[CPProt.net] A Rival Is Charged, and a Map Dealer Wants to Say, 'Told You So'

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

October 10, 2005
A Rival Is Charged, and a Map Dealer Wants to Say, 'Told You So' 
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

He considers himself an oracle and, yes, a bit of an opportunist, too. He
says that nothing will make him sorrier than to be proved right. Yet he
concedes that he could benefit financially, should it be proved that his
archrival in the business of selling rare or important maps is found to be a
thief.

Still, W. Graham Arader III, who has been criticized by clients and
colleagues for years for his attacks on E. Forbes Smiley III, a leading
competitor, says he is looking forward to vindication.

"I've been telling everybody that Forbes is a crook for 20 years, and
everybody says to me, 'You just think the only good maps are the ones you
have,' " Mr. Arader said in a recent interview.

He added: "I'm not a bag lady walking down Madison Avenue with a grocery
cart filled with bottles. I'm the oracle that was ignored."

Not quite ignored but certainly doubted, until four months ago, when Mr.
Smiley was accused of leaving Yale's rare-book library with several maps
from its collection in his briefcase and jacket. Mr. Smiley has since been
charged with three counts of larceny in Connecticut state court and is also
being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation about maps that
disappeared from other institutions he visited.

Mr. Smiley has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, Richard A. Reeve, said that
neither he nor Mr. Smiley would have any comment on his case, Mr. Arader's
accusation, or any other legal matter. 

Mr. Arader, 54, has spent more than three decades operating in the rarefied
but cutthroat world of maps, books, Americana and antiquities, eventually
becoming known as the pre-eminent map dealer in the field.

At the same time, he has gained a reputation for attacking his rivals, Mr.
Smiley among them. He once wore a wire to help put another famous map dealer
behind bars for theft, and other dealers and some clients have said that his
efforts are mostly motivated by money, revenge and age-old rivalries.

He certainly had more to lose than many others whenever Mr. Smiley came up
with a new find or offered a map at prices below those set by the major
dealers and auction houses.

Mr. Arader said many clients did question his integrity for quoting higher
prices than Mr. Smiley did on similar merchandise, and chalked up his rants
to jealousy, taking their business elsewhere. William Reese, a prominent
rare book and map dealer in New Haven who helped Yale appraise the maps
found with Mr. Smiley on the day of his arrest, said that he, too, had
nursed suspicions about Mr. Smiley. 

"The thing that never made sense is, here was this man who was always
evidently broke and always writing people bad checks and owing people money,
and yet he had all these fantastic maps," said Mr. Reese, who is one of
several dealers who had billing disputes with Mr. Smiley. Some of the other
dealers' disputes show up in court records. "The two just did not compute."

Still, Mr. Reese said he did not think it was right for Mr. Arader to now
accuse others of being in on the suspected thefts.

"Graham has used this whole unfortunate business to try to attack other
dealers who are his competitors," Mr. Reese said. "I think it's extremely
unlikely that the particular people he's accused of being in cahoots with
Smiley are in cahoots. They bought things from Smiley thinking they were
buying things that were legitimately on the market."

Mr. Arader said he had every right to question the behavior of other dealers
and collectors, given how loyally and lavishly he had served his clients:
taking maps to their homes to save them the trip, framing and hanging their
purchases, writing checks to their favorite charities, and dashing off to
their soirees when he felt he should have been spending time with his seven
children, ages 7 months to 21 years old.

With Mr. Smiley, a resident of the Chilmark section of Martha's Vineyard,
mostly out of commission pending the resolution of his legal problems, Mr.
Arader makes no secret of how eager he now is to see other chips fall.

As hard as it is to discern "what goes on in the mind of a collector," as
Mr. Arader put it, he has been urging law enforcement officials on the case
"to go after the high fruit."

He has also shared correspondence with the F.B.I. that indicates that he
warned some of his clients that Mr. Smiley's deals were too good to be true,
and that "there is no way that he can be getting these maps legally,"
according to an e-mail message from Mr. Arader to a client.

The client had taken the stance in a previous e-mail message that "just
because something doesn't come through your hands doesn't make it
suspicious."

That Mr. Smiley has been accused of taking items from Yale, Mr. Arader's
alma mater, only makes Mr. Arader angrier. At Yale, he said, he focused on
"blondes and squash," but became interested in maps after he met Alexander
Orr Vietor, the curator of Yale's map collection. Before long, Mr. Arader
was selling maps from his dormitory room. "I love maps, and when you get
hooked, you get hooked," he said.

These days, he says his net worth is $200 million, counting the $100 million
inventory of maps that fills his galleries in Manhattan, Philadelphia,
Houston and San Francisco and the walls of his six-story Beaux-Arts town
house on Madison Avenue that doubles as a showroom. 

For all his moral certitude, Mr. Arader acknowledges that his own buying and
selling habits have not always been above reproach. For instance, he once
bought old atlases, which he cut up to retrieve the maps inside, much the
way hunters display the horns of a prize buck on their mantels but discard
the carcass. 

Cutting the books was legal since he owned them, rival dealers say, but it
set a lot of teeth on edge.

Mr. Arader insists that he long ago abandoned that practice. "I was a
Visigoth," he said. "It made people crazy. I don't do it anymore."

He also sees nothing untoward about his and Mr. Reese's joint purchase nine
years ago of Thomas Jefferson's Proclamation of the Louisiana Purchase. They
bought it for $772,500 and quickly resold it for $1 million. 

Mr. Arader acknowledged that the document, signed in 1803 by President
Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison, might once have been
government property. But he said the legal spats over the document's
provenance had been worked out before he bought it. 

Not that he did not have some explaining to do. Mr. Arader's daughter
Josephine, now 20, recalled how thrilled she was to learn about that part of
history by reading Jefferson's own words. But when she told her teacher
where she had received her information, she said she was sent to the
principal's office for lying.

http://www.nytimes.com/