A National Treasure
By Brian Baxter
The American Lawyer
June 1, 2007
The widespread looting in Baghdad following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime did not spare the National Museum of Iraq. One of the world's greatest collections of archeological artifacts-some dating from 3100 B.C.-was ravaged, and many priceless pieces went missing.
Marine Corps Colonel Matthew Bogdanos sprang into action. The leader of a task force investigating corruption, Bogdanos sold his superiors on a mission to find the missing museum pieces. "[Mesopotamia] is the cradle of civilization, where the first laws were written and first depiction of the human face created," Bogdanos says. "This wasn't just an Iraqi or an American tragedy but a humanitarian one because of our shared cultural heritage."
It was a task well suited to Bogdanos. The 50-year-old has a degree in classics and his Greek upbringing taught him to appreciate ancient cultures-his mother gave him a copy of Homer's The Iliad when he was a child. He's also a tenacious investigator. A 19-year veteran of the New York County district attorney's office, Bogdanos earned the nickname "Pit Bull" from New York newspapers for prosecuting hip-hop star Sean "Diddy" Combs on gun charges and putting other tabloid stars (like the Baby-Faced Butcher, a 15-year-old girl convicted of killing a man in Central Park) behind bars.
Bogdanos was recalled to active duty in the Marines a few days after September 11, 2001-Bogdanos and his family lived a block from Ground Zero-and he went on a four-and-a-half-year prosecutorial hiatus. After the Iraq war began in 2003, he was initially assigned to track down terrorist financing networks and violations of United Nations Security Council resolutions in Iraq. Bogdanos recalls an angry female British journalist screaming at him in Basra, "You macho assholes are down here looking for missiles and money and the finest museum in the world in Baghdad has just been looted!"
Bogdanos took 13 members of his team to Baghdad and began the complex task of searching for missing artifacts. After endless hours of drinking tea with sheiks and imams, playing backgammon to cultivate informants, organizing raids, and instituting a countrywide amnesty program that Bogdanos wasn't sure he had the legal authority to issue, the team earned some hard-won successes. The amnesty program paid almost immediate dividends when someone anonymously returned the famous Warka Vase, believed to be carved by the Sumerians more than five millennia ago. Another tip led U.S. military police to the Mask of Warka, the earliest-known depiction of a human face, dating back to 3100 B.C. The treasure of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud was discovered in a flooded underground vault in the Central Bank of Iraq. And of the 170,000 pieces initially reported missing, Bogdanos says only about 14,000 were actually stolen, of which roughly 6,000 have since been recovered. (Another 62,000 items that had been removed before the war were eventually returned to the museum.)
But while nearly all of the most valuable and historically significant pieces have been found, Bogdanos agonizes about the Lioness Attacking a Nubian, an eighth-century B.C. ivory plaque that remains lost. It's one reason why Bogdanos decided to write a book: Thieves of Baghdad. "To the extent that publicity about me increases the level of awareness about the continuing cultural catastrophe in Iraq, that's great," he says. The book was published in 2005.
Bogdanos's efforts have not gone without notice. U.S. Air Force chief master sergeant Roberto Pineiro, who served with Bogdanos in Afghanistan and Iraq, says "the skills he honed as a prosecutor" were an integral part of the antiquities investigation. In 2005 President George W. Bush awarded Bogdanos the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony for his investigation into the theft of Iraqi antiquities. Bogdanos returned to the courtroom a few months later, something he credits to the "extraordinary support" of his boss, Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau.
Bogdanos remains an active reservist in the Marine Corps while juggling the roles of prosecutor and proselytizer. (He hits the lecture circuit whenever he can to push for a global antiquities task force.) He also has four young children with his wife, Claudia, of counsel at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges.
Bogdanos has donated all proceeds from his book to the Iraqi Museum, which opened for one day July 3, 2003, in a ceremony Bogdanos attended. It hasn't reopened. Yet, Bogdanos doesn't blame Iraqis for the thefts and disrepair. "It was never a public museum," he says. "[Iraqis] called it Saddam's Gift Shop, so there was never that sense of pride and ownership that what was there was actually theirs."
E-mail Ben Hallman: bbaxter@alm.com
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