Brett Sokol

BOCA RATON, Fla. — “There are probably more spies in America now than at any other point in our history,” said H. Keith Melton, a longtime historical adviser to the CIA who has spent the past few decades obsessively researching international espionage while amassing a sprawling collection of spyware from all sides, predating and spanning the Cold War. “I preserve and protect; I don’t look at things politically.”

To that end, he’s donating the bulk of his collection — more than 7,000 items — to the International Spy Museum in Washington, where he’s on the board. Devices heading to its new 140,000-square-foot headquarters include a Nazi Enigma code machine abandoned in France by a German unit fleeing advancing American soldiers, one of whom took it home after the war; a 13-foot-long British “Sleeping Beauty” submarine that allowed a single sailor to slip undetected into an enemy harbor; and a British-built World War II-era cigarette that fires a .22-caliber bullet.

Even as thousands of pieces are being donated, however, undercover gear and espionage ephemera fill the guesthouse adjoining the Boca Raton home where Melton and his wife, Karen, live, making it a de facto private spy museum. “I’m not sure I’d want to sleep under the same roof as some of this stuff,” Karen Melton said, eyeing a particularly ominous bust of Stalin.

Aside from being a prolific author on the clandestine world, Keith Melton was a technical adviser for the recent 1980s-set TV drama “The Americans,” lending the show Soviet-era hidden cameras and eavesdropping devices. He said veteran agents from the KGB and its successor, the SVR, loved the series: “They thought it made them look really good.”

Their colleagues are apparently still at work here, he added. The same shortwave radio broadcasts used to transmit coded messages to the East Coast “sleeper” agents arrested in 2010 and deported are back on the air, sending fresh codes to presumably a new set of agents.

Melton was never an intelligence agent himself. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy and serving in Vietnam, he became, according to Forbes, one of the largest McDonald’s franchise owners in America — a career that enabled him to remain above the ideological fray as well as to finance his collecting.

Melton’s most prized acquisition took him 40 years to find: the ice ax a Soviet agent used in 1940 to kill exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky as he sat reading inside his Mexico City compound. The ax finally surfaced in 2005: The curator of a Mexican police museum had given it to his daughter, who then stashed it under her bed for 30 years, Melton said. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: When the ax finally emerged, how did you know it was genuine?

Keith Melton: No. 1, I have a paper trail going back to the Mexican police evidence room since 1946. No. 2, this was a very obscure type of ax made only in 1928. Third and most definitive is the rust pattern on the blade. Photos taken on the evening of the assassination reveal a bloody fingerprint. A friend at the FBI helped confirm every speck of this rust is exactly consistent with the contour of the fingerprint.

Q: What was the price?Six figures?

Karen Melton: [smiles and silently jerks her thumb skyward]

Keith Melton: No, no [blushing].

Q: You paid seven figures for the ax?

Keith Melton: The assassination of Trotsky was the crime of the century! Relative to its time, it exceeded the publicity of the killing of Kennedy.

Q: Why was it soimportant to own the ax?

Keith Melton: To relate to history, I need to touch and hold an object. It’s one thing to read about it, but I need to hold it.

Karen Melton: Some homes have deer antlers mounted on the wall. Other homes have golf trophies. [Sighs good-naturedly] We have murder weapons.

Q: How do you persuade today’s spies to part with their arsenals?

Keith Melton: I always take the historical approach while traveling the world to visit intelligence services, knocking on their door and handing them one of my books. I did that in East Germany as it was collapsing in 1990. I did the same thing in Moscow in the spring of 1992.

Q: And if that doesn’t work?

Keith Melton: Cash is good [chuckling]. When society is disassembling and in chaos, cash brings a lot of things to the surface.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/arts/design/show-us-your-wall-h-keith-melton.html" id="daa684bc-b527-37d1-afb6-84df2a876ce3">The New York Times</a>.

It's No Secret That Espionage Is This Collector's Passion

(Show Us Your Wall)

<h1>Miami’s art world has been waiting for the other cultural shoe to drop since 2014, when the nonprofit ArtCenter/South Florida sold one of its two buildings for $88 million — after buying it in 1988 for only $684,000, when the surrounding South Beach neighborhood was more sketchy than stylish. A scrappy organization founded to provide affordable studios, and largely ignored by the city’s marquee art institutions, was suddenly poised to become a major player.</h1>

The ArtCenter is finally announcing plans for its Cinderella-like windfall (one that, thanks to investments, has since swollen to $100 million, more than the endowment of any other South Florida visual arts organization, many of whom have been struggling to fundraise even a fraction of that sum). It will be moving to the mainland Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, where it will build a new $30 million, 40,000-square-foot art center with 22 studios for resident artists, a 2,500-square-foot exhibition space, a 120-seat theater, as well as classrooms and work spaces for an expanded array of instructional courses on mediums like painting and filmmaking.

“We need a facility that reflects our aspirations,” Dennis Scholl, the ArtCenter president and chief executive said, adding that an architect would be selected by May, with groundbreaking set for September 2020 and a planned opening in Spring 2022.

At that point the rain of cash is likely to continue: Scholl confirmed that the ArtCenter would vacate its remaining South Beach building, though he declined to elaborate on specific plans for the property. The building was assessed by Miami-Dade County at $10 million, but real estate brokers believe it would sell for three to four times that figure.

The newly expanded mission is to beef up Miami’s art infrastructure, Scholl continued in a recent interview, with a focus on career support for emerging artists. “We believe Miami is and should be a 365-day-a-year art town, not a five-day-a-year art town,” he said, addressing criticism that local art activity is anemic outside the annual Art Basel fair.

Accordingly, Scholl felt Little Haiti was a natural fit for the ArtCenter. “The Upper East Side of Miami is where the contemporary art community is basically relocating,” he said, citing its critical mass of artists and well-respected galleries — many of whom have taken a cue from the ArtCenter’s South Beach history lesson on gentrification and bought their properties outright, rather than sign leases.

A name change for the ArtCenter is also in store, to Oolite Arts, a reference to Miami’s underlying geology. “Oolite is what Miami is made of; it just sung to us,” Scholl said. “I’ve always loved the texture of oolite and the way it was formed — which is a series of disparate granules that come together and create a porous but strong bedrock. All of these things reflect who we are and what we hope to become.”

Many Miamians may be less enthused about oolite, or, as it’s more commonly known, limestone. Water bubbles up through limestone’s holes — considered by scientists to be a major factor in the sea-level rise which has swamped some local neighborhoods even on sunny days. So is Oolite Arts tempting fate by invoking this phenomenon?

“Since you’re trying to torture me,” Scholl answered wryly, “our new site is one of the highest points in Miami-Dade County. It is 11 feet above sea level,” practically Mount Everest by local standards. And while locating a veritable Noah’s Ark for artists wasn’t a goal, “It was a pleasant thing to learn."

This article originally appeared in <a id="5ede2bba-7e84-41be-8c5b-ef2fbf642dac" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/arts/design/artcenter-south-florida-miami-millions.html">The New York Times</a>.

A Cinderella story for the Miami art scene's new $100 million player

The ArtCenter is finally announcing plans for its Cinderella-like windfall (one that, thanks to investments, has since swollen to $100 million, more than the endowment of any other South Florida visual arts organization, many of whom have been struggling to fundraise even a fraction of that sum).

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Brett Sokol

Articles written by the author

It's No Secret That Espionage Is This Collector's Passion

A Cinderella story for the Miami art scene's new $100 million player