Editor's Note: In The Map Thief, Michael Blanding reports on the remarkable story of Forbes Smiley, a man whose mounting debt drove him to white collar crime. The offense? Smiley robbed nearly 100 rare maps from well-known libraries, raking in some 3 million dollars in black market money. Michael joins us to explain the impetus behind Forbes's improprieties: his obsession with idyllic living, his distaste for brute commercialism, and a legal battle he waged for the soul of a quaint American town.

When I first started researching the story of Forbes Smiley for my book The Map Thief, I interviewed one of his closest friends, who said, "If you want to understand Forbes, you have to understand Sebec." It wasn't long before I understood what he meant. Sebec is a fleabite of a town in far northern Maine, just shy of Moosehead Lake and Baxter State Park. It’s a vacation spot for summer folks who own houses -- charmingly called "camps" -- on the shore of Sebec Lake; but mostly it’s a depressed logging town in one of the poorest counties in Maine.

Smiley bought a farmhouse there in 1989, and fell instantly in love. Despite the fact that the house was crumbling on its very foundations, he saw potential in the structure, and in the town itself, which seemed to him, despite its rough edges, a quaint New England village waiting to be discovered. Smiley had always been a lover of New England history; growing up in a small town in New Hampshire, he was always disappointed when that town had become overrun by commercialization. In college, when friends were fantasizing about moving into a house together after graduation, Smiley spun a more grandiose vision -- a town where they could all live, and fashion into a sort of utopian small-town ideal. He called it "Small Hope." Decades later, he set about trying to make that vision a reality.

Encouraged by some local preservationists, Smiley bought up some additional land by the shore of Sebec Lake for a park, where they built a gazebo and planted rose bushes. Soon after, he bought the town post office, a general store, and a restaurant, and spent half a million refurbishing them. He spent even more money hiring half of the town to run them. Many residents hailed him as a Robin Hood for rescuing their village and putting it on the map as a tourist destination.

Unfortunately for Smiley and his friends, not everyone shared this vision. A couple who lived across the street from his shops named the Moriartys tried to create their own dream -- of a speedboat marina and ice cream shop. The preservationists tried to fight the project, pointing out a flaw in the permit, and a nasty feud was born. There are few worse things you can do to a Mainer than tell him how to run his property, and Bill and Charlene Moriarty fought back with a vengeance. Town meetings became angry verbal brawls, ending just short of fisticuffs. Speedboats began buzzing by Smiley’s house, and his neighbors filed complaint after complaint against his own properties. When the town ruled in favor of the Moriartys, Smiley filed suit in county court, adding thousands of dollars in legal bills to his debts.

It was around this time that the stress and financial difficulties became too much for Smiley. Sitting in a library one day, he told me, Smiley found himself looking down at a map that he knew he could sell the next day for tens of thousands of dollars and make payroll up in Maine that Friday. He folded it up, slipped it into a pocket, and walked out. After that, he stole dozens more maps, all the while he continued to fight his legal battles up in Maine. Eventually, Smiley lost the lawsuit in county court, when a judge ruled the Moriartys could build their marina. Shortly afterwards he fled Sebec with his family, never to return.

About a year after that, he was arrested at Yale University’s rare-book library, when a librarian found an X-Acto knife blade he dropped on the floor. He confessed to stealing 97 maps worth more than $3 million. Some of that money he stole, to be sure, went into fancy meals and plane tickets, and some went into building a new home on the island of Martha’s Vineyard after he left Sebec.

But the fact is, much of it went into creating his vision of a perfect New England town in Maine. If you want to understand the true motivation for Smiley’s crimes, Sebec isn’t a bad place to start looking.

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Michael Blanding is the author of The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World’s Favorite Soft Drink (Avery, 2010) and most recently The Map Thief (Gotham, 2014), and a journalist with more than 15 years of experience writing long-form narrative and investigative journalism. Previously a staff writer and editor at Boston magazine, Blanding has since freelanced for publications including The Nation, The New Republic, Consumers Digest, and the Boston Globe Magazine, where he has focused on investigative stories involving intensive research and interviews. Blanding has been named a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, and a network fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. An amateur map lover, Blanding has a collection of international subway maps and bought his first antiquarian map while reporting this book.