The Map Thief (18 page)

“Largely encouraged by many local residents of Sebec, I have taken on this project in the hope that its success will add in a small way to the health and prosperity of the town as a whole,” Smiley modestly told
The
Piscataquis Observer,
detailing his plans to include a renovated post office and shops. “We’re trying to fish around and see what people need. The key is to listen and keep asking questions—and to meet local needs first.”

He spent tens of thousands of dollars over the winter renovating the post office, installing terrazzo floors and restoring rows of brass post office boxes. It officially opened in the spring of 2002, managed by Mallett’s wife, Jayne Lello. By late summer, Smiley had added a general store complete with candy counter and farmers’ market selling local produce. “
Hey, neighbor! The old-fashioned general store of your childhood is alive and well—here in Sebec, Maine,” warmly greeted the Sebec Village Shops’ website. The store catered both to local needs and to the more upscale tastes of Sebec’s summer visitors, stocking gourmet Rao’s Coffee next to Maxwell House. The homewares section featured a $120 hand-carved children’s rocking horse, a $50 earthenware mixing bowl set, and a $35 beaded “wine skirt.”

The following year, in the fall of 2002,
Smiley opened a restaurant with the same sensibility, hiring a local chef to make simple food with quality, organic ingredients. Affectionately dubbed the “chatterbox café,” it quickly became a neighborhood hub where locals sat in spindle-back chairs and gossiped about fishing, the logging business, the Red Sox, and their neighbors. In the morning, the café served home-baked bread and biscuits, truck-stop egg breakfasts, and stacks of pancakes with local maple syrup. For lunch, it offered sandwiches and hamburgers. And three nights a week, it opened for dinner with entrées of roast chicken and local trout.

The businesses were a godsend to the town economy, employing between fifteen and thirty people depending upon the season. Smiley ran the business as a nonprofit, paying above-prevailing wages for the area
and earning a steady stream of supporters for his largesse. “
He was Robin Hood,” Mallett later remembered. “He came up here with a vision to revitalize the town, and he employed practically everyone in it.”

From the beginning, the project bled money. By local estimates, Smiley spent $
600,000 on the renovations alone, and thousands more every week on payroll during the summer. Now when Smiley’s friends came to Sebec for summer visits or Boys’ Weekends, they ate all of their meals there—leaving generous tips for the waitresses, but otherwise paying nothing. Smiley sat back proudly, reveling in how he had nearly single-handedly revitalized a town that badly needed it (
Figure 12
).

FIGURE 12
SMILEY’S SEBEC.

—

NOT EVERYONE SHARED
Smiley’s vision, however. As he went around trying to gain support to turn the village into a historic district, he met resistance from property owners who refused based on the cost it would take to restore their properties. “
Sometimes he went by my house and I swear I caught him looking up at the molding on the porch like he owned it,” one of his neighbors later remembered.

Next door to Smiley’s shops was a community center called the Sebec Reading Room, a lending library that hosted events including the annual Fourth of July festivities.
Smiley tried to convince them to restore the façade and increase the setbacks from the road. The association’s president at the time, Louisa Finnemore, flat-out refused. Smiley had broken Maine’s most important, if unstated rule—stay the hell out of your neighbors’ business. “Who is this flatlander who has come to town to tell everyone what to do?” some of his neighbors began to complain.

No one clashed with him more than
Bill and Charlene Moriarty, who had moved to Sebec from Sanbornville in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, an hour and a half drive north of where Smiley grew up. There the couple had operated a boat repair and storage facility amid a family vacationland of speedboats, fried food, and video arcades. Bill Moriarty knew Sebec from hunting trips in Maine and was enamored of both its natural beauty and its unique educational system—which allowed students to attend nearby private prep school Foxcroft Academy free of charge.

The
Moriartys purchased a home and general store in Sebec in January 2001, across the lake from Smiley’s house and directly across the street from the Sebec Village Shops. They planned to turn the property
into a marina that would include an ice cream shop and docking for local boat owners. As they began construction in the spring of 2002, Smiley and his friends were dismayed. It was exactly the kind of business they didn’t want in the village; they could only imagine the loud and rowdy boaters it would attract.

Examining the permit the Moriartys had been issued the previous April, however, he and his friends thought they saw a way to stop it: The couple had never included the
word “marina” in their application. In fact, the permit for the property
specified “that it stays as it is, dry storage to sell,” and the chairman of the planning board had written the Moriartys a letter confirming the
permit “pertains only to the use of the buildings, not to include an exterior marina.” She also said, however, that the planning board was “investigating further the proper procedures for issuing a permit for a marina” and would let them know if it needed any more information.

The preservationists filed a complaint with the town, and on June 5, 2002, the town’s code enforcement officer, Bill Murphy, issued a “
stop work” order to close down construction. Until now, most local disputes had been ironed out over coffee at the local diner or at town meetings, where members of the same families had filled the seats of the selectmen and planning board for generations. Now the marina issue became a lightning rod, dividing the town and raising the heat at town meetings.

Post office manager Jayne Lello remembered standing up to insist that the permit include the word “marina” and being told to “
stick it up your ass.” Another burly man asked if she wanted to take it outside. She stopped going to meetings after that. The battle continued in letters and newspaper editorials. “I am ashamed that what should have been a simple permit request by a business entrepreneur was
allowed to remain ‘unclear’ for over a year because the nature of the business wasn’t spelled out on the request,” selectman Susan Dow wrote to a local paper. “I, for one, don’t want more regulations telling me what to do with my property.”

A few days later, Mallett fired back in another editorial. “I am very concerned that local and state environmental laws have been publicly disregarded,” he wrote. “Indeed, I feel as if we do not have a town government at all, but have
resorted to a more tribal approach.” While Mallett seemed to be leading the charge, however, it was Smiley who
became the public target of the opposition. At the annual town meeting in August,
residents approved every one of forty-two articles on the agenda, except one—a proposal by residents to pave Cove Road, the road where Smiley and Fariel had their homes. Soon after, Charlene Moriarty wrote a letter to the town enforcement officer with a list of
alleged violations at Smiley’s shops, including the percentage of parking and vegetative growth, and permits to serve food.

Privately, she and her husband began bad-mouthing Smiley, saying he was spending money “like it wasn’t his own.” It was idle speculation on their part, since they had no evidence that he’d done anything wrong in the way he had acquired his money. At the same time they were spreading their rumors, however, a librarian at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library had begun to suspect the same thing. And she thought she had proof.

MISSING MAPS, MISSING CARDS

FIGURE 13
ROBERT DUDLEY. “CARTA PARTICOLARE DELLA VIRGINIA VECCHIA E NUOUA.” FLORENCE, 1646.

2002–2004

YALE’S STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY
looks more like a cathedral than a library. Two heavy wooden doors open onto a long aisle with a four-story vaulted ceiling lined with stained-glass depictions of thinkers, explorers, and saints. It takes a half minute to walk across the flagstones to the main desk at the end of the hall, where a row of elevators take visitors up to the Map Collection on the seventh floor.

Compared to the rest of the library—or for that matter, the state-of-the-art Beinecke a few blocks away—the map department is
underwhelming. Cramped and cluttered, its three rooms are stuffed to capacity. On one side, giant flat files hold modern maps (that is, anything more recent than 1850). Past them, a locked door leads to a room where the old maps are stored. To the other side is the reading room, half of it occupied by a large wooden table, the rest with file cabinets and shelves filled with reference books and globes.

On a recent visit, I was greeted at the door by assistant librarian Margit Kaye, who is tall and blond and was wearing a light black sweater and slim gray slacks. “I’ve been working here twenty-plus years,” she told me in a German accent. Actually, the
number is more like forty-five. She
worked with the first curator of the map department, Alexander O. Vietor, and mentored generations of students. “You know Graham Arader? He calls me his mentor,” she continued. Few people know more about antiquarian maps than she does—and no one knows Yale’s collection better.

“We’ve got everything ready for you,” she said, leading me inside and opening the top of a metal storage box in the corner. Pulling out a plastic-encased map, she slid
John Seller’s 1675 “Mapp of New England” onto the table. This was the same copy that Andy Antippas stole from Yale back in 1978, before Graham Arader bought it from him and alerted authorities. It was also the same map that, in another copy, Smiley advertised in one of his very first ads before selling it to Norman Leventhal in the mid-1980s.

Printed on rough gray paper, it is just a foot and a half high and about as long. But it holds an impressive amount of detail. The interior teems with woods and hills, British soldiers fighting off a skirmish of American Indians, and animals. Kaye pointed out a turkey west of Boston she said is the earliest image of the animal ever depicted on a map. The map is surprisingly full of color; pinks, yellows, and greens trace the borders of counties and colonies and fill in the clothing of the two Native Americans on either side of the cartouche.

All in all, it is a fine copy of the map—though not without a few stains, or “foxing,” as it’s called by collectors. One
dark smudge below and to the left of a ship sailing past Martha’s Vineyard always gave Kaye a twinge of guilt, since she suspected she was the one who made it during her many handlings of the map over the years. She knew that smudge so well, she did a double-take one day in July 2002 when she saw it on Forbes Smiley’s website.

Smiley had just launched the site a month before, advertising Seller’s map as one of the first he offered for sale. As Kaye examined the picture on the site, she immediately noticed the smudge in the corner.
Oh my God,
she thought.
That’s our map.
The listing referred to it as “a fine dark impression, carefully colored in an original hand,” going on for several paragraphs about the history of the map and the later maps it inspired. At the end of the listing, the description noted, “Yale University is home to an uncolored copy of the first state, bound with four pages of printed text comprising a brief history of New England.”

Except that wasn’t true. The library’s curators had long ago separated the map from the pages of text, storing it separately. And now as Kaye went to look for the map to prove she wasn’t imagining things, she couldn’t find it in the drawer where it was supposed to be filed. She searched methodically through other drawers, flipping through map after map without success. That wasn’t unusual—with a quarter-million maps in the collection, it was impossible to keep all of them filed correctly. But this was a special map, one of only a handful of its kind in the world—and it shouldn’t have been missing.

Kaye printed out the page from Smiley’s site and
took it to the head curator of the department, Fred Musto, to share her concerns. “What do you want me to do?” he said, according to her later recollection. “Call the police and arrest the guy?” Kaye had to admit the evidence was circumstantial. Since the Sterling didn’t keep records of maps checked out by patrons, there was nothing to prove Smiley had even looked at it, much less taken it.

All Kaye had was the smudge. But as Smiley made clear, his copy was colored, while Yale’s wasn’t. And why would he mention Yale’s copy on the site if he himself had taken it? Most important, Smiley was a respected map dealer, and Kaye was a loyal employee. Yale had paid for her master’s of library science degree at Southern Connecticut State University, where her teachers had taught her that to go over the head of superiors was “worse than the kiss of death.” She let the matter drop. But from then on, she resolved to keep a closer eye on Smiley whenever he visited.

—

SMILEY WAS IN
the Sterling often in those days. At least once a month, he took a plane from his home on the Vineyard to Tweed Airport in
New Haven, invariably wearing an olive-colored tweed jacket and appearing at the library full of jokes and good humor. He installed himself in the reading room and filled out slip after slip for maps he wanted to research. Sometimes, he took whole drawers out of the card catalog into the reading room to flip through.

Oftentimes the catalog listed only the drawer and folder where a map appeared along with other maps from the same time period. At his request, Musto and Kaye brought him whole folders containing dozens of maps at once. Musto had been trained as a general reference librarian and knew little about maps. According to staff who worked with him, he often took long lunches and was away from the map department for hours at a time. Even when he was there, he sometimes spent long minutes in the back room, searching for or cataloging maps.

It was during one of those times that
Smiley sat in the reading room, brooding.
Sebec worked,
he thought. For all the problems he’d had in the map business, he’d watched family after family come up to Sebec and be happy. And now he had the opportunity to extend that happiness to others in the community—if he could see the project through. With the marina standoff brewing, his whole vision was now at risk. And he was struggling as it was to find the money to pay the workers at Sebec Village Shops. He glanced over at the circulation desk, empty again. Then he glanced at the map on the table. How many people would even know if it disappeared? Almost without thinking, he folded the map into a rectangle the size of a credit card and slipped it into his blazer pocket. He looked around again. The desk was still empty. The rest of the maps were still on the table as if nothing had happened.

He gathered them up and returned them to their folder. A few minutes later, he walked out of the room with his heart pounding, taking the elevator downstairs and walking across the flagstone floor. As he pushed open the heavy wooden door to head back outside, no one gave him a second look.

That’s the way Smiley described the first map he stole. “The Sterling Library is the first place I realized I had access to material that was not well catalogued,” he later told me, “and it wasn’t clear it would be missed.” When combined with the financial pressures he faced, that opportunity to walk out with the map became impossible for him to resist. “I am looking at a piece of paper that I can fold and put in my pocket,
that people in New York expect me to show up with because I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years legitimately. And I can get thirty thousand dollars wired up to Maine that afternoon,” he explained.

Smiley told me he didn’t remember exactly which map he stole first, though in court records he claimed that his
thefts started in the spring of 2002. If that is true, then the John Seller map of New England may have been among his first. After taking the map, he carefully colored parts of it to obscure its origins, dabbing paint onto the three-hundred-year-old paper just as he’d seen Mick Tooley do in London years earlier. He filled the blank shield to the left of the cartouche with a shade of salmon pink and painted the skirts of the Indians holding up the cartouche a pale green.

When it was ready, he
brought the map to his friend Harry Newman, knowing it was just the kind of map he loved—crudely drawn and primitive, with lots of stories written into its blank spaces of exploration and American Indian wars. He offered the map at $75,000—easily half of what it was worth on the market. Since Smiley’s costs were zero, however, he could afford to sell on the cheap. But this wasn’t a map Newman would want to sell; this was one he’d want to frame and keep, and having recently bought a house, he was in no position to buy it. After he turned it down, Smiley called another client, Harold
Osher, a doctor and map collector from Portland, Maine, who had turned his collection into a map library based at the University of Southern Maine. Osher was thrilled to see such a rarity at such a good price and gladly bought it from him.

The
stealing became easier after that. He was at the Sterling and other libraries all the time doing research. It was easy enough when he saw an opportunity to slip a map into his pocket and walk out undetected. For all the ease with which he stole the maps, however, he was mistaken in thinking that no one noticed.

—

AFTER THAT FIRST INCIDENT
with the John Seller map, Margit
Kaye began to carefully watch the maps that Smiley requested on his visits to the Sterling. Over the years, she had gotten to know him well—and had always been impressed with how well dressed and full of knowledge he seemed. She’d even found herself wishing her daughter could meet a nice man like that.

Now, however, she noticed a change in him. He always seemed to be in a rush, arriving late on a Friday with excuses of plane delays, and then hastily requesting dozens of map folders. As Kaye went to collect them one by one from the back room, she often had to leave him unattended in the reading room. She tried to keep an eye on him, but all she saw was a harried map scholar, eagerly turning over pages.

When Smiley wasn’t at the library, Kaye continued to monitor his website for any other maps that Yale might be missing. That October, she
discovered four maps on the site that Yale had in its catalogs but weren’t in the drawers. Three of them were important early state maps—of Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and South Carolina from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—while the last was a sea chart of the Pacific Ocean by Samuel Thornton, John Thornton’s son and successor in producing
The English Pilot.
Again she printed out the pages and brought them to Musto’s attention—but once again, he told her there was nothing he could do without proof.

As she continued to look at the website, another image continued to bother her: a map of Boston that
Henry Pelham made in 1777, just after the Revolutionary War had broken out. She was sure that she’d seen that map in Yale’s collection, but there was no card in the catalog to indicate it. Finally, in February 2003, it suddenly occurred to her that there was another source she could check. Back when the library began digitizing its card catalog some twenty-five years earlier, staff made a microfilm copy of it, exactly as it appeared on June 30, 1978.

Kaye spooled through the roll to the place where the maps of Boston were catalogued, and there she
found the image of the card: “A plan of Boston in New England with its environs . . . Henry Pelham . . . 1777.” She went back to the card catalog, but the card definitely wasn’t there. As she looked at the evidence, she suddenly realized: If someone could steal maps, they could also steal cards. That meant the library could be missing maps of which it had no record at all.