The Tomb Raiders of the Upper East Side
When Matthew Bogdanos got a tip about a looted mummy coffin whose corpse had been dumped in the Nile, he approached the coffin’s buyer—the Metropolitan Museum of Art—with few of the courtesies traditionally accorded New York’s premier cultural institution.
Bogdanos, a 64-year-old prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, is chief of its Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The only one of its kind in the world, his squad of prosecutors, criminal investigators, and art specialists polices the loftiest reaches of New York’s art market—a genteel club of museums, collectors, and auction houses that buy and sell the relics of ancient civilizations.
People in Manhattan’s antiquities trade tend to carry themselves with an air of refinement. Bogdanos does not. He’s a retired Marine colonel and amateur middleweight boxer who likes to drive opponents “into the corner and beat the living shit out of them,” his trainer told me.
In the case of the Met’s mummy coffin, Bogdanos got off the phone with a smuggler turned informant in Dubai and, by day’s end, had opened a grand-jury investigation in Manhattan. He subpoenaed the emails, texts, and handwritten notes of every Met employee involved in the coffin’s purchase.
What Bogdanos found “shocked the conscience,” he told me. According to an official summary of the grand-jury investigation, the Met had acquired the golden first-century-B.C. coffin, for $4 million, despite what Bogdanos saw as a sea of red flags: three conflicting ownership histories, the involvement of known traffickers, a forged export license that bore the stamp Arab Republic of Egypt before the country used that name. The Met had allegedly deleted emails at the dealer’s request and deflected questions from Egypt. Smugglers had so hastily disposed of the coffin’s occupant—an Egyptian priest—that the museum’s conservators found a finger bone still stuck inside.
According to a 2019 search warrant, the Met was the probable site of criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree, a felony punishable by up to 25 years in prison. The intimation was that Met officials knew—or should have known—that the coffin was looted, but bought it anyway. (A Met spokesperson said the museum had been deceived by an “international criminal organization.” Though never charged, the Met apologized to the people of Egypt, reformed its acquisitions process, and forfeited the coffin to the DA.)
Over the past decade, Bogdanos and his agents have impounded more than 3,600 antiquities, valued at some $200 million. They’ve raided art fairs on Park Avenue, and in Rockefeller Center. They at the five-star on display at the five-star Pierre.
