Col matthew bogdanos biography

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