The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Verse, Violence and the Art of Forgery

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Thrilled at the prospect of acquiring a handwritten, signed poem by Dickinson, Lombardo had immediately gone to the Special Collections budget to see if he could raise the $3,000–$5,000 he thought he would need to bid on the poem. Several things bothered him, though. First, the handwriting did not look like Dickinson’s. Second, the punctuation and page layout were not in the poet’s usual, unique style. The poem was also signed ‘Emily Dickinson,’ a form rare for the poet outside of legal documents. There was almost no information about the poem’s provenance.

Convinced that this was not an authentic Dickinson manuscript, Lombardo did a bit of research and quickly realized that what was being offered at auction was not an Emily Dickinson original at all. It was a version of the poem edited and transcribed by Mabel Loomis Todd, the poet’s first editor. Realizing that the auction was only days away, Lombardo had called the head of the Books and Manuscripts Department at Sotheby’s. His call was never returned. Lombardo then left a detailed message with another Sotheby’s employee, alerting the auction house to the error.

Lombardo assumed that, after his warning, the poem would be pulled from the auction. He was astonished, when the results of the auction were sent to him, to discover that the so-called ‘Autograph Transcription’ had been sold for $4,400. When he called again to find out what had happened, the story began to take on even more improbable twists. Sotheby’s informed him that they had contacted Ralph Franklin prior to the auction for his opinion, and that he had agreed that it was not a Dickinson original. Despite Franklin’s opinion Sotheby’s decided to leave the poem in the auction, but announce from the podium that item #2028 was not in Dickinson’s hand. But the phone bidders had no way of hearing the announcement. And one of them subsequently became the proud owner of a perfect example of Mabel Loomis Todd’s handwriting.

Had he become the victim of a similar deception? Perhaps he had misread things again, just as he had failed to see that under his father’s happy-go-lucky exterior there was a darker side. As his doubts about the poem rose, he felt his old ghosts returning. Perhaps the competence he thought he had built up over seventeen years at the Jones Library was an illusion. Perhaps his father’s Sicilian sense of fatalism had been right. No matter how good life might seem, the drought would come, the olive trees would die, and you would have to sell the farm.

To celebrate the return of the poem to Amherst, Lombardo had organized a gala reception at the Jones Library. A few days before the gala Lombardo was sitting on Amherst Common, a historic park in the center of the town. The Common was what had drawn Lombardo to Amherst in the first place. He remembered the first time he had driven here, how he had passed the Common and thought how beautiful it looked, with its rectangle of green grass framed by the historic brick buildings of Amherst College. In colonial times English Puritans had grazed their sheep here. And even today the Common was the focus of Amherst life. There were fairs and concerts, flea markets and poetry readings. The Common was where the heart of this community, which he had worked so hard to become part of, beat strongest.

Lombardo had just been to the Amherst College Library to collect a book he had ordered about Mark Hofmann: Richard Turley’s Victims, which the Church of Latter-Day Saints had commissioned in the wake of the murder case. As he sat in the sun outside the library, Lombardo began to leaf through the book’s lengthy appendixes. One of them was a list of Hofmann’s non-Mormon forgeries.

In 1986, as part of a plea-bargain arrangement Hofmann made with prosecutors in Salt Lake City, he had agreed to full disclosure about his forgeries: how many there were, how they had been created, to whom they had been sold. This eventually became a six-hundred-page ‘confession’ published by the Salt Lake County Attorney’s office. As usual, Hofmann only told part of the truth. In a second agreement reached with special investigator Michael George, he had then agreed to furnish a complete list of all his Mormon and non-Mormon forgeries.

In 1988 a list was discovered in Hofmann’s prison cell. The first page of this two-page document, which was handwritten in Hofmann’s chicken-scratch script, is headed ‘Mormon and Mormon-Related Autographs.’ It lists a total of sixty-one names, among them most of the founding fathers of the Mormon Church, including Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. A second, alphabetical list, headed ‘Forged Non-Mormon Autographs,’ had the names of twenty-three people, among them some of America’s greatest historical figures, like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Paul Revere, and Jack London. Emily Dickinson’s was the sixth name down, between John Brown and Button Gwinnett.

Lombardo’s mouth went as dry as sand. ‘As I looked over the Common it was entering my mind that, if this really was a forgery, I did not think I could be part of this town anymore,’ he recalled. ‘I would not be able to face people, knowing that I had caused all this.’

He had no choice. Two days later, on July 30, this eagerly awaited new work by the town’s most famous daughter came home to Amherst. Several hundred people crammed into the Special Collections section of the library to witness its unveiling. Dickinson scholars who had flown in from Washington or Virginia mingled with local people who had walked across the Common. There were state representatives and local writers, as well as professors from the area’s numerous colleges, like Smith and Vassar. A Dickinson family descendant, Angela Brassley, the great-great-granddaughter of Samuel Fowler Dickinson, the poet’s grandfather, had even flown over from England with her husband and two children. They were photographed standing proudly next to the poem. There were children and flowers everywhere.

Lombardo gave a speech in which he celebrated the numerous coincidences that had enabled the library to buy the poem (some felt that the hand of God had been at work), and thanked all those who had contributed money. He then introduced the actress Belinda West, who had been asked to read the poem. Her reading, he said, would symbolically send Dickinson’s lost words into the world and make a connection with the elusive poet. After the reading a local musician, Sean Vernon, sang an arrangement of the poem that he had created for the acoustic guitar. This was followed by a classical arrangement by New York composer Leo Smit, who had once worked with Aaron Copland. Smit could not attend the event, but he had sent a copy of the score the poem had inspired him to write. ‘It was one of the most beautiful things we have done at the library,’ said Lombardo. ‘It was like people filing through to see the Pietà.’

The analogy is apt. Since the rise of the cult of the artist-as-hero, dating back to the birth of Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century, literary manuscripts have replaced the relics of the saints as powerful talismanic objects. When James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, found himself standing in front of what he believed to be the original manuscript of King Lear, in London, on February 20, 1795 – it was, in fact, a forgery by William Henry Ireland – he knelt down on the floor and kissed it. ‘I shall now die contented,’ he said, ‘since I have lived to see the present day.’

For Dickinson aficionados the discovery of a new poem may not have been quite such an overwhelming experience. But it was nonetheless an epiphanous moment. In the last thirty years a cult has grown up around Dickinson’s work and life, as powerful as the cult that surrounded Shakespeare in Samuel Johnson’s day. Her literary stock has risen so fast that, in the opinion of the celebrated critic Harold Bloom, she is, with Walt Whitman, America’s greatest poet. Her idiosyncratic idiom appeals to postmodern ears. Like Sylvia Plath she is seen as an avatar of female consciousness. Her solitary life echoes with today’s lifestyles. Dickinson was the girl who never grew up. She did not marry or have children. She never entered the messy world of adult sexual relations. In a postmodern, postfeminist world of frayed gender relations, this inner exile is seen as a form of heroism, her decision not to marry the only smart choice.

As a result one of the world’s most private poets has spawned a sprawling, global community of devotees. There are more than 67,000 entries in a dozen languages on the Internet, including a hypertext poetry room, where you can see her poems as they appeared in the fascicles and a virtual reality tour of the Homestead. There are chat rooms where you can discuss your favorite poems. There are lesbian Web sites where you can read the steamy verses it is claimed she wrote to her sister-in-law, Sue Dickinson. You can download her recipes for black cake or gingerbread or purchase a Dor-A-Bil doll, complete with woodblock torso, for $19.95.

The thirty-nine words on this sheet of blue-lined paper brought the guests at the Jones Library as close as it is possible to get to her. This is especially true in the digital age where everything is available, and nothing is special. Whether it is Picasso or pornography, the data flooding across our screens is just that: data. You cannot touch it or feel it. It is gone in a second. An original manuscript, whether it is the piece of paper on which Paul McCartney scribbled down the words to ‘Hey, Jude,’ or a poem by Emily Dickinson, connects us in a visceral way to the past and brings us as close as it is possible to get to the men and women who have changed the world and given voice to the thoughts and emotions we ourselves cannot articulate.

For the people crowding around the poem the idea that Amherst’s most famous daughter had held this piece of paper in her hand, had shaped and formed each letter, then signed it with her name, folded it, and sent it to a child, moved them in a way that no reproduction could match. In an age obsessed with celebrity and lacking in greatness, it was also a token of how high the human spirit could rise. ‘She is like an eleventh-century mystic,’ said Lombardo. ‘And what she has left behind are like the parables of the saints, because they can be universally applied. You feel she is speaking to you very personally.’

While people came over to congratulate him on acquiring the poem, Lombardo had a sickening feeling in his stomach. He had almost called off the gala. As it was, he asked most of his closest friends not to attend. He had told only two people in the room of his suspicions about the poem: the director of the Jones Library, Bonnie Isman, and his wife, Karen. As he listened to speaker after speaker heap praise on him, he imagined the disbelief and shock the people who were now congratulating him would feel, if they knew what he knew. The worst of it was having to put on that smiling face and pretend that this was the most exciting moment of his career, how thrilled he was to have acquired this wonderful treasure for the people of Amherst.

He knew that if it became public that Hofmann had once owned the poem, its authenticity would always be questioned. He also knew that, despite everything he had achieved at the library, this, and this alone, would be what people would remember him for. He would be remembered as the curator who took $24,000 of the library’s money and spent it on a fake.

He imagined how quickly the congratulations he had been receiving would turn to sneers; how fast his efforts would be branded as egotism. People would say that he had landed himself, and them, in this mess because of his vanity and inexperience; because he liked the limelight and liked reading his name in the papers. Some people, he knew, were only waiting for an opportunity to bring him down. That was the other side of small-town life. Everyone was in everyone else’s business. Emily had known that. Eventually she would not even leave her house, so frightened and disgusted was she by the rumors and backbiting, the matrons in black tut-tutting on the street, those mean-spirited shrews, who all claimed to be good Christian women, whispering about Sapphic love and secret meetings she was supposed to have with married men.

If the poem were a Mark Hofmann forgery, it would not only mean the end of his life in Amherst, it would also annihilate his faith in his profession. Lombardo had no illusions about how institutions functioned. Whether they were governments or auction houses, institutions were always liable to corruption. But he had always clung to a belief that the individuals who worked in his profession were people of integrity who did their job because they had a genuine love of manuscripts and history. Why had Sotheby’s not done their research and found out the link to Hofmann? Why had Marsha Malinowski said the poem had come from the Midwest, when it had probably come from the Gallery of History in Las Vegas?

Lombardo had never seriously considered keeping quiet. There had been moments when he had thought that perhaps he should just ignore Ashworth’s call and tell Franklin that, after this latest examination they had performed, he felt satisfied that the poem was genuine. If it were a forgery, it had been so masterfully done that no one would ever know the difference. But as he watched his neighbors and colleagues file out of the library into the balmy summer air, as he shook hands with people whom he would see on the street corner in the morning, or meet at Labor Day parties, he knew that he could not do that. He owed them the truth.

The first thing he did was call the Gallery of History in Las Vegas. Gareth Williams, a senior company employee, was at first friendly and helpful. He told Lombardo that he was familiar with the poem and that the Gallery had acquired it sometime before 1994. But when Lombardo asked Williams if the Gallery of History would mind going back into their records to check who had bought the poem, Williams grew testy. He told him that the computers were down. As to the provenance, as far as Williams could recall, the poem had come from California, as part of the estate of a collector. Who had died.

The so-called ‘dead man provenance’ – a bogus history created to disguise a manuscript’s true origins – is one of the oldest tricks in the historical documents trade. And this was now the second corpse Lombardo had stumbled upon. Marsha Malinowski had told him that the poem had originally come from a dead dealer in the Midwest. But she had made no mention of the Gallery of History in Las Vegas, even though Lombardo now knew from Franklin that the poem had been there three years ago; and that, at an earlier date, it had been seen by Brent Ashworth hanging on the wall with a price tag of between $35,000-$40,000 in another one of Todd Axelrod’s stores. Had she just forgotten to mention it? It would seem unlikely that she had not known of the Las Vegas connection. After all, Sotheby’s prides itself on its expert evaluations of the things it sells. But now he was being told that the poem had come from a dead collector in California. The corpses were multiplying. Was Malinowski lying? Was the Gallery of History lying? Were they both?

Lombardo was enmeshed in a cruel paradox. By proving the poem was a forgery, he would be proving that his finest hour had actually been his greatest blunder. There was one way to save his reputation and the reputation of the library, though: uncover the poem’s true origins. For that, he would need all the expertise he had accumulated over the years. His search for the truth was an opportunity in another, more personal way. By proving that the poem was genuine, or not, he would be proving to himself and others that he could indeed distinguish between what was real and what was not. In so doing he would at last be able to lay his ghosts to rest.

Again Lombardo turned to Ralph Franklin. Franklin had by this time become increasingly fascinated with finding out the truth about the poem himself; and he told Lombardo that he would call Sotheby’s. It was a generous thing to do. As director of the Beinecke Library, Franklin was one of Sotheby’s most important customers. If he got on the wrong side of this story, it could ruin their relationship.

Franklin called David Redden, a man he had known for many years. The worldwide head of books, manuscripts, and collectibles, Redden is one of the most senior and experienced members of Sotheby’s staff. He is on the board of directors. He is also one of Sotheby’s most experienced auctioneers. When van Goghs or Monets go under the hammer for tens of millions of dollars, the suave, debonair David Redden is likely to be the person calling the bids.

Franklin wanted to press Redden about the poem’s provenance. Though there had been no mention of it in the catalog, Franklin suspected that the Emily Dickinson poem had been consigned by Todd Axelrod, of the Gallery of History in Las Vegas. Redden insisted that the poem had not come from the Gallery of History.

Franklin was not convinced. If Marsha Malinowski’s account of the provenance was true – that the poem came from a collector who got it from a dealer in the Midwest who had died – it had changed hands four times between late 1994, when Franklin first saw it, and 1997, when it was auctioned. But Franklin knew that, in the rare manuscripts business, things just did not move that fast. Had the poem been consigned by somebody on behalf of the Gallery of History? Franklin asked Redden. Redden said it had not. He said that it had been consigned by ‘an individual’ who, he told Franklin, had no connection either direct or indirect to the Gallery of History in Las Vegas.

Franklin still felt uneasy. And on August 3, some days after his conversation with Redden, he told Lombardo that he had decided to withdraw the poem from his book. It was a bitter blow. Franklin’s belief in the poem had been the I-beam on which Lombardo’s own hopes had rested. Now it had been removed. But Franklin did not stop helping Lombardo. He checked and rechecked his copy of the manuscript. He read up on Hofmann and the Mormon murders. He conferred almost daily with Lombardo. Soon these two very different men – a patrician academic from Yale who dressed in Armani suits and loved the opera, and an antiestablishment liberal from Amherst who wore jeans and John Lennon signature glasses, and loved rock and roll – were becoming fast friends. They joked about being Watson and Sherlock Holmes. They shared their anxieties. Franklin had tried to call Tammy Kahrs, the archivist from the Gallery of History who had first contacted him about the poem. Apparently she was dead.

Both men had by now acquired copies of the revised 1986 edition of Todd Axelrod’s book Collecting Historical Documents, and on page 198 they found the text of what claimed to be ‘an unpublished poem, handwritten by Massachusetts poetess Emily Dickinson,’ neatly framed and illustrated with the famous daguerreotype of the poet. The print was in a minuscule font, too small to read with the naked eye, but under magnification it became clear that this was the poem Lombardo had bought at Sotheby’s.

The discovery was important because it established a detailed provenance for the poem. It showed that Axelrod had not just recently acquired it from someone else but had bought it sometime in the mid-1980s, not long before Hofmann was convicted of murder. He still had it at the end of the eighties when Brent Ashworth, who had already been offered the poem by Hofmann for $10,000, saw it for sale in one of Axelrod’s galleries. And it was still in Axelrod’s hands in 1994, when Tammy Kahrs contacted Franklin.

On August 4 Lombardo called the illustrious auction house on Madison Avenue to say that, given the numerous suspicions surrounding the poem, it was now their responsibility to prove its authenticity. The Marsha Malinowksi Lombardo reached by phone that day was not the breezily cheerful woman he had spoken to six weeks earlier. Her voice was shaky, and when Lombardo mentioned Hofmann, she grew defensive. There was, she said, ‘absolutely no question’ of the poem’s authenticity. She also insisted that several experts had studied the poem, among them a well-known expert on forgery, Kenneth Rendell.

Later that day Lombardo spoke to ‘Special Agent Kiffer.’ Unlike Malinowski, Kiffer was calm and reassuring. He insisted that Sotheby’s guarantees what it sells. When Lombardo raised his suspicions about Hofmann, Kiffer sought to placate him by explaining that, before he became a forger, Hofmann had been a legitimate dealer of historical documents. Kiffer did not mention Rendell, but he did say that ‘ten to fifteen’ manuscript experts had examined the poem.

The mention of Kenneth Rendell was reassuring. A tough, ambitious man, with showrooms on New York’s Madison Avenue and in Newton, Massachusetts, Rendell has built one of America’s most successful historical manuscripts businesses. His flair for self-promotion and his immense experience have made him the dealer of choice for some of the richest collectors in the world. Among them is Bill Gates, for whom Rendell is building one of the world’s most important collections of historical documents. When Gates bought Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated notebook, the Codex Leicester, for $30.8 million in 1994, it was Rendell who was bidding for him. Rendell is also an acknowledged expert on forgery. His book Forging History is a classic. He has also testified in numerous high-profile cases. Indeed, it was Rendell who exposed another celebrated forgery case, the Hitler Diaries, and his testimony at Hofmann’s preliminary hearing in 1986 was crucial in establishing a motive for the two murders. Rendell was away in the South Pacific when Lombardo called, but his office in Boston said they would be happy to forward him a fax. A fax came back from Tahiti saying that he had declined to authenticate the poem for Sotheby’s. Later it would become clear that not only had Rendell never authenticated the poem, he had never even seen it.

Kiffer also told Lombardo that he had consulted a woman named Jennifer Larson about two questionable documents in the catalog for the May 1997 sale, which took place one month before the Dickinson poem was auctioned. Larson is a respected rare books dealer and former chairperson of the Ethics Committee of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. Since the late eighties she has also devoted herself to researching Hofmann’s non-Mormon forgeries to prevent his fakes from contaminating the trade she loves. According to Kiffer, Larson had not raised any concerns about the Dickinson manuscript. Of course. He had never asked her about it.

Lombardo tried to locate Larson in San Francisco, where she ran a store called Yuerba Buena books. She had moved. He made a follow-up call to the Gallery of History, in Las Vegas. Initially, Gareth Williams had told him that the poem had come from a dealer in California who had died. Now he claimed that he was ‘not familiar’ with a Dickinson poem at all. When Lombardo asked to speak to Tammy Kahrs, the archivist who had faxed Ralph Franklin the poem in 1994, Williams said she was dead.

A few days later, Williams called back, this time in an agitated mood. He said that maybe the Gallery of History had had a Dickinson poem, but he could not recall the details. He also made it clear that Lombardo’s inquiries were not welcome. When Lombardo asked him to check back through the records for any information about the poem’s provenance, Williams told him that he could not. The computers were down.

The next piece in the puzzle fell into place when Lombardo reached Jennifer Larson at her new home in Rochester, New York. The documentation she faxed Lombardo – documentation that she could have made available to Sotheby’s, if they had asked – was enough to make any reputable dealer not want to touch the Dickinson poem. Included in it was a copy of Hofmann’s travel records, which the police had put together for the trial. These placed Hofmann in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1983 and 1984. Perhaps Hofmann had traveled to Cambridge to visit the Houghton Library at Harvard, which holds the largest number of Dickinson manuscripts.

Larson also told Lombardo that she had spoken to a TV reporter from Salt Lake City named Con Psarris, who had made a number of programs about Hofmann’s forgeries. In October 1990, while researching a possible Emily Dickinson connection, he had sent Hofmann the text of the poem that had appeared in Axelrod’s book, querying whether it was a forgery. The poem began ‘That God cannot be understood,’ but Psarras had slightly misquoted the remainder of the poem. Hofmann had replied from his jail cell with the pedantry of a university professor. ‘The E. Dickinson item referred to is a forgery,’ he wrote via his lawyer, Ron Yengich. He then wrote out the authoritative version of the text, emending several points of punctuation and capitalization. It was the poem Daniel Lombardo had bought at Sotheby’s.

The evidence against the poem began look compelling, if not complete, but Lombardo had to be sure. He contacted Robert Backman, a clinical graphologist with twenty years of experience with the Department of Defense (during World War II he worked on forgeries that appeared as propaganda). Backman came to Amherst to examine the poem. One of the things that made it so hard to prove either way was that the poem was written in pencil. Ink can be subjected to cyclotron tests and chemical analyses. But there are no forensic tests for pencil.

The pencil was first developed in the Renaissance, when artists began to use styluses made of silver or lead for ruling lines or drawing. The first mention of the lead pencil as we know it today came in a treatise on fossils published in England in 1565. A year earlier, in the village of Borrowdale, in Cumbria, a violent storm had uprooted a giant oak tree. Beneath it was found a vast deposit of almost pure graphite, and the pencil was born. At first, sticks of graphite were simply inserted in a wooden sheath. But by the middle of the next century these crudely made wooden pencils had been replaced by pencils made of ground graphite dust mixed with adhesives. Later, clay was added and the pencil leads were fired in kilns to increase their hardness and uniformity. Apart from manufacturing improvements the only development since then has been the introduction of the mechanical pencil in 1822. As a result it is almost impossible to date documents written in pencil.

Backman knew this. Even the phrase ‘Aunt Emily,’ which had been written in a different hand, on the back of the manuscript, in red indelible pencil – and not, as Sotheby’s listed it in their catalog, in red ink – appeared to be authentic. Like Franklin and Lombardo before him he concluded that the paper was right. The handwriting also appeared to be genuine. But when Lombardo told him that the document had once been in the hands of Mark Hofmann, Backman shook his head and said, ‘Well, that changes everything.’

If the experts could not tell a Hofmann forgery, how could Lombardo ever determine the truth about the poem? And if he could not definitively prove to Sotheby’s that the poem was a forgery, he would not be able to force them to return the library’s money. The circumstantial evidence strongly suggested the poem was not authentic. But each time Lombardo looked at the poem he found it impossible to believe that a forger could have got inside Emily Dickinson’s mind, and simulated her handwriting, so seamlessly and completely as this.

Lombardo’s next call, to David Hewitt, a journalist with the Maine Antiques Digest who had written two in-depth features about the Hofmann case, confused him even more. Hewitt told him that Hofmann was a compulsive liar and a braggart, and that on several occasions, in an attempt to win favor with the parole board, had even confessed to forgeries that he had never executed. Was the Emily Dickinson poem one of his false claims? Where was the truth?

Both Dan Lombardo and Ralph Franklin had read the report of a forensic scientist named George Throckmorton, who had done extensive examinations of Hofmann’s forgeries at the time of the 1986 trial, using an ultraviolet lamp and a high-powered stereo microscope. The Beinecke Library had both. So, on a hot day in the middle of August, Lombardo packed ‘That God Cannot Be Understood’ into his briefcase, along with about $100,000 worth of other Dickinson manuscripts from the Jones Library’s collection, and set off in his car for New Haven.

Franklin and Lombardo worked in a darkroom in the basement of the Beinecke Library. As the poem had been written in pencil, there would be no telltale signs of chemical tampering with the ink. But there might be on the paper. Under ultraviolet light any attempt to age the paper artificially with chemicals would cause it to fluoresce. Would this be the proof they were looking for? It wasn’t. The paper did not fluoresce. When they looked at the poem under the ultraviolet lamp, they thought that they detected a slight opalescent blue smear, like a brushstroke, around the boss mark. Franklin was not certain, but he sensed that something was not quite right with the embossed image of the Capitol stamped on the top left-hand corner of the page. There were also splotches along the edges of the document in that area, as though some sort of chemical had been spilled there. Had Hofmann applied a chemical to the paper to make it ‘take’ the boss mark better?

Next Franklin examined the poem under a stereo microscope, with a powerful raking light shone from the side. This would show the boss mark in better relief. The roof of the Capitol building on the boss mark looked flat. In other examples of boss marks from Capitol stationery Franklin had brought for comparison, there appeared to be a cupola on the roof. On its own this might not have been enough, but in conjunction with the slight fluorescence this tiny flaw made Franklin and Lombardo suspicious. Or perhaps there was a Congress boss mark they did not know of. Perhaps it was the right boss mark, and the paper had simply not been impressed as strongly as usual. Was that why the cupola seemed faint? Every answer led to fresh questions.

Franklin also used the stereo microscope to study the capital E in the word Everyone, which he felt showed signs of hesitation. When we write, the pen or pencil moves fluently and unhesitatingly across the page, touching and lifting from the paper rather like a plane landing and taking off. We don’t pause to think about what we are doing. If we do, we usually make a mistake. Forgers are not writing naturally, however. They have to think about what they are doing, and they often give themselves away by making awkward pen-lifts or hesitating in the middle of a letter. Was the slight hesitation Franklin had detected the telltale sign that the poem was a forgery?

A few days later Lombardo reached a man named Shannon Flynn. Flynn, a jovial Irish-American from Salt Lake City, had negotiated many of Hofmann’s business deals and acted as his courier. Flynn was also a crack marksman and firearms expert. When Hofmann was arrested, the police had found a cache of weapons at Flynn’s apartment: a lugged rifle, a Magnum .357, and an Uzi that had been converted to fully automatic status.

If anyone had told Lombardo when he became curator of Special Collections at the Jones Library that he would one day be making phone calls to a man in Salt Lake City whom the police had questioned for ten hours as a suspected accessory to a double murder, he would have laughed. When he reached Flynn at a Salt Lake City gun shop named Pro Arms and Ammunition, he also realized, for the first time, that he was frightened.

As it turned out, he had nothing to fear. All charges relating to the murders had eventually been dropped against Flynn, and since Hofmann had gone to jail, he had made it his policy to be completely transparent with both the media and the DA’s office. To Lombardo he confirmed that, in 1985, he had flown from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas, on Mark Hofmann’s behalf, to deliver what purported to be a poem by Emily Dickinson to Todd Axelrod, of the Gallery of History.

Lombardo now felt he had enough circumstantial evidence to prove the poem was a forgery. Though David Redden of Sotheby’s had said there was no connection, direct or indirect, to the Gallery of History, it now seemed to Lombardo almost certain that the poem had indeed come from Las Vegas. He knew that Axelrod had bought it from Hofmann. Ipso facto, unless Axelrod had not told Sotheby’s where he had originally obtained the poem, they must have known of or suspected a Hofmann connection.

Lombardo faxed David Redden, at Sotheby’s, a one-page letter detailing his suspicions. Redden did not even bother to return his calls. Instead he had an underling, Kimball Higgs, respond. ‘It certainly looks like a forgery,’ Higgs said offhandedly. ‘It’s our problem. Please send the poem back.’ And the $24,000? Higgs told Lombardo that there should be ‘no problem’ about that. But when Lombardo asked for Sotheby’s agreement in writing that they would return the library’s money, Higgs declined.

Six days later Lombardo met with the board of trustees of the Jones Library in Amherst. It was a moment he had been dreading. He had kept his doubts, and all the research he had done, secret. Now he was about to tell his community and the world that the Emily Dickinson poem was a fake. The members of the board of trustees reacted with a mixture of shock and sympathy. One person burst into hysterical laughter at the sheer absurdity of what had been done to them. ‘I was heartbroken,’ recalled Lombardo, ‘just completely heartbroken that I had let so many people down.’ But this was no time for self-pity. Lombardo notified Sotheby’s that in forty-eight hours he would be issuing a press release stating that the poem was a forgery, and that he would like by that time their assurance in writing that the Jones Library would receive a full refund. A few days later, Sotheby’s complied with his demand. ‘There was no apology. No embarrassment,’ said Lombardo tartly.

‘It was as if this was just a little blip in their daily business. Just routine.’

CHAPTER FOUR Auction Artifice (#ulink_648e34f9-76f3-5a23-8183-ebfca65a5ddb)

Though Sotheby’s counts among its board of directors two lords, an earl, a marquess, and Her Royal Highness the Infanta Pilar de Bourbon, duchess of Badajoz, it has, since its foundation in London in 1744, auctioned numerous works of art, and manuscripts, that have turned out to be forgeries.

The small print in their catalogs does include a guarantee of authenticity, albeit one limited to five years. But if anything proves to be ‘wrong,’ Sotheby’s (and this applies to all the auction houses) can always say, as they routinely do, that they are merely the agents for the sale and, therefore, not directly responsible. The onus is on you, the purchaser, to satisfy yourself that the article you buy is genuine. The codes of secrecy by which auction houses conceal the identity of both consignor and purchaser add a further level of obfuscation. Caveat emptor.

It is a familiar ritual: a stolen painting, or a fake Chippendale chair, passes through the salesroom. Doubts are raised. The auction house returns the consignor’s money, disclaims its responsibility to police the market, then six months or a year later the same happens all over again. In 1997 an exposé by Channel 4 actually showed a Sotheby’s employee in Milan smuggling an Old Master painting out of Italy: one instance of a cynical and widespread pattern of abuse by which unprovenanced art from Italy and India, much of it stolen by organized gangs of grave robbers, had been, with the full knowledge of Sotheby’s, put under the hammer at its UK auction house.

The Dispatches program and the subsequent media exposure – a headline in The Times read, ‘Sotheby’s and the Art of Smuggling’ – seemed to have a sobering effect on the company. In March 1997, with much fanfare, Sotheby’s announced a $10 million inquiry to be run out of the New York office, under the direct supervision of its glamorous new chief executive, Diana D. Brooks.

Only later would it become clear that just as Ms. Brooks was asking the world to believe that such cases of malpractice were isolated, not systemic, Sotheby’s was being shaken by allegations that its chairman, Alfred Taubman, had negotiated a commission fixing deal, with Christie’s in London. Those charges led to Ms. Brooks’s resignation and charges of fraud and malpractice being leveled against Taubman, for which he would face a possible term in jail.

Taubman’s attempt to fix commission fees was motivated by naked greed. By the mid-nineties Sotheby’s – and Christie’s – had turned what in the eighteenth century was regarded as a rather grubby and dishonorable trade into a multibillion-dollar industry. Like owning a Porsche or a house in the Hamptons, raising a paddle at an auction had come to be regarded as an essential rite de passage of the very rich. And as the longest bull market in history began its vertiginous climb, prices went through the roof. In 1996 a pretty enough, but not great, John Singer Sargent painting called ‘Cashmere’ sold in New York for $11.1 million. In the same year a sculpture by a minor French artist, titled ‘Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans,’ sold for $11.9 million.

The rare books and manuscripts department is the poor cousin at Sotheby’s. The big money is in fine art and jewels. Rare books and manuscripts also take a long time to catalog. As a result there is enormous pressure to turn over as much volume as possible. ‘Everything is hype these days,’ said Justin Schiller, a well-known dealer of antiquarian books. ‘In the old days you would collect things with true value. Today people don’t know what to collect, so you have things like Diana’s dresses selling for $250,000 or a Honus Wagner baseball card for $500,000. It’s not what the auction houses are making on these things. The real value is in the publicity.’ Splashy, one-of-a-kind items like an unpublished Emily Dickinson poem are worth far more than the commission. They generate headlines. And bring in the punters.

The hunger for hype, combined with a captive clientele, has created the perfect environment for what Samuel T. Coleridge called, in a different context, the willing suspension of disbelief. This operates just as powerfully with the purchaser.

‘There is an incredible desire on the part of people to believe that something they have purchased is real,’ Jennifer Larson said. ‘It is what you think you have and want to believe you have – not what you really have – that matters.’

Mark Hofmann knew this too. He once said of his Mormon forgeries that they were documents he felt could have been part of Mormon history. He also said that deceiving people gave him a feeling of power. More than greed, this hunger for power – the power to shape and change history – seems to be ultimately what drove him. His forgeries found willing buyers because they told stories people wanted to hear.

The auction houses also tell stories, in the form of the narratives they publish in their catalogs. The most appealing stories of all have an element of mystery and romance: like the elderly woman who cuts the back off an old picture frame and finds a John Singer Sargent painting; or the bank clerk who stumbles on a priceless Washington letter while leafing through a dusty archive during her lunch break. The public loves these stories as they love stories of buried treasure. They appeal to the side of us that wants to believe in Lady Luck, in coincidence, and serendipity.

Facts that might take away from the attractiveness of a painting or manuscript, raise suspicions about its authenticity, or comprise the owner’s desire for anonymity, are carefully excised from the stories that the auction houses tell. The catalog for the auction at which the Emily Dickinson poem was sold, for instance, cited august individuals and institutions like Randolph Hearst as consignees. It did not mention the Gallery of History in Las Vegas.

Something similar had already happened. When Hofmann was arrested in 1985, his possessions were seized to pay off his creditors. Hofmann was not just a forger. He was also a serious book collector. And when police raided his house in Salt Lake City, they found a magnificent collection of antiquarian children’s books. The person chosen to dispose of Hofmann’s children’s books was a book dealer in California named Mark Hime. From him the books found their way to a well-known New York collector by the name of Richard Manney. A few years later Manney consigned his collection to Sotheby’s for sale.

The books appeared in Sotheby’s October 11, 1991, catalog as the Richard Manney Library. Detailed provenance was given to reinforce the importance and legitimacy of the collection. But one name was missing: Mark Hofmann’s.

These were not the first Hofmann items that Sotheby’s had sold either. In October 1985, only two weeks after he was arrested for murder, a Daniel Boone letter, supposedly written during the Indian Wars in Kentucky, was put under the hammer for $31,900. It came with a wonderful story of Boone’s heroism on the American frontier. But the manuscript was consigned by a Salt Lake City businessman named Kenneth Woolley, who had in turn bought it from his cousin, Mark Hofmann. If anyone had looked closely they might also have noticed that the letter was dated April 1.

Ken Farnsworth, one of two lead investigators for the Salt Lake City DA’s office, had called Sotheby’s at the time, to warn them about the Boone document. Hofmann was already behind bars. But having seen numerous lives shattered by Hofman’s forgeries, Farnsworth was determined to get as many of them as he could off the market. He contacted antiquarian book dealers all over America. He contacted the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society. He visited the British Library. He even went to Paris and alerted one of France’s leading historical documents dealers.

All these institutions were extremely cooperative. But when he contacted Sotheby’s he was met with a wall of silence. At first he was told that the auction house would provide the name and address of the consignee of the Boone letter if he (Farnsworth) provided a written account of his findings. When he forwarded a letter detailing his suspicions, he was told that Sotheby’s would only comply with a subpoena from a court. Mike George, another Salt Lake City investigator who worked on the Hofmann case, remembers similar problems. ‘At Sotheby’s we were met with “Don’t want to talk to you, don’t care what you have to say.”’

One person did care, it seems. Mary Jo Kline, the Sotheby’s employee who handled the sale of the Boone letter, informed the head of the the rare books and manuscripts department that in the future she would never again catalog anything that had passed through Hofmann’s hands. Her boss acquiesced and, as far as Kline was concerned, agreed to a larger policy decision: never to handle anything with Hofmann provenance. Three years after that, in a move that shocked the closely knit historical documents world, Kline’s boss thanked her for her pains by terminating her. His name was David Redden. Redden was still at the helm twelve years later when, a month before Sotheby’s auctioned the Dickinson poem, they advertised two other Hofmann forgeries in their May 1997 catalog. One was a minor Daniel Boone autograph. The other was a sensational item: a Reward of Merit, ‘one of only three ever discovered,’ signed by Nathan Hale.

When he saw the Hale document in the catalog, Brent Ashworth, who would later alert them to a possible Hofmann connection with the Dickinson poem, called Selby Kiffer and told him that he had seen the Hale manuscript in one of Todd Axelrod’s stores and believed it was also a Hofmann forgery. As he would a month later with the Dickinson poem, Kiffer denied that the document came from Las Vegas. He seemed to have taken Ashworth’s warnings seriously, though, for on May 2 Kimball Higgs contacted Jennifer Larson by fax. ‘Here are two lots that Brent [Ashworth] brought to our attention as possible MH [Mark Hofmann] originals. He felt sure about the Hale and less positive about the Boone. If you have an opinion we would love to hear it.’

Larson faxed back a raft of documentation. The first item read: ‘Appears on Mark Hofmann’s holographic list, “Forged Non-Mormon Autographs.”’ This was the list found in Hofmann’s prison cell in Draper, Utah, in 1988.

Both Daniel Boone and Nathan Hale were on the list. So was Emily Dickinson. Sotheby’s withdrew the Boone document but kept the far more valuable Hale autograph in the auction. It was put under the hammer for $27,000. After the sale, as doubts about it began to multiply, Selby Kiffer told the Maine Antiques Digest that Kenneth Rendell had ‘authenticated’ the Hale document. When Rendell learned of this, he was incensed. ‘I am meticulously careful about not expressing opinions on things we do not sell,’ insisted Rendell. ‘It was totally inaccurate.’ In a letter to the Maine Antiques Digest, Marsha Malinowski distanced herself from Kiffer’s assertion that Rendell had ‘authenticated’ the Hale manuscript, and Kiffer would later apologize to Rendell for misusing his name. (No such apologies were made to Daniel Lombardo, however, even though Malinowski had claimed to him that Rendell had also authenticated the Emily Dickinson poem.) Not only had Rendell never authenticated the Reward of Merit, he had found it highly questionable when he had seen it at Sotheby’s public display before the auction. ‘There was a coloration I didn’t like about the document, a shifting of the ink that reminded me of some of the Mark Hofmann stuff.’ Rendell said nothing to Sotheby’s. But having spotted the effect on the Hale manuscript, he decided that, however cheap it would be, he would not bid on it.

One of the people who had nearly bought the Hale document was the well-known New York book dealer Justin Schiller. Schiller had almost been bankrupted by his dealings with Mark Hofmann in the 1980s, something that was well known to everyone in the trade. But during a phone call to Selby Kiffer at Sotheby’s a week before the May 19 auction, when Schiller had made known his interest in acquiring the document and sought to find out its provenance, Kiffer had made no mention of a Hofmann connection. ‘When you buy from an auction house like Sotheby’s, you assume that there is a legitimate title, and that everything else has been validated by the auction attorneys,’ said Schiller. ‘So unless I had been alerted by the auction house that there could have been a problem, I would not have suspected anything. I trust the system.’ In this case his trust was misplaced. For by the time he called, Sotheby’s had received enough evidence from Jennifer Larson of a Hofmann connection to make even the rankest amateur not want to touch the Nathan Hale Reward of Merit. Larson had told Sotheby’s, for instance, that in an interview with Mike George, Hofmann had stated that he forged two printed documents by Hale: Rewards of Merit with Hale’s inscription on them, signed to the better students he was teaching. Larson also alerted Sotheby’s to the fact that a similar Nathan Hale document had been sold at auction by Charles Hamilton in August 1983, and that among the evidence seized by Salt Lake City police was a record of a registered shipment from Mark Hofmann to Charles Hamilton dated July 13, in other words three weeks before the auction. Finally, she enclosed a letter written to her by Hofmann from jail, on June 29, 1990. ‘Your note reminded me of the Nathan Hale “Reward of Merit” which I failed to mention in my letter of June 25,’ writes Hofmann. ‘It is, indeed, a forgery.’