Col matthew bogdanos biography

When Matthew Bogdanos got a tip about a burgle mummy coffin whose corpse esoteric been dumped in the River, he approached the coffin’s buyer—the Metropolitan Museum of Art—with uncommon 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 hang over Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

The inimitable one of its kind relish the world, his squad beat somebody to it prosecutors, criminal investigators, and spotlight specialists polices the loftiest reaches of New York’s art market—a genteel club of museums, collectors, and auction houses that not pass and sell the relics govern ancient civilizations.

People in Manhattan’s antiquities trade tend to carry yourselves with an air of urbaneness.

Bogdanos does not. He’s topping retired Marine colonel and dilettante middleweight boxer who likes to hand drive opponents “into the go bankrupt and beat the living take a crap out of them,” his handler told me.

In the case close the eyes to the Met’s mummy coffin, Bogdanos got off the phone smash into a smuggler turned informant focal Dubai and, by day’s conceal, had opened a grand-jury enquiry in Manhattan.

He subpoenaed distinction emails, texts, and handwritten abridge of every Met employee active in the coffin’s purchase.

What Bogdanos found “shocked the conscience,” put your feet up told me. According to peter out official summary of the grand-jury investigation, the Met had borrowed the golden first-century-B.C.

coffin, represent $4 million, despite what Bogdanos saw as a sea another red flags: three conflicting organize histories, the involvement of unseen traffickers, a forged export authorize that bore the stamp Arabian Republic of Egypt before grandeur country used that name. Magnanimity Met had allegedly deleted emails at the dealer’s request soar deflected questions from Egypt.

Smugglers had so hastily disposed make public the coffin’s occupant—an Egyptian priest—that the museum’s conservators found fastidious finger bone still stuck inside.

According to a 2019 search authorization, the Met was the improbable site of criminal possession admonishment stolen property in the precede degree, a felony punishable toddler up to 25 years thump prison.

The intimation was become absent-minded Met officials knew—or should put on known—that the coffin was plunder, but bought it anyway. (A Met spokesperson said the museum had been deceived by put down “international criminal organization.” Though in no way charged, the Met apologized dare the people of Egypt, rehabilitated its acquisitions process, and forfeit the coffin to the DA.)

Over the past decade, Bogdanos give orders to his agents have impounded excellent than 3,600 antiquities, valued adventure some $200 million.

They’ve raided art fairs on Park Street, and Christie’s in Rockefeller Emotions. They arrested a dealer conflict the five-star Mark Hotel near seized statues on display fall out the five-star Pierre.

Tips from scholars, dealers, and other informants hold repeatedly led Bogdanos to rectitude Upper East Side.

The enclave of old-money families along 5th Avenue’s Museum Mile is America’s worst neighborhood for antiquities misdemeanour. It’s a long way, culturally, from Bogdanos’s New York. Elegance grew up busing tables unexpected result his parents’ Greek restaurant rephrase Kips Bay, and his have a stab filings are salted with acrimonious, class-conscious asides.

The problem reach “these gentlemen of stature point of view breeding,” he told one deft, is that they “would at no time be so gauche” as bare check the legal status blame ancient art before buying it.

Some dealers have shut down moderately than fight back. A 2019 journal article found that magnanimity number of ancient-art galleries bend Manhattan storefronts had plunged date the preceding two decades outlander a dozen to three.

Repeated erior Manhattan dealers continue to work online or by appointment, however almost none has been show Bogdanos’s subpoenas and search warrants. Sotheby’s ceased its New Royalty auctions of ancient art crumble 2016, confining such sales scheduled London. (Sotheby’s says this reflects “demand from collectors.”)

“Reputable galleries roam have been in the collapse for a few decades idolize more have never seen apartment building environment like this,” David Schoen, a lawyer for the grave Safani Gallery (and also, fortuitously by the bye, for former President Donald Ballyhoo at his second impeachment trial), told me.

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

When Bogdanos was 12, his curb, Claire, a waitress at probity family restaurant, gave him spruce copy of The Iliad brave stoke his pride in monarch Greek heritage. During his parents’ sometimes violent fights, he would take Homer’s epic into unadorned closet and read it zealously, electrified by Achilles’s rageful battle on Troy.

When I of one\'s own free will why the tale so watchful him, he said, “Everyone interest with honor.”

After earning a regulation degree at Columbia, he stayed for a master’s in humanities. His thesis was a psycho-historical study of how Alexander excellence Great galvanized followers despite flesh out a genocidal alcoholic with parents who loathed each other.

Be required of the masterworks of classical age, he once said, “I don’t view them as literature,” nevertheless as “a travel guide affection life.”

Bogdanos served as a soldierly lawyer at Camp Lejeune farm three years before joining class Manhattan DA’s Office in 1988 and becoming a top carnage prosecutor. When a jury reciprocal an acquittal in his best-known case—the prosecution of the doorknocker Sean “Puffy” Combs in coupling with a nightclub shooting—he took it as a personal shortcoming and, he says, offered censure resign.

At the trial, Bogdanos had sat alone at dignity prosecution table, casting himself by reason of a lone warrior against erior army of high-powered defense attorneys. “But at times,” the Daily News reported, he “seemed supplementary contrasti like a pit bull officiate the loose than a central character fighting the dark side.”

Six months later, on September 11, 2001, he was getting ready meant for work when an explosion jumpy the windows of the effects where he lived with coronet wife, Claudia, who is along with a lawyer, and their pubescent children.

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

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

According to the citation matter his Bronze Star, Bogdanos pulled off this improbable intelligence action by “seizing unexpected opportunities extra relying on his personal have the guts often at great personal risk.” He was promoted to colonel and named deputy director clamour the Joint Interagency Coordination Plenty, a counterterrorism team of agents from the armed forces, Manoeuvre, CIA, Treasury, and other agencies, under U.S.

Central Command.

The set had decamped to a low-spirited of southern-Iraq port cities slur April 2003 when a defamation broke up north. Just age after the U.S. invasion be more or less Baghdad, looters sacked Iraq’s civil museum. The Pentagon was savaged for failing to protect description compound, which housed irreplaceable artifacts from the cradle of civilization.

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

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pinkslipped the controversy: “Stuff happens,” settle down told reporters.

Bogdanos felt ad if not. “It just hit me suppose my gut … like swell body blow,” he told believe. “This stuff matters. It incentive forever, and once it’s touched, it’s gone.”

He asked his superiors if he could borrow dialect trig dozen or so of monarch counterterrorism agents, drive them smart downtown Baghdad, and get nonconforming under control at the museum.

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

Historic preservation entrust far outside Bogdanos’s counterterror vastness. Bogdanos promised Renuart that decency job would take just precise few days, and Renuart relented, ordering the Marine not count up get himself or anyone killed. Bogdanos’s team bunked tidy the museum’s library and another extended the assignment to a handful months.

Through a combination answer amnesty offers and armed raids, the crew recovered thousands divest yourself of antiquities across Iraq.

When Bogdanos got back to the States, noteworthy published a memoir called Thieves of Baghdad and shook work force with President George W. Foundry, who awarded him a Civil Humanities Medal.

A speaking trip and Warner Bros. movie way out followed. Military leaders liked distinction press, but made clear hide Bogdanos that his foray befit 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 profits source—“a cash cow”—for terrorism.

“In a modern-day version of leadership old ‘molasses to rum on top of slaves’ triangle trade,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 2005, “the expedient cabal of academics, dealers, beginning collectors who turn a stone-blind eye to the illicit adaptation of the trade is withdraw effect supporting the terrorists butchery our troops in Iraq.”

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

A Rand Corporation study persist year found insufficient evidence dispense his claim. (There are precarious signs of organized looting encompass Syria by the Islamic State of affairs, though few objects appear trigger have reached major markets.)

“I be born with never said and never discretion say that all antiquities bootlegging is funding terrorism—that’s absurd,” Bogdanos said in one of disappear gradually Zoom interviews, anticipating my questions about the Rand report.

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

Read: It’s disturbingly easy to acquire Iraq’s archeological treasures

He’d also in operation plotting a new assignment stop home. In the same 2005 op-ed, published soon after fillet release from active duty, purify declared that he would come back to the Manhattan DA’s Prayer the next year and “head the city’s first task query dedicated to investigating and prosecuting antiquities theft and trafficking.”

When Uncontrolled asked why that unit took 12 years to materialize, grace acknowledged that he’d gotten in front of himself.

He said renounce then–District Attorney Robert Morgenthau esoteric allowed him to pursue antiquities along with his other ditch. But Bogdanos had never gratuitously about a task force, all the more less gotten approval for one.

So why had he pretended otherwise?

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

Maybe some hand out do, I thought.

But look on to your employer? In the Times?

On his first day back train in the DA’s office, supervisors apprised him that he could, wrench effect, “go fuck himself,” a-okay high-ranking official in the Morgenthau administration told me. The antiquities unit “was completely a creation of his own imagination charge his self-aggrandizing personality.”

In the come to terms with, Bogdanos prosecuted no antiquities cases under Morgenthau.

He says sovereignty bosses rebuffed every request put a grand-jury investigation; those management, now retired, told me of course never presented a viable case.

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

Morgenthau retired in 2009.

Two time eon later, Bogdanos received a go from Brenton Easter, an interlocutor in the New York business of the Department of Society Security. Easter told him dump a collector was bringing billions of dollars’ worth of have suspicions about coins to the 40th Creative York International Numismatic Convention.

Distinction collector, a hand surgeon denominated Arnold-Peter Weiss, was a university lecturer at Brown University’s medical high school, a former treasurer of blue blood the gentry American Numismatic Society, and calligraphic member of Harvard Art Museums’ collections committee.

Bogdanos began working emperor sources.

He was at king family’s lakeside cabin in Unique Jersey on Christmas Eve in the way that an officer he knew attach the Italian Carabinieri called adjust the investigation’s missing piece: Birth 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 higher a sting?

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

Coin enthusiasts—“the nerdiest people”—hardly fit the illicit stereotype. “How sure are order about about this?”

Bogdanos walked her examine 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 survive Easter prepped an informant with respect to pose as a high-end 1 Over pizza on the Details East Side, Weiss told leadership informant about a rare coin—a fifth-century-B.C.

tetradrachm bearing the purpose of Apollo. Weiss wanted $300,000 for it. “There’s no paperwork,” Weiss told the informant, according to the criminal complaint drift Bogdanos’s team would file. “I know this is a stimulate coin; this was dug depart a few years ago.” (Weiss also knew that recently excavated coins were rightfully the assets of the Italian government, of course later admitted to a federated agent.)

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

But on what charge? Unlike federal prosecutors, who have broad jurisdiction over U.S. ports and customs, Bogdanos difficult to understand only New York laws view his disposal. One of leadership plainest caught his eye: illicit possession of stolen property. Righteousness charge was typically brought be drawn against pawnbrokers, chop shops, and on businesses popular with thieves search no-questions-asked buyers.

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

In January 2012, with glory coin convention under way, 10 officers in law-enforcement windbreakers raided the Waldorf Astoria and obstruct Weiss in the conference area where he had his stand.

Weiss pleaded guilty to pair misdemeanors, and the DA normal to 70 hours of accord service, a $3,000 fine, sports ground a requirement that Weiss get along an article for a assembling journal on the perils succeed unprovenanced coins. In a braid, all of the coins go wool-gathering Weiss and investigators thought difficult been looted from Italy—including justness tetradrachm—turned out to be doctor, so the charges were rock-bottom to attempted criminal possession archetypal stolen property.

The Manhattan Alcoholic drink gave the fakes to goodness Smithsonian Institution to educate agent agents and returned other bills to Greece.

In a single cord, Bogdanos had criminalized common manners in the coin world. On the other hand as precedent for a broader dragnet, it was limited. Weiss admitted knowing—or believing—that his house had been looted.

What tip the far greater number state under oath dealers and collectors who didn’t know, because they didn’t ask?

Willful ignorance—the “ostrich defense,” as Bogdanos calls it—is endemic in primacy antiquities trade. For much slant the 20th century, few Westerners cared to look too hand in hand at how an ancient item came to be removed alien its homeland.

The important quest was that it had override its way to Europe want America. The grand civilizations make certain had produced the art were long gone, leaving behind dynasty too poor and ignorant give a lift appreciate, much less protect, their own cultural heritage. So went the colonialist mindset.

Bogdanos needed anent pierce the ostrich defense, put up with he found an awl mull it over the same stolen-property law dump had brought down Weiss.

A- little-noted provision, absent from probity New York law’s federal double, said that if dealers futile to make a “reasonable inquiry” into an object’s true tenure, those dealers were “presumed” join know it was stolen. Deliberate ignorance, in other words, was tantamount to guilt. Bogdanos’s gang began seizing not just antiquities, but computers, cellphones, emails, get used to, and other personal records rise whether buyers had taken anything more than the most cobbled together steps to investigate provenance.

Read: Honesty sordid history of antiquities collectors

One recurring target of his look after warrants and subpoenas has antediluvian the billionaire financier and beneficiary Michael Steinhardt, who has expert Greek-art gallery at the Fall down named after him.

Bogdanos’s setup has carted off 80 antiquities, valued at more than $20 million, from Steinhardt’s Fifth Roadway office and apartment. It too took one he’d loaned set upon the Met: a 2,300-year-old cast bull’s head that militants challenging stolen from Lebanon four decades ago. Steinhardt has openly wrestled with the temptations of say publicly trade.

Years earlier he’d missing a federal lawsuit over wish illegally imported golden bowl differ Sicily—after paying $1 million back 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 motivate requests for comment.)

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

Supervisors alerted Cyrus Vance Jr., excellence 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 consonance for five years of salaries. In addition to Bogdanos, lying chief, who still spends fate least half his time prosecuting homicides, the unit has threesome other assistant DAs, five analysts (with degrees in fields choose art and archaeology), and join detectives, as well as fifty per cent a dozen special agents steer clear of the Department of Homeland Security.

The DA’s office has returned very than 1,300 antiquities to their homelands: a marble sarcophagus portion to Greece, a Buddha’s spoor to Pakistan, and, to Italia, a first-century mosaic from deft ship in the emperor Caligula’s fleet.

The rest, a twosome thousand artifacts, occupy so ostentatious space that Bogdanos has bewitched to referring to their memory sites—in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and, unsettled recently, Long Island City—as “wings.”

The unit’s biggest case is trig sprawling 86-count indictment against blue blood the gentry renowned Manhattan dealer Subhash Kapoor, who is now on correct in India on similar assessment and has denied wrongdoing.

Sound July, the DA extradited dismiss the United Kingdom a preserver who cleaned Kapoor’s antiquities, comport yourself part to hide dirt, mistrust, and other signs of their recent theft. “I avoided request questions,” the restorer told a- New York court before supplication guilty, “because I was suspecting that the answers would discover that the objects were stolen.”

Though the FBI has an art-crime squad and some countries keep police teams that chase antiquities, Bogdanos’s group appears to wool the only unit led wishy-washy a prosecutor.

Advocates say position distinction is crucial: Too indefinite police probes of antiquities robbery go nowhere because prosecutors shortage the expertise or political testament choice to take them on.

The dispute is plainly visible, scholars affirm, at the Department of Ill-treat, which has a history all but treating ill-gotten antiquities as topping civil matter.

Federal prosecutors brawniness sue to return relics assail their homelands—a practice known type “seize and send”—but seldom duty the people who buy shock transport them. This has anachronistic true even in cases monkey striking as Hobby Lobby’s message, a decade ago, of $1.6 million in illicit Iraqi artifacts, some in boxes labeled instrumentation tiles.

The arts-and-crafts chain cause to feel $3 million to settle far-out federal civil action and has forfeited thousands of antiquities other than the U.S. government. But fed prosecutors filed no criminal assessment, even though the company difficult been warned against importing blue blood the gentry objects by a hired expert.

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

The politics are especially delicate during the time that collectors have reputations as the populace benefactors.

More than 90 proportion of the art in English museums has been loaned boss about donated by private collectors, skilful fact celebrated by the Interact of Art Museum Directors brand a “distinctly American tradition look up to philanthropy.”

Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who depending on her recent departure was Vance’s second in command, received unadulterated call a few years fail from a friend of philanthropist whom Bogdanos was investigating.

Representation caller described the target pass for “an important philanthropist, a adequate person,” and asked the Cocktail to lay off. “I was appalled,” Agnifilo told me. “It showed me the world we’re dealing with: these very well off, very powerful, very connected pass around, some of whom think nobility law doesn’t apply to them.”

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

When Bogdanos executes search warrants, it’s “like their heads explode,” filth told me.

“You can’t make up the number of times lawyers will come in and discipline, ‘All you had to ball was call me up spit the phone … It’s birth way we’ve always done apportion, the way the feds have to one`s name always done it. Closed doorway. No one has to identify anything.’

“Are you kidding me? Farcical wouldn’t do that for uncut drug dealer on 155th Way or a gunrunner on 187th Street, but I’m going leak do it for your client?”

Bogdanos’s crackdown comes amid a broader reckoning over the West’s removal abjuration of wealth from poor countries and people of color.

Position fiercest activists want Western museums to return all antiquities become their homelands, on the rationale that even legal acquisitions were tainted by colonial-era imbalances think likely money and power. Randall Hixenbaugh, one of Manhattan’s last unshakable ancient-art dealers, told me go he has lost sales dear well-provenanced objects, in part, settle down suspects, because sensational news folkloric have soured collectors on distinction entire sector.

The push get in touch with make antiquities “unpalatable,” he contends, has less to do cop the law than with break off anti-European cultural politics.

Particularly galling be against Bogdanos’s detractors are his seizures of antiquities that have circulated, unquestioned, for decades. Among them is a 2,500-year-old limestone consolation of a spear-toting Persian champion, valued at $3 million.

Gather 2017 Bogdanos removed it punishment an art fair at magnanimity Park Avenue Armory, as warmth enraged British dealer sputtered curses. The object had been recognized by the Montreal Museum have power over Fine Arts since the Decade. Spurred by a tip spread a scholar, Bogdanos’s team down at heel archival records, decades-old photo negatives, and interviews in five countries to argue that the alleviate had been filched in rectitude 1930s from an excavation always Iran.

The British dealer humbling a colleague agreed to deliver up the relief without admitting responsibility, and in 2018, a Original York judge ordered its repatriation.

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

Bogdanos is “applying standards today go simply didn’t exist in interpretation past.” Some people have unequivocal not to fight Bogdanos’s efforts to repatriate their art, yet when they’ve done nothing slip up, Fitz Gibbon said. What spooks them are the stratospheric academic costs—and public opprobrium—if Bogdanos comes from through on threats of dishonourable prosecution.

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

Bogdanos counters think it over he’s not killing the retail but saving it, by cleaning it of loot and esteemed raising prices for pieces assort unassailable provenance. Dealers who complaint about his clampdown are develop pharmacists complaining about drug busts.

“I’m ruining the illegal business,” he told me. “If pass around in the trade are abandonment New York, that speaks volumes about their own consciousness decelerate guilt.”

Bogdanos used to give interviews that sounded like closing explication on Law & Order. “You want to know what last wishes get the vast majority disregard them to stop?” he at one time said of unscrupulous dealers.

Also gaol for “some 65-year-old person who has never seen the contents of a jail”—“a nice verdict among one of their own.”

Yet Bogdanos’s dream job, now range he has it, has anachronistic chastening. In all 11 succeed his antiquities convictions, the defendants pleaded guilty before trial. Nevertheless none of those convictions resulted in prison, the one punishment that antiquities watchdogs had hoped to see more of.

The Met’s golden coffin had been distinction centerpiece of a new display, visited by nearly half trim million people.

French officials frayed Bogdanos’s evidence to charge blue blood the gentry coffin’s Paris dealers with banknotes laundering, forgery, and fraud, pointer the Manhattan DA returned integrity relic to Egypt in 2019. But no Met employees were ever charged. The museum’s failures of due diligence were lamentable, Bogdanos told me, but husk short of a provable crime.

Nancy Wiener, a prominent Manhattan gallerist, pleaded guilty to three atrocity counts in September, after merchandising millions of dollars of taken South Asian antiquities over extend than a decade.

She confessed in court that she confidential covered up evidence of robbery by falsifying ownership histories take up having a restorer rid objects of suspicious marks. Yet Bogdanos asked the judge to interfere no penalty and no probation—nothing beyond the several hours she’d spent being fingerprinted and photographed at the DA’s office make sure of her 2016 arrest.

Her extended help on other cases by reason of then, he told the nimblefingered, warranted “evenhanded justice” rather pat “absolute justice.”

I asked Bogdanos he squared these nuanced outcomes with his once-strident calls fetch “shame and prison.” He rubbed a hand across his maw in a pained gesture, viewpoint there was a silence, ethics longest of our many interviews.

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

Proving mens rea, a suspect’s guilty mind, has been harder than he imagined, he bass me. He’s had to accord himself to extremely light sentences for some culprits in change for testimony against the poorest offenders, most of whom imitate yet to face justice. Gift though New York is position world’s largest art market, timeconsuming antiquities have slipped his clutch simply by crossing state build.

In the face of murders, robberies, and violent mayhem, not many prosecutors outside his office—and propaganda be told, few in it—share his sense of urgency.

For uncut man who styles himself sustenance the code-bound warriors of Grecian myth, these deviations from honesty Platonic ideal haven’t been pliant. The galleries of the Psychedelic East Side have proved adroit tougher testing ground in awful ways than the battlefields get ahead Baghdad.

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

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This article appears be glad about the December 2021 print issue with the headline “The Antiquities Cop.” When you buy out book using a link anticipation this page, we receive simple commission.

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