tower all the way to the yale e british arts center. it was there that the police officer introduced himself and said he was with the library and asked if smiley had per chance inadvertently taken anything with him. smiley, even though he was under no obligation to cooperate, he decided that he would go back with this officer to the ld beinecke and they began looking through his things. first they looked through his briefcase and found a number of ooking rare map there is but smiley said he had brought those with him.him. they found no evidence to find that wasn't true. then they noticed him fidgeting with his blazer pocket and something in his blazer and they f asked him to take it out. when they did, he took out this. this is a map of new england by john smith in 1616. this is yale's copy that was done in 1631. i want to pause for a moment andin 161 tell you about this map and done explain what makes it so i163 important and what makes it so 1.t

valuable. we all know of john smith from the virginia colony down the street from here and his role in founding that and study in 1607. he had sort of a second chapter in his life after he was sort of drummed out of virginia for from h reasons that i won't go into. he started exploring this area that was then just known as e was north virginia with the idea of founding a new colony there. and he thought that it needed a known snappier name so he came up with the name new england and john smith was actually the person it who coined that term as a way tome claim this territory for his ew engl home country and sort of tell as the other countries, you know, this is english territory. and he also wanted to claim this his territory for himself and make ort of sure that he got credit for eng discovering it and that he was going to be involved in the sure t colonization and so he put an enormous portrait of himself up it and here in the corner. be and he was so vain that, a actually updated the portrait ofn the years on different versions of the map.us up this is a later version of the map.

you can see his beard is much bushier than earlier versions of the and his jacket is much more you elaborately decorated.ca is m another interesting thing about uc this map is that you probably d his ja can't see it from there, but all up and down the coastline here are names of english towns and pr citiesob. london is there. but and cambridge and oxford and other places. of course, in 1616, before the pilgrims landed in new england, none of those cities or towns ford and existed.f those the reason they're there on the map is because after he made the map, he brought it to england and presented it to prince charles at the time and asked him to change the names of all charles the native american settlements to english towns and cities. it was this breathtaking act of e virtual colonization that occurred before a single english settler had actually set foot inactually the territory.

and interestingly, most of the towns or cities disappeared on the map or aren't in the place he put them inspect one remained in the corner. you can see where he wrote pilg plymouth.h wit that is where the pilgrims when they sailed from plymouth with the copy of smith's map in hand the locat on the mayflower they steered toioouth that location and took the name for the plymouth colony. so, this is a really important rtant map and it's a seminal document in the founding exploration of north america. and it's also a quite rare map. even though it's not a one of a umeninnol kind, there are only a few copies that exist in variation quit institutions throughout the country and the world. and because of, that it's a very a valuable map. at auction this map could go e easily for $50,000 to a map collector.cause and so when smiley was found go with this map that was both rare and valuable, one of the librarians at the time noticed 0,0

the handwriting at the bottom ofd so w the map and recognized it as belonging to a patron of yale who donated a lot of libraries and book it is to library. she immediately cried out, luable that's our map.t they put handcuffs on smiley and led him away to spend the night the in jail. so the fbi was called in to investigate this case. do immediately they realized that libra they had a problem. that so as i mentioned, there may have only been a few dozen copies of this map.s on it's not so they're there's only one copy. it's not like a work of art in a museum where there's one copy. if it's missing from the wall, ey reali everyone knows it's stolen. an fbi agent came in and said, i understand smiley had a copy of this map, that you are missing a copy of this map but how do i know the copy you're missing is the copy that smiley took? and they actually got lucky veryere's on early on in the case with work of another map smiley had on him that day.ssing it's this one.wall, this is a map by gerard de jode, a dutch map maker was talking th about from the 1500s.is know

this is the world map from his atlas, which is even more rare than the smith map. it was only produced in the it's t first edition of his atlas, which never sold very well and very few copies of this map survived. probably worth $150,000 at least at auction.s m cop and so it wasn't what was on the front of this map that interested investigators, though. it is what was on the back of this map.ieob so, you can see that on the back of the map there were these four little worm holes that had been made by these parasitic pests, probably hundreds of years ago as it was sitting on the dusty shelf of a library. the four holes on the map lined up exactly where four holes in the atlas that was in yale's collection that smiley was looking at that day. this was as good as a fingerprint to investigators. it was sort of this cartographic csi they were able to catch him red-handed and say he took this map, yes, it was from the volume belonging to yale. because it was worth over $150,000 they could charge him with theft of a heritage which carries a hefty sentence. the fbi knew smiley had stolen as o myohe wde b it was at least two maps, maybe more. the fbi agent began to further investigate the case.four h

even though he knew nothing about rare maps when he started our working on the case, he did knowhat a lot about thieves. and he knew that when a thief is that sm caught red-handed, it's usually not the first time they've ing at committed a theft.y. so, he began calling around and sending e-mails out to other finger rare book and manuscript libraries around the country. he asked them two questions. have forbes smiley been in your collection lately? and, are you missing any rare maps? and six institutions answered yes to both of those questions. yale university both the sterling and the beinecke, boston public library, new york public library, missing from twoit divisions, the rare book and map division, the houghton library and newberry library in chicago. investigators had to determine h what maps were missing from the libraries, what books smiley looked at, which maps he may e fbi have taken and where those maps rted may have ended up. and it became quite an ordeal. the libraries had to go back in many cases through hundreds of so, he call slips dating back several wo

years to find which items smiley had looked at and then compare them to their catalogs. boston public library, new york public library, missing from twolibrar divisions, the rare book and mapissin division, the houghton libraryg ap and newberry library in chicago. investigators had to determine what maps were missing from the libraries, what books smiley beca looked at, which maps he may have taken and where those maps may have ended up. b and it became quite an ordeal. the libraries had to go back in gh many cases through hundreds of

call slips dating back several years to find which items smileynd then had looked at and then compare them to their catalogs. we for those books acquired over 100 years ago they were not accurately cataloged as to what maps they contain. some might just say map or maps. some may list some maps, but not others. some may have said they had a map but they're missing it long them, before smiley got there.forwar it was really this difficult dsmiley enterprise they had to go in to figure out the extent of his crimes. lucky for them, he did come forward when he heard there were federal charges pending against l him. smiley did come forward and he offered to cooperate.hat. as david said, he eventually admitted stealing 97 maps, but ole the libraries to this day accuse

him of stealing more than he admitted. i'll get to that in a moment and show you some examples of that. the maps that he stole were worth over $3 million in total. so, they were -- the cream de la all cream of antique maps. most expensive, most valuable maps that he stole. and so all this happened in 2005-2006. re this was all -- had been new reported in newspaperssp. by th pretty well known by the time e that i started on this trail in 2011.ta i remember reading about this case in "new yorker" and other places it happened. i was a map lover myself and i was intrigued by these rare objects and the fact that people were willing to pay thousands and tense of thousands of is dollars for them.places it made me curious to know more s a ma about why that was the case. but i also wanted to know more about smiley. he had never talked to the press before. he had given an interview. he had never explained why he started taking these maps, about wh especially given the fact that he was himself a rare map dealer. by all accounts loved these maps and celebrated them. espe what was it that caused him to go to the dark side as it were and start actually taking these loved maps out of libraries? so that is the task i set for myself.au

originally i was going to write and st an article for boston magazine and update the case, tell it lib start to finish. through a friend of smiley he agreed to talk to me. i sat across the picnic table at martha vineyard and bit end of artic that four hours i was completely convinced this was not a magazine article, this was a book. that he was such a complex rticle character in this world of map dealers and map collectors was ch so interesting. finally, the stories of the map makers themselves many times were just as interesting as smiley's story f not more so.akers i'm going to share about what i learned about smiley and some of these maps that he stole. this is another map i had made for the book in new england showing key stories and locations. smiley grew up in this small town in new hampshire called bedford. despite his high flute ant name, e forbes smiley ii. he was always fascinated with history.s and even as a young boy, he would pshire

read about history and studied miley history of the area, story. particularly the history of new boy, england.nd and he went to college in -- hampshire college in massachusetts and he made history a special. history and religion.special he was known for all sorts of eccentric things like reciting the iliad in the middle of iad campus and telling his friends about every church steeple they passed and the architecture of that church. after college he settled in new nt york. it was there he entered the map

trade. he started at this department conve store, b. altman's department store, which no longer exists but had a small division that sold rare maps and atlases. it was conveniently located just a dozen blocks from new york public library. that's where his real education in maps began. and he became so fascinated by looking at the different maps and comparing them to each other bli and realizing which map maker e d he copied from whom.em to and he just couldn't get enough real of this topic and became ma incredibly knowledgeable in a rom short period of time.t co as he went on as a map dealer, he was successful.nough the late 1980s was a very good time to become a map dealer because the prices of maps were suddenly increasing as he exponentially. and, you know, people -- well, even wealthy people were no longer able to afford a lot of fine art .fford the prices for that had become untakenable.fine art so maps became a new way of collecting for folks who were wealth y not billionaires.nable. doctors, lawyers, wall street executives. who would buy these rare maps, coll put them on their walls and have

if not a one-of-a-kind item, a very rare item that was stre beautiful to look at and also had this historical story be behind.-t. -t. they became very popularec.amnt for maps that went for a couple tually thousand dollars went for tens of thousands of dollars and eventually approaching hundreds of thousands of dollars. he put together a collection of he maps in the new york and mid-atlantic region for a man named larry slaughter which was donated to new york public co library as slaughter collection. he also put together a ut toget collection of maps in boston and new england for a man named norman leventhal. ironic given later events and

given he was taking maps out of those very libraries he was putting them into. he also had several flaws that were his undoing. was he was a terrible business person. from the beginning he was chasing maps he couldn't afford and buying one map in order to pay for another one. he became notorious for bouncing checks to his fellow dealers and some stopped doing business withe c him and hurt his client base. in addition, he -- as maps became more valuable in the 1980s there was a lot more competition that ensued.ious so, a number of new map dealers came in and they really looked at it as a business and we may him think of map dealing and an collecting as this rarefied ition, pursuit of people, you know, studiously studying in the libraries. it's quite a business in some ways a cut-throat business of people bidding against each other at auctions for a very small number of valuable items.mb

ways a number of these map dealers didn't like smiley very much either because he bounced checks to them or because they just thought him arrogant and sort of a know it all and so they would aga bid against him in auction and times dr sometimes drive the price up on him.mes they sometimes they would bid together against him.

lastly, smiley was just never a team player. always had this secretive, go it alone attitude that, you know, he was just going to make it on his own two feet and he didn't need anyone else's help. again, that contributed to his financial problems because it was really necessary sometimes for different dealers to sort of ban together in bidding on certain items they would split up. so he became even less able to compete because of that. eventually, as he told me, he was too proud to admit he failed in this pursuit and he told me that he was looking at the map of sterling memorial library on and omenheap g the table in front of him, realizing he could fold it down to the size of a credit card, walk out with it in his pocket and sell it the next day for $30,000.em for that was the moment when temptation got the better of him. he sold that first map and may have told himself it was just money this one-time thing he was going to do and get out of his financial duress. of course, that started a slippery slope and he began stealing more and more maps and selling them for more and more y t to money and became map thief that i write about in my book. i'm going to talk about a few of the maps he stole just to give you an idea of the kind of items he took and why they're valuable and what he did with them when he took them. aey'r

this is another map by john smith. it's actually a map he made a few years before his map of new la england and a map of the virginia colony. it's a particularly striking map because john smith had rudimentary survey materials.hat was he went up and down chesapeake bay in the rivers in a very small boat and just took sights on different landmarks. from that he was able to create this very accurate map of the region that was in use as a map for 200 years after he created ated it.on on this map he did not put a picture of himself. he put a picture as the native american chief in the corner andot p and this picture of another native american here. pic there's little crosses at some areas along the rivers he put

there and scholars today think that was the limits of the area tod he actually individually surveyed himself. point past that was the area he actually relied upon the knowledge of the natives of the area to map the rest of the h area. you can see how accurate that is, as well. it's particularly successful andzing really quite amazing he was ablehis. to do the job on this. smiley had stole -- there were two copies of this map missing from the boston public library. map when smiley admitted the maps he had taken, he only admitted to . stealing one. and interestingly enough, the librarian afterwards did not give up on this. he was sure smiley had taken the other one as well and he began scanning dealers' catalogs and ad actually saw a copy of this map tay teali an and went down to new york with the book that the map was missing from and was able to ds did n match that map against the book by a little impression that was made in the page on the -- that was facing where the map was missing.sctch that so, that's at last one map

smiley did not admit to that was athat eventually recovered by the library. on the smith map you can see thmiss north is actually to the right. then on this map north is at theovered top. you can see the chesapeake bay. the appalachian mountains here. this map was sort of the definitive map of the 18th century washington area. it was all done from original surveys by joshua frye and peter jefferson. north if you're wondering if that jefferson has any relation to thomas jefferson, he was actually his father.ches and after peter jefferson died fh he bequeathed his surveying equipment to thomas jefferson who created some maps of his own, including one map of virginia.has in map was made between the ÷s growing tension between french and english.

as colonists move inward into the mountains, they move against the french who were coming down from canada.te eventually, that would erupt in french and indian war. but for almost 100 years before war actually broke out, there was sort of this cartographic war between french and indian for them to draw competing maps of the ohio valley and into virginia.h. so, this map is actually commissioned in order to survey the this area here where these competing claims were taking place. and was, you know, leaps ahead t of any maps for the time and was the most accurate map into the revolutionary war. as i said, this was thomas jefferson's father and thomas jefferson used this map as well to create his own maps. this was taken from the boston public library. an atlas of maps made in 1875, one around the american revolution. were this is one smiley took out of that atlas.d was, i want to show you a few maps of m washington, d.c. as well since we are -- since that's where we

are today.ap into this is a map made in 1792. it was the first printed map of washington, d.c.maps it was made by andrew ellicott, who was assistant to l'enfant plaza.e he designed washington, d.c. and designed it on a model of paris and grand boulevards that would

go through the center of the cent city and, unfortunately, he put the boulh thd property of one of the main land owners at the time and he wasn'tun that thrilled about it and complained to washington and he jefferson, who were in charge of plans for the capitol and d who w l'enfant was dismissed so it fell to.plans ellicott to continue his plans and actually put them into practice. he finished the surveying and produced a series of maps of inished washington, d.c.washin and the first published map was don done in june of 1792. there were two pirated versions that appeared in magazines before the official map was everwere two printed.red in this map you're looking at was offici actually in a magazine that was

printed in boston. is incredibly rare. after smiley's thefts were discovered, harvard and boston public library were both missing their copy of the ellicott map from the edition of that magazine. of course, smiley only admitted stealing it from -- admitted stealing one copy of this map.vered, a so, after the maps were recovered, a number of the libraries all went down to new haven and -- to look at the maps bit and determine whose was whose. they had a little bit of a fightwas over some of these maps. being librarians, it was a quiet fight, but there was a lot of maps that changed hands and that went to different institutions zb"

who were able to prove through different marks on the map or different impressions whose was whose. this was actually proven to be harvard's copy of this map. so, the boston public library is still missing their edition. this is the last map i want to it's show you. this is also by ellicott and this also of washington, d.c. you can see it's a very different looking map. m

and it was meant to be displayedhe knew in this diamond shaped like s this. and as you can see it's all of the topography of washington, d.c. sort of stripped of the landmarks and the street names. and this one is also quite rare. after smiley's thefts were revealed, yale university, the sterling library there realized they were missing their copy. and smiley actually listed a copy of this map on his website. in that listing mentioned that he knew of no versions of this map that had come up for auction since 1991 when he had actually helped purchase it for the slaughter collection, which ended up at new york public library. but as i said, yale was missing their copy of this map. right around the time it was on smiley's website, the map also appeared in the catalog of a dealer smiley was known to do but business with.ist smiley never admitted to stealing this one. yale didn't have any defining marks that would show this is actually their map. they didn't have a digital image of it.mi didn they didn't have any other kinds of evidence and so because of that, the fbi decided that it wasn't a map that smiley had ngma actu stolen and it was never returned and never recovered back to yale. i just wanted to close with a few words about what smiley did with the money he gained from stealing these maps because in some ways i find this to be one of the more compelling aspects of the story and one of the things that convinced me there because was a book here. this is a map of a small town inng

maine called sebeck, a flea bite of a town.of the can you barely find to a map in far northern maine. smiley purchased a farmhouse here in the late 1980s, right up here.ite and given his life of history a and love of new england, he restored this farmhouse lovingly to his ideal of a perfect new england farmhouse. his he didn't stop there.new he began buying up property, including the post office and a ere. restaurant, a general store.ing he renovated this children's erty park with gazebo. half the people in town looked at him as this robin hood coming in to save the economic prospects.ndne he employed carpenters, as laborers, people that worked in his shops and stores.3 s all in all spent about $1

million on this project of renovating this town. of course, the other half of the town town wasn't all that pleased about some new yorker coming up th to maine and telling them what to do with their town and their the property. a number of residents of the town got into a feud with him. particularly the folks across the street from him on the lake ty was a family known as the -- th named the moriartys. ice they had a different version of shop a the town they would like to see and it involved an ice cream shop and speed boat marina, sort of this pleasure boating center. at and the two of them really came at odds and started this feud t that really divide the whole alf town in half so half of the ffice. people would eat at smiley's restaurant and mail letters if the his post office. th the other half of the town would eat there, mail letters there and eat at the restaurant in that town. it eventually grew into this

t legal battle that ended up costing smiley even more money ion in legal bills on top of the money he was already spending on this renovation project and all the people he was employing and the deaths that he had had in aused h the first place. and it caused him to rapidly increase the pace of his stealing in the last six months and target new areas, including the beinecke library, where he's eventually caught. that gives you a little sense of who this character was and the interesting contradictions involved in his tale. as i mentioned, he did steal upwards of 100 maps that we know of. as david said, the libraries accused him of stealing 150 more. he did spend three years in prison, which a lot of the libraries wish he had spent more of a jail term, but he was given time off for the cooperation

that he provided to the fbi. he currently lives on martha's vineyard, where last i knew he was working as a lands escaper for $12 an hour. he has nothing to do with rare maps anymore. in prison he did pick up a new hobby of water color painting. this is a picture of a water color on display at an art show at martha's vineyard i attended. just goes to show you how talented a person he is, that hoolorthsh just in a few short years was s. able to produce a water color of this caliber. as you can see on the label, there's one change since his map si dealing days. he no longer goes by the name e.the forbes smiley iii. now he goes by edward and sometimes ed. thank you for coming. by e i'm happy to answer some dw questions. there are microphones in the aisles.phones if you have a question, please please come up to the mike. >> thank you very much.

informational and then more u very general. d.c. the boulevard in d.c. and the his landowner and then a more general -- realize this isn't necessarily your area of authority, but how well are institutions doing these days, in your opinion, of protecting their goods? >> so your question is -- >> what was the boulevard and who was the property owner? >> that i can't tell you. i once knew that during my research, but there are so many maps and so many details. >> comment on how institutions in your opinion are doing these days in terms of protecting their materials? can' >> that i can't comment because i look quite a bit into that. particularly, the libraries that smiley target have had done a lot to change their security practices.had don they've installed new cameras. they have, in some cases, installed new policies for how maps are delivered to patrons, for example, yale has a bar code affixed to every single map and u

:ñ a it's scanned in and out of the vault every time someone wants af to look at it op other libraries in have instituted digital images vaul so if, god forbid, a map has gone missing, they can identify it and tell that it's their map. on the other hand, you know, as you know, you know, libraries heir are chronically short-staffed and underfunded and so there's a real variation between libraries and and what they've -- what they've done and what they've been able as lon to do. you know, there wasn't a single real curator who i spoke to who said this couldn't happen again somewhere. as long as we're providing

access to these materials, unless we want to lock them all up and provide digital images to people, which would be a real shame, you'll assume some measure of risk and the question is, how much risk are you able to minimize. >> i have a question over here. i got a sense of reading your book at the end, a number of libraries weren't forthcoming in the maps they were missing. and i was kind of -- wanted to get your feel for why you felt -- they felt that way? i a a at r in >> yeah. there was a real -- there was a tot real variety of the amount of transparency that libraries werere able to show. and in some cases that's understandable. you can imagine that if you are looking for donations of material from people, you know, you don't want to be necessarily inst advertising the fact that have plays i had items stolen from your institution. unfortunately, that also, you that know, plays into some of these

thefts by smiley and other people and allows them to dissemin continue because of the fact low that these thefts aren't widely disseminated. it sometimes can allow them to go on a lot longer than they think otherwise would have.es there's a real tension that exists there.cvñrent you know, to their credit, i think libraries have gotten ormati better about that and become is more transparent since the smiley affair. i was impressed how transparent the libraries were and opened up their files and were incredibly open and the information they gave me. there still is that secrecy that exists in terms of these deaths that can help aid and abet et n the thieves.ma >> i think there must be a commonality between the market for these maps and old books or antiquities, in that there's almost a black market that people ignore from where those mar maps come from. how it would be possible for hose

people to buy these things when thi they come from yale or whatever. and i'm just wondering if you could talk a little more about whate that black market and how things can be sold so easily when w they're so -- while they have been stolen. do you not have to say what the precedent is and where they got them?e obviously, the answer is no. >> it's interesting as i began this to research this issue ask how maps are bought and sold.sold. people asked me, is there a e a black market where they're selling these things, and then y it's ending up in, you know,ou this private collection in japane

or something. m it's actually unlike art theft, thefts of rare maps and books can be done quite out in the open because there are multiple copies of these things. smiley would go primarily from three dealers he worked with for a number of years and he would ouldthre witrs say that he was selling off maps that were in the collection of an old boston dealer -- old boston collector and he was going to be coming to them with very rare material over the next few months. t th those dealers bought that story,fool they believed him and they bought these maps and then sold them on to other collectors and se they put them on their wall in fool display. there's definitely some the criticism of whether those . dealers should have asked more questions and if they should have accepted smiley's story at face value. at the same time, it's difficult a in some cases to prove the provenance of these maps. once you go back a couple of decades, it can be sometimes behardat hard. even if you know it was sold at action in the 1990s, then you u

can ask, where was it sold ask, before that, going back two or three deaths is hard. i think there has been a lot more effort on the part of th dealers to look at provenance and not just take the dealer's word at face value, but i think that is one of the -- one of the issues inherent in the field that sort of aids and abets the thieves. >> there's no shame either. it's wanting to acquire it overcomes the possibility that, perhaps, it was taken from yale ha att just library.alue it just astounding me, but, i be mean -- >> i certainly think that's the case. there's this willful ignorance shame that you don't ask too many questions because you don't want to know the answers to them. i don't think that represents everyone in the field but certainly some of that does go onqu.overco >> i just wanted to answer the question the gentleman raised a that y few moments ago about the know location. it was torn down by daniel n't carroll, relation to charles eryone i carroll, carrollton, so far, the mansion was located at the

intersection of what is now new jersey avenue and independence avenue, basically in the front yard of the capitol building. and l'enfant knew what land was rela his to play with and what was ti still private land. he knew that was still his lands, carroll ignored him. to prove his point, he went in and in the dead of night and tore land. that building down just to prove it was his. that's what helped to contribute. gn >> thank you so much for tellinge dea that story.d just goes to show you the story behind these maps, you know, politics was alive and well in as d.c. even before the city of d.c. was actually created here. >> i'm wondering how much is water color sell for? is there possibly a further for him in that field? >> i don't know. that art show was part of a that ch s grant that the island cultural commission gave to different artists to display their work.

i think he -- maybe he made like art s $2,000 or something.ho ar you know, certainly i don't know if it has occurred to him that he could sell e. forbes smiley originals and profit just from the name alone. to my knowledge, he hasn't gone and actually sold any of his work. >> thanks for the engaging talk. engk two quick questions. the if there were a movie on the ed 5zc zsince smiley story, who do you see playing mr. smiley, since you tting know him that well?wi secondly, sitting with the ng right archivalists of the united states sitting right in front ofmap you, if you could procure any pu map in any way without punishment in the world, what

would that be? >> got to be careful what i say here. in terms of the movie, you know, i sort of see william h. macy as the smiley character. that immediately springs to mind. will maybe brad pitt as the m investigative reporter telling a his story. >> casting is being done as you spr speak. >> in terms of the map that i >> in would take, if i -- if i could, it would probably be a map from yale that i uncovered during my research. it was by this gentleman by the name of john seller and there's only three copies in the world around and it was a very early map of ' new england and it shows the --

the area of new england around the time of king phillips' war. it's this very interesting map where there are all these pictures of sort of colonists rrticular and native americans fighting sto each other and this glimpse in time to this area. of course, being from new england, it's really anoth particularly interesting to me. and the interesting thing about t and that map is that it's actually been stolen twice from yale. it was stolen back in the '70s and was by another map thief who sold it and it was recovered. and then smiley came in and stole it again. and actually put a copy on his but website. he actually colored the map, which was particularly devastating given the fact there's only three of these things. he actually colored it. he put it on his website. in his description of the map t he said there was a version at yale that was uncolored but that this was a different version. which was just really, you know, the height of uberous that he would do such a thing. >> thank you. >> thank you all so much. great questions. appreciate you coming. i'm happy to sign any books you may have.

y st you've been watching american history tv on c-span3. we to want hear from you. follow us on twitter @cspanhistory. connect with us on facebook at you facebook.com/cspanhistory where you can leave comments. check out upcoming programs on our website, c-span.org/history. every sunday at 6 p.m. and ornd 10 p.m. eastern, a look at american artifacts. travel with c-span to historic sites, museums and archives to learn what artifacts reveal ives about american history. american artifacts every sunday c-span at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. eastern here on american history tv on c-span3.d and the 114th congress 14th gavels in on tuesday at noon eastern.

we'll see the swearing-in of members and the election of the house speaker.he new watch the house live on c-span e best and the senate live on c-span2. on and with the new congress, you'll have the best access on the c-span networks with the most extensive coverage anywhere. track the gop as it leads on capitol hill and have your say tol hill as events unfold on tv, radio as ev and the web.en an for 17 years, the unabomber mailed homemade bombs that targets airliners, universities and killing 23 and injuries 24 others. a panel of former fbi agents and co-author of the book "unabomber" talked about the investigation and explained how the fbi changed its methods to capture suspect ted kaczynski. this talk was sponsored by the museum.odpt sponso it's about an hour.

good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. my name is craig floyd.is i'm the chairman and ceo of national officers memorial fund. i want to welcome you all here fund. today to the museum's witness to y history, investigating the to unabomber, the tenth in our da series of witness events.unabombe generously sponsored by our by friends from target, who join us here in the front row, as well the as in partnership today with the museum, our host.st. i'll turn things over to john maynard in just a moment from in the museum for moderation of the today's event. i want to thank you all for ev comingen. today is a glorious day outside. the fact you would want to spend an hour or two here with us, that's extra special.ou and i thank you for taking the us. time to join us.]4u i think you're in for just a who

fascinating discussion here in wi just a moment. i also want to thank our friends from c-span who tend to cover many of these witness to history events. they're with us once again today.emor they'll be sharing this on air over the coming weeks. for those of you who may not be familiar with the national law enforcement officers memorial fund, our organization, a little background. bi we remember formed in 1984 by congressman mario biaggi, a a former new york city police officer and police legend.tually he is actually the author of the legislation to establish the national law enforcement memorial, our first major initiative.jor we dedicated that memorial in memor 1991. it sits just a couple of blocks ocks from here and-n judiciary scare,and-n the 400 block of e street judic northwest washington. on the walls of that memorial reet are the names of 20,267 federal, state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement ames professionals who have given their lives in the line of duty. our latest initiative is to t establish a national law rritoria enforcement museum.sional we've been working on this now since 2000, when congress ne of authorized our organization to build the first ever national

law enforcement museum. we've been working on it ever eum. since. on that museum will open in just a few years from now in a place, again, called judiciary square, organ right across the street from thethe fir national memorial. enfor but in many ways our museum already exists. we we've collected 17,000 artifacts. fascinating artifacts of law enforcement history that will will help us tell that story. and we've also produced a number of educational and public and programming events of which witness to history is part of that. this afternoon is certainly a good example. grou

we bring together law enforcement professionals, experts, who were involved in mber in some of the most famous criminalngest cases in american history.cement and today we bring together a group of experts who work so diligently and for so long on the unabomber investigation.get one of the longest manhunts in today's american law enforcement history. and i want to just thank once hn again our friends from target o will for sponsoring today's event and all of our witness to history events. i now would like to turn our program over to john maynard, who will moderate today's program. john, please join us here. >> thank you, craig. good afternoon, ladies and prog gentlemen. and those of you watching on c-span. welcome to the museum's night studio and welcome to the museum, the unabomber's cabin. for nearly two decades beginning in 1978 an i will loses ive criminal sent homemade bombs that targeted universities, ces anoses airlines and computer stores, bombs killing three people and injuring 23 others. the fbi branded him the juring unabomber and despite an investigation that spanned eightespite states and involved about 500 agents, the fbi was flummoxed.st

35,000-word manifesto written by the unabomber, whose real name was ted kaczynski, proved a 35,000 turning event and brought an end of reign.it the before the manifesto the investigation was hampered by bureaucracy, institutional pride, professional jealousies he and some egos. today we talk to three fbi agents to bring finality to the instit case by cutting through the ssiona cumbersome procedures of the l investigation and breaking free of bureaucratic restraint.s their new book "unabomber: how the fbi broke its own rules to capture ted kaczynski" details the investigation into the fi unabomber how these three worked in the agency. jim freeman, to my left, was the special agent in charge of the multi-agency unabomb investigation. he began his career as a special agent with the fbi in 1964 with assignments in oklahoma city, los angeles and miami.o se ra and in 1993 assigned a special restra agent in charge of the san in francisco division. t following the unabomber investigation he returned from the fbi in 1996, retired from the fbi in 1996, and he joined ber charles schwab.ncy. just recently retired as senior vp of global security. max noel ultimately became special agent supervisor of expand task force and ultimately concentrating on monday upon. he served as an fbi agent for 30 years and worked on numerous

high-profile investigations car including the weather underground, the patty hearst kidnapping and the disappearance of jimmy hoffa. he retired from the fbi in 1999. terry turchie between 1994 and 1998 on an operational level. t nassi following the unabomber case he became inspector and led the task force in the hunt for 19 olympic bomber eric rudolph.93 in 1999 he was named deputy sa assistant in the new e counterterrorism division of thestigat fbi and traveled extensively overseas to investigate international terrorism in the middle east and in the former soviet union . i should also note in the book, jim writes that terry is the ecentl only fbi agent he knows who got into a fight with a russian spy. when he wrestled a kgb agent to the ground on a brooklyn subway platform in 1986. so, please welcome our panel. if you're treating today's conversation, please use the be museum's handle which is @museumy upon and national law enforcement .vestig handle which is @nleomf. jim, let's start with you.

1998 on an operational level. following the unabomber case he became inspector and led the task force in the hunt for olympic bomber eric rudolph. foror in 1999 he was named deputy assistant in the new i counterterrorism division of the fbi and traveled extensively overseas to investigate ision international terrorism in the ravele middle east and in the former soviet union . fo i should also note in the book, jim writes that terry is the only fbi agent he knows who got into a fight with a russian spy. when he wrestled a kgb agent to agen the ground on a brooklyn subway ÷5hij platform in 1986. so, please welcome our panel. if you're treating today's se the conversation, please use the al law museum's handle which is @museum's sta and national law enforcement rtall handle which is @nleomf.om your jim, let's start with you.at was all three of you are listed as

co-authors but the book is told >> from your perspective. tell us how the book came together and what was your main >> well, thank you for your kind comments, introducing the three of us. i want to point out we represent dozens of fbi agents and atf ff agents and officers of the u.s. postal inspection service, who all made a -- worked together for that task force the last three years. gine might imagine how many individuals went into such a project. the book came about in a very similar way to how the investigation came about those last two yearssi. two yea when i had volunteered -- i was the only volunteer ever for the sk unabomb task force after 16 years of inability to find him. i volunteered because i was in san francisco, and that's where the task force had been set up. so i wanted to take a shot at

catching ted kaczynski. the investigation required that t i look for a team that would bring together a strategic plan. and terry was where i went.isor he was in the san francisco the office. he was a supervisor of national intelligence matters in the palo alto agency.up. i decided i wanted a different perspective. i wanted to shake it up. after 16 years what else could i do but shake it up? in the fbi there's that time -- a wall between the national al intelligence service and criminal investigative service for various reasons. in i wanted to take advantage of book c the synergy of that in preparingway. a strategic plan and executing it. the book came together the same way. it was a matter of the three of us represent a unique perspective in the way the case was managed. we wrote it in that manner.ook

we didn't want to write a book that stood on its own as our own creation.od we wanted to just do a crea definitive description of the investigation, which was very complex and had over the years had not been appropriately t described in any of the books that had been written about the unabomb case or mostly centered on ted kaczynski.ski. can he wrote the book to center n. on the investigation.x, >> terry and max, i will ask you both, tell us about your reaction when you were asked to you join this newly formed task oss force.f >> i was stunned. t i was very happy in palo alto. any of you familiar with california know that's a nice place to be. we had an office across from stanford. i was settled for the rest of my career, at least i thought until hee day. jim had this bizarre idea that he was going to solve the unabomb. i got a call one day. he said, i have a couple

questions to ask you. how do you feel about coming up to a to the city and taking over the unabomb task force? jim is putting together a thank different structure and is interested in you doing that. my response was to laugh and say, that's funny, but thanks for the offer, but no thanks. so there was a pause. he said, i'm actually not joking. and then i didn't know what to say. everybody tried to stay away from the corridor in the san dieryb sa francisco office where they had signs that said unabomb.nd no one wanted to go near there.there. i said, i think i would need a me do lot of time to close up everything down here and get up there. and he said, how much time do you need? i said, probably i need a month. he said, how about a couple of hours?edi saeed nothing went right until i met jim in the office and realized he was very, very serious and

maybe we had a chance to do things differently. >> max, tell us about your enrollment? >> i was already on the task force.th jim i saw jim's taking over the task force and reconfiguring it and ging bringing terry in as an an opportunity to leave the task d force and go back to what i did best. and i submitted a memorandum to jim to that effect saying, please, let me go back and do was what i was doing before, which 5dffrime was organized crime and asian erry a organized crime work. unfortunately, terry and jim had other ideas. sa terry convinced me that i neededd, to stay. he went in and saw jim.m, jim said, i know he wants off but he's not going.s, so i stayed. >> jim, for maybe some of our younger visitors, give us a brief overview of the unabomber. what were some of his targets atso and some of his motives as we later learned? that's what made it difficult to rn identify a suspect was because unab

the unabomber became very clear e early on had to be a lone wolf. to he was not talking to anyone, or else something would have come to light in less than 16, 17 years. his his early targets were against university professors, graduate students, bombs sent through theuate mail to specific professors as ents, well as bombs placed in the to spec corridor outside of computer s room university of utah. that was repeated in other locations as well, university ofni california at berkeley. then there was -- early on, i ve think his third bombing was against american airlines his thir flight, a mailed bomb was placed on there with a rigged altimeter that was a barometer was used and rigged to be an altimeter to explode at a certain altitude. it did detonate. did it did ignite a fire but it

didn't explode.zed it saved the lives of all the people on that plane. even so, the pilot recognized that smoke was coming into the cabin and he did an emergency landing saving people's lives. airline and universities were the early targets.la so the fbi has a propensity for acronyms. it became unabomb and it was a moniker that stuck. >> i will ask you again, jim, for both max and terry, when did did you realize that this was a case you would have to adjust the the normal protocol and the subtitle of the week is how the fbi broke we its own rules.st thi go through some of those rules.ng >> well, we actually had a meeting in jim's office.wanted one of the first things it he ou wanted was a strategy.t

he wasn't very clear on exactly what he wanted, but he knew he . wanted it to be out of the box and really something we hadn't tried before. really made the impression that we want to solve this case.way. we're not just doing this for some process or to kind of meetings baby-sit here until someone else comes along. we're all here in san francisco and we're going to stay here until we do this. i went away. i talked to max. max and i had a number of kusbout and meetings over the next week and met with just about everybody that was on the task force. and talked to them about what -- they thought our lacking -- some of our failings were as far as what we had overlooked before and how we might do this in a at different way.y i it became apparent that we needed a different organization ant to and structure and then we needed things that come with that.here a so at the end of a week, i gave jim a paper.

it said, here is what i think wehave should do based upon everybody itv talked to and their input.ot number one, we had kind of a morale issue. a lot of people did want to get off the task force. they had worked hard. they had been there a long time.agent, they were tired.ether, to try to deal with that, it was kind of simple. i recommended to jim that we hen you have people choose a partner.day, p i know when you watch tv, ha everybody works with a partner.that w that's not necessarily the wayas it is in real life. so we had a meeting. differe we told everybody whether it's an fbi and atf agent or postal inspector and atf agent, have people get together, choose a partner. and you will be with this person for a long, long time. that way when you have a down day, probably your partner will have an up day. you guys will be more creative working together like this. that was the biggest thing we did to make a difference in the internal mechanism of how things would operate. then all the more complicated things made several suggestions. we needed to have a media component built into the e.rae strategy to use the media to getget to the public. eventually, we would have things and a specific message to tell the public. we needed a significant

analytical capability that was integrated into the investigation that up until that time we just didn't have. third, we needed to deal with the issue of profiling.pai again, you probably watched shows like "criminal minds" and ds" an that type of thing. it doesn't happen in real life like on tv or in a couple of hour movie. so we needed to look differentlywo there. e. we chose different people to work with us on the profiling.ly the s we will get into that in a many while. those are the essence of what i aad had passed along to jim that was really the sum total of what ia. many of the agents and analysts we had had told me during the di interviews. >> you mentioned the media. it's a natural question for me he to ask, but as we were discussing earlier, the fbi does play it close to the vest when it comes to media. what was the advantage in this case for you to shift the strategy to be more media friendly? tha >> we knew right away that we a needed to have a consistent to the message to take to the public. have

we also had to have a consistent spokesperson. so we decided to recommend to jim that he be our spokesperson. not fbi headquarters, not all the others that had a hand in it alway but jim because jim would alwaysstest be sitting with us and would coming have the latest information that we were going to be getting coming from the reinvestigationstent that max was very much involved in. we wanted to give a consistent ven we message to the public. over time what we ended up esto doing, long before even we got the manifesto in 1995, was we started go being to the public with one message, and that was when you think about the unabomber, think about chicago, hat thiunabombe between 1978 and 1980, then think about salt lake city, because between 1980 and about 1982 or '83, that seemed to be the focus of where there was a connection for the unabomber. an and then after that time frame, from 1985 and on, think of the san francisco bay area.