The Map Thief (21 page)

One thing it lacked was other families with young children. Now that Smiley’s son was approaching school age, Smiley took new interest in the school, which was designed for one hundred students but had an
enrollment of only forty-six. To increase enrollment, a group of residents
proposed building a private preschool to act as a feeder into the elementary school and make the town more welcoming to young families. Smiley helped organize the group and signed on as its business agent and secretary, raising money for the school and contributing some himself.

Though he was only forty-eight years old, he
began looking for an exit strategy from the high-stress world of map dealing. But he had to hold on a little longer, to finish the new home and establish himself in the community before planning his next move. He’d gotten too used to high-end living, too used to projecting the image of himself as a successful map dealer, to give it all up now. The pressure of maintaining that life, however, was taking its toll on his body. His back began seizing up on him, making it painful to move or even stand for long periods of time. He had trouble sleeping too, waking up with nightmares and finding himself unable to go back to bed.

Smiley’s
new modular home arrived in nine parts in February 2005, hauled on a barge from Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Chilmark harbor. It was such an unusual sight, one of the local papers featured a photo on the front page. As construction began, Smiley wrote a letter to the editor apologizing for the unsightliness in a strangely passive voice. “Due to certain delays in the construction process, our new residence . . . has been
left naked to the scrutiny of all passersby,” he wrote. “Please be assured that, as soon as possible, our plans to face this building in old stone and screen it heavily to the road will be accomplished.”

The truth was, however, that Smiley was overextended again. According to their contractor, Pizzano, the Smileys had ordered a $105,000 kitchen from Italy and spent $20,000 on flooring alone. When Pizzano suggested they cover the outside with fake stone, Smiley told him there was no way he was going to have imitation materials on his house—it would have to be real stone, a decision that added $250,000 to the construction cost. “
Money was no object,” Pizzano later remembered. “I was billing him monthly for forty, eighty, ninety thousand dollars.” As Smiley struggled to keep up with the cost, the home remained a mess of tar-paper siding, with pallets full of construction materials strewn about the dirt driveway.

And even though he’d left Sebec, planning never to return, he was still supporting payroll up in Maine through the slow winter months, all
the while paying tens of thousands for the new home on the Vineyard. That January, the government filed a
tax lien for $57,063 on his property. The only way he could see to get out from under was to increase the pace of his thefts.

—

THAT PREVIOUS SUMMER,
the Boston Public Library
had officially launched the new Norman B. Leventhal Map Center. As its first curator, it appointed Ron Grim, who was previously a map history specialist at the Library of Congress. Short and genial with owlish spectacles, Grim was the perfect person for the job, displaying an infectious enthusiasm for cartographic history. When he first arrived in Boston, he began going through the shelves to familiarize himself with the collection, noting the call slips that provided a record of who had used each item. Smiley’s name came up over and over.
Smiley knows this collection better than I do,
he thought.

He had no idea at the time that Smiley had been using his knowledge to systematically dismantle it. Among the rarest of all the treasures in the new map center were several copies of
The American Pilot,
a collection of sea charts by John Norman and his son William that was the American answer to the
The English Pilot, The Fourth Book.
The sea atlas was continually updated in the decades after the Revolution, guiding the clipper ships from Boston and New York that finally led to the American dominance of Atlantic trade. As with any maritime atlas, however, the books were in constant use aboard the rolling decks of merchant vessels, leading to their rapid deterioration.

Only ten copies of
The American Pilot
were known to have survived, and
Boston had four of them—one from 1794, two from 1798, and one from 1816. Smiley
examined the last copy multiple times, including in December 2004 and January 2005. On one of those occasions, he tore out a chart of Florida and the Bahamas and
took it down to New York to show his friend Harry Newman at the Old Print Shop. Even by 1816, Florida was still relatively uncharted territory. Smiley showed Newman where the mapmaker had copied from other English charts and where he had added new information from an American ship captain. Newman was happy to purchase it.

That fall, he
went to Boston to view another sea atlas,
The Atlantic
Neptune
of J.F.W. Des Barres. A few months later, in February 2005, he sold a chart of Charleston, South Carolina, from the book to Burden. Later that spring, Grim met Smiley for the first and only time. When one of his colleagues mentioned that Smiley was in the rare-book room, Grim went over to say hello and the two got into a spirited discussion about a map Smiley was viewing. Around the same time, Smiley sent Grim a check for $1,000 to preserve another map from the Des Barres volume, this one of Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps he sent it out of guilt, or simply to keep up the impression that he was a wealthy map dealer and benefactor—or maybe he was planning his next theft. Whatever his motive, the check bounced.

While he was up in Boston that spring, Smiley also headed across the Charles River to Harvard University. He
avoided the Harvard Map Collection, the basement repository where
Mapping Boston
author David Cobb served as curator, and targeted Harvard’s rare-book library, Houghton Library, instead. Perhaps he felt the curators there would be less likely to know which maps they had tucked inside their books. Sitting beneath portraits of past Harvard presidents, he requested a
copy of Champlain’s
Voyages,
along with
travelogues from several other French explorers that also contained maps of New France.

During one of his visits there, he took out a
copy of Hubbard’s book about the New England Indian wars, containing John Foster’s map of New England. It’s this map that, in its London printing, famously includes the “Wine Hills” typo. Harvard, however, had two copies of the book with the rare Boston printing of the map with the correctly labeled “White Hills.” The library’s catalog, however, listed the map in only one of them, erroneously listing the other as missing. When Smiley found the map inside, he slipped it out, making the listing accurate. It was the same map that Bill Reese had suspected Smiley of stealing from the Beinecke back in the 1990s. It’s ironic then, that it was in his briefcase when he visited the Beinecke that spring.

Smiley had
avoided going to the Beinecke for years—perhaps due to the bad taste left in his mouth after that incident with Reese. That May, however, he visited twice. On one trip, he requested a rare
book by German geographer Johann Huttich dating all the way back to 1532. He opened the white vellum cover and turned stiff, crinkly pages filled with Latin text until he came to what he was looking for: an
unusual
“double-cordiform” map of the world by French cartographer Oronce Fine that represented each hemisphere in a unusual heart-shaped projection.

Shortly after looking at it in the library, he
brought it to Paul Cohen at the Arkway in New York, but Cohen wasn’t interested in buying it. Smiley then called Harry Newman, telling him he was up the street and asking if he was interested in taking a look. Newman was excited—he’d never seen a copy of Fine’s map. “I’m going to take a cab,” said Smiley. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” When he got to the Old Print Shop and opened his portfolio, however, it was empty. In a panic, Smiley ran back outside to the street to see if the map had fallen out. It had started raining outside, and water sloshed in the gutter of Lexington Avenue as he searched, but there was no map to be found. He called Arkway, but Cohen told him the map wasn’t there either. Newman put out a call on the Internet for the map, asking anyone to contact him if it turned up somewhere at another dealer’s shop, but it never did. The map,
valued at more than $40,000, was simply lost.

On his second trip to the Beinecke, he requested an
even older book, by Hernán Cortés, the Spanish explorer who had led the conquest of Mexico. The book, published in 1524, had a
map of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which has the distinction of being the first map made of any North American city. It is also the
last
map of Tenochtitlán. After Cortés completed his sketch, he burned the city to the ground. (The location is now the site of Mexico City.) Again, Smiley called Newman, who agreed to purchase the map. Even as Newman marveled over the rare find, he couldn’t help but notice the change that had come over Smiley. Gone was the enthusiastic, bombastic Smiley he had known. Now he seemed tired, beaten down, and distracted. Newman was concerned for his friend, but he never put together his appearance with the rare finds he was coming up with on a regular basis—assuming he was suffering from stress and poor health.

The truth was, no matter how much Smiley stole, he never seemed to have enough to cover his debts or alleviate the stress he felt. When he arrived at the Beinecke on June 8, 2005, he was in a virtual state of panic. He had
already paid out more than $500,000 on the Vineyard house and owed at least $200,000 more. In order to make up that kind of money, he’d need a big score. The John Smith map of New England was an
obvious choice. He could sell it easily and make up for the one he’d missed out on at Swann a few months before. But that map was probably
worth only $50,000 to $60,000 at most.

To make a real dent in his debts, he’d need something truly rare. A few years earlier,
Arkway had sold a copy of the world map from
Speculum Orbis Terrarum
by Gerard de Jode for $85,000. A pristine copy like the one in the Beinecke’s collection could fetch as much as $125,000. The day Smiley decided to take it, however, was also the day he dropped his razor on the floor—and the Beinecke’s staff already had him under surveillance.

—

WHEN I VISITED
the Beinecke eight years later, in the summer of 2013, the
guard opened a door labeled “Staff Only” and led me through a maze of corridors. This was the side of the library few patrons see—gone were the polished tables and glass cases full of books, replaced with metal lockers and drab walls. The guard led me into a control room outfitted with five huge flat-screen TVs on one wall, and a half-dozen computers beneath them. The screens were split into multiple camera shots; each table had a feed from directly overhead, and the guard showed me how she could zoom in close enough to practically read over a patron’s shoulder.

“None of this was here back then,” she said, referring to the day Smiley was caught stealing the de Jode map. “If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have this nice control room and we all wouldn’t have jobs,” she said jokingly. At that time, the library’s security cameras were pretty basic, pointed from a fixed position with no capacity to zoom. The guard cued up a tape on one of the monitors—the only one that will still play the old format—and there was Forbes Smiley sitting at the end of the table farthest from the circulation desk, with light streaming in through the courtyard windows. His white hair was cut short and thinning on top, and he was wearing a white shirt, skinny black tie, and silver wire-rimmed glasses.

As the tape started, Smiley was flipping rapidly through a weatherbeaten atlas propped on a foam support. After a few minutes, he closed the book and tied it up quickly and almost carelessly with string. He left for a few minutes before returning with another large book in a case. As the counter on the monitor read 50:00, he unfolded the case to reveal a
heavy brown leather volume. He put both case and book down on the foam and flipped the pages one by one for twenty-seven seconds.

Finally, he arrived at the page he was looking for. In the corner was a “
wind face”—one of the puffy-faced cherubs de Jode placed around the margins of his world map to label the names and directions of the winds. Smiley paused a moment, and then, so quickly as to be nearly imperceptible, he flicked his wrist to fold two pages of the map down in half. He closed the book immediately, holding it tight with one hand as he placed it spine-down on the table. With the other hand, he took the case off the foam supports.

For nearly a minute, the camera’s view was obscured by the back of a blond woman wearing a white tank top who seemed barely aware of Smiley. Then, at 51:06, he sighed and opened the book again to the title page, staring at it intently. At 51:21, his right hand slowly slipped under the pages to find the ones he had folded down before. At 51:36, he began to look around and make notes with his left hand, all the while his right was working beneath the page. This activity went on for nearly a minute, before, at 52:20, his right hand suddenly darted from beneath the page.

“See that! He’s got it now!” shouted one of several security guards who had gathered around the monitor to watch with me. But I had to rewind and play the tape several times to even see his hand move—never mind see the map, which was presumably now in his lap. At 52:45, he reached back over with his right hand as if to put his pencil in his blazer pocket. It was at that moment, perhaps, that he transferred the map to his pocket—though it remained invisible on the monitor.

From there, he only had to clean up. At 52:57, he began to intently pull little pieces of paper out of the center of the binding, making no attempt to hide his actions. He put a small pile of the paper pieces to the left side of the book, his hand shaking slightly. By this time, the curators and guards who had been watching him from the reader services desk must have seen his suspicious actions. At 54:00, a staff member walked by, and Smiley glanced up at her, then down again. After she passed, he furtively glanced back again before blowing his nose on his handkerchief and coughing.