The following story appeared this morning on Yahoo. --ECW
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U.S. map thief resented prestigious libraries: court
By Jason Szep
A dealer of antique treasures who admitted stealing more than $3 million in
rare maps was resentful of the world's top libraries and acted to finance
his rich tastes and rising debt, prosecutors said on Thursday.
Shedding light into why Edward Forbes Smiley III stole 98 of the world's
most precious maps over seven years, papers filed in Connecticut's U.S.
District Court said he initially acted because he felt he had been wronged
and slighted.
"Although he had a large degree of access to many libraries for his research
and used such access, he did not steal maps from every library that he
visited," prosecutors wrote.
Smiley faces restitution and up to six years in prison when he is sentenced
on September 27, more than a year after he was caught with seven rare maps
in his briefcase and tweed blazer after leaving Yale University's rare-book
library.
In June, Smiley, once one of the country's most respected dealers in rare
maps, admitted to the thefts from the British Library in London, New York
and Boston public libraries, the Harvard and Yale university libraries and a
Chicago library.
He was arrested after a keen-eyed library staffer noticed a dropped X-Acto
knife blade on the floor.
"He explained that his initial thefts were acting out of resentment toward
persons at certain institutions that he believed had wronged him,
individuals who he believed had slighted him or used certain of his research
without accreditation," prosecutors wrote.
SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT
"Other thefts he explained resulted from some misguided sense of entitlement
to the maps because he had, through collectors, provided better versions of
the same map to the institution. He also acknowledged that stealing and
selling the maps was profitable and he had mounting debts."
Prosecutors did not request a specific sentence but said the 50-year-old
antiquarian from Martha's Vineyard island in Massachusetts should be given
credit for cooperating with federal investigators and helping recover most
of the maps.
"From any perspective, the defendant has taken tremendous steps toward
addressing the wrongs he committed," they wrote.
They added that six of the maps likely never will be recovered, while two
are in the hands of identified collectors and 90 have been or most likely
will be recovered.
One of the oldest was Tudor world map dating from 1520 taken from the
reading room of the British Library. Another was a 1524 drawing of the New
World by Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes belonging to Houghton Library at
Harvard University. Like many of the others, it had been cut out of a bound
book.
"Smiley also explained in detail how he stole the maps from various
libraries, including using a razor in certain instances to cut the maps out,
clean the edges of the map and scrape off identifying marks," the
prosecutors said.
Under a plea agreement, Smiley has agreed to sell some of his property to
help make restitution, including a home worth around $600,000 on 4.3 acres
in Martha's Vineyard and another in Maine.