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Map Thief Acted out of Spite, Prosecutors SayA Massachusetts map dealer who admitted in June to stealing rare maps worth about $3 million claims that his actions were partly motivated by resentment towards curators at the libraries that owned them. In papers filed September 21 with the U.S. District Court in New Haven, Connecticut, attorneys prosecuting E. Forbes Smiley III explained that “his initial thefts were acting out of resentment towards 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,” the Associated Press reported September 21.Smiley, who is scheduled for sentencing September 27, faces restitution and up to six years of prison under federal guidelines for stealing 97 antique maps over an eight-year period from the New York and Boston public libraries, Chicago’s Newberry Library, Harvard University, and the British Library. His attorney, Richard A. Reeve, has requested a sentence of only three years, saying that the “libraries are getting back maps that they never would have gotten were it not for Mr. Smiley’s cooperation.” The prosecution says that only four maps have not been returned by those who have them, but that five others are lost, according to the September 20 New Haven Register. However, in a legal brief filed September 13 by Philadelphia-area attorney Robert E. Goldman, the British Library has called for a stiff sentence of eight years. The request was prompted by Smiley’s admitted theft from the library of a world map—one of the first to show America as a distinct continent—by the 16th-century German cartographer Peter Apian. Goldman’s brief said that Smiley’s actions “ripped at the heart of our public institutions which stored, protected, and made available to the public over centuries maps which provided a bridge between past and future generations.” The map has been recovered and returned to the library. Clive Field, the British Library’s director of scholarship and collections, said in the September 15 Guardian that Smiley’s cooperation has “not been as full as one would wish” and that he is a “serial thief on an industrial scale.” The British Library, as well as Harvard and the other affected institutions, suspect that he is responsible for other missing maps. However, prosecutors in the case admit that the “FBI has not identified other information suggesting that Smiley has a hidden cache of maps or is protecting some unidentified purchaser of his maps.” Posted September 22, 2006. |
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