To Catch a Thief

[Kara Sundstrom]

To Catch a Thief
How a Civil War buff's chance discovery led to a sting, a raid and a victory against traffickers in stolen historical documents

By Steve Twomey
Smithsonian magazine, April 2008




Pay Dirt in Montana
Steve Twomey

A librarian's sleuthing turns up a crime with at least 100 victims


In the fall of 2006, a history devotee named Dean Thomas was surprised by something he saw on eBay, the online auction house. Someone was offering 144-year-old letters sent by munitions companies to Philadelphia's Frankford Arsenal, a major supplier of the Union Army during the Civil War. How had he missed these? Thomas wondered. Hadn't he combed the records of that very arsenal in that very conflict? "Boy, am I a dummy," he thought.

Thomas is the author of an impressive, if not best-selling, addition to Civil War studies titled Round Ball to Rimfire. Its three volumes explore every type of cartridge, ball and bullet used in the war—used, that is, by the North. With a volume on Southern munitions yet to come, the opus stands at 1,360 pages—yours for $139.90 from Thomas Publications, the company Thomas founded in 1986, according to its Web site, "to produce quality books on historical topics."

The company occupies a drab building west of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that is as much museum as business, displaying old weapons as well as its books. Between stints of writing at home, Dean runs the business, and his brother, Jim, sets type, lays out pages and crops photos. It was Jim who first saw the Frankford Arsenal documents as he was hunting for a gift for Dean—a perpetual challenge, because Dean's got everything a history buff could want, or almost. "How many people do you know have a cannon on their porch and a Revolutionary War soldier's hut in their office?" Jim says.

Jim bid on two of the Arsenal letters. Their presence on eBay didn't alarm him, because old public papers can find their way into private hands in legitimate ways and be legitimately sold. What did worry Jim, though, was whether his brother would like them, so he asked him to peek online. Dean liked the letters enough to ask Jim to bid on a third.

Yet Dean, 59, kept puzzling over the letters, because even though he had meticulously tracked down all manner of Arsenal documents for his book, he couldn't remember seeing or hearing about these.

"He was kind of beating himself up for being a bad researcher," Jim says.

A few nights after he first saw the letters, Dean visited eBay to see if Jim's bids had won. He had, for $298.88. But now the seller had a new offering: another Civil War letter, this one sent to the Arsenal by an American diplomat. Its topic was an unusual type of Austrian ammunition called guncotton.

This time, vintage memories began to rustle.

Dean had devoted eight pages of his Round Ball opus to guncotton, specifically citing the diplomat's letter. He rose, went to his files and found a photocopy of it. He had made the copy more than 25 years earlier in Washington, D.C. because he could neither buy nor borrow the original. No one could. It belonged to the citizens of the United States.

The National Archives, he now had no doubt, had been robbed.

Searching his files further, Dean also found a photocopy of one of the three letters Jim had just won. That made two stolen items. After checking eBay again, Dean discovered that he had copies of two more documents up for sale. That made four.

They weren't big-deal documents—not letters from Jefferson to Adams—and they weren't worth much on the open market. But this was not a matter of fame or riches. This was about stewardship of the national story. Whatever doubts Dean had about his research talents gave way to anger at whoever was doing this. "He was peddling American history," Dean says of the perpetrator. "It wasn't his to sell, and he was a thief."

The next morning, September 25, 2006, Dean telephoned the Archives.

People of larcenous character have been tempted by rare documents for as long as libraries and archives have offered access to them. Pilfering a 16th-century map of North America or walking out with a letter bearing the signature of Jefferson Davis is the first step on the freeway to easy money because the world teems with buyers seeking an intimate connection with the past, something to frame on a wall or display on a coffee table.

Traditionally, the custodians of heritage have been leery of making too much fuss over thefts. After all, the filching of a historical treasure from a restricted and guarded room is embarrassing, and an admission of breached security could hurt funding or discourage potential donors from bequeathing their prized collections. But a string of recent high-value crimes has led not only to greater vigilance but also to greater frankness about the threat. The more the public knows of the trafficking in purloined history, the thinking goes, the more difficult the fencing.

"Please, please, please don't keep it quiet," Rob Lopresti, a librarian from Western Washington University, told an American Library Association gathering in June. If you stay silent about a theft, Lopresti added, "you're sleeping with the enemy."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/to-catch-a-thief.html

[Kara Sundstrom]

In March 2000, a National Park Service worker saw an item for sale on eBay that he thought might belong to the Archives. It did. The agency, known formally as the National Archives and Records Administration, determined that an employee named Shawn P. Aubitz had whisked away several hundred documents and photos, including pardons signed by James Madison, Abraham Lincoln and other presidents. Aubitz was sentenced to 21 months in prison, but 61 of the presidential pardons are still missing.

During a six-year spree that ended in 2002, a Virginia amateur historian named Howard Harner repeatedly tucked Civil War papers into his clothes and strode out of the Archives. In all, he filched more than 100, including letters signed by Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Harner was sentenced to two years in federal prison; the Archives never got back most of what he took.

On February 21, 2006, a library employee at Western Washington University returned from the President's Day weekend to discover that someone had refiled books upside down or out of order in the government documents collection. In time, the staff determined that at least 648 pages of maps, lithographs, charts and illustrations had been torn from at least 102 vintage volumes. Evidence in that case led law enforcement authorities in December 2007 to a history-for-sale scheme that might have more victims than any in recent years, at least 100. (See "Pay Dirt in Montana," page 98.)

Above all there is E. Forbes Smiley III, an East Coast map dealer who, in January 2007, took up residence in a federal prison near Boston.

Smiley stole at least 97 maps from six distinguished institutions and sold them the old-fashioned way, privately, without eBay. A simple mistake stopped his spree: on June 8, 2005, a staff member found an X-Acto blade on the floor of Yale University's rare book and manuscript library. Told of the find, a supervisor noticed a man at a table examining rare maps and, using visitor logs, identified him as Smiley. Through an Internet search, the supervisor discovered that Smiley was a map dealer. A police officer found several Yale maps in Smiley's briefcase. After his arrest, five other libraries realized that Smiley had robbed them, too. "Nobody ever told me in library school I'd be on a first-name basis with an FBI agent," says David Cobb, the map curator at Harvard University, one of Smiley's targets.

The 97 maps were worth $3 million. But street value does not begin to capture the role of rare manuscripts, books and maps in illuminating a culture's milestones and missteps. When a car is stolen, its owner suffers alone. When a Civil War document disappears from an archive, everyone is diminished, even if just a little. It is no longer there to educate a Dean Thomas, who in turn cannot tell the rest of us about it.

Even though almost all the maps Smiley admitted stealing were recovered, the theft electrified the rare-document world because, as a high-end dealer, he had been family, trusted by the very institutions he had plundered. He had brazenly tossed aside the obligation to treat rare collections as community property instead of as a cultural ATM.

The New York Public Library was another of his targets, and in a statement to the judge in the case, library president Paul LeClerc wrote that "the maps stolen by Mr. Smiley provide a window into the past, illustrating how our predecessors once perceived of their relationship with the world and one [an]other." Losing such items to thieves causes "incalculable" damage, he added.

No less damage is done when manuscripts, books, photos and prints are torn—sometimes literally—from the public domain and sold into a life behind private walls. LeClerc may have been writing only about maps, but his words underscore the consequences when any rare and historical item is stolen from a great public collection: "Who knows what prize-winning book will not be written, or what historical or scientific discovery will not be made?"

When Dean Thomas telephoned the Archives, he was connected to Special Agent Kelly Maltagliati, a mother of two in her late 40s who used to stake out Florida swamps to nab drug runners for U.S. Customs. Maltagliati works at a building known as Archives II, which sits on a bucolic campus in College Park, Maryland, and is the modern-architecture sibling of Archives I, the stately tourist destination by the National Mall in Washington, a few miles away.

Besides records, Archives II houses the Office of Inspector General (OIG), which has the job of investigating thefts from the two main buildings, as well as from 13 regional centers, 12 presidential libraries and a slew of other facilities. So many papers, photos, artifacts and other pieces of Americana reside in those places that nobody can offer more than a ballpark number of the total. But the OIG knows precisely how many employees it has to recover anything stolen from them: seven, including Maltagliati and the inspector general himself.

"We're like the 300 spartans," Paul Brachfeld says, "less about 298."

As IG, Brachfeld has many duties, such as conducting audits of the Archives' operations, but he especially loves thwarting thieves. A wiry, intense man with a long federal career, Brachfeld, 50, radiates a kid's sense of wonder when he describes the thrill of holding recovered documents.

"We're a democracy. Democracy counts on records," he says. Some, certainly, are far more famous than others, but he will pursue the theft of any. "It's not for me to decide for the American public what's an important document or a relevant document or a critical document," he says. "They're all our documents. It's like deciding which child you like more in your family."

Protecting a family of documents is complicated by the very nature of the Archives and, indeed, of any special collection. Though rare books, maps and documents are not allowed to circulate like the latest best sellers, they are not locked away in vaults, either. They are meant to be requested and studied, and those who ask to inspect them are not strip-searched after they do so. Though security is extensive, it is possible to stuff an item inside a sock or shirt. President Bill Clinton's former national security adviser Samuel R. (Sandy) Berger strode out of Archives I with classified documents in 2003; he was ultimately caught and fined $50,000.

"If I come to the National Archives today and I have larceny in my blood, I can probably walk out and make some good money," Brachfeld says. "There are people that will do that."