share their three-bedroom
apartment in Washington Heights, and for six months, Statt did, he recalled
in a recent interview at his office at Amherst College, where he is director
of media relations. It was a typical gift, Statt said, not for its monetary
value but its thoughtfulness.

After Altman's closed, Smiley opened a gallery in Midtown and a separate
office on the Upper East Side. In the late 1980s, his office was
burglarized, along with four art galleries nearby, said Baynton-Williams,
who went to work for Smiley just after the burglary. Smiley had no
insurance. He lost his entire stock, estimated at $250,000, and had to
rebuild the business with no inventory and huge debts.

Although not in New York at the time, Baynton-Williams says the FBI led the
investigation and he personally helped Smiley rebuild, calling on his
contacts in London.

Baynton-Williams, who runs MapForum, a leading map journal, worked for
Smiley between 1989 and 1992. He says Smiley was "simply hopeless" with
money, although personable and an excellent salesman.

"If you met him, he's friendly, charming, very good company with a fund of
stories and a genteel persona," he said. "He is a good bloke."

They remained friendly until a disagreement over a client ended their
friendship a few years ago. "Forbes' problem is he always wanted people to
be happy with him and if they weren't, he'd often find it easier to make up
a story."

Eventually, Smiley closed his office and ran his business from home, with no
more than a phone line, a post office box and Internet service. He catered
to a few wealthy, accomplished map collectors, hunting down treasures to
fill the gaps in their collections. He helped one client, Lawrence
Slaughter, a computer specialist for the United Nations, amass an important
collection of early English maps and other material of Colonial North
America that was later donated to the New York Public Library.

In 1998, the library unveiled a major show of Slaughter's maps. The opening
was a high point for Smiley, who walked his friends through the exhibit and
later addressed Slaughter's heirs at a private dinner. It was a low point
for rival map dealer W. Graham Arader III.

"I gnashed my teeth with jealousy," Arader said. "He had found incredible
things for Slaughter. I remember leaving the New York Public Library saying
`How is he finding this material?'"

The question had occurred to others. Smiley was seldom seen at auctions or
map shows and did not belong to the standard trade group, the Antiquarian
Booksellers Association of America. Smiley apparently told some dealers the
maps he had for sale had been bought back from former customers at Altman's.

Sebec

In 1989, Smiley spotted an ad for an old farmhouse in Down East, the
magazine about Maine. He flew to Bangor with his father and Statt. The 1820s
house looked like the one he had grown up in except for the rot, missing
floorboards and raccoons. "Don't buy it," Statt told him.

But after it was renovated, the house became another testament to the great
"Forbesian eye," his sixth sense for the latent beauty residing in a thing.

"He's a preservationist," said Scott Slater, a friend from Hampshire. "He
wants things to last."

On his front porch in Cambridge, Mass., Slater recently brought out several
photo albums filled with Sebec photos. Slater writes fiction and takes care
of his 13-year old son, Gordon, a cancer survivor who is in a wheelchair.

When Gordon lost the use of his legs, Smiley built a stretcher to hoist the
boy up the stairs of the Sebec farmhouse. He let Gordon sleep among the
curiosities in his first-floor study and took him for rides on a Tom Sawyer
raft built out of logs. Gordon still has the wooden sword and shield "Uncle
Forbes" carved for him before christening him "Sir Gordon of the Lake."

Gordon is unabashed in his admiration. "All the things he does is very
old-fashioned, very classy," he said.

In back of Smiley's farmhouse, a treehouse made of windows and doors has
pulleys for raising and lowering water balloons and catapults for slinging
them. Periodically, the red barn nearby has been turned into a haunted
house, a natural history museum and a stage for putting on plays. Inside the
farmhouse, the playroom overflows with thrift store dress-up clothing.

Smiley designed a shelving system in Sebec for his massive collection of
blues records, all 78s, while adding to his father's collection of gardening
books. But there are no maps hanging from the walls.

"He once told me he forced himself not to collect maps," said Bennett
Fischer, a Hampshire friend who now teaches art to special education
students in New York City. "He thought trading in what you collected would
be the death of you as a dealer."

Martha's Vineyard

By the late 1990s, many of the Smileys' friends had left the city. The
couple cast about for a house closer to Sebec and finally settled on the
Vineyard, moving from an island of skyscrapers and breathtaking manmade
beauty to one marked by pine barrens, ocean and an eclectic mix of artists
and old money.

In December 1997, they paid $265,000 for a wood-shingle home shaped like a
flying saucer on North Road in Chilmark. North Road runs past "Seinfeld"
writer Larry David's retreat, "The Aerie," before winding down a hill to
Menemsha Harbor, an old fishing port now lined by antique shops,
restaurants, a Texaco station and a general store. The Bite, a small shack
that sells fried fish, is a popular take-out spot. The Smileys go there
often, one shopkeeper said, to buy dinner, then watch the sun set over the
harbor - a local tradition. As the sun sinks into the ocean, the Gay Head
lighthouse starts its sweep, dragging its golden arm back and forth over the
black water.

Of all the towns on the island, Chilmark is the most private. Bill Murray,
James Taylor, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, own houses here. And
well-to-do families have summered here for generations.

Smiley may have been wealthy by Maine standards. But in Chilmark, where a
monthly summer rental can fetch $300,000, he stood solidly on the bottom
rung. The impressive name that adorned his professional stationery, E.
Forbes Smiley III, disguised a stark reality. Money was tight.

This past April, the Smileys paid off a $57,000 IRS tax lien after selling
their neighbors a small piece of their 4-acre property, according to Dukes
County records. The lien was for unpaid income taxes, mostly from 2001.
Three years earlier, they paid off a nearly $41,000 tax lien from income in
1997.

In Sebec, they were late to pay property taxes, town records show, and slow
to pay contractors who worked on their house and store. The locals noticed
Smiley's money seemed to come in spurts but they assumed Smiley was a
trust-fund kid living check to check.

In the summer of 2004, the Smileys tore down the "spaceship" and designed a
new home with clean lines and lots of windows to let in light. They picked a
modular house, friends say, so they could afford to build modern.

The units arrived in February and work followed furiously. David Pizzano,
the general contractor, suggested they use fake stone for the front facade,
which would be quicker and less expensive. But Smiley barely seemed to blink
at the price and turned down Pizzano's advice. A $100,000 kitchen from Italy
was on order, Pizzano said, when Smiley's arrest hit the news. It was July
Fourth weekend. The following Tuesday, the workers returned to the site,
packed up their tools and left.

The house now sits suspended in an eerie state of half completion. Mounds of
dirt and rock lie in the driveway. On a recent Saturday morning, Lisa Smiley
appeared in the driveway with the family dog, Eban. "I'm sorry," she said,
when asked if she would be willing to talk.

For two months, the couple and their 5-year-old son had been living in
Smiley's studio, a small outbuilding on the Chilmark property, Pizzano said.
Out of pity, Pizzano said, he recently turned on the power and water so the
Smileys could move in to the modular house. The Smileys still owe him
$224,000, said Pizzano, who has filed a lawsuit in Dukes County Court to
recover the money.

Lisa Smiley volunteered occasionally at a modern art gallery in Vineyard
Haven, Etherington Fine Art, but Mary Etherington, the owner, politely
declined to elaborate. Forbes Smiley liked to listen to a local blues band,
Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish, according to his friends. Yet Hoy, when
approached one afternoon at the Chilmark Flea Market, just scratched his
head. "I don't know anybody who's ever seen the guy," he said. "He's just a
summer guy who wanted a scene up here."

Battle For A Town's Soul

Smiley had open-heart surgery in 1998 - a few months after moving to the
Vineyard. But if anything caused him stress, his friends say, it was the
feud that developed with the Moriartys, a couple also trying to run a
successful business in Sebec.

It became a battle over two visions for a quaint New England town: one of
historic preservation and gentrified taste, the other, the freedom to do
with your property what you please. Smiley had existed peacefully in town
for more than a decade. But when he bought Sebec's general store and post
office, in October 2001, the seeds of tumult were planted. He had seen the
town of his childhood ruined by suburban sprawl and wanted to save Sebec
from a similar fate.

"I think he really had a vision of trying to save Sebec from itself," Slater
said.

Today he is viewed as either a savior or a pariah.

When Smiley bought the store and post office, it was a dark, dingy place
where chickens and goats roamed out back. He sunk an estimated half million
dollars into renovations. He moved the kitchen to the basement and finished
its dirt floor. He filled the kitchen with shiny equipment and installed a
dumb waiter to raise the food to the dining room. He designed an ingenious
contraption for sending orders, rolled in a tube, down a chuteto the
kitchen.

He and the Sebec Historical Society had a vision of turning Sebec into a
living historic district, luring artists and tourists. The two 1820s
buildings across the street were critical to the plan but before they could
raise the money to buy them, Bill and Charlene Moriarty arrived on the
scene.

The Moriartys own a boat storage and repair yard in Wakefield, N.H., but
they wanted to save their boys from being bused to a city high school. Bill
Moriarty had been on hunting trips to Sebec and knew about the town's unique
educational system. Sebec, a town with only 620 people, pays tuition for its
teenagers to attend Foxcroft Academy, an elite prep school one town away. If
they moved to Sebec, their sons would receive a private school education for
the price of their town taxes. In 2002, they bought the "ship house" on the
lake and the store next to it, and got permission to operate a marina.

But before they set foot in town, the preservationists looked at the
Moriartys' permit and spotted some problems, including the absence of the
word "marina." They complained to the board of selectmen, which at the time
included Smiley's friend and next door neighbor Glenn Fariel. The town
issued a "stop work" order but after a hearing and a long review, the marina
permit was reinstated.

Smiley hired a prominent zoning attorney in Portland, more than two hours
away, and sued the town and the Moriartys. Two years later, a state judge
upheld the permit.

Until the lawsuit, town business was done informally, on a handshake.
Government rarely got in the way. Though the state now sets rules for
building on the waterfront, the town of Sebec still has no zoning.

At the height of the battle, Hamilton Wright, a summer resident, arranged
for two selectmen at the time, Buzz Small and Susan Dow, to each meet Smiley
at his gazebo. Separately, the selectmen urged Smiley to drop his suit. He
refused, offering a reason that is now repeated around town like a line from
a favorite movie: "I don't like to lose."

"I found him to be very arrogant," said Small, a civil engineer. "He thought
he was helping the town by having his lawyer show us how town government
ought to be run."

"I think he wanted a place for his friends to come to that would be more
like his own surroundings," said Dow, director of imaging at Eastern Maine
Medical Center in Bangor. "There may be some formally uneducated people in
this community. But they're not stupid and they shouldn't be condescended
to."

The Feud

Smiley's store, Sebec Village Shops, resembles an old-fashioned New England
general store. The regulars gather mornings in the rocking chairs on the
wooden porch for coffee and pastries. Historic post cards, home-baked breads
and jars of dried fruit and penny candy fill the shop. A drawing of the
bridge a few feet away, a popular diving spot for kids, is sewn into the
logo of the T-shirts for sale.

At the back is a period post office, with wooden counters and a bank of
authentic combination mailboxes. A small barber chair with a pony's head
sits in a corner. On occasion, Smiley paid a barber to give free haircuts to
any kid small enough to fit in the chair. The terrazzo floors, designed for
high-traffic areas, glint under the soft lights. Smiley ordered them after
admiring the flooring at Logan International Airport in Boston.

Hamilton Wright is a regular. If he's not seated on the porch of the store
smoking his pipe, he is on the balcony of his small cottage a few yards
away. He is legally blind but has been coming to Sebec for so long he can
"see" the beaver lodge below his deck, the white birch tree behind him and a
million other details. A retired psychoanalyst and social worker from
upstate New York, he is one of Smiley's ardent supporters.

"We've all missed him this year," he said, pulling on his pipe. "For my
money, knowing Forbes fairly well, if Forbes said `not guilty' I bet he
meant it."

"It just doesn't match his nature. His sense of right and wrong is pretty
strict."

Forbes' employees are also fiercely loyal. The store provides about 18
full-time jobs in one of Maine's poorest counties. Diane Cables commuted an
hour to work at McDonald's in Dover-Foxcroft before landing the job at
Smiley's, washing dishes. Originally from Canaan, Conn., she has also washed
dishes at Hotchkiss, a nearby prep school. "I love this man for what he done
for this place," she said.

Melinda Wentworth oversees the cooks and waitresses, including her daughter,
who just started school at Loomis-Chaffee in Windsor, Conn. Originally from
New Orleans, Wentworth settled in Maine after meeting her husband, who is
part of the family that owns Moosehead Manufacturing, a furniture maker in
Monson.

"This is an incredible gift," she said, slicing organic red potatoes into a
pot. "This place has been a model for progressive development."

Jayne Lello runs the post office and helped implement Smiley's vision. She
is married to folk singer David Mallett, who grew up in Sebec and is
president of the historical society. She took a break from sorting the mail
one morning to chat.

"Generous to a fault has been his role in this community, visionary,
positive and enthusiastic," she said. "It's a joy to have that family
involved in our community."

But the town is sharply divided. Smiley's detractors see a man who put
things ahead of people and whose philanthropy still contains a heavy element
of self-interest.

When stories of the map thefts broke, no one gloated more than the
Moriartys. A couple from Connecticut called them the day the story ran in
The Hartford Courant. In short order, copies were distributed across town.
The news clips are now taped to their storefront window, along with Smiley's
mug shot.

Customers are allowed to dock at the Moriartys' marina but anyone intending
to visit Smiley's store is turned away. "Violators will be towed," says the
sign propped against their single gas pump. On a recent Saturday, their
pontoon boat was the only vessel docked at the marina. Picnic tables, shaded
by bright Pepsi umbrellas, sat empty.

Bill and Charlene's living room overlooks the lake and Smiley's house. On a
recent afternoon, they sat in their recliner chairs, which are draped in
sheets to protect the furniture from dog hair, looking out toward Smiley's
house.

Charlene punched the buttons on her calculator, trying to estimate Smiley's
payroll. She and her husband can't figure out how he covers his expenses.

"He seemed to do a little better after he was arrested," Bill said. "It was
like after Jim Morrison died, everyone wanted to buy his records."

"We often said he was spending money like it wasn't his own," Charlene said.
"It obviously wasn't."

Even before the map story broke, almost everyone in town had an opinion
about Smiley. The maps have thrust him back into the morning chatter at
Green Acres, a general store and diner where the working folks congregate. A
few miles from Smiley's store, Green Acres has linoleum floors, two gas
pumps out front and a peg board menu on the wall lettered with the warning:
"Order What You Want/Take What You Can Get."

Potatoes were frying on the grill, as Walt Emmons, an electrical and oil
contractor originally from Middlebury, Conn., took a seat at the counter.

"It's his vision or no vision," Emmons said.

Buddy Baird, a stocky, former woodcutter, nodded in agreement from his usual
table by the window. "Once he bought that store he wanted to dictate what
the whole town would look like," he said. "He never would have been a
problem at all if he hadn't started looking down his long nose to tell us
all how to live."

During the lawsuit, the town discovered Smiley had covered too much land at
his store with parking and would need to replace several parking spots with
grass. The town sent a warning letter but so far no action has been taken.
It's a sore point among the locals. "He wanted everyone to conform to the
letter of the law," Baird said. "But he didn't think it applied to him."

The feud shows no sign of letting up. Rather than walk across the street to
Smiley's post office for their mail, the Moriartys drive 12 miles away, to
the Dover-Foxcroft post office.

On a warm August day, the Moriartys were busy pouring the foundation for a
garage. When construction is finished, the two-car garage will virtually
block Smiley's view of the lake from his cafe window. Charlene Moriarty
insists she had nowhere else to build but on the water.

As the map saga unfolds, the locals wonder what will happen to Sebec Village
Shops. No one wants the store to close, even those who dislike the man who
owns it. "If we pull the belt a little tighter and make a few adjustments,
we could stay open," said Lello, hopefully.

In the meantime, Charles Fitzgerald, an older man who owns a house in
Chilmark and acres of woods in Atkinson, Maine, recently purchased a small
piece of land in Sebec from Lisa Smiley. There are rumors that Fitzgerald,
who once ran for Congress in Maine on the Green Party line, might buy the
store.

The apples are ripening on the trees Smiley planted in front of his house,
and a 1954 flatbed truck is parked haphazardly out front, as if he might
come bounding down the steps at any moment. On Oct. 3, he will make an
appearance - not in Sebec, but in Superior Court in New Haven on three
larceny charges. The locals look forward to the next round of news, eager to
learn more about the man they thought they knew.