![]() When Bogdanos was 12, his mother, Claire, a waitress at the family restaurant, gave him a copy of The Iliad to stoke his pride in his Greek heritage. “It’s like being hit by snipers,” one person complained to The Art Newspaper. “Reputable galleries that have been in the business for a few decades or more have never seen an environment like this,” David Schoen, a lawyer for the venerable Safani Gallery (and also, incidentally, for former President Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial), told me. (Sotheby’s says this reflects “demand from collectors.”) Sotheby’s ceased its New York auctions of ancient art in 2016, confining such sales to London. Other Manhattan dealers continue to operate online or by appointment, but almost none has been spared Bogdanos’s subpoenas and search warrants. A 2019 journal article found that the number of ancient-art galleries with Manhattan storefronts had plunged over the preceding two decades from a dozen to three. Some dealers have shut down rather than fight back. The problem with “these gentlemen of stature and breeding,” he told one judge, is that they “would never be so gauche” as to check the legal status of ancient art before buying it. He grew up busing tables at his parents’ Greek restaurant in Kips Bay, and his court filings are salted with sarcastic, class-conscious asides. It’s a long way, culturally, from Bogdanos’s New York. The enclave of old-money families along Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile is America’s worst neighborhood for antiquities crime. ![]() Tips from scholars, dealers, and other informants have repeatedly led Bogdanos to the Upper East Side. They arrested a dealer at the five-star Mark Hotel and seized statues on display at the five-star Pierre. They’ve raided art fairs on Park Avenue, and Christie’s in Rockefeller Center. Over the past decade, Bogdanos and his agents have impounded more than 3,600 antiquities, valued at some $200 million. Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala in 2018, posing with a coffin that the Manhattan DA later discovered had been looted from Egypt (Landon Nordeman / Trunk Archive) (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.) The intimation was that Met officials knew-or should have known-that the coffin was looted, but bought it anyway. 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.Īccording 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 Met had allegedly deleted emails at the dealer’s request and deflected questions from Egypt. ![]() 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. According to an official summary of the grand-jury investigation, the Met had acquired the golden first-century-B.C. What Bogdanos found “shocked the conscience,” he told me. He subpoenaed the emails, texts, and handwritten notes of every Met employee involved in the coffin’s purchase. 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’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. People in Manhattan’s antiquities trade tend to carry themselves with an air of refinement. 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. View Moreīogdanos, a 64-year-old prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, is chief of its Antiquities Trafficking Unit. ![]() ![]() Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]()
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