U.S. map thief resented prestigious libraries

A dealer of antique treasures who admitted stealing more than $3 million in rare maps was resentful of the world's top libraries and acted to finance his rich tastes and rising debt, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Shedding light into why Edward Forbes Smiley III stole 98 of the world's most precious maps over seven years, papers filed in Connecticut's U.S. District Court said he initially acted because he felt he had been wronged and slighted.

"Although he had a large degree of access to many libraries for his research and used such access, he did not steal maps from every library that he visited," prosecutors wrote.

Smiley faces restitution and up to six years in prison when he is sentenced on September 27, more than a year after he was caught with seven rare maps in his briefcase and tweed blazer after leaving Yale University's rare-book library.

In June, Smiley, once one of the country's most respected dealers in rare maps, admitted to the thefts from the British Library in London, New York and Boston public libraries, the Harvard and Yale university libraries and a Chicago library.

He was arrested after a keen-eyed library staffer noticed a dropped X-Acto knife blade on the floor.