Last week Melnikas was being questioned by U.S. Customs officials on suspicion of smuggling stolen goods, a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and $250,000 in fines. He is not speaking to the press, but his lawyer, James E. Phillips of Columbus, says the charge is “inconsistent with his career and his reputation” and adds that Melnikas is “totally bewildered.” If so, he’s not the only one. Specialists in rare manuscripts are buzzing about what appears to have been a major theft from a presumably well-guarded location: the Vatican Library.
Suspicious about the pages, Ferrini sent photocopies to James Marrow, an art-his-tory professor at Princeton. “My curiosity was piqued,” says Marrow, who traced them to a sumptuously illustrated copy of two Roman treatises on war and agriculture. The copy had been commissioned in the 14th century by the poet Petrarch and was annotated in his handwriting. “The light bulb went off around 11 at night,” says Marrow. “I found an article which in essence proved that this came from the Vatican.” He waited until 2 a.m.–opening-up time at the Vatican Library in Rome–and called Father Leonard Boyle, director of the library, who checked the manuscript and found that the pages were missing. “We went back through our records of who had borrowed the manuscript, but we immediately eliminated Professor Melnikas from any possible suspicion,” Boyle told NEWSWEEK. “He’s been coming to the library for 30 years. We treated him like one of our own staff.” Indeed, it was the Vatican that published Melnikas’s major scholarly work, a three-volume collection of illustrated manuscripts on canonic law. But when Boyle sent Ferrini a list of those who had worked with the manuscript, Melnikas’s name jumped out. “We were shocked,” says Boyle. Melnikas had used the manuscript in July 1987.
Security precautions at the Vatican Library are similar to those at other institutions housing rare documents. No materials circulate; they can be used only in the library, and bags must be kept in lockers ownstairs. The Vatican permits only certain scholars to use the collection–professors and graduate students working on materials they cannot find elsewhere. But Melnikas had special access. “He used the library during times it was closed to all other scholars,” says Boyle.
Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, which maintains a database of stolen art, says theft by staff members and trusted visitors occasionally occurs at libraries, but may go unreported. “If people slice up the books it’s very difficult for the institution to know, unless they check every fragile manuscript that has just been examined,” she says. “You make the assumption that the person coming to study is a scholar who respects and loves the material.”
Melnikas, 68, has been teaching at Ohio State for 36 years. Quiet and reclusive, the Lithuanian-born professor is married but has no children and, apparently, few close friends. At a salary of less than $60,000, he was known to feel underpaid. “We felt he was being paid commensurate with his performance,” says Donald Harris, dean of the college of the arts. Administrators had recommended that Melnikas accept early retirement and a buyout package. Had Ferrini sold the pages, they might have brought as much as a half-a-million dollars.
Right now the pages–including a third one that Melnikas turned over upon questioning-are in the care of Customs while the investigation continues. And Melnikas’s students and colleagues are wondering whether he could possibly have committed the kind of crime that makes a bibliophile’s blood run cold. “Whoever did this cut right through the annotations by Petrarch,” says Ferrini. “He is an absolute barbarian.”
