[MSN] E. Forbes Smiley III pleaded guilty to the theft of an antique map from the Beinecke Library at Yale, and admitted that he had stolen nearly 100 maps over the last eight years from institutions in the United States and Britain.

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

June 22, 2006
Dealer Pleads Guilty to Map Theft From Yale Library 
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

NEW HAVEN, June 22 - The antiquities dealer E. Forbes Smiley III pleaded
guilty in federal court today to the theft of an antique map from the
Beinecke Library at Yale, and as part of his plea agreement admitted that he
had stolen nearly 100 maps over the last eight years from institutions in
the United States and Britain.

Mr. Smiley's guilty plea related to only one map, from the Yale library, and
later this afternoon in state court he pleaded guilty to stealing three
other maps from Yale. In his statement in federal court today, he admitted
taking 97 maps valued at $3 million from institutions in New York, Chicago
and London. Twenty of those maps were taken from Yale. 

"I concealed them in my briefcase with the intention of removing them from
the library," said Mr. Smiley, 50. 

He acknowledged that he knew what he had done was wrong and said, "I very
much regret my actions and apologize to the court and all the institutions
harmed by my actions."

Speaking on the courthouse steps, United States Attorney Kevin O'Connor
credited Mr. Smiley with assisting in the recovery of most of the pilfered
maps. "The vast majority will be recovered and returned to the original
owners," he said, acknowledging that the recovery would be impossible
without Mr. Smiley's assistance.

Of the 97 missing maps, 86 are in the possession of the government, Mr.
O'Connor said, and 6 others have been located but not yet turned over by
their current owners. The remaining five maps have been deemed
unrecoverable.

The defense and the prosecution agreed that the government could have proved
Mr. Smiley's guilty in the theft of 18 of the maps. But in numerous
debriefings he detailed the 79 other thefts.

Mr. Smiley, who graduated from Hampshire College with a degree in church
history and classics then attended Princeton Theological Seminary for a
year, has agreed to establish a restitution fund.

Because of his cooperation and acceptance of responsibility, the prosecution
has agreed to reduction in the sentencing guidelines on the federal
conviction to between 57 and 71 months. In the state court case, the plea
agreement calls for a minimum sentence of two and a half years to be served
concurrently with the federal prison term.

Mr. Smiley's admission comes more than 10 months after he entered his
initial plea of not guilty after a library worker's discovery of an X-Acto
knife blade on the reading room floor began the unraveling of his scheme.

By early the same afternoon, 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 said, 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. 

After being charged with larceny in the first degree Mr. Smiley pleaded not
guilty on Aug. 9 and 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.

The cause prompted many of the libraries and universities that had ushered
Mr. Smiley into their cloistered precincts - including the New York Public
Library and the Boston Public Library - to scour their collections for signs
of tampering. And many of his customers in the rarefied world of collecting
cautiously reviewed their purchases.

According to an accounting released by the federal prosecutor, Mr. Smiley
acknowledged taking 34 maps from the Boston Public Library, 32 from the New
York Public Library, 11 from Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, 9 from
Beinecke Library at Yale, 8 from Houghton Library at Harvard, 2 from the
Newberry Library in Chicago and 1 from the British Library.