The Map Thief

by Michael Blanding

  Other dealers, such as Reese and Arader, doubted the theft had even happened. There is scant evidence in the record to prove that it did. No newspaper stories refer to it, and neither the New York Police Department, nor the FBI, nor Interpol could produce records of any investigation. Smiley himself referred to the incident in court papers several times between 1989 and 1991, putting the loss anywhere between $220,000 and $330,000 depending upon the date. “Though I may be an ‘expert’ in cartography, I am, admittedly, no businessman,” he wrote in one case, “thus no insurance.”

  The other galleries in the building have long since closed, but I did track down the super, who still works in an office in the basement of the building. He remembered Smiley as a good tenant who paid his rent on time, but as for any burglary in the building at that time, he shakes his head. “I can’t say it never happened, but there is a one percent chance out of a thousand that it did,” he says. Asked if it’s possible he was never alerted, he adds, “Usually someone farts in this building, and I hear about it. It’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t hear about something like that.”

  Whatever the truth of the situation, friends said Smiley grew despondent after the incident. As the weeks went by without a single map surfacing, he hinted darkly that one of his rival dealers might have been behind it. The map world was too small for nothing to turn up. I get it, he fumed. You do this alone.

  “I didn’t trust the marketplace after that,” he later told me. “I went on to be a loner, and I think it was unnecessary and imprudent.” He rubbed his hands together. “It was straight-up foolish to struggle so hard because I insisted on doing everything myself.” Smiley stopped advertising and putting out catalogs, relying solely on his network of personal collectors to continue buying and selling maps. Some of his friends and family urged him to cut his losses and get out of the business, but Smiley stayed in. There was no way he was going to allow himself to be beaten.

  Rebuilding his collection wasn’t as easy as it had been to build it in the first place, however. By now, many of his European contacts had retired or died. To help him, he hired Baynton-Williams, a third-generation map dealer whose father was one of the leading dealers in London, and who called on his connections to help find Smiley material. He was impressed with Smiley’s ability to buy and sell but quickly grew frustrated covering for him over his promises to pay. Some of Smiley’s best clients were sympathetic toward his plight and told him they’d wait to be reimbursed for items they’d bought but were stolen before he could deliver them.

  One person who showed no sympathy was Graham Arader, who had sold Smiley several maps, including a rare 1759 map of Pennsylvania by Nicholas Scull, in May 1989. Smiley signed a note promising to pay him nearly $50,000 for the map by late June. When he failed to do that, Arader sued. The next month, the two settled, agreeing to a new payment plan, but Smiley kept defaulting on payments for nearly a year. It wasn’t until the following spring that Arader got his money, along with interest and $5,000 in attorney fees.

  In order to make ends meet, Smiley took out a mortgage on the house in Maine for $40,000 and called upon friends for loans. But his debts mounted. Creditors began suing him for unpaid bills, and he defaulted on credit cards, including more than $20,000 owed to American Express for travel expenses. The IRS hit him with liens for nearly $5,000 in unpaid taxes, and ironically, he even failed to pay the bill for $10,000 to a burglar alarm company in April 1990. In another case, he got into a dispute with a Spanish map collector, José Porrúa, who accused Smiley of selling him maps in poor condition. Smiley blamed the gallery theft for his failure to reimburse Porrúa the money for the sales, again defaulting over and over on payments to make up the debt. Eventually, the court ordered him to pay Porrúa $35,000 in April 1991.

  As difficult as all these financial problems were for Smiley, nothing hurt him as badly as a falling-out with his first and biggest client—Norman Leventhal.

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  FOR YEARS, SMILEY and Leventhal had a symbiotic relationship. Leventhal worked exclusively with Smiley, who tirelessly tracked down all the pieces of the puzzle he could find to tell the story of the mapping of New England. Together they put together a collection that had never been assembled before—and probably never could be again, given the rarity of some of the maps in the collection. As Leventhal began showing his maps more publicly, however, their relationship became more complicated.

  In 1988, Leventhal attended a presentation at the Boston Society of Architects in which Harvard architecture professor Alex Krieger showed slide after slide of old maps of Boston to illustrate how the city had changed over time. After the presentation, Leventhal approached him. “What do you know about maps?” he asked. “Not much,” Krieger responded. But he did know about Boston. After visiting Leventhal’s collection at the Boston Harbor Hotel, Krieger struck up a friendship with the collector. He introduced him to other local historians and librarians and eventually agreed to become his curator.

  When he met with Smiley to discuss the purchase of more maps, Krieger took an immediate dislike to him. He seemed obsequious and too eager to please—the way he called Norman “Mr. Leventhal” and referred to him as “Professor Krieger.” “I thought he was slimy,” he later told me. “Just the way he was courting Norman in an overdone way—kind of just sucking up, but unduly so,” Krieger later said. Until now, Leventhal hadn’t been too concerned with how much he paid for the maps Smiley found, writing checks for the prices he quoted without question or negotiation.

  But Krieger began to wonder whether the prices Smiley charged were fair. When Smiley brought them a new map, he started calling around to other dealers to ask what they would charge for a similar map. Of course, in a trade with such few players, map prices are a subjective concept, varying dramatically depending on individual taste, condition, and color—to say nothing of the potential motives of Smiley’s competition, who continued to be jealous of the way Smiley had sewn up his clients and certainly hoped to sell to Leventhal directly.

  According to Krieger, Smiley’s prices were close to those of other dealers at first, sometimes higher and sometimes lower. After a year or two, however, Krieger said he began to notice that Smiley’s prices were creeping up relative to the competition, frequently coming in highest. When they began to be even higher than Graham Arader’s, Krieger really began to become suspicious that he was overcharging them.

  Finally, Smiley brought Leventhal a 1785 map of New England by the eighteenth-century mapmaking team of Norman and Coles, which was only the fourth map printed in the United States. Only two copies of the map were known to exist, Smiley told them, with the other at Yale. There would never be another opportunity to buy it, he continued, setting its price at $100,000. Even Leventhal hesitated at that figure, but convinced by Smiley’s sales pitch, he agreed to the sale. Afterward, Krieger called Chicago map dealer Ken Nebenzahl to ask how much he’d charge for the map. The Chicago dealer agreed that it was an important map but thought there were several other copies in existence. Based on a photograph, he said a fair price would be $25,000.

  Krieger was stunned. He confronted Smiley, bluffing that he had another opportunity to acquire the same map for a quarter of the price. Smiley backtracked, explaining how difficult it was to accurately price maps in the market, but sticking by his initial enthusiasm for the map. He reduced the price to $60,000, which Leventhal paid, and offered several other maps free of charge as well. But Krieger had lost trust in him. By now, other dealers were calling Krieger to offer material for Leventhal’s collection, and he began to buy maps from Arkway and others.

  Shortly after the incident, Leventhal decided to have the entire collection appraised, and Nebenzahl flew into Boston, staying at the hotel for several nights and removing each map from its frame to price it. Many had appreciated in just a few years and were worth thousands more than he’d paid for them, but some of the more recent ones were worth less than Leventhal
had paid, in Nebenzahl’s estimation. At the end of the appraisal, Nebenzahl brought out a portfolio of other maps Leventhal might be interested in buying, and soon Leventhal was buying from him too. When I spoke with him, Smiley remembered his falling-out with Leventhal differently. In Smiley’s recollection, Krieger and Leventhal were upset not about the high price of a map, but over the cost of an eighteenth-century view of Boston that he’d discovered on wallpaper in a house in France. Due to the cost of cutting it from the plaster and export duties to get it out of the country, the wallpaper became much more expensive than a reproduction of the same view available in the United States. When Krieger and Leventhal discovered that, Smiley said, they balked at the price of the original. “My jaw dropped open,” Smiley told me. “We were in the business of collecting originals. If you want to collect facsimiles, go ahead, but it has nothing to do with me.”

  Whatever the cause, both Krieger and Smiley agreed that the relationship with Leventhal cooled after that. Leventhal bought a few more maps from Smiley, but gradually they parted ways. Smiley felt helpless to retain his client but rationalized the loss with the fact that the collection was practically finished anyway—at least, there was little more he could add to it. But he resented the way he’d been pushed aside and never given credit for the role he’d played in building the first great map collection of such a historically important part of the world.

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  SMILEY FARED BETTER with his other major client, Larry Slaughter, who became more serious about his map collection after his retirement in 1988. A quiet and private person who rarely spoke about his map collection even to friends, Slaughter appreciated Smiley’s diffident formality. Using what Mick Tooley had taught him, Smiley showed Slaughter how he could assemble a collection that could tell stories about how the mid-Atlantic area had been settled. By now, that was easier said than done. A decade of interest in rare maps had dried up the market and driven up prices. By March 1990, The New York Times had taken notice, interviewing map dealers, including Smiley, for a feature story on the popularity of maps in home décor. “The problem for dealers is not so much selling as finding the really nice things,” Smiley said.

  One source Smiley found for new material was Howard Welsh, a New Jersey textile magnate and longtime patron of the New York Public Library, who had assembled a collection of a thousand maps and a hundred globes over forty years. Smiley originally met him at B. Altman; now as he got older, he began using Smiley as his agent to start selling off parts of his collection, with the proceeds going to support his family. When Welsh died suddenly of a heart attack on November 9, 1990, however, his children decided instead to sell the collection through Sotheby’s, concluding the deal within a matter of weeks.

  Smiley showed up at the auction along with other dealers the following June, acquiring among other maps the John Seller map of New Jersey that Alice Hudson had picked for the Mercator Society book. But he watched as another buyer picked up a group of four books of The English Pilot, including The Fourth Book from 1713—the same edition Smiley said was stolen from his studio—and the only copy of it sold at auction in decades. He did buy a pair of maps of Washington, DC, by Andrew Ellicott, including a rare map of the original survey of the District of Columbia before Washington—printed in an unusual diamond shape rather than the familiar square.

  In the following months, he picked up other treasures for Slaughter as well, including a rare 1787 book by President Thomas Jefferson containing a map he’d made of Virginia. Jefferson’s father, who’d previously mapped the state, had died when Jefferson was only fourteen, leaving him his surveyor tools. Jefferson taught himself how to use them, becoming an amateur mapmaker—and after becoming president, he updated his father’s map for a book he wrote about his state. Smiley purchased a copy in 1991, adding it to three others in Slaughter’s collection.

  In October 1991, he purchased a beautifully intact first edition of The English Pilot, The Fourth Book from 1689 for $45,000 in a sale at Christie’s of the map collection of the Du Pont family. In 1993, he bought a first-edition copy of Seller’s Atlas Maritimus from 1682, the only copy in the United States, at auction at the Christian Brothers Academy for $6,500. And in 1994, he finally acquired a copy of the 1713 edition of The English Pilot, The Fourth Book from an auction at Sotheby’s London.

  At the same time Smiley was helping to build the collection for Larry Slaughter, he was also continuing to work on his scholarship. With the help of his assistant, Ashley Baynton-Williams, he began work on a book, The Printed Charts of New England 1614–1800: A Carto-bibliography, that would trace the mapmaking of New England through forty-seven sea charts, starting with John Smith’s 1614 map of New England. He approached the curator of the map department at Yale, Barbara McCorkle, who wrote an introduction to the book, and appealed to the Mercator Society to publish the work, which he envisioned as the first in a series that would trace the carto-bibliography of North America. With the enthusiastic support of Slaughter and Alice Hudson, the society solicited bids from printers and tentatively agreed to help raise $8,000 to print it.

  According to Alice Hudson, however, Smiley and Baynton-Williams got into a dispute about who deserved credit for the writing. Baynton-Williams had prepared the intial text, but Hudson said later that Smiley thought his descriptions were poor and had to be rewritten; Baynton-Williams, however, believed he’d done the lion’s share of the work and Smiley had only come in at the end to polish it. When the two were unable to resolve their differences, Hudson put the manuscript into a file drawer in the NYPL Map Division, where it remained.

  Despite the new income from his sales to Slaughter, Smiley’s financial difficulties continued. He continued to owe thousands of dollars in back taxes to both the state and federal governments—with the IRS filing a lien for $21,000 in 1992 and another for $25,000 in 1994. Even as he was paying off creditors, however, he was spending lots of money to rebuild the house in Sebec.

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  BACK IN THE 1800S, logs crowded so thick around the milldam on Sebec Lake that a person could walk across the lake on them. From there, they were floated to the City of Bangor in rafts down the river or, in winter, carried on a special steam train outfitted with skis. At its height in 1870, Sebec was the largest town in Piscataquis County, with a population of more than a thousand people (Figure 9). Since then, however, its fortunes have ebbed as the lumber business has dried up and gone to Canada and the population dropped to only six hundred. Now Piscataquis is the second-poorest county in Maine and one of the most sparsely populated areas east of the Mississippi.

  Still, the town has retained a sparse beauty, with wooded hills rising over the lake, and dozens of historic homes clustered around the village center. Among the residents are summer visitors who own homes—still quaintly referred to as “camps”—on the lakeshore. Their children join the local kids jumping off the milldam bridge into the lake and running through the surrounding woods. The house Smiley bought overlooking the dam in 1989 conforms to the New England farmhouse rhyme: “Big house, little house, back house, barn.” A five-over-five Colonial saltbox, it features two fireplaces bisected by a central staircase. Attached to it is a smaller carbon copy with kitchen and pantry, servants’ quarters that have since been converted into a garage, and finally the big red barn. Smiley put Adirondack chairs on the front lawn and cleared a path through wildflowers and smoke bush down to a grassy area that gave way to a small wooden dock.

  He spared no expense on the house itself, digging out a new foundation for the kitchen and installing new cabinets and an antique stove. He put a slate sink in the back pantry, beside ingenious cabinets to hold spices. Downstairs, he laid flagstone tiles and installed a pool table and beer fridge. In the main house, he jacked up the floor and laid new two-by-six stringers to support it, and he rebuilt the chimney.

  Lisa’s job, meanwhile, was to decorate the home. She chose a rustic, country aesthetic that harkened back a h
alf century. She painted the kitchen bright yellow, installing a long table flanked by rattan chairs. In the dining room was another long wooden table, with matching wooden benches. Off the main hall, a children’s playroom was filled with antique toys—a hobbyhorse, a stuffed bear, and a dollhouse. And in the corner was Smiley’s office, where he retreated to look at maps and installed shelves for blues records and his father’s gardening book collection after he died in 1994. The only map hanging in the house was one that was there when they bought it—a map of Sebec Lake done for the Dover-Foxcoft Chamber of Commerce in 1962 that hung over the dining room table.

  Starting the year after he bought it, Smiley and Lisa began coming up to the house every summer as a refuge from the city. Smiley bought two antique wooden speedboats and drove them across the lake to where one of his best friends from college, Bennett Fischer, began renting a home. In the early 1990s, Scott Slater and Paul Statt began bringing their families up as well. A video from August 18, 1993, shows sun streaming through the window as Smiley and Slater sit together at the table beneath the map of Sebec.

  “How are your pancakes?” Lisa asks, coming in from the kitchen. Smiley is sitting at the end of the table in a red-checkered shirt. “Oh, very good indeed. We’ve started our Sebec feeding frenzy,” says Smiley. They talk about a house Slater is planning on buying in Harpswell on the Maine coast. “We can . . . visit Forbes and Forbes can visit us on the coast,” Slater says. “All summer long, while we’re eating.” Smiley chimes in: “In between meals. We can have breakfast here and lunch in Harpswell.”