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

He had acquired several Dickinson poems before, but they were not new poems, like this one. To acquire it would be the crowning event of his career. The fact that the Jones Library was a public library, not a university, where ordinary people could go in and see the poem, made him even more determined. By chance the annual meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society was scheduled to take place at the Jones Library, and Lombardo decided to use the occasion to launch an appeal. The meeting took place in the large meeting room, a beautiful wood-floored reception room with a fireplace at one end of it. People had come from all over the United States. After a lunch of sandwiches and potato chips Lombardo gave a brief presentation on the poem and outlined what a marvelous opportunity this was for the library. As soon as he had finished his speech, a Dickinson scholar from Case Western Reserve University stood up and pledged $1,000. Others excitedly followed. A retired doctor who had traveled down from Kankakee, Illinois, to attend the meeting pledged $1,000. It was like a spark going around the room. Graduate students who could barely afford to pay their rent offered $100. By the end of the meeting Lombardo had pledges for $8,000. With the Jones Library’s $5,000 he now had $13,000.

Some of the scholars at the meeting privately doubted the quality of the poem. It seemed too trite, too simplistic, even for a first draft. But no one voiced their reservations. Everyone was swept along on a wave of euphoria. ‘We are all starting on a great adventure together,’ Lombardo thought.

He had no doubts about the poem’s authenticity. After all, it was being auctioned by the illustrious house of Sotheby’s, from whom he had bought several other manuscripts for the Jones Library. Over the weekend, however, he did one more thing to authenticate the poem: he called Ralph Franklin at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Franklin is the world’s leading expert on Dickinson’s ‘fascicles,’ the improvised books she made by sewing together bundles of poems. Franklin’s Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson is the definitive word on the subject. After her death Emily Dickinson’s fascicles were unbound and the poems pasted into scrapbooks, and Franklin spent years laboriously reconstructing the original order of the poems. Franklin told Lombardo that he had been aware of the poem since 1994, and that he was planning to include it in the new edition of his book, due to be published in late 1997. For Lombardo it was a gold seal of approval and he spent the rest of the weekend on the phone, trying to raise more money. News of the poem had gone out on the Internet, and pledges poured in. It helped that the stock market was in the longest bull run in its history. Several donors gave dividends from their investments.

By Sunday night Lombardo had raised $17,000. A meeting of the Friends of the Jones Library, a local support group, the day before the auction, brought even more money. One donor, a retired physicist from Alexandria, Virginia, called to say he wanted to double his donation. By Monday evening – the auction was the next day – Lombardo had $24,000. Less the commission that Sotheby’s would take, this meant that Lombardo had $21,000 to bid. For the first time, as he went to bed that night, he felt he had a real chance of being able to buy the poem.

It was a hot summer night. There was no moon and barely a breeze. Outside in the garden a raccoon scratched at a trash can. Next to him his wife lay on her side, breathing quietly. Lombardo closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But he could not stop thinking about the auction. He was a small-town librarian up against some of the wealthiest academic institutions and collectors in the world. Everyone in Amherst would be watching him. He could one day leave his work behind and feel that he had made a real contribution to his community. At the same time he was gnawed by a feeling of insecurity that he might let everyone down.

For most of his life Lombardo had felt like an outsider. As a young man he used to say to his friends that all he really wanted to do was have time to read and hike. He wasn’t completely serious. There were plenty of other things he liked doing, but there was some truth in his claim. Books were his passports to the world, a place where his imagination could roam free. Hiking was his way of staying connected to the earth. Walking along a back-country path, surrounded by trees, and water, and light, and animals, he felt both humbled and enlarged. Humbled, because in comparison with the vastness of the universe he felt like the tiniest atom. Enlarged, because he knew he was part of the great continuum of life. His hero in high school had been Henry David Thoreau. Lombardo must have read Walden Pond fifteen times. If he went hiking, he usually took his well-worn copy with him. It was more than a book. It was a guide to life, and he dreamed of living the spare, simple existence that Thoreau had lived.

As he lay in bed, worrying about what the next day would bring, he remembered an incident from his boyhood in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Lombardo had grown up in an Italian-American family. His father, Jimmy, who had come to America from Sicily as a child, had been the town barber. Everyone knew and liked Jimmy. He was the sort of warm, happy-go-lucky man that everyone would stop and greet as he walked down the street.

Lombardo adored his father. On summer evenings he would sit on the back stoop listening to him playing the mandolin, singing the Sicilian love songs with which he had courted his mother on the other side of the world. When, at the age of five, he heard that his father had been elected president of the local barber’s union, Dan assumed that he had been elected president of the United States.

There was, however, another side to his father that Dan came to know about only later: a dark, fatalistic side that he had carried with him to the New World from his native Sicily; a feeling that, however good life might seem at the moment, the drought would come, you would lose the farm and spend the rest of your life eating beans. He suffered from depression, and could not wait for the summer to come each year so he could return to Sicily and play his mandolin under the stars, in cafés that looked over the Mediterranean. One year, Jimmy came home from Sicily and suffered a breakdown and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

The discovery of his father’s breakdown traumatized Lombardo. If he had been so wrong about his father, how could he be sure that anything was what it appeared to be? This sense of dissonance between his own perceptions of the world and how things really were, the feeling that he was never quite sure what was real and what was not, undermined his ability to direct and manage his life.

Like most nonconformists in the sixties, Lombardo grew his hair long and rebelled. He learned to play the drums. At the University of Connecticut he immersed himself in the works of Thoreau and his contemporaries, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s withdrawal from the world of getting and spending had chimed with the zeitgeist of the sixties and with Lombardo’s own search for meaning in his life. He tried teaching, but the rigidities of the school system alienated him. After a brief time spent in Puerto Rico, and a stint on a commune in Massachusetts, he found the life he had been looking for at the Jones Library.

At the time of his arrival, in 1982, the Jones Library’s rich collection of literary and historical manuscripts was languishing in obscurity, the victim of budget constraints. The books, photographs, and manuscripts were poorly cataloged, and dispersed over nine rooms on two floors. Lombardo lobbied long and hard for funding. Working with an architect, he then oversaw the restoration of the second floor of the library where the Special Collections were housed. Lombardo wanted to make the people of Amherst feel that the Special Collections department was not just for scholars and academics but belonged to everyone. He helped design a large exhibition space and a reading room with armchairs and Persian rugs on the floor. Using old photographs and other archive material, as well as their manuscripts, he organized permanent exhibitions on both Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, which became destinations for travelers and school groups, as well as scholars.

He wanted people to experience these writers not as the remote historical figures of academic study but as flesh-and-blood people who had lived and worked in the town, just like them. He began to write a weekly column in the Amherst Bulletin about every aspect of the history of the town. It was not the usual quaint version of local history. Lombardo was interested in the nitty-gritty of life, not the poetic illusion. He described the lives of prostitutes and the abuse of opium. He wrote about the entertainers who had passed through the town and the conditions in the surrounding factories. Readers loved these stories and clipped them from the paper. When Garrison Keillor came to Amherst to broadcast Tales of Lake Wobegone, he wove several of Dan’s stories into his monologues.

Meanwhile, Dan went on improving the Special Collections department. He oversaw the installation of state-of-the-art climate-control systems; equipped a paper conservation studio; and ushered in the digital age by computerizing the cataloging and indexing of the library’s manuscripts. He doubled the size of the historic photograph collection, broadening its scope to include rare photos of African Americans at end of the nineteenth century, as well as photos from across the country and from Europe. Lombardo always felt that culture should not be the preserve of dead white people of European origin. He arranged for the donation of the Julius Lester Collection, the archives of a prominent African American writer and activist with close connections to Amherst. And he augmented the Frost and Dickinson collections with manuscripts he acquired at auction and through rare book and manuscript dealers. With each successfully completed project his self-confidence grew. The more he learned, the surer he felt of the decisions he made. The more others trusted and believed in him, the more he trusted and believed in himself.

He could not go to the auction personally – he was leaving on a long-planned trip to Italy the next day – so he had arranged to bid by phone. The poem was Lot 74. Sotheby’s had advised him that bidding would begin at 2:30 P.M. and had arranged to call him two lots before. At 2:00 P.M. Lombardo installed himself in the director’s office in the basement of the Jones Library. All calls come in there, and Lombardo wanted to be sure that he had an open line. On the desk in front of him he had a sheet of figures that told him at each point of the bidding what Sotheby’s 12.5 percent commission would add on.

Lombardo disliked telephone bidding. Things move so fast, and there are no visual cues as to how many people are bidding or who they are. But he had bid at auctions before, both by phone and in person, and been successful. Working as a drummer on studio sessions had also taught him about pressure. One mistake, a mishit cymbal or a slip of the foot, can ruin a take. As the minutes ticked toward 2:30 P.M., his heart began to beat faster. Finally the phone rang. A woman speaking in a low voice told him that the auction had reached Lot 69. In the background he could hear the voice of the auctioneer on Madison Avenue. He imagined the limousines lined up along the curb outside and the liveried doormen ushering in the rich and powerful collectors who lived on Central Park and spent more on travel than he earned in a year.

Bidding at a Sotheby’s auction was like playing in a high-stakes poker game. There was the same adrenaline rush and the same feeling of euphoria when your bid was accepted. Every time Lombardo had been involved in an auction and been successful, he had felt an enormous high. His bidding strategy was never to be in on the early stages so as not to heat up the auction.

There was a write-in bid for $8,000, and the bidding on the poem started there, jumping in increments of $500 in seconds. The young woman at the end of the line kept asking, ‘Do you want to bid? Do you want to bid?’ But Lombardo held back and grew more and more anxious. If this did not stop soon, he thought, it would spiral beyond his budget of $20,000. But at $15,000 the pace of the bidding slowed. And at $17,000 Lombardo jumped in. In poker you say, ‘Hit me.’ At Sotheby’s the word is ‘Bid.’ Lombardo’s first bid was immediately countered by one for $18,000. Lombardo bid again. One more bid and he would have to get out. His invisible opponent bid $20,000. Lombardo bid $21,000. It was his last bid, and he felt sure that whoever he was bidding against would keep going. But at $21,000 the hammer came down. Lot 74 was coming home to Amherst.

‘I went out and told everyone who was waiting outside the door,’ he recalled, ‘“We got it!” And they all started hugging me and crowding around. People were so excited. They all felt a sense of personal involvement. It was a privilege to be part of this. I was being flooded with congratulations and warmth. It was as though the sky had opened up, a lightning bolt had come down, and God said, “This is your moment.”’

Helped by a group of volunteers, he spent the rest of the afternoon calling members of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Twenty-four hours later he boarded a plane to Italy. The trip with his family – to Rome, the Adriatic, and the medieval hill towns of Umbria – was an important family occasion. His aging mother would probably be seeing the relatives she had grown up with for the last time. As the plane sped toward Italy, he felt, literally, on top of the world.

On his arrival back in Amherst, the first thing Lombardo did was to go through all the articles that had been written about the poem. People in Amherst had already started to come into the library to see it, even though red tape at Sotheby’s meant that it would take several more weeks to arrive. In the meantime Lombardo began to organize an exhibition for the end of July, with the theme of how to date a poem. He would draw attention to similarities in the handwriting with two other Dickinson manuscripts the library owned. So, he wrote a brief essay about the paper and the boss mark. And, again, he consulted with Ralph Franklin at the Beinecke Library.

According to Franklin the handwriting exactly matched the date given by Sotheby’s, 1871. Lombardo was particularly curious to know who had written the words ‘Aunt Emily’ on the back of the poem. They were in a different hand. Unlike the poem, which was written in ordinary black lead, the words ‘Aunt Emily’ were in what appeared to be red pencil. Lombardo’s first supposition was that they had been written either by Ned or Martha Dickinson, the poet’s nephew and niece. He had samples of Martha’s handwriting at the library. For Ned’s handwriting he contacted Brown University, who sent him photocopies of letters that Ned Dickinson had written to his sister. Neither matched.

This did not especially worry him. Dickinson had numerous cousins, on both her father’s and mother’s side. Perhaps the poem had been written for one of her cousins in Boston, Fanny or Lou Norcross. Perhaps one or the other of them had written ‘Aunt Emily’ on the back of the poem, then filed it away as a memento of her illustrious relation.

Lombardo also wanted to present to the public as much information as he could about the poem’s provenance. In the historical documents world the chain of transactions known as provenance is the gold standard of authenticity. But provenance is much more than a simple list of commercial transactions. It is the story of a document or a book’s journey across time, and the people whose lives it has touched.

To find out as much as he could about the poem’s provenance, Lombardo called Marsha Malinowski, one of the two Sotheby’s employees who had handled the sale. Malinowski was a senior expert in the Department of Books and Manuscripts, and vice president of Sotheby’s. She was charming. She told Lombardo how delighted she was that the poem was going back to Amherst and that she would be happy to try and find out who had consigned it for auction. But for the moment all she could say was that it had come from a collector, who had got it from a dealer in the Midwest. Who had died.

Three days later Lombardo was sitting at his desk in the Jones Library when the phone rang. It was a long-distance call from Provo, Utah. The man at the other end of the line introduced himself as Brent Ashworth. He said that he was an attorney and that, in his spare time, he was a keen collector of historical documents. Ashworth also mentioned that he was the chairman of the Utah branch of the Emily Dickinson Society.

Lombardo assumed that he was calling to congratulate him on the purchase of the poem. People had been calling or e-mailing for weeks. What Ashworth had to say was not, however, cheerful. One day, in Salt Lake City, in 1985, Ashworth told Lombardo, he had been offered an Emily Dickinson poem for $10,000 by a forger named Mark Hofmann. Ashworth was not one hundred percent sure that the poem was the same one that Lombardo had just bought at Sotheby’s, but he was pretty certain it was.

Ashworth told Lombardo something else: that when he’d seen the poem in the Sotheby’s catalog, he’d immediately called Selby Kiffer, the other Sotheby’s employee who had handled the sale. Ashworth had done business with Kiffer, a young, upwardly mobile manuscripts expert at Sotheby’s, for many years, and wanted to warn him of the Hofmann connection. Like Malinowski, Kiffer is a senior expert in the Department of Books and Manuscripts and a vice president (in the catalog for the June 3 sale, he was also listed as being in charge of business development). Because Kiffer had always been so zealous in reporting stolen books to the FBI, his nickname at Sotheby’s was ‘Special Agent Kiffer.’ Kiffer insisted to Ashworth that he had had the poem ‘checked out.’ When Ashworth asked who had checked it out, Kiffer mentioned Ralph Franklin, at Yale University.

Lombardo put down the phone and stared out the window. He had a hollow, empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. Mark Hofmann, he remembered, was a Salt Lake City rare documents dealer who had created a string of sensational forgeries of Mormon historical documents in the early 1980s that undermined some of the central tenets of the church’s teaching. His most famous forgery came to be known as the Salamander Letter. It purported to have been written more than a century earlier by Martin Harris, the scribe who had helped Joseph Smith, the prophet and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, write the Book of Mormon from a set of golden plates Smith claimed to have found in the ground in upstate New York. According to the founding legend of the Mormon religion Smith had been led to the golden plates by an angel. Hofmann’s forgery completely undermined that legend. In it he had portrayed Smith as a money-grubbing prospector who found the plates while digging in the dirt for gold. Instead of divine intervention Hofmann’s letter had described black magic and cabalism. The Mormon Church had bought the document for $40,000 in the hope that it would never be made public.

It was well known that Hofmann had also produced a string of literary forgeries nearly always of American icons, charismatic historical figures who touched a deep chord in the national consciousness, like Abraham Lincoln, Betsy Ross, or Daniel Boone. Had Hofmann, Lombardo wondered, also created an Emily Dickinson poem?

As well as being a brilliant forger, Hofmann was a master of deceit who delighted in the mayhem caused by his lies. On the outside he was a fresh-faced, bookish man who would go unnoticed in most crowds. He dressed conservatively, usually with a white shirt, tie, and jacket. He was a knowledgeable and respected dealer and collector of rare books and historical documents. He was a happily married family man who had spent thousands of dollars assembling one of America’s finest collections of rare children’s books, including a signed first edition of Alice in Wonderland, as a patrimony for his four children. Underneath this guise of normalcy, however, was another person whom Hofmann hid from everyone, including his wife and children. When he found himself entangled in his own web of lies, he had mutated into a cold-blooded psychopath.

Lombardo still believed, and wanted to believe, that the Dickinson poem was genuine. Maybe the man who had called him from Salt Lake City was a kook and this whole thing a practical joke. Lombardo checked on Ashworth and found that far from being crazy, he was a widely respected member of Salt Lake City society, an attorney, and a serious collector of historical documents. Between 1981 and 1985 he had also bought nearly half a million dollars’ worth of rare manuscripts from Mark Hofmann. ‘I was over at Hofmann’s house all the time,’ Ashworth told Lombardo over the phone. ‘I usually went up on Wednesdays and he’d pull out something juicy he wanted to offer me. On one of those days he pulled out this Emily Dickinson.’

The poem’s agnostic sentiments had jarred with Ash-worth’s Mormon faith, and he had passed on it. Then, in the late eighties, several years after Hofmann had been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, Ashworth had seen the Dickinson poem again. It was lavishly framed and selling for between $35,000 and $40,000, in an upscale historical-documents store in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. The store was called the Gallery of History, part of a Las Vegas-based chain owned by a man named Todd Axelrod.

The historical-manuscripts business was traditionally the curious obsession of a few hundred fanatics. There were big collectors, like Malcolm Forbes and Armand Hammer, who amassed collections worth millions of dollars, but for most people old parchment was about as exciting as, well, old parchment. Dealers generally went into the business because they loved history and culture. Few expected to make a killing. Todd Axelrod, the son of a publisher of books on domestic pets from Neptune City, New Jersey, took this rather tweedy cultural backwater and turned it into a multimillion-dollar, mass-market business. After making a fortune as a securities broker on Wall Street, he moved to Las Vegas and, in February 1982, opened the first of a number of boutique-style stores. Crisscrossing America by plane, Axelrod then set about trying to corner the market in historical documents. In all he spent more than $3 million assembling one of the nation’s largest private collections of Americana: a hundred thousand historic documents preserved, as Axelrod liked to boast, to Library of Congress standards. Among this treasure trove was Abraham Lincoln’s letter to Grace Bedell, the young girl who had suggested he grow a beard to help him win the presidency. The price tag was $1.25 million. Not everyone could afford an Honest Abe. So Axelrod made sure that there was something for every taste and pocketbook. There were signed photos of Elvis. Movie buffs could buy memorabilia from Gone With the Wind. For sports fans there were clip signatures from Lou Gehrig or Ty Cobb. Some of Axelrod’s inventory came from a young historical-documents dealer in Salt Lake City named Mark Hofmann.

In the first twenty-two months of operation Axelrod’s company turned over $1.4 million and Axelrod began to open other stores in Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and Costa Mesa, California. All were situated in the same kind of upscale shopping malls. All featured costly metallic fronting, lavish display cases, track lighting, and state-of-the-art climate control systems. Axelrod’s target customer was a new, eighties breed of collector who did not want to keep their purchases tucked away in vaults or safety deposit boxes, as old-style collectors had. They wanted to see their money hanging on the wall. It was all about ‘impact.’ A John F. Kennedy letter, matted in gray suede and framed in silver, could lend an air of probity to the boardroom of a futures trader on Wall Street. A collection of John Paul Jones memorabilia, encased in a gold frame, could make the new rich entrepreneur who owned everything feel that he even ‘owned’ a piece of history. Competitors referred to Axel-rod’s company as Autographs R Us.