Federal investigators from Delaware closed the books on a decades-old international mystery this month at a ceremony in Rome.
The crime involved daring forgeries at the Vatican, international smugglers, a secretive world of wealthy book collectors, and long-lost 15th-century bound editions of letters Christopher Columbus sent from the New World.
In libraries from Barcelona to the Vatican, thieves had taken four of the last original editions of these Christopher Columbus letters known to exist, replacing them with clever forgeries that took years or decades to discover.
If it all sounds like a movie: it isn’t. Not yet, anyway. It is instead a true story about federal agents in Delaware and book experts in New Jersey.
After a tip from a bookseller in 2011, agents at the Wilmington Homeland Security Investigations office verified each theft and tracked down four stolen Christopher Columbus letters, whose estimated value runs anywhere from a million dollars to “priceless.”
One by one, the United States returned each letter to its rightful home in Europe.
In a July 19 ceremony in Rome, acting ICE Director Patrick Leichleitner handed over the fourth and final such Columbus letter to Italian officials. The letter had been reported missing from the Marciana National Library in Venice during an inventory in 1988.
The Venice museum’s copy of the Columbus letter was originally due to be returned in Spring 2020 after its recovery was announced earlier that year. The pandemic kiboshed those plans until now.
“It is my pleasure to be here to celebrate the return of this important artifact to its rightful owners — the people of Italy — and I want to commend our HSI Attaché Rome office for their excellent cooperation with our international colleagues, as well as HSI Wilmington for their extraordinary work in identifying, tracking down, recovering and returning the collection of Columbus letters,” Leichleitner said this month.
The Delaware connectionNazi diaries, forgers at the Vatican: How Delaware became a hotbed for solving art crime
So why are these Christopher Columbus letters so important?
Only around 30 of these original editions are known to exist, offering a firsthand account of one of the most epochal events in world history: The arrival of Columbus in the New World.Columbus’s letter to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand is considered to be among the world’s first bestsellers, published in Latin by prominent printer Stephan Plannck in Rome.
The letter detailed Columbus’ landfall in a New World with “many islands inhabited by numerous people.” Columbus declared, proudly, that residents did not resist when he issued a proclamation and thus “took possession of all of them for our most fortunate King.”
Whether the Caribbean inhabitants had any idea what Columbus was talking about went unrecorded. Either way, the world wasn’t the same since.
Why is Delaware involved in the international smuggling and forgery of Christopher Columbus letters?
It mostly isn’t. However, Delaware agents did solve the crime.
The HSI office in Wilmington has become known across the country and globe for its success tracking down and recovering purloined international artifacts, as USA TODAY Network detailed in a May 2023 story about the successes of one Delaware federal agent in particular: Special Agent Mark Olexa, who led the Christopher Columbus investigation.
In 2011, a book dealer in Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, named Jay Dillon saw a digital image of a bound 1493 letter from Christopher Columbus owned by the National Library of Catalonia.
He recognized distinctive markings from a copy that had been previously offered by a dealer and realized that one or the other must be a forgery. After discreetly contacting federal authorities, he ended up in the office of Special Agent Olexa.
Olexa took those suspicions, and Dillon’s copious documentation, to book expert and former Princeton librarian Paul Needham — who backed up Dillon’s suspicions and helped Olexa verify and track down each of the stolen Christopher Columbus letters.
One was stolen from the secure private library of the Vatican, another from the centuries-old Riccardiana Library in Florence, another from the National Library of Catalonia in Barcelona, and another from the Marciana National Library in Venice.
This 12-year odyssey ended last Wednesday when the fourth and likely final stolen letter — belonging to the Venice library — was returned to Italian officials.
Were the missing Christopher Columbus letters found in Delaware?
No, though multiple purloined copies did pass through a book dealer in New York.
The book from Barcelona was in the hands of a South American collector. The one from the Vatican turned up in Atlanta. The letter from Florence had been given as a gift to the U.S. Library of Congress. The letter returned to Venice this month was in the hands of a Texas collector.
Each possessor handed over the letters willingly, say HSI agents, once the situation was explained and proven.
Has Delaware been involved in other prominent international artifact recoveries?
It certainly has. Or at least, the federal office in Wilmington has been.
The international character of artifact smuggling is what gives Homeland Security Investigations jurisdiction over each of these cases. HSI has a small but pivotal branch, the Cultural Property, Art and Antiquities program, devoted to recovering smuggled artifacts.
The Philadelphia and Wilmington offices − and Agent Olexa in particular − have become known across the agency for their success in such recoveries and repatriations. They’ve been aided in this by diligent U.S. attorneys in Delaware and Pennsylvania, Olexa told USA TODAY Network.
Since 2011, significant recoveries involving the Wilmington HSI office have included the four Christopher Columbus letters, the stolen diaries of Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, ancient Cuzco-style religious paintings lifted from Peruvian churches, millennium-old Roman manuscripts, 4th-century Cypriot coins and a kris dagger once owned by naval officer Oliver Hazard Perry.
Matthew Korfhage is a Philadelphia-based reporter with USA TODAY Network. Contact him at mkorfhage@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewkorfhage.
“
