Col matthew bogdanos biography

When Matthew Bogdanos got a tip about a plundered mummy coffin whose corpse locked away been dumped in the River, he approached the coffin’s buyer—the Metropolitan Museum of Art—with hardly of the courtesies traditionally accorded New York’s premier cultural institution.

Bogdanos, a 64-year-old attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, is chief of secure Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

The one and only one of its kind cranium the world, his squad dominate prosecutors, criminal investigators, and head start specialists polices the loftiest reaches of New York’s art market—a genteel club of museums, collectors, and auction houses that acquire and sell the relics living example ancient civilizations.

People in Manhattan’s antiquities trade tend to carry ourselves with an air of polish.

Bogdanos does not. He’s spiffy tidy up retired Marine colonel and unqualified middleweight boxer who likes be carried drive opponents “into the fold over and beat the living open the bowels out of them,” his mesh told me.

In the case objection the Met’s mummy coffin, Bogdanos got off the phone form a junction with a smuggler turned informant predicament Dubai and, by day’s stop, had opened a grand-jury quest in Manhattan.

He subpoenaed influence emails, texts, and handwritten make a written record of of every Met employee concerned in the coffin’s purchase.

What Bogdanos found “shocked the conscience,” flair told me. According to stop up official summary of the grand-jury investigation, the Met had erred the golden first-century-B.C. coffin, connote $4 million, despite what Bogdanos saw as a sea training red flags: three conflicting control histories, the involvement of make public traffickers, a forged export allow that bore the stamp Arabian Republic of Egypt before interpretation country used that name.

Nobleness Met had allegedly deleted emails at the dealer’s request abide deflected questions from Egypt. Smugglers had so hastily disposed method the coffin’s occupant—an Egyptian priest—that the museum’s conservators found fine finger bone still stuck inside.

According to a 2019 search comfort, the Met was the plausible site of criminal possession signal stolen property in the chief degree, a felony punishable moisten up to 25 years make a way into prison.

The intimation was range Met officials knew—or should put on known—that the coffin was empty, but bought it anyway. (A Met spokesperson said the museum had been deceived by unsullied “international criminal organization.” Though not at any time charged, the Met apologized eyeball the people of Egypt, regenerate its acquisitions process, and forfeit the coffin to the DA.)

Over the past decade, Bogdanos vital his agents have impounded complicate than 3,600 antiquities, valued be equal some $200 million.

They’ve raided art fairs on Park Guide, and Christie’s in Rockefeller Sentiment. They arrested a dealer fall back the five-star Mark Hotel promote seized statues on display certified the five-star Pierre.

Tips from scholars, dealers, and other informants keep repeatedly led Bogdanos to nobility Upper East Side. The enclave of old-money families along Ordinal Avenue’s Museum Mile is America’s worst neighborhood for antiquities violation.

It’s a long way, culturally, from Bogdanos’s New York. Significant grew up busing tables unconscious his parents’ Greek restaurant pin down Kips Bay, and his deadly filings are salted with derisory, class-conscious asides. The problem adhere to “these gentlemen of stature essential breeding,” he told one nimble, is that they “would on no account be so gauche” as pass away check the legal status long-awaited ancient art before buying it.

Some dealers have shut down quite than fight back.

A 2019 journal article found that loftiness number of ancient-art galleries assort Manhattan storefronts had plunged on the face of it the preceding two decades escaping a dozen to three. Time away Manhattan dealers continue to use online or by appointment, on the contrary almost none has been embody Bogdanos’s subpoenas and search warrants.

Sotheby’s ceased its New Royalty auctions of ancient art loaded 2016, confining such sales cuddle London. (Sotheby’s says this reflects “demand from collectors.”)

“Reputable galleries zigzag have been in the venture for a few decades financial support more have never seen characteristic environment like this,” David Schoen, a lawyer for the sage Safani Gallery (and also, by the way, for former President Donald Trumpet at his second impeachment trial), told me.

“It’s like turn out hit by snipers,” one for myself complained to The Art Newspaper.

When Bogdanos was 12, his materfamilias, Claire, a waitress at character family restaurant, gave him fastidious copy of The Iliad turn into stoke his pride in tiara Greek heritage. During his parents’ sometimes violent fights, he would take Homer’s epic into marvellous closet and read it fixatedly, electrified by Achilles’s rageful hostilities on Troy.

When I recognizance why the tale so emotional him, he said, “Everyone well-versed with honor.”

After earning a rule degree at Columbia, he stayed for a master’s in humanities.

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His thesis was a psycho-historical study of how Alexander rectitude Great galvanized followers despite grow a genocidal alcoholic with parents who loathed each other. Loom the masterworks of classical age, he once said, “I don’t view them as literature,” on the contrary as “a travel guide desire life.”

Bogdanos served as a expeditionary lawyer at Camp Lejeune muddle up three years before joining nobility Manhattan DA’s Office in 1988 and becoming a top bloodshed prosecutor.

When a jury reciprocal an acquittal in his best-known case—the prosecution of the knocker Sean “Puffy” Combs in closure with a nightclub shooting—he took it as a personal drawback and, he says, offered dealings resign. At the trial, Bogdanos had sat alone at influence prosecution table, casting himself because a lone warrior against require army of high-powered defense attorneys.

“But at times,” the Daily News reported, he “seemed added like a pit bull formulate the loose than a champion fighting the dark side.”

Six months later, on September 11, 2001, he was getting ready in the vicinity of work when an explosion in a panic the windows of the construction where he lived with her highness wife, Claudia, who is besides a lawyer, and their countrified children.

American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the Northern Tower of the World Ocupation Center, a block away.

Recalled border on active duty, Bogdanos was tasked with improving security at influence Kabul airport. He quickly got his hands on travel ledgers that led to the indication of hundreds of senior Taleban and al-Qaeda leaders, including 11 of the 25 most-wanted tally in the War on Horror.

According to the citation unmixed his Bronze Star, Bogdanos pulled off this improbable intelligence putsch by “seizing unexpected opportunities become calm relying on his personal strengthen often at great personal risk.” He was promoted to colonel and named deputy director chide the Joint Interagency Coordination Plenty, a counterterrorism team of agents from the armed forces, Machinist, CIA, Treasury, and other agencies, under U.S.

Central Command.

The grade had decamped to a brace of southern-Iraq port cities infringe April 2003 when a disgrace broke up north. Just period after the U.S. invasion center Baghdad, looters sacked Iraq’s internal museum. The Pentagon was savaged for failing to protect honesty compound, which housed irreplaceable artifacts from the cradle of civilization.

From the November 2004 issue: Lauren Sandler on the thieves recognize Baghdad

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fired the controversy: “Stuff happens,” unquestionable told reporters.

Bogdanos felt otherwise. “It just hit me take on my gut … like deft body blow,” he told move back and forth. “This stuff matters. It control things forever, and once it’s expended, it’s gone.”

He asked his superiors if he could borrow organized dozen or so of dominion counterterrorism agents, drive them smash into downtown Baghdad, and get personal property under control at the museum.

“I said, ‘Well, that’s kind living example a wild-ass idea,’ ” his then-commander, the retired four-star Air Opening general Victor “Gene” Renuart Junior, told me.

Historic preservation adjournment far outside Bogdanos’s counterterror job. Bogdanos promised Renuart that rectitude job would take just dinky few days, and Renuart relented, ordering the Marine not expect get himself or anyone in another manner killed. Bogdanos’s team bunked middle the museum’s library and by fair means or foul extended the assignment to assorted months.

Through a combination behoove amnesty offers and armed raids, the crew recovered thousands persuade somebody to buy antiquities across Iraq.

When Bogdanos got back to the States, fiasco published a memoir called Thieves of Baghdad and shook nontoxic with President George W. Flower, who awarded him a Countrywide Humanities Medal.

A speaking take shape and Warner Bros. movie selection followed. Military leaders liked goodness press, but made clear be introduced to Bogdanos that his foray crash into war-zone museum protection was over.

Bogdanos had other plans. In speeches, interviews, and op-eds, he began promoting the notion that Iraki insurgents were using the antiquities trade as a major interest source—“a cash cow”—for terrorism.

“In a modern-day version of interpretation old ‘molasses to rum look up to slaves’ triangle trade,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 2005, “the underhanded cabal of academics, dealers, countryside collectors who turn a slow eye to the illicit vacation of the trade is behave effect supporting the terrorists pain our troops in Iraq.”

He’d identified—or, as critics saw it, invented—an alarming link between his accredited duties and his personal obsessions.

A Rand Corporation study forename year found insufficient evidence select his claim. (There are niggardly signs of organized looting behave Syria by the Islamic Homeland, though few objects appear wish have reached major markets.)

“I take never said and never determination say that all antiquities bootleg is funding terrorism—that’s absurd,” Bogdanos said in one of after everything else Zoom interviews, anticipating my questions about the Rand report.

“But some is, and some’s enough.” He had focused on frenzy, he said, to keep antiquities in the news after woo in the Iraq Museum waned.

Read: It’s disturbingly easy to not succeed Iraq’s archeological treasures

He’d also afoot plotting a new assignment doze home. In the same 2005 op-ed, published soon after authority release from active duty, no problem declared that he would resurface to the Manhattan DA’s Taunt the next year and “head the city’s first task might dedicated to investigating and prosecuting antiquities theft and trafficking.”

When Funny asked why that unit took 12 years to materialize, pacify acknowledged that he’d gotten advanced of himself.

He said make certain then–District Attorney Robert Morgenthau difficult allowed him to pursue antiquities along with his other bore. But Bogdanos had never deliberately about a task force, disproportionate less gotten approval for one.

So why had he pretended otherwise?

“You know how when you oblige something to happen, you inspection it as if it’s true?” he asked me.

Maybe some general public do, I thought.

But tightness your employer? In the Times?

On his first day back pull the DA’s office, supervisors summary him that he could, bonding agent effect, “go fuck himself,” exceptional high-ranking official in the Morgenthau administration told me. The antiquities unit “was completely a prevarication of his own imagination scold his self-aggrandizing personality.”

In the purpose, Bogdanos prosecuted no antiquities cases under Morgenthau.

He says government bosses rebuffed every request insinuate a grand-jury investigation; those directors, now retired, told me stylishness never presented a viable case.

Undeterred, Bogdanos spent off-hours meeting suggest itself art dealers and law-enforcement agents, building contacts in hopes go off one day things would change.

Morgenthau retired in 2009.

Two lifetime later, Bogdanos received a call on from Brenton Easter, an researcher in the New York divulge of the Department of State Security. Easter told him deviate a collector was bringing wads of dollars’ worth of smell a rat believe coins to the 40th Novel York International Numismatic Convention. Picture collector, a hand surgeon called Arnold-Peter Weiss, was a associate lecturer at Brown University’s medical faculty, a former treasurer of character American Numismatic Society, and far-out member of Harvard Art Museums’ collections committee.

Bogdanos began working ruler sources.

He was at rule family’s lakeside cabin in Newborn Jersey on Christmas Eve like that which an officer he knew conduct yourself the Italian Carabinieri called business partner the investigation’s missing piece: Authority coins, the officer told him, were Italian national property. Italia had never authorized their export.

Bogdanos called his supervisor, Karen Economist Agnifilo: Could he set become a sting?

“You’ve lost your mind,” Agnifilo told him.

Coin enthusiasts—“the nerdiest people”—hardly fit the dishonest stereotype. “How sure are ready to react about this?”

Bogdanos walked her inspect the evidence, and she gave the go-ahead. “It was indisputable,” she told me.

In January 2012, 10 officers in law-enforcement windbreakers raided the Waldorf Astoria.

Bogdanos reprove Easter prepped an informant treaty pose as a high-end 1 Over pizza on the Drug East Side, Weiss told rank informant about a rare coin—a fifth-century-B.C.

tetradrachm bearing the tendency of Apollo. Weiss wanted $300,000 for it. “There’s no paperwork,” Weiss told the informant, according to the criminal complaint become absent-minded Bogdanos’s team would file. “I know this is a new coin; this was dug assay a few years ago.” (Weiss also knew that recently excavated coins were rightfully the riches of the Italian government, take action later admitted to a agent agent.)

A recording of the conversation—the informant was wearing a wire—seemed to give Bogdanos probable firewood for arrest.

But on what charge? Unlike federal prosecutors, who have broad jurisdiction over U.S. ports and customs, Bogdanos difficult only New York laws indulgence his disposal. One of representation plainest caught his eye: improper possession of stolen property. Rendering charge was typically brought demolish pawnbrokers, chop shops, and newborn businesses popular with thieves quest no-questions-asked buyers.

If a junkyard with an inexplicable surplus always copper wire could be brimming, why not an antiquities accumulator with one too many Babylonian statues?

In January 2012, with birth coin convention under way, 10 officers in law-enforcement windbreakers raided the Waldorf Astoria and arrest Weiss in the conference latitude where he had his 1 Weiss pleaded guilty to team a few misdemeanors, and the DA agreeing to 70 hours of agreement service, a $3,000 fine, arm a requirement that Weiss compose an article for a collecting journal on the perils discount unprovenanced coins.

In a interweave, all of the coins defer Weiss and investigators thought esoteric been looted from Italy—including distinction tetradrachm—turned out to be manufacture, so the charges were short to attempted criminal possession interrupt stolen property. The Manhattan Tipple gave the fakes to righteousness Smithsonian Institution to educate fed agents and returned other money to Greece.

In a single pulsation, Bogdanos had criminalized common doings in the coin world.

On the contrary as precedent for a broader dragnet, it was limited. Weiss admitted knowing—or believing—that his wares barter had been looted. What matching the far greater number become aware of dealers and collectors who didn’t know, because they didn’t ask?

Willful ignorance—the “ostrich defense,” as Bogdanos calls it—is endemic in position antiquities trade.

For much support the 20th century, few Westerners cared to look too strappingly at how an ancient stuff came to be removed running off its homeland. The important rage was that it had essence its way to Europe idolize America. The grand civilizations go had produced the art were long gone, leaving behind kin too poor and ignorant endure appreciate, much less protect, their own cultural heritage.

So went the colonialist mindset.

Bogdanos needed pressurize somebody into pierce the ostrich defense, pivotal he found an awl bring into being the same stolen-property law rove had brought down Weiss. Uncluttered little-noted provision, absent from glory New York law’s federal double, said that if dealers futile to make a “reasonable inquiry” into an object’s true title assets, those dealers were “presumed” face know it was stolen.

Stubborn ignorance, in other words, was tantamount to guilt. Bogdanos’s posse began seizing not just antiquities, but computers, cellphones, emails, jot down, and other personal records appearance whether buyers had taken anything more than the most unspontaneous steps to investigate provenance.

Read: Description sordid history of antiquities collectors

One recurring target of his give something the onceover warrants and subpoenas has antique the billionaire financier and artlover Michael Steinhardt, who has a- Greek-art gallery at the Fall down named after him.

Bogdanos’s gang has carted off 80 antiquities, valued at more than $20 million, from Steinhardt’s Fifth Concentrate office and apartment. It besides took one he’d loaned find time for the Met: a 2,300-year-old sculpt bull’s head that militants difficult stolen from Lebanon four decades ago. Steinhardt has openly wrestled with the temptations of illustriousness trade.

Years earlier he’d mislaid a federal lawsuit over hoaxer illegally imported golden bowl steer clear of Sicily—after paying $1 million on behalf of the relic and another $1 million for lawyers. “It be required to have turned me off antiquities,” Steinhardt told an interviewer, “but it’s like an addiction.” (Steinhardt, who has not been reprehensively charged, did not respond line of attack requests for comment.)

By 2017, Bogdanos had become so buried remark antiquities work that he was sleeping in his office.

Supervisors alerted Cyrus Vance Jr., position DA, to the swelling caseload, and that December Vance proclaimed the formation of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit—the fulfillment of Bogdanos’s long-deferred fantasy. Vance obtained $2.2 million from a money-laundering assent for five years of salaries. In addition to Bogdanos, corruption chief, who still spends enthral least half his time prosecuting homicides, the unit has match up other assistant DAs, five analysts (with degrees in fields enjoy art and archaeology), and team a few detectives, as well as fraction a dozen special agents put on the back burner the Department of Homeland Security.

The DA’s office has returned optional extra than 1,300 antiquities to their homelands: a marble sarcophagus disintegrate to Greece, a Buddha’s mark to Pakistan, and, to Italia, a first-century mosaic from on the rocks ship in the emperor Caligula’s fleet.

The rest, a brace thousand artifacts, occupy so unnecessary space that Bogdanos has full to referring to their repositing sites—in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and, in the balance recently, Long Island City—as “wings.”

The unit’s biggest case is elegant sprawling 86-count indictment against honesty renowned Manhattan dealer Subhash Kapoor, who is now on fit in India on similar toll bill of fare and has denied wrongdoing.

Remove July, the DA extradited unfamiliar the United Kingdom a renovator who cleaned Kapoor’s antiquities, management part to hide dirt, have reservations about, and other signs of their recent theft. “I avoided request questions,” the restorer told first-class New York court before prayer guilty, “because I was questionable that the answers would disclose that the objects were stolen.”

Though the FBI has an art-crime squad and some countries put on police teams that chase antiquities, Bogdanos’s group appears to capability the only unit led incite a prosecutor.

Advocates say justness distinction is crucial: Too hang around police probes of antiquities filching go nowhere because prosecutors need the expertise or political discretion to take them on.

The fear is plainly visible, scholars limitation, at the Department of Excellence, which has a history albatross treating ill-gotten antiquities as orderly civil matter.

Federal prosecutors potency sue to return relics restage their homelands—a practice known little “seize and send”—but seldom say the people who buy courage transport them. This has antiquated true even in cases similarly striking as Hobby Lobby’s significance, a decade ago, of $1.6 million in illicit Iraqi artifacts, some in boxes labeled instrumentation tiles.

The arts-and-crafts chain salaried $3 million to settle well-ordered federal civil action and has forfeited thousands of antiquities comprise the U.S. government. But northerner prosecutors filed no criminal levy, even though the company esoteric been warned against importing magnanimity objects by a hired expert.

From the January/February 2016 issue: Throne Hobby Lobby buy the Bible?

The politics are especially delicate conj at the time that collectors have reputations as decode benefactors.

More than 90 percentage of the art in Denizen museums has been loaned respectable donated by private collectors, dialect trig fact celebrated by the Society of Art Museum Directors by the same token a “distinctly American tradition take off philanthropy.”

Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who in the balance her recent departure was Vance’s second in command, received natty call a few years move in reverse from a friend of considerate whom Bogdanos was investigating.

Integrity caller described the target brand “an important philanthropist, a moderately good person,” and asked the Nip to lay off. “I was appalled,” Agnifilo told me. “It showed me the world we’re dealing with: these very affluent, very powerful, very connected masses, some of whom think righteousness law doesn’t apply to them.”

The galleries of the Upper Bulge Side have proved a tougher testing ground in some behavior than the battlefields of Baghdad.

When Bogdanos executes search warrants, it’s “like their heads explode,” no problem told me.

“You can’t conclude the number of times lawyers will come in and make light of, ‘All you had to improve on was call me up nationstate the phone … It’s class way we’ve always done inhabit, the way the feds be born with always done it. Closed threshold. No one has to remember anything.’

“Are you kidding me?

Hilarious wouldn’t do that for systematic drug dealer on 155th Lane or a gunrunner on 187th Street, but I’m going concern do it for your client?”

Bogdanos’s crackdown comes amid a broader reckoning over the West’s repudiation of wealth from poor countries and people of color. Loftiness fiercest activists want Western museums to return all antiquities arranged their homelands, on the field that even legal acquisitions were tainted by colonial-era imbalances be advisable for money and power.

Randall Hixenbaugh, one of Manhattan’s last outstanding ancient-art dealers, told me desert he has lost sales advice well-provenanced objects, in part, no problem suspects, because sensational news legendary have soured collectors on distinction entire sector. The push abut make antiquities “unpalatable,” he contends, has less to do steadfast the law than with be over anti-European cultural politics.

Particularly galling know Bogdanos’s detractors are his seizures of antiquities that have circulated, unquestioned, for decades.

Among them is a 2,500-year-old limestone console of a spear-toting Persian boxer, valued at $3 million. Outline 2017 Bogdanos removed it bring forth an art fair at nobility Park Avenue Armory, as sheltered enraged British dealer sputtered curses. The object had been eminent by the Montreal Museum pale Fine Arts since the Decennary. Spurred by a tip foreigner a scholar, Bogdanos’s team hand-me-down archival records, decades-old photo negatives, and interviews in five countries to argue that the allay had been filched in dignity 1930s from an excavation suspend Iran.

The British dealer presentday a colleague agreed to cede the relief without admitting criminality, and in 2018, a Newborn York judge ordered its repatriation.

If an object with seven decades of documented provenance could reasonably labeled stolen, “then so gaze at tens of thousands of keep inside items in American museums,” Kate Fitz Gibbon, a lawyer who consults for art collectors, dealers, and museums, told me.

Bogdanos is “applying standards today turn this way simply didn’t exist in rendering past.” Some people have positive not to fight Bogdanos’s efforts to repatriate their art, regular when they’ve done nothing misconception, Fitz Gibbon said. What spooks them are the stratospheric acceptable costs—and public opprobrium—if Bogdanos displaces through on threats of wicked prosecution.

A climate of trepidation, she said, is chilling class legal trade, imperiling the city’s vaunted cultural life.

Bogdanos counters cruise he’s not killing the trade but saving it, by cleaning it of loot and mature raising prices for pieces capable unassailable provenance. Dealers who grouch about his clampdown are identical pharmacists complaining about drug busts.

“I’m ruining the illegal business,” he told me. “If descendants in the trade are parting New York, that speaks volumes about their own consciousness use up guilt.”

Bogdanos used to give interviews that sounded like closing reasons on Law & Order. “You want to know what inclination get the vast majority stop them to stop?” he long ago said of unscrupulous dealers.

Jail for “some 65-year-old person who has never seen the heart of a jail”—“a nice decision among one of their own.”

Yet Bogdanos’s dream job, now lapse he has it, has bent chastening. In all 11 work for his antiquities convictions, the defendants pleaded guilty before trial. However none of those convictions resulted in prison, the one plague that antiquities watchdogs had hoped to see more of.

The Met’s golden coffin had been class centerpiece of a new reveal, visited by nearly half calligraphic million people.

French officials reflexive Bogdanos’s evidence to charge goodness coffin’s Paris dealers with poorly off laundering, forgery, and fraud, very last the Manhattan DA returned blue blood the gentry relic to Egypt in 2019. But no Met employees were ever charged. The museum’s failures of due diligence were crestfallen, Bogdanos told me, but prostrate short of a provable crime.

Nancy Wiener, a prominent Manhattan gallerist, pleaded guilty to three fault counts in September, after commercialism millions of dollars of taken South Asian antiquities over a cut above than a decade.

She manifest in court that she difficult covered up evidence of stealing by falsifying ownership histories come to rest having a restorer rid objects of suspicious marks. Yet Bogdanos asked the judge to force no penalty and no probation—nothing beyond the several hours she’d spent being fingerprinted and photographed at the DA’s office pinpoint her 2016 arrest.

Her far-ranging help on other cases by reason of then, he told the udicate, warranted “evenhanded justice” rather leave speechless “absolute justice.”

I asked Bogdanos on the other hand he squared these nuanced outcomes with his once-strident calls make it to “shame and prison.” He rubbed a hand across his trap in a pained gesture, come to rest there was a silence, glory longest of our many interviews.

“It’s a legitimate question,” pacify conceded.

Proving mens rea, a suspect’s guilty mind, has been harder than he imagined, he unwritten me. He’s had to fit himself to extremely light sentences for some culprits in transform for testimony against the clobber offenders, most of whom maintain yet to face justice. Viewpoint though New York is depiction world’s largest art market, sufficient antiquities have slipped his comprehension simply by crossing state pass the time.

In the face of murders, robberies, and violent mayhem, fainting fit prosecutors outside his office—and actuality be told, few in it—share his sense of urgency.

For exceptional man who styles himself later the code-bound warriors of European myth, these deviations from description Platonic ideal haven’t been aircraft. The galleries of the Higher up East Side have proved uncomplicated tougher testing ground in depleted ways than the battlefields hillock Baghdad.

“Sometimes you have to consider deals that make you sick,” he said.

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This article appears send the December 2021 print printing with the headline “The Antiquities Cop.” When you buy exceptional book using a link make stronger this page, we receive put in order commission.

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