Thank you for coming. I am pleased to be here at the national archives. I became a great lover of archives by going to institutions smiley ended up taking rare maps out of. I got to see a lot of the old documents myself. There is nothing like being able to see an original document and touch it and see it with your own eyes. It is a Wonderful Service buildings like this provide in providing access to these materials. Im going to dive in with a reading from the beginning of my book. With the first sentence in the first chapter so there is nothing you need to know going in. The im going to talk about same character i got to know well over the past three years and show you images of some of the maps he still, particularly focusing on the virginia and washington, d. C. Area. Let me dive right in. This is the beginning of my book, the map thief. No matter how much you try to suppress it, the tickle cap freaking out into a cough kept breaking out into a cough. The Manuscript Library at Yale University was quiet except for the low hum of the air conditioning and the click of fingers on keyboards making smiley painfully aware of the noise he was making. At one point, he pulled a handkerchief from out of his pocket. As he did and xacto knife blade dropped on the carpeted floor. He folded the cloth and put it back in his pocket oblivious to what happened. Studying rare atlases in preparation for the annual gathering of map collectors who came to buy, sell, and trade antiquarian maps. A few words inevitably spring to mind about smiley. Gregarious, larger than life. He spoke with the residents of an italian tenor mangled by a neighborly affectation. His voice was full of money. When he made phone calls, he made sure to announce he was calling from the vineyard. His upperclass [indiscernible] he ingratiated himself with librarians by inquiring about family and updated them on the new home he was built on Marthas Vineyard. Most of all, people thought of his laugh. His smile world up out of his belly with a cackle that only increased in volume the longer it went on. Theater producers sat him in the front row to egg on the audience. Caused people to excuse the pretension in his voice when expounding on his obsessions. Architecture, new england history, the blues, and of course, maps. Whether they liked them or not, his colleagues and rivals have been seduced by his knowledge which in certain areas exceeded that of anyone else in the world. On the morning of june 8, two thousand five, however, none of the librarians at the service desk recognized him. Had they known him, they would have been shocked at the transformation he had undergone. In addition to the cough that developed overnight, he was suffering from a splitting headache left over from a night of drinking. Smiley have been drinking a lot these days. It was the only thing that took his thoughts away from problems that multiplied in his mind when he was sober. Managing theod at details of the business. He was overextended and hemorrhaging money. He was feeling a fresh sense of desperation by the time he left to get lunch around 11 00. Sitting in a coffee shop around the corner, he turned his options around in his mind. He could take the train to new york and fly to london or he could abandon the plan heading back to the vineyard sparing the expense and hoping to find another way out of this mess. While pondering his predicament, the situation in the reading room changed in his absence. He might have missed the blade fell from his pocket, but a library and had not. They make regular sweeps of the room to make sure materials are handled properly and alert patrons they are being watched. She immediately spied the blade on the floor. Onele is more alarming to who works with rare books. She picked up the blade in a tissue and walked back out of the room. That gives you a flavor for how i start the book and this character of Forbes Smiley, who i got to know well in all of his contradictions. Even though that is the beginning of my book, it was the end of the story for Forbes Smiley. Librarian found the xacto knife blade, they began googling the names of patrons in the library and discovered Forbes Smiley was a dealer in rare maps. This made them even more nervous, so they called the police department. As smiley left a library, a plainclothes policeman was following was behind. This is a map i made for the book. I say i made it. I thought i would make my own map for the book. I thought if i was going to write a book about maps, i should have some of my own in it. It only took me about 10 minutes of drawing to realize that would not happen. I hired an illustrator from the netherlands, which i was pleased by, because the netherlands is where the golden age of map making was in the 1500s and 1600s. This is a map teacher of the Yale University campus. The top is the library. Smiley walked down the street past the tower all the way to the art center. It was there that the Police Officer introduced himself and said he was with the library and asked if smiley had inadvertently taken anything with him. Even though he was under no obligation to cooperate, decided he would go back with the officer and they began looking through his things. First, they looked through his briefcase and found a number of rare maps which smiley said he had brought with him. They found no evidence to show that was not true. There, theyanding noticed him fidgeting with his blazer pocket and something in his blazer. They asked him to take it out. When he did, he took out this. This is a map of new england by john smith. It was originally done in 1616. This is a yale copy done in 1631. I want to pause for a moment and tell you a bit about this map and explain what makes it so important and value both. Valuable. We all know john smith from the and the founding of that in 1607. But he had a Second Chapter in his life after he was drummed out of virginia for reasons i will not go into. He started exploring the area then known as north virginia with the idea of founding a new colony. He thought it needed a snappier name so he came up with the name new england. John smith was the person who coined that term as a way to claim this territory for his home country and tell the other countries this is a new territory. He also wanted to claim this territory for himself and make sure he got credit for discovering it and would be involved in the colonization. He put an enormous portrait of himself in the corner. He was so vain he updated the portrait over the years on different versions of the map. This is a later version. You can see his beard is much than earlier versions and his jacket is more elaborately decorated. All up and down the coastline here are names of english towns and cities. London, cambridge, oxford, and other places. In 1616 before the pilgrims landed in new england, none of the cities or towns existed. The reason they are on the map is because after he made the map, he brought it to england and presented it to Prince Charles and asked him to change the names of all of the native american settlements to english towns and cities. Act ofthis breathtaking virtual colonization that occurred before a single english settler could set foot on the territory. He did succeed claiming the territory for england. Interestingly, most towns and cities on the map have disappeared or are not in the places he put them. In the corner, you can see where he wrote plymouth. Whenwas where the pilgrims they sailed with a copy of his map steered to that location and founded their colony there and took the name for the plymouth colony. This is a really important map. In the seminal document founding and exploration of north america. It is also a quite rare map. Even though it is not a oneofakind, there are only a few dozen copies of this map that exist in various institutions in the world. Because of that, it is a very valuable map. At auction, this map could easily go for 50,000 to a collector. When smiley was found with this map that was rare and valuable, one of the librarians noticed the handwriting at the bottom of as belonging to a patron of yale who had donated a lot of rare maps and books to the library. She immediately cried out, that is our map. They put handcuffs on smiley and let him away to spend the night in jail. The fbi was called in to investigate this case. Immediately, they realized they had a problem. As i mentioned, there may have been only a few dozen copies of this map. But it is not so rare there is only one copy. It is not like a work of art in a museum where there is only one copy and if it is missing everyone knows it was stolen. The fbi agent came in and said i understand smiley had a copy of this map, that you are missing a copy, but how do i know the copy you are missing is the copy smiley took . I actually got lucky early on in the case they actually got lucky early on in the case with another map smiley had on him that day. It was this when. This is a map by one of the dutch mapmakers i was talking about from the 1500s. This is the world map from his atlas, which is even more rare than the smith map. It was only produced in the First Edition of the atlas which never sold well. Very few copies of the map survived. Probably worth at least 150,000 at auction. It was not what was on the front of the map that interested investigators. It was what was on the back of the map. You can see on the back there were four little wormholes made by parasitic pests, probably hundreds of years ago as it was sitting on the dusty shelf of a library. Linedur holes on the map up exactly with four holes in the atlas that was in yields collection smiley was looking at yales smiley was looking at that date. They were able to catch him redhanded and say yes, he took this map and it came from this volume belonging to yale. Because it was an object worth over 100,000, they could charge him with a federal crime which carries a hefty federal sentence. Agents knew he had stolen at least two maps and probably more. The fbi agents began to further investigate the case. You know he knew nothing about rare maps when he started working on the case, he did know a lot about thieves and he knew when a thief is caught redhanded, it is usually not the first time they have committed a theft. Calling around and sending emails out to other rare book and Manuscript Librarys around the country. Them two questions. Has Forbes Smiley been in your collection lately and are you missing any maps . These two universities answered yes. Both were missing maps. The new york library was missing maps from two divisions. The library at harvard and the British Library in london and the Newberry Library in chicago. Now it became this sort of Treasure Hunt where investigators had to determine what maps were missing from the librarys, what books smiley look at, which maps he might have taken and where those might have ended up it became quite an ordeal. Backibraries had to go through hundreds of call slips dating back several years to find out which items smiley had looked at and compare them to their catalog for those items. As you can imagine with these rare books acquired over 100 years ago, they were not adequately catalog in terms of what maps they contained. Some might just say map or maps. Some may list some but not others. Some may have been missing them long before smiley got there. It was a difficult enterprise they had to go into to figure out [indiscernible] lucky for them, he did come forward when he heard there were federal charges pending against him. Smiley did come forward and he offered to cooperate could he eventually admitted stealing 97 maps. But the libraries to this day accuse him of stealing more than he admitted to. The maps he stole were worth over 3 million in total. They were the creme de la creme of antique maps, the most value and expensive he stole. 20052006. Ppened in this had been reported in the newspapers. It was pretty wellknown by the time i started on this trail in 2011. I remember reading about this case in the new yorker and other places when it happened. I am a map lover myself and have always been intrigued by these rare objects and the fact people were willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for them. It made me curious to know more about why that was the case. I also wanted to know more about smiley. He had never talked to the press before. He had never given an interview. He never explained why he started taking these maps, especially given the fact he was himself a rare map dealer and loved these maps and celebrated them. What caused him to go to the dark side and start taking these maps out of libraries . That is the task i set for myself. Originally, i was going to write an article for boston magazine and update the case and tell it start to finish. Through a friend of smileys, he agreed to talk to me. I sat across a picnic table on Marthas Vineyard for four hours, and he told me the story. I was completely convinced this was not a magazine article. This was a book. He was such a complex character and that dealers were so interesting. The stories of the mapmakers were just as interesting as smiley story if not more so. I want to share about what i learned about smiley and some of these maps he stole. This is another map i had made for the book of new england showing key locations in the story. Smiley grew up in a little town in New Hampshire called bedford. Hepite his highfalutin name, grew up middleclass as the son of an electrical engineer. He did not come from the vast pools of well you might imagine. He was always fascinated with history. Even as a young boy, he would read about history and study the history of the area, particularly the history of new england. He went to Hampshire College in amherst, massachusetts. He made history his specialty, history and religion. He was known for all sorts of eccentric things like reciting the iliad in the middle of campus are telling his friends the history of every church they passed. After college, he settled in new york. It was there he entered the map trade. He started at this Department Store which no longer exists, but had a Small Division that sold rare maps analysis. It was located just a dozen blocks from the New York Public Library. That is where his real education in maps began. He became so fascinated looking at the different maps and comparing them and realizing which mapmaker had copied from that he could not get enough of this topic and became incredibly knowledgeable in a short time. Own as at out on his dealer, he was quite successful. The late 1980s was a very good time to become a map dealer because the prices were increasing exponentially. Even wealthy people were no longer able to afford a lot of fine art. The prices had become unattainable. Maps became a new way of collecting for folks who were wealthy but not billionaires. Wall streetyers, types who would buy these rare maps, put them on their walls and have a rare item that was beautiful to look at and had this historical story behind it. They became very popular. Maps that went for a couple of thousand dollars went for tens of thousand dollars, eventually approaching hundreds of thousands of dollars. Successful for quite a while. He put together a collection of maps of new york and the midatlantic region including washington and virginia for a man by the name of larry slaughter which was donated to the New York Public Library as the slaughter collection of maps. He also put together a collection of maps of boston and new england for a developer named norman leventhal. That was contributed to the boston Public Library as the leventhal collection of maps. ,oth ironic given later events that he was taking maps out of the libraries he was putting them into. Smiley, even though he was very successful putting together these collections and in selling maps for quite a while, he also had several flaws that were his undoing. One was he was a terrible business person. From the beginning, he was always chasing maps he could not afford and buying one to pay for another one. He became notorious for bouncing checks to fellow dealers. Some of them stopped doing business with him and hurt his client base. As maps became more valuable in the 1980s, there was more competition than ensued. A number of new dealers came in and looked at it as a business. We may think about dealing and collecting as a rarefied pursuit of people studying and libraries, but it is quite a business, and in some ways a cutthroat business of people bidding against each other at auctions for a small number of rare and valuable items. A number of these map dealers did not like smiley very much, either because he bounced checks to them or they thought he was all, so and a know it they would bid against him and sometimes drive the price up on him. Sometimes they would band together against him. Smiley was never a team player. He always had this sort of secretive, go it alone attitude, that he was going to make it on his own and did not need anyone elses help. That contributed to his financial problems because it was necessary sometimes for different dealers to band together bidding on certain items they would split up, so he became even less able to compete because of that. Me, helly, as he told was too proud to admit he had failed in this pursuit. He told me he was looking at a map at the Sterling Memorial Library on the table in front of him realizing he could fold it down to the size of a credit card, walk out with it in his pocket, and sell at the next day for 30,000. That was the moment temptation got the better of him. He sold the first map and told himself it was a onetime thing he would do to get out of financial duress. But of course, that started a slippery slope and he began stealing more maps and selling them for more money and became the map thief that i write about in my book. Im going to talk about a few of the maps he stole to give you an idea of the kind of items he valuablewhy they are and what he did with someone he took them. Johnis another map by smith, a map he made a few years before the map of new england. It is a map of the virginia colony. It is striking because john smith had written entry surveying materials rudimentary survey materials. He went up and down the river and had a sextant he would use on different landmarks. From that, he was able to create this accurate map of the region in use as a map for 200 years after he created it. As you can see, on this map he did not put a picture of himself. He put a picture of the native andican chief in the corner a picture of another native american here. There are little crosses in some areas along the rivers he put there. That was the limits of the area he individually surveyed himself. Were areas heat relied upon the knowledge of the natives of the area to map the rest of the area. You can see how accurate that is as well. It was particularly successful and amazing he was able to do the job he was on this. Smiley stole. There were two copies of this map missing from the boston Public Library. When smiley admitted to taking them out, he only admitted to stealing one. Did notarian afterwards give up on this. He was sure smiley had taken the other one as well and began scanning catalogs and sought a copy of this map. He went to new york with a copy of the book the map was missing from and was able to match it against the book by an impression made in the page facing where the map was missing. That is at least one he did not admit to that was in route eventually recovered by the library. This is another map of virginia. You can see Chesapeake Bay here. On the smith map, north is to the right. On this map, north is at the top. You can see the Chesapeake Bay and appalachian mountains. This was the definitive map of the 18th century of the virginia and washington area. It was all done from original surveys by fry and jefferson. If youre wondering if that jefferson has any relation to Thomas Jefferson, he was actually his father. After Peter Jefferson died, he bequeathed his surveying equipment to Thomas Jefferson who created one map of virginia. Tos map was made in response the growing tensions between the french and english. As the colonists moved inward into the mountains, they began running up against the french coming down from canada. Eventually, that would erupt in the french and indian war. Almost 100 years before war broke out, there was this cartographic war between the english and french with both drawing competing maps to claim the territory of the ohio valley into virginia. This map is commissioned in order to survey this area where these competing claims were taking place. It was leaps ahead of any maps at the time and the most accurate map until the revolutionary war. As i said, this was Thomas Jeffersons father. Thomas jefferson used this map to create his own map. This map was taken from the boston Public Library. It was part of an applets atlas of the United States made around the time of the revolution. This is one smiley took out of that. I want to show you a few maps of. C, as well. D this is a map made in 1792. It was the first printed map of washington, d. C. It was made by andrew ellicott, the assistant of charles lenfant, who many of you have no doubt heard of. Applause is just a few blocks he designed with the grand boulevards that would go through the center of the city. Thoseunately, he put through the property of one of the mainland owners at the time and he was not thrilled about it. He complained to washington and jefferson who were in charge of plans for the capital and land enfant was dismissed. It was up to ellicott to continue the plans and put them into practice. He finished the surveying and produced a series of maps of washington, d. C. The First Published map was done in june of 1792. There were two pirated versions that appeared in magazines before the official map was printed. This map youre looking at was in a magazine printed in boston. It is incredibly rare. The other map was in a magazine in philadelphia. That is more common. The boston map is incredibly rare. After smileys thefts were discovered, both harvard and the boston Public Library were both missing their copy of the a look map from theicott original magazines. Smiley only admits to stealing one copy of this map. Ater the maps were recovered, number of libraries went down to new haven to look at the maps and determine whos was whose. They had a little bit of a fight over some of these maps. Being librarians, it was a quiet fight. But there were a lot of maps that changed hands and went to different institutions who were able to prove through different marks were impressions were impressions or impressions whos was whose. This was proven to be the harvard map. Boston is still missing theirs. This is another map by ellicott and also washington, d. C. It is very different looking. It was meant to be displayed in this diamond shape. As you can see, it is all the topography of washington, d. C. , sort of stripped of landmarks and street names. This one is also quite rare. After smileys thefts were Yale University library realized they were missing their copy. Smiley lifted a copy of this listed a copy of this map on his website and in the listing mentioned he knew of no version of this map that had come at 1991, when he had helped purchase it for the slaughter collection that ended up at the New York Public Library. Yale was missing their copy of this map. Right around the time it was on smileys website, the map also appeared in the catalog of a dealer smiley was known to do business with. Smiley never admitted to stealing this one. Yale did not have any kind of defining marks that would show this was their map. They did not have an additional image of it or have any other evidence. Decidedof that, the fbi it was not a map smiley had stolen and was never returned back to yale. Wanted to close with a few words about what smiley did with the money he gained from stealing these mouse. In some ways i find this to be one of the more compelling aspects of the story and one of the things that convinced me there was a book here. This is a map of a small town in maine. It is a little flea bite of a town. You can barely find it on a map. Smiley purchased a farm house here in the late 1980s, write up here. Given his love of history in new england, he restored this farmhouse to this image of the perfect ideal new england farmhouse. He did not stop there. He decided he was going to restore the rest of the town and began buying up property including the post office, a restaurant, a general store. He renovated a childrens park. About half the people in town looked at him as a robin hood figure. Employed carpenters, laborers, people that work in shops and stores. All in all, spent about 1 million on this project of renovating the town. The town wasf of not pleased about some new yorker coming up to maine and telling them what to do with their town and how to run the property. A number of residents got into a feud with him, particularly the folks across the street from him on the lake was a family known as the moriartys. They decided they had a different version of the town they would like to see. It involved an ice cream shop, a speed boat marina, a pleasure boating center. Became at odds and started this feud that divided the town in half. Half of the people would eat at smileys restaurant and mail letters that his post office. The others would go to the store and send their letters there and eat at the restaurant in the town. It eventually grew into this legal battle that ended up costing smiley even more money in legal bills, on top of the money he was already spending on the renovation project and all the people he was employing the debts he had in the first place. It caused them to rapidly increase the pace of his stealing in the last six months and target new areas, including the by nikki library where he is eventually caught. That gives you a sense of who this character was and the interesting contradictions involved in his tail. He did still upwards of 100 maps we know of. Libraries accused him of stealing at least 150 more. He did spend three years in prison. A lot of libraries wish he had spent more of a jail term, but he was given time off for the cooperation he provided to the fbi. He currently lives on Marthas Vineyard where last i knew he was working as a landscaper for 12 an hour. He has nothing to do with prayer maps anymore. In prison, he did pick up a new hobby of watercolor painting. This is a picture of watercolor on display in an art show at Marthas Vineyard i attended. It just goes to show how talented he is that in a few short years he was able to produce a watercolor of this caliber. As you can see on the label, there is one change since his map dealing days. Ifno longer goes by Forbes Smiley iii. He now goes by edward or even ed. I would be happy to answer questions. If you have questions, please. Ome up to the mic to thank you very much. Informational and more general. Realize this is not necessarily your area of authority, but how well our institutions doing protecting their goods our institutions doing protecting their goods . Your question is more about what boulevard . And who is the property owner. Once knew that during my research, but there are so many maps and details comment on how institutions in your opinion are doing these days in terms of protecting their materials. I can comment on that because i looked quite a bit into that. Librariesly the smiley targeted have done a lot to change their security practices. They have installed new cameras. In some cases installed new policy for how maps are delivered to patrons. Toe has a barcode affixed every map that it scans in and out of the vault every time someone wants to look at it. Other libraries have instituted to juggle imaging so if god for bid a map has gone missing they can identify it and tell it is their map. Know, other hand, as you libraries are chronically short staffed and underfunded. The real variation between libraries and what they have done and been able to do, there was not a single curator i spoke to that said this could not happen again somewhere. As long as we are providing access to these materials, unless we want to lock them up and just provide digital images which would be a shame, youre going to assume some measure of risk. The question is how much you are able to minimize. I have a question over here. I got a sense in reading your book at the end that a number of libraries were not forthcoming in the maps they were missing. Fornted to get your feel why they felt that way. Ofthere was a real variety the amount of transparency libraries were able to show. In some cases, that is understandable. You can imagine if you are looking for donations of you dontfrom people want to be advertising the fact that you have had items stolen from your institution. Unfortunately, that also plays byo some of these thefts smiley and other people and allows them to continue because of the fact that these thefts are not widely disseminated. It sometimes can allow them to go on a lot longer than they otherwise would. Theres a real tension that exists. To their credit, i think leiber is a gotten better about that. It has been more transparent since the smiley affair. I was impressed in my research how transparent many of them were prayed they opened their files and were incredibly open in what they gave me. But there still is secrecy that exists in terms of the thefts that can aid in helping thieves. I think there must be a commonality between the market books or maps and old there ises in that almost a black market. People ignore from where those maps come from. How it would be possible for people to buy these things when yale ore come from whatever. I am wondering if you could talk more about that black market and how things can be sold so easily when they have been stolen. Is there nothing do you not have to say where they got them . Obviously, the answer is no. It is interesting. As i started to research this issue and find out how these maps have gotten sold, a lot of people asked me if there was some kind of black market where they are selling these something,e fence or and it is ending up in this private collection in japan or something. Thefts, unlike art thefts of rare books and maps can be done in the open the customer are multiple copies. Smiley had three dealers he worked with for a number of years. He would say he was selling off maps in the collection of an old andon dealer or collector would be coming to them with very rare materials over the next few months. Those dealers but that story. They believed him. They bought these maps and sold them on to other collectors who put them on their wall and told the story. There is definitely some criticism of whether those dealers should have asked more questions and should have accepted smileys story at face value. At the same time, it is difficult in some cases to prove the problems provenance of these maps. Once you go back a couple of decades, it can be hard even if you know it was sold at auction in the 1990s, you have to ask when it was sold before that. Going back more than two or three steps is hard. I think there has been more effort on the part of dealers to look at providence promenades and not just take the sellers word at face value. That is Something Else that aids in the best the thieves. There is no shame wanting to acquire it overcomes the possibility that perhaps it was taken from yale library. It just assumes me. I certainly think that is the case in some cases, that there is willful ignorance. You dont estimate questions because you do not want to know the answers. I dont think that represents everyone, but that is certainly something that goes on. I wanted to answer the question the gentleman raised a few minutes ago about the location. The mansion i got torn down was owned by one of the three original commissioners, daniel , the brother and relation to charles carroll, a big landowner. At independence avenue. Fant knew what land was his to play with. Carol ignored him. Antprove his point, lenf tore the building down. That contributed to his dismissal. Thank you. That shows the story behind some of these maps, politics was alive and well in d. C. Before the city was created. Over here. I am wondering how much is watercolors sell for and is there possibly a future for him in that field. [laughter] i dont know. That art show was part of the commission gave money to Famous Artists to display their work. I think maybe he made 2000 or something. I dont know it has occurred to him that he could sell originals and profit just from the name alone. To my knowledge, he has not sold any of his work. Thanks for and engaging talk. On thee were a movie Edward Smiley story, who do you see paying that much playing mr. Smiley . Playing mr. If you could procure any map in any way without punishment in the world, what would that be . [laughter] got to be careful what i say here. [laughter] know,ms of the movie, you i sort of see William H Macy as character wasley maybe brad pitt as the Investigative Reporter telling his story. Casting is being done as you speak. In terms of the map i would it would could, probably be a map from yale i uncovered during my research. It was by a gentleman by the name of john steller. There are only three copies in the world. It was an early map of new england and shows the area of new england around the time of king philip. It is this interesting map with all these pictures of colonists and native americans fighting each other. T is a real glimpse in time it is particularly interesting to me. The interesting thing about that map is it has been stolen twice from yale. It was stolen back in the 1970s by another map thief who sold it. It was recovered. Smiley came in and stole it again and put a copy on his website. Which was the map, particularly devastating given the fact there were only three of these. He colored it and put it on his website. He colored it and put it on the website. And in the description of the map, he said there was a version uncolored but this was a different version which was the height of hubris that he would do such a thing. Was he map itself beautiful. Would love to have it on my wall. Thank you all so much. No more questions, we appreciate you coming. Books thato sign any you may have. [ applause ] youre watching American History tv, 48