$1M Heist of Heiress' First Editions
A home-electronics installer was busted for lifting $1 million in rare books from a sprawling Fifth Avenue mansion owned by the socialite widow of a Vanderbilt heir.
Timothy Smith, 41, was booked Tuesday after investigators found him with 51 prized books from the late Carter Burden's extensive collection, which includes first-edition works by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It is not known whether those titles were part of the robbery.
Smith -- who owns his own audio-video installation business and serves as condo-board president at his East 86th Street building -- pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Wednesday on a grand larceny charge, officials said. ...
Carter Burden, a multimillionaire descendant of robber baron Commodore Vanderbilt, died in 1996. He served on the City Council from 1969 to 1978.
Book-collecting was one of Carter Burden's great hobbies. His collection of first-edition 20th-century American literature is regarded as one of the finest in the world.
"You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too many books," he once said.
Two years after Burden's 1996 death, his family donated some of his collection to the Pierpont Morgan Library that included more than 30,000 books and other papers valued at as much as $10 million.
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