Map thief faces $1.8m fine and time in jail

THE TOOLS of his trade were a sharp razor blade and a brass neck.

Now the antiques expert who stole some of the world’s rarest and most ancient maps from the British Library and many leading American institutions faces 10 years in jail and the wrath of the world of cartographers.
Edward Forbes Smiley III, 50, has pleaded guilty in New Haven, Connecticut, US, to stealing 97 ancient maps worth $2.9 million. He will be sentenced in September and will almost certainly go to jail and face fines approaching $1.8 million. The scale of his thievery is already making waves throughout the institutions that bought rare maps from him.
Smiley, from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, was well-known in the trade and a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic. Librarians were used to seeing the scholarly figure in his blazer quietly examining old atlases.
Then, in June last year, Smiley was in Yale University’s Beinecke Library when a member of staff spotted a razor blade on the floor. Asked if it was his, Smiley behaved in a suspicious fashion. Questioned further by a detective, he admitted that it was his. In his pocket was a page cut from a 390-year-old atlas.
The FBI were called in. Initially, Smiley denied everything but his rivals in the trade felt that his arrest explained how he had been able to sell at seemingly bargain prices. Map dealers who knew him were amazed to discover what he had done.
Smiley’s website, complete with a 1688 map of “Pensilvania”, still exudes that self-confidence. “My practice has always been to work closely with collectors and develop a long-term relationship,” reads his statement, which boasts of 25 years in the trade. “We buy worldwide very aggressively.”
Now honest traders and institutions are waiting to see the effect of his crimes. “It has come as a real blow to the map trade,” said Paul Clark, of Carson Clark Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland’s leading map specialists.