Raiders of the lost art

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1:04Welcome to the Crossing Continents podcast. I'm Sandra Canthal.

1:11I'm Sunday Steinkrishner, the owner of B &B Rare Books. Nice to meet you. This program begins with a mystery. Hello. Hi, I'm Josh. I'm the other owner of B &B. Which unfolded on the fifth floor of an office building in midtown Manhattan. With lovely windows and lots of bright lights. The view of the Empire State Building right there. Yeah, you can't see all the way to the top, can you? B &B isn't a typical bookshop. A little more special here. Mostly first editions, a lot of books signed by the author, rare works. On one side of this office, assistants are wrapping up packages in bubble wrap. And on the other, special items are on display in glass cabinets.

1:54It's probably a very rare copy of Brave New World and Black Beauty and Fahrenheit 451. And a Pablo Picasso? A little etching? Not only is he signed, but he's doodled in it. Yeah, that's what makes it really rare. August 6, 1954. How much is that worth? That's$15 ,000. Wow, I don't even want to touch that. I'm afraid to touch that. Sunday Steinkirchner and Joshua Mann have been buying and selling rare books together since 2003. They have an easygoing manner with one another, which is notable because they were once a married couple, but are now just very well-attuned business partners. Their store specializes in mostly 19th and 20th century English and American literature, which might be what tempted one potential customer into the office early last year.

2:40One day I walked in in January of 2025, and there was a man sitting with a suitcase full of books and some of the books were on the floor and scattered about and I went to our display case and there was one book on top of there and that's when I opened it up and saw original letters from John Keats and I almost fell over. John Keats, the English romantic poet, is thought to have written about 37 love letters to his fiancée Fanny Braun before he died at the age of 25 in 1821. Somehow, Sunday was holding eight of them in her hands, bound together in a leather-covered book. He probably didn't know that this one was particularly valuable, but also the signs were pointing to that these books probably did not belong to him.

3:26So Sunday and Josh convinced the seller they needed to verify the collection's authenticity in order to figure out what the books might be worth and how best to sell them. But it was really just a stalling tactic. The entire time we were just thinking, just stall, get him to leave the books here so we can figure out who owned these books. And that's what they went to work doing. In fact, it was all they did for several weeks, scouring academic sources, police records and bookbinding companies with absolutely no luck. But the seller eventually did realize that the Keats volume was in fact very valuable and returned to reclaim it.

4:06Sunday and Josh put themselves in real professional and legal jeopardy when they said no. I had to tell him directly, I don't believe these belong to you. You only have two ways to get this out of here. One, you just provide us some type of title or proof of ownership or option number two, which is you're welcome to call the police and then we'll have them sorted and decide what we should do with it. In fact, the seller had a third option. He sued to get what was still his property back. But Sunday and Josh didn't give up. They were determined to continue the search for the book's rightful owner.

4:51It was on the morning their case, which they were very likely to lose, was due to come to court when they finally had a breakthrough. I check my phone at like 4 or 5 o 'clock in the morning and I get an email from an agent at this art loss registry. The art loss register in London holds the world's largest private database for stolen art. The book was stolen and it was named in the police report on Long Island in Manhasset in Nassau County. Nassau County is where the seller said he lived. It was also the home of the Whitney family, famed for New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. The Keats book was one of several reporters stolen from their estate in 1989, but that information was buried under decades of police paperwork.

5:41With this mystery solved, the court case was postponed. But Sunda and Josh weren't the only ones alerted to the true history of the Keats letters. Now local law authorities knew about the book, too. The district attorney, Matthew Bogdanos, who's the person who runs the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which we had not previously known existed, they called us and they said, keep the book, don't give it back to this person, because now this is so much further beyond him and you. This is involving an entirely other family. The books were stolen from. This is involving now law enforcement. Now law enforcement is involved.

6:17It wasn't being returned to the person who brought it to us, and it was going to be returned to the family. And so it was. Good morning, everybody. It is my privilege to lead a unit whose function is to return to the rightful owners their priceless cultural heritage, whether it be antiquities, works of art, or rare books. At a press conference where Matthew Bogdanos of the Manhattan District Attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit returned the books to a member of the Whitney family. Our mission is, without fear or favor, to correct history's wrongs whenever those wrongs violate New York's criminal law.

6:59I'm Sandra Canthor, and this edition of Crossing Continents is about one man's personal mission to return stolen culture and history to its rightful owners, and the reasons why he thinks it's vitally important to our past and for our future.

7:1868-year-old retired Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos is a busy man. He's both the head of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, or ATU, and an assistant district attorney prosecuting homicide cases. It's an unusual criminal overlap, but as Bogdanos sees it, cultural vandalism and violent crime have more in common than people might ordinarily think. They both require painstaking attention to detail, hard work and determination in order to bring justice to the victims. In one case, it's the surviving family members of a homicide victim. And in the other, it's the surviving members of a victimized culture.

8:04And each touches a different part of your soul. Boak Danos has been a prosecutor in New York for more than 30 years. He also holds a master's degree in classical civilization, an interest sparked in him at a young age by a gift from his mother. I was raised in the restaurant business here in Manhattan, a Greek restaurant naturally, my father being Greek, and I was a busboy in the restaurant. When I was 13 years old, my mother gave me a copy of The Iliad, and it has been my guidebook since then. Alongside reading Homer and waiting tables at the family restaurant, he also took up amateur boxing.

8:46At the age of 19, Bogdanos joined the Marines. After eight years, he left active service but remained in the reserves and pursued a legal career in New York City. After the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, he returned to active duty and did combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. When he was stationed in Basra in 2003, he got word that the Iraq Museum was being looted. He was so incensed, he asked permission from his commanding officer to take a team to Baghdad and swiftly sort out the situation. Like modern-day monuments men, the Allied team sent to rescue art and antiquities stolen by the Nazis in World War II.

9:27The general said, all right, how long do you think it's going to take you. And I said these words, come on, sir, I'm a New York City homicide prosecutor. I'll have it wrapped up in three to five days. Fast forward, it took five years. Matthew Bogdanos estimates he and his team managed to recover about two thirds of the objects that had been looted. But when he returned to New York to resume his job as a prosecutor, his work in Baghdad followed him. When I came back here to the district attorney's office, I had seen that many of the antiquities that we were tracking around the world that started from the Iraq Museum investigation were making their way to or through New York.

10:14And he felt compelled to follow that trail. I began developing contacts, informants, collaborating with international law enforcement agencies, particularly Italy, Greece, the UK, as well as Turkey, Iraq and Egypt especially. And I realized that when we couldn't stop the looting itself and when we couldn't capture, recover the material as it hit the borders, once it left the borders, it would disappear and then it would reappear in New York. So I realized that New York was essential to stopping the illegal antiquities trade. The Antiquities Trafficking Unit officially came into being in 2017. Located in a well-worn municipal building in downtown Manhattan, I meet Matthew Bogdanos in his above-ground office.

11:07I'll get to his below-ground space later on. In this large room is a noticeably neat desk, a wide variety of framed posters and personal memorabilia on the walls, and tables piled with cardboard boxes that I assume is paperwork from other cases. The ATU is staffed with prosecutors, analysts and investigators with extensive knowledge of the antiquities they are tracking and the people moving them. You want to take down an antiquities network, flip an antiquities dealer. And so that's what we have done in virtually all of our cases. We have now convicted 18 separate people of antiquities trafficking.

11:50And we have another seven active arrest warrants around the world for individuals who are actively engaging in antiquities trafficking. Not 30 years ago, not 20 years ago, now. Antiquities are a small but important part of the New York art world. But what defines an antiquity? Most countries have legal apparatus to define antiquities, and generally it's anything more than 100 years. Some countries, it's more than 500 years. But generally, I think the best definition is you know it when you see it. It's very old. It's very old, and it represents a culture. And it's that premise which underpins Matthew Bogdanus' passion for this work, because he strongly believes that history has shown us cultural vandalism is often a harbinger of much worse to come.

12:46We have seen time and time again over millennia that when you attack a people's culture, you are in effect attacking their identity. Destruction of cultural heritage always comes first. and then you attack the people. Look at the former Yugoslavia. I was in Kosovo. You name the side. They attacked the cultural heritage. They blew up churches and temples, bridges, because they recognized how important cultural heritage is to the identity and the unity of a people.

13:23Hello. Hello, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. Oh my gosh, what a beautiful apartment this is. Thank you. Uptown from the offices of the ATU is the home of one of those art experts who's worked with Matthew Bogdanos and his team. It's one of those New York City apartments which comes with its own history. My mother bought it. She was the illegal subtenant of an illegal tenant in a commercial space in the 70s. It used to be a factory to make leotards. So when we moved in, I kept finding needles from the sewing machines working their way up from between the floors. You didn't step on any of them, I hope?

13:59No, fortunately. This is the home of Erin Thompson, who has a job with a very specific title. I'm a professor of art crime at the City University of New York. I'm the only one in America, as far as I can tell. Professor Thompson has combined her qualifications as a lawyer with a PhD in art history. I study all sorts of overlaps between art and crime, from forgery to art made by the incarcerated to fraud on the antiquities market. Humans have always made art, and we must have started to steal it pretty soon after we started to make it. It's valuable, it's beautiful, people want it, so you can either sell it legally or you can snatch it and then make much more money illegally.

14:45Stealing the treasures of a culture's history is a crime taking place in many corners of the world. Though it's hard to know exact figures because illicit markets are, by their very nature, hard to measure. But there are some clear signs that it is a huge problem. So, for example, during the Syrian conflict, we were monitoring archaeological sites using satellite photography. And you can see a pristine archaeological site, an ancient city within weeks is covered with looter's holes. It looks like the surface of the moon. People going in, destroying an entire settlement, destroying our knowledge of the past to seek things for the market.

15:29Maybe they find a few pieces. Maybe they find a masterwork. Who knows? but the promise of making a lot of money by selling these things to wealthy foreign collectors leads to incalculable destruction. And once historical pieces go missing, they're incredibly difficult to trace. Italy doesn't know when somebody digs up a tomb and sneaks something out of the country, how's it supposed to reclaim it? Or letters and manuscripts like the Keats letters. It's really very difficult to keep track of every single piece of paper in an archive. Much easier to know when the Mona Lisa goes missing, for example.

16:06You make a ton of money if you are able to transform the freshly looted artifacts outfitted with a fake provenance or just find buyers who won't ask a lot of questions. Provenance is the traceable history of an object, such as where it was found, who's owned it, and where and when it was bought and sold in the past. The problem is, I don't know, something like 90 % of the artifacts on the market don't have a long provenance history. They'll be sold with records indicating where they've been for the last 10 years. That doesn't mean they weren't looted because we've caught dealers lying. We've caught them faking that provenance.

16:47So the dealers are going to say, well, if we don't have any information, that doesn't mean it's illegal. and I'm going to say if we don't have any information, that's really not a good sign. Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydrogenated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. so you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market.

17:30Since 2012, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has seized more than 6 ,000 objects from public institutions, businesses, and private homes in order to return them to their countries of origin. According to Matthew Bogdanos, all search warrants and turnover orders must be signed and approved by a judge. But there have been some cases he's worked on which were more glaring than others. For example, an extraordinary antiquity comes on the market for the first time. It fetches$4 million at auction in Paris, never previously photographed. Wait, what? You have to be a career law enforcement officer to know that there's something wrong with that picture.

18:16And that's a picture you can check out for yourself. He's describing an event which came to light at the 2018 Met Gala, one of the most high-profile events of the fashion world that takes place at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2017, the Met bought an extraordinary Egyptian gold coffin for$4 million in Paris. The next year, Kim Kardashian was pictured standing next to it wearing a gold Versace dress on the night of the gala. It's a life-size coffin of Nejamonk. It sells for$4 million. It has never, ever been seen before. Where's it been? Where's it been hiding? This is a centerpiece of any museum in the world.

19:03Nobody asked where it came from. Of course, it was stolen during the Arab Spring. We know this because we found the looter. And I flew over and interviewed the actual looter who looted the piece. Sometimes a picture is worth more than a thousand words. That photograph of Kim Kardashian went viral and it was seen by the looter who had not been paid. The ATU obtained a warrant to seize the piece from the Metropolitan Museum. And according to a museum spokesperson, After learning it had been the victim of a fraud and cooperatively returning the coffin to Egypt in 2019, the Met undertook a thorough review of its process for verifying documentation and approving acquisitions, and then strengthen requirements for acquiring antiquities.

19:48It now devotes substantial resources to provenance research and continues to work with the DA's office. Colonel Bogdanos comes across as charming and intimidating in equal measure, but it doesn't feel like it would take much to tip that balance against you. He has the demeanour of a man who spent plenty of time fighting his corner, both in the courtrooms of New York City and the boxing ring, which he still frequents. Which makes me wonder, what do the titans of the art world think when they see him walking through their doors? It's an interesting dynamic. Had you asked me the question 15 years ago, what do museum directors or gallery owners or auction house managers think when we walk in the door?

20:3415 years ago, it would have been incredulity. What, are you kidding me? wait, you wanted me to ask where it came from? Who does that? That's so untoward. I had someone tell me that is so impolite. It was a Brit. Said that is so untoward. That's what he told me. You want me to ask my client where she got it from? We don't do that here. That's not what my client expects. That was 15 years ago. Then it transitioned to a little anger. What are you doing here? What, you want to give it back to fill in the blank of the country? They can't take care of it. They lost it in the first place. We can take care of it better.

21:17We appreciate it more. So you went from incredulity to let's call it hubris. And that dynamic is still evolving. I would say in the last five years, it's been extraordinary. Museum directors have called me up out of the blue and said, we have some pieces in our collection that came from someone you just convicted. And we're concerned about the provenance. Can we work together to see if these are in fact stolen? I've had gallery owners do the exact same thing. It's extraordinary. It is absolutely one of the best underreported success stories is there is a sea change in the entire industry that now says, we want to be one of the good guys.

22:05I've had more museum directors and gallery owners say to me, 20 years ago, there were no rules. And then 15 years ago, we didn't know what the rules were. Now we know what the rules are. We'll follow them. And if this office can take credit for anything, it's that. An hour subway ride north of the ATU's downtown office is one of the campuses of Fordham University, situated along a loud and very busy street swirling with a cacophony of people and traffic. Pass through its gated entrance and you'll find the Walsh Family Library, a striking modern building that's home to the Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Art.

22:49I'm Jennifer Udell. I'm the curator of university art. And it's quite an oasis here because I came off in an absolutely thronging high street. How did you get here? I took the D train. Oh, well done. And did you call it a high street? I just did, didn't I? Yes. Sorry. If only it was high street, like in Edinburgh. Jennifer walks us through the library's large, airy atrium to the museum, which is open to the public free of charge. We have some visitors in here now, which is unusual because it's summer and we're pretty slow here in the summer. Because it is incredibly hot here at the moment. Oh, it's wretched.

23:26Tomorrow's going to be even worse. During my visit to New York, the temperature hit 38 degrees Celsius, which meant, in that moment, one of the library's most notable attractions was its air conditioning. It's about 4 ,000 square feet. And you walk in and it's a huge open space. Yes. Some blue walls, some white walls, some mosaics, statues. Very welcoming lighting. It's a very welcoming space. It is, and thank you for saying that, because I completely reinstalled it and redesigned it in 2021, when 99 objects were repatriated and taken back to Italy. And this is why I'm here. Jennifer has experience dealing with the Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

24:12So let's go back for just a second. When you say you lost 99 items in your collection, how does one lose 99 items in a collection? They were repatriated. In 2006, a former classics student at Fordham, William Walsh, donated his considerable antiquities collection to the university, approximately 300 ancient objects. But from the very beginning, Jennifer knew accepting the donation would be problematic. Fordham's donor who acquired and collected the objects had bought the 99 in question from this dealer who was essentially the New York fence for this Italian art trafficker that the Carabinieri had had their eye on for a while and then subsequently the Southern District.

25:00The Southern District is a geographical reference to the Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The Carabinieri is a major arm of Italian law enforcement. The two organizations work very closely together. And so 99 of those objects were seized, repatriated and sent back to Italy. The university could have turned the donation down, but instead decided there was more benefit in putting the objects on display while simultaneously acknowledging and researching their history. And in the meantime, the collection can be studied, and at least the Source Nation knows where the material is. That's the position we took.

25:36Was it the perfect solution? Probably not. Definitely not. In fact, it was very controversial and put Jennifer at the centre of a debate about how institutions like this should treat stolen pieces of history. I did want to point out this object here. This is a cinerary hut urn. What's a cinerary hut? It's a receptacle for cremated remains. It's a pre-Roman Iron Age culture, and it was tagged early, early on as being problematic. The Italian authorities tracked this object to Fordham University and wanted it back. The museum could have challenged the seizure in court, a battle they would lose, or return it to Italy.

26:19But Jennifer put forward another possibility. The third option is we acknowledge ownership of Italy, and we keep it here on long-term loan. This is the way forward. And there's a card next to it explaining it. It's a Cinerary Hut Urn, Villanovan, Iron Age, 9th century BCE. And then underneath, in bold black letters, it said, Lent by the Republic of Italy. this object was looted and then acquired by the donor at auction in 1996. It was repatriated to Italy in 2010 and has been on long-term loan to Fordham since then. So you're being very open about the provenance of this object. And that's part of a teaching collection as well and that means saying things like this.

27:07So this must be a problem for museums around the world. If you've got objects and you don't, you're not really 100 % sure of their provenance, what do you do? Just take them and put them in a basement until you figure it out? I mean, maybe it's the right thing to do. Maybe keeping them from the public is the right thing to do. But you can see an argument on both sides. Well, that's why this is a difficult issue. Because stealing antiquities and destroying ancient sites is a very, very, very, very bad thing. And it's horrific and something we don't want to play into. And yet, what do you do with these things?