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# An interesting man, to be sure, the Manhattan prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos, who since 2003, when he witnessed the mass looting in Baghdad with his own eyes, has devoted himself to fighting the trade in stolen antiquities
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/interesnyi-konechno-chelovek-mankhettenskii-prokuror-metiu-bogdanos-kotoryi-s-2003-goda-kogda-sobstvennoochno-nabliudal-massovye-razgrableniia-v-bagdade-stal-zanimatsia-borboi-s-torgovl/
- Published: 2026-07-18T12:33:25.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:36.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, The East, Museums, Heritage, New York, People

An interesting man, to be sure, the Manhattan prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos, who since 2003, when he witnessed the mass looting in Baghdad with his own eyes, has devoted himself to fighting the trade in stolen antiquities. The unit of the New York police that he heads has seized thousands of objects worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which has changed the way museums and auction houses check the provenance of their wares and keeps the disputes over restitution permanently alive.

The son of a Greek father and a French mother, he grew up in Lower Manhattan, waiting at table in the family restaurant, Deno's Place, boxed as an amateur in the middleweight division, joined the Marine Corps at nineteen, took a degree in classics and a law degree at university, and completed master's degrees in classical philology and in strategy.

Since 1988 he has been a Manhattan prosecutor, and in that post he has conducted more than two hundred trials for serious crimes, over a hundred of them for murder.

During his service in the Marine Corps he took part in Desert Storm and dozens of other operations. In 2003, while in Iraq, he headed the international investigation into the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad, from which thousands of objects were stolen in the chaos of the first weeks after the invasion. Bogdanos recovered more than six thousand of them and received the National Humanities Medal from the hands of Bush for it.

On returning to the District Attorney's office in 2010, he created the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, the first and only unit of its kind in the world. His team has put about ten smugglers behind bars, seized more than six thousand objects worth upwards of 480 million dollars, and returned them to nearly thirty countries: Greece, Italy, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, India, Cambodia, Nepal and others.

The most celebrated episode was that of the gold coffin of the priest Nedjemankh, of the first century BC, which the Metropolitan Museum bought for four million and beside which Kim Kardashian posed at the Met Gala in 2018\. The coffin turned out to have been freshly dug up and smuggled out of Egypt. One may also recall the seizure of more than 2,600 idols worth 143 million from the New York dealer [Subhash Kapoor](https://theparnassian.com/assoshieited-press-soobshchaet-chto-na-etoi-nedele-na-tseremonii-v-ofise-okruzhnoi-prokuratury-mankhettena-v-niu-iorke-vlasti-ssha-vernuli-pakistanu-133-ukradennykh-predmeta-iskusstva-s/?ref=theparnassian.com), the [return](https://theparnassian.com/bronzovaia-statuia-rimskogo-imperatora-marka-avreliia-khraniashchaiasia-v-klivlendskom-khudozhestvennom-muzee-ssha-budet-vozvrashchena-v-turtsiiu-posle-mnogoletnikh-nauchnykh-i-iuridich/?ref=theparnassian.com) of the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius to Turkey, and the [17 antiquities](https://theparnassian.com/prokuratura-mankhettena-vernula-italii-i-vatikanu-17-predmetov/?ref=theparnassian.com) sent back, six ancient Chinese books among them, to the Vatican.