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.’
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.
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