For Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, the work is never finished. Reflecting on his career repatriating invaluable stolen cultural artifacts through the New York District Attorney’s Office and during his military service overseas, Bogdanos admits that “just as one case closes, another opens.” 

At the intersection of passion and justice, Bogdanos upholds a tireless commitment to his decades-long crusade against the illegal antiquities trade. This fight has taken Bogdanos from the rubble of Baghdad to the auction houses of Manhattan, and from the halls of the United Nations to underground terrorist bunkers in the Iraqi desert.

“History warns us worse is coming,” Bogdanos says. “Once you erase a people’s historical identity, the next step is to erase the people themselves.”

Actionable Intelligence

This reality drives his work, pushing him forward with an urgency that rises above any single investigation or recovered artifact. For Bogdanos, protecting cultural heritage equates to saving human life. After leading the 2003 investigation into the looting of the Iraq Museum, where he and his team recovered thousands of stolen antiquities, Bogdanos was not satisfied with simply writing a report. He took his findings from the museum and turned them into actionable intelligence, testifying before the United Nations, Interpol, and the British Parliament. 

Bogdanos then went a step further, teaming up with William Patrick to author Thieves of Baghdad, a work not done for personal gain (all royalties go to the Iraq Museum) but to sound an alarm that the art world was reluctant to hear: the genteel world of antiquities collecting had become a laundering scheme financing global terrorism.

“Smugglers care only about making money, whether the cargo is drugs, weapons, human beings, or antiquities,” Bogdanos wrote in a 2005 New York Times op-ed. 

Funding Terrorism

By 2015, the UN Security Council acknowledged what Bogdanos had been warning of for nearly a decade: Terrorism was being funded across the region through the use of “the looting and smuggling of cultural heritage.”

But Bogdanos refused to wait for international bureaucracy to catch up. Upon returning to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, he established New York City’s first task force dedicated to investigating and prosecuting antiquities theft and trafficking. His approach was characteristically direct: “Don’t call them collectors. Call them what they are: criminals.”

Bogdanos’s uncompromising stance stems from his classical education and upbringing, where he grew to love ancient history and even embraced the Greek concepts of themis (what’s right) and aretē (excellence for its own sake). 

“If you decide in advance to act honorably, then when the moment arises, you know exactly what to do,” says Bogdanos. For the district attorney, honor isn’t an ideal or abstraction. It’s a decision made well before a crisis arrives; a form of mental conditioning that points you toward the right action.

Blood “Antiquities”

Bogdanos’s commitment now extends to the next generation of cultural guardians. At the 2015 Cairo Summit, Bogdanos joined ministers and advocates from 10 Middle Eastern and North African countries to forge the Cairo Declaration—a regional task force tasked with halting the trade in what he calls “blood antiquities.” 

The summit was a moment where years of advocacy finally bore fruit, yet Bogdanos knows this victory is merely one battle in a war that will be “measured in decades, not years.”

What makes Bogdanos’s work remarkable is not just his success in any single endeavor, but his refusal to rest on those successes. Each criminal conviction is not an endpoint but a launching pad for the next mission. As Bogdanos notes about illicit art from World War II still being recovered today, “The battle must be joined today to stop the destruction before it is too late.”