A forger,thief, library director

The full extent of the losses is not known — the library lacks a complete catalogue — but prosecutors have compared it to the destruction of Dresden during World War II. In 2012,the authorities recovered more than 1,000 library volumes from a self-storage unit in Verona traced to De Caro.

“This is the biggest books scandal to hit in the past 150-200 years,” said Fabrizio Govi,president of the Italian Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association,adding that nothing of this scope had happened since the case of Count Guglielmo Libri,a 19th-century Italian collector who absconded with books on a grand scale.

Rare books admired by connoisseurs have been fetching increasingly higher prices. Last week,the Bay Psalm Book,the first book printed in English in North America,became the most expensive ever bought at auction when it sold for $14,165,000.

Last year,the International Association of Antiquarian Booksellers issued a warning for buyers and sellers to check any Italian books from the 15th through 17th centuries purchased in the first half of 2012,in case they had been removed from the Girolamini.

“The international market absorbed,without batting an eye,books that they couldn’t not have known came from the Girolamini Library,” Giovanni Melillo,the Naples prosecutor who is leading the investigations,said. “The rule ‘don’t ask,don’t tell’ is what governs the rare book market,” he added.

Prosecutors have requested cooperation from across Europe,as well as from the US and Argentina.

De Caro,39,is a character who seems to have been conjured by crime novelist Andrea Camilleri: a rare book lover; a figure in the nebulous orbit of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi; a sometime consultant in the renewable-energy field; and,by his own admission to prosecutors,the architect of the most successful forgery of a book by Galileo ever executed.

In March,De Caro was convicted of theft and conspiracy to sell some of the books. He is serving a seven-year sentence under house arrest. De Caro said he had wanted to sell them to raise money to restore the library and that its plunder had begun long before his tenure.

Built in the 16th and 17th centuries,the Girolamini is a hybrid of a state library and a religious institution. It has been placed under the receivership of the Italian Culture Ministry. Prosecutors began investigating after Tomaso Montanari,an art historian,wrote an article in an Italian newspaper in March 2012 reporting disarray at the library.

De Caro and his associates were eventually found out by a brother-and-sister team of whistle-blower librarians at the Girolamini who gave prosecutors video surveillance footage showing De Caro and his associates removing boxes of books from the library. In August,police arrested a rare book dealer in Munich,Herbert Schauer of the auction house Zisska & Schauer,on charges of complicity in receiving books taken from the Girolamini. He is being held in a prison outside Naples.

How De Caro,a self-taught bibliophile without a college degree,became director of the library appears to involve political connections.

In the lower-court proceedings De Caro testified that he had several copies of Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius forged in Argentina,including one that he placed in the national library in Naples,and that he had taken the original. Last year,Nick Wilding,a scholar,uncovered the forgery.

NYT