Map Thief To Serve Jail Time

A federal judge yesterday sentenced map dealer-turned-thief E. Forbes Smiley III—who has admitted to stealing eight maps from Harvard’s Houghton Library—to three-and-a-half years in prison followed by three years of supervised release.

Smiley was also ordered to pay nearly $2 million in restitution for the 98 maps he stole over a seven-year-period from institutions around the U.S. as well as the British Library.

But today’s sentencing doesn’t close the case of the thief who made national headlines in June 2005, when he was caught carrying seven maps out of Yale’s Beinecke Library. Smiley will also be sentenced in October in Connecticut state court for larceny charges resulting from his thefts at Yale.

Smiley was a well-known rare maps dealer who built up a business selling his stolen maps to other dealers. These dealers are the ones who will receive the majority of the restitution payment.

“We thank the federal authorities for all the work that they did on the Smiley case,” Harvard College Library (HCL) spokeswoman Beth I. Brainard said after Smiley’s sentence was announced. “We’re always grateful to see individuals who steal and deface valuable library materials brought to justice.”

HCL encouraged Judge Janet Bond Arterton to punish Smiley with “the maximum penalty for his crimes,” according to the victim impact statement HCL submitted to the court.

“At any time in the future, when readers use any book that was previously used by Mr. Smiley, those individuals must always wonder if their observations and conclusions will be rendered invalid because his actions removed, and thus disguised, vital evidence,” HCL’s top librarian, Nancy M. Cline, wrote in her impact statement.

The maximum penalty for Smiley’s crimes would be 10 years of jail, but in a plea agreement with Smiley, federal prosecutors said they would seek a lighter sentence.

U.S. Attorney Kevin J. O’Connor said he was pleased with the outcome of the sentencing. “We believe that the court balanced the severity of this crime with this defendant’s significant cooperation in recovering most of the maps that he stole and imposed a fair sentence,” O’Connor said in a statement.

Smiley’s capture doesn’t end the search for the 13 rare maps that Harvard is missing. Several institutions say they are missing maps with titles identical to the eight that Smiley says he stole from Harvard. And five of Harvard’s 13 missing maps are not among the items Smiley has confessed to stealing.

Still, Brainard said that HCL can prove that Smiley viewed all of the books from which the 13 maps are missing.

Brainard said the next step in the Smiley saga is to get the recovered maps returned to their rightful owners. Maps that HCL believes to still be missing have been advertised on rare maps and missing cultural property web sites since this summer.

—Staff writer Brittney L. Moraski can be reached at bmoraski@fas.harvard.edu.