The $8 million library plunder plot
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh considered almost every threat to its rare-books collection, said curator and true-crime author Travis McDade in Smithsonian Magazine. There was one weak point.
LIKE NUCLEAR POWER plants and sensitive computer networks, the safest rare-book collections are protected by what is known as “defense in depth”— a series of small, overlapping measures designed to thwart a thief who might be able to overcome a single deterrent. The Oliver Room, home to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s rare books and archives, was something close to the Platonic ideal of this concept. Greg Priore, manager of the room starting in 1992, designed it that way.
The room has a single point of entry, and only a few people had keys to it. When anyone, employee or patron, entered the collection, Priore wanted to know. The room had limited daytime hours, and all guests were required to sign in and leave personal items, such as jackets and bags, in a locker outside. Activity in the room was under constant camera surveillance.
In addition, the Oliver Room had Priore himself. His desk sat at a spot that commanded the room and the table where patrons worked. When a patron returned a book, he checked that it was still intact. Security for special collections does not get much better than that of the Oliver Room. In the spring of 2017, then, the library’s administration was surprised to find out that many of the room’s holdings were gone. It wasn’t just that a few items were missing. It was the most extensive theft from an American library in at least a century, the value of the stolen objects estimated to be $8 million.
Visitors and researchers alike love old maps, and few are more impressive than those in Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, commonly known as the Blaeu Atlas. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s version, printed in 1644, originally comprised three volumes containing 276 hand-colored engravings that mapped the known world in the age of European exploration. All 276 maps were missing.
The photographer Edward Curtis created 40 volumes of photogravure prints of
Native Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. Only 272 sets were made; in 2012, Christie’s sold one set for $2.8 million. The Carnegie Library’s set held some 1,500 photogravure “plates”—illustrations made apart from a book and inserted into it. Almost all had been cut and removed from their bindings.
And this was just the beginning. The person who worked over the Oliver Room stole nearly everything of significant monetary value, sparing no country or century or subject. He took the oldest book in the library, a collection of sermons printed in 1473, and also the most recognizable book, a first edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. From John James Audubon’s 1851–54 Quadrupeds of North America, he stole 108 of the 155 handcolored lithographs. In short, he took nearly everything he could get his hands on. And he did it with impunity for close to 25 years.
HEN THE UNIVERSITY of Pittsburgh moved to establish an archive of the institution’s rarest holdings, Priore seemed, both on paper and in person, like the perfect candidate to run it. He had graduated with an M.A. in European history a few years earlier from nearby Duquesne University, and was then working in the library’s Pennsylvania Room, a space dedicated to local history and genealogy. Priore was hired in 1991 to oversee the collection, housed in a room that was renamed the next year after William R. Oliver, a longtime library benefactor.
Priore comes across as professional but easygoing, the sort of guy who knows a lot but wears his knowledge lightly. Just under 6 feet tall, with a resonant voice and a prominent mustache, he is the son of a local obstetrician and spent the bulk of his life within walking distance of the Carnegie Library. An important job at a prestigious institution in his home city was something like a dream.
In the fall of 2016, library officials decided it was time to audit the collection, and hired the Pall Mall Art Advisors to do the appraisal. Kerry-Lee Jeffrey and Christiana Scavuzzo began their audit on April 3, 2017, a Monday, using the 1991 inventory as a guide. Within an hour, there was trouble. Jeffrey was looking for Thomas
WMcKenney and James Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America. This landmark work included 120 hand-colored lithographs, the result of a project that began in 1821 with McKenney’s attempt to document in full color the dress and spiritual practices of Native Americans who had visited Washington, D.C., to arrange treaties with the government.
The three-volume set of folios would be a highlight in any collection. But the Carnegie Library’s version had been hidden on a top shelf at the end of a row. When Jeffrey discovered why, her stomach dropped. “Once a plump book filled with plates,” she would recall, “the sides had caved in on themselves.” All those stunning illustrations had been cut from the binding.
The appraisers discovered that many of the invaluable books with illustrations or maps had been ransacked. A copy of Ptolemy’s groundbreaking La Geographia, printed in 1548, had survived intact for over 400 years, but now all of its maps were missing. Of an 18-volume set of Giovanni Piranesi’s extremely rare etchings, printed between 1748 and 1807, the assessors noted dryly, “The only part of this asset located during on-site inspection was its bindings. The contents have evidently been removed from the bindings and the appraiser is taking the extraordinary assumption that they have been removed from the premises.” The replacement value for the Piranesis alone was $600,000.
wrote an email to the Ellis School asking for an extension on tuition payments. “I am trying to juggle tuition payments for 4 kids,” he wrote. A few weeks later, he asked Duquesne officials to lift a hold on accounts assigned to two of his children, since he had made overdue tuition payments. In February 2016, Priore asked his landlord for an extension, falsely claiming his wife had missed work because of a heart attack. The rent was four months past due.
Priore lived close enough to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh that he could walk to work in 15 minutes. One route took him past the famous blue edifice of the Caliban Book Shop, one of the city’s best-known cultural spots. The store was founded in 1991 by a gregarious Pittsburgher named John Schulman, who had acquired the sort of status that comes from years of reputable work in the profession. After decades selling rare books, he was familiar to most in the business and even somewhat well known outside of it. Thanks to appearances on Antiques Roadshow, he was PBS-famous. Schulman treated the books, maps, and prints that Priore brought him exactly as he would process the rare and antiquarian materials he got from any source. He would describe an individual book in ways people in the market would understand and, depending on the quality of an item, list it on his website. But with the items Priore brought, there was an added step. Whenever Schulman got a Carnegie book from Priore, he or one of his employees pressed a small red stamp, bright as lipstick, on the bottom of the bookplate on the inside front cover that marked the book as coming from the Oliver Room. The stamp pronounced the book “Withdrawn from Library.” Apparently, Priore knew he was about to get caught six months before it happened. In the fall of 2016, when the library administration was discussing the possibility of an appraisal of the Oliver Room—which would necessarily uncover missing assets— he argued against it. Still, with or without Priore’s approval, the administration decided to go ahead with the assessment. Priore talked to Schulman about it, and the bookseller tried to help his supplier by emailing a number of possible explanations for why many items were missing. Some items might be out for repair or loan, Schulman offered, urging Priore to create documents attesting to this. For his part, Priore suggested that the room’s defenses weren’t perfect. When library administrators interviewed him on April 18, 2017, he told Cooper that he did leave catalogers, interns, and volunteers to work by themselves in the room. He added that maintenance workers—in particular, some men who had done repairs to the roof—had access to the room.
In the end, though, there was no way to hide his decades of crimes. Thousands of plates, maps, and photographs were missing; clearly, this was not the work of a patron or workman. In April Priore was suspended from his job and in June he was fired. Pittsburgh police began a formal investigation in June, and on Aug. 24 executed search warrants at Priore’s home, the Caliban Book Shop, and a Caliban warehouse. Police questioned Priore the same day. It didn’t take long for him to come clean.
HIS PAST JANUARY in an Allegheny County court, Greg Priore pleaded guilty to theft and receiving stolen property, while Schulman pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property, theft by deception, and forgery. The guidelines for such crimes recommend a standard sentence of nine to 16 months’ incarceration but include two other possibilities: an aggravated range of up to 25 months’ incarceration, and a mitigated range that could include probation. Much of what governs sentencing in property crimes comes down to the numbers. The Pall Mall Art Advisors spent months determining the replacement value for each item Priore had destroyed or stolen outright. The total, they concluded, was more than $8 million. But even this number, they said, was inadequate. While some of the stolen books and plates have been recovered from unsuspecting clients of Schulman’s, many items were irreplaceable—not available for purchase anywhere at any price. Despite this, Judge Alexander Bicket sentenced Priore to three years’ house arrest and 12 years’ probation. Schulman received four years’ house arrest and 12 years’ probation. Both Schulman and Priore, through representatives, declined to speak to Smithsonian. After the sentences were made public,
Carole Kamin, a member of the board of the Carnegie Natural History Museum, wrote to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that supporters of local nonprofits “were appalled at the unbelievably light sentences.”
At the in-person sentencing on June 18, where Priore apologized for his thefts (“I am deeply sorry for what I have done,” he said), several witnesses from the library spoke about the terrible effects of these crimes. “We do not want an apology,” Cooper, the library’s director, told the judge. “Any apology from these thieves would be meaningless. They are only sorry that we discovered what they did.”
TFrom Smithsonian Magazine (Sept. 2020). This article has been edited for The Week and is used with permission.