Hot Art (30 page)

Perhaps the most striking symbol of art that survived the collapse and the ensuing inferno was a J. Seward Johnson Jr. bronze sculpture, commissioned by Merrill Lynch, of a man sitting on a bench. The man held an open briefcase on his lap, and the briefcase held a stapler, calculator, tape recorder, and some pencils. According to
usa Today,
mourners at Ground Zero left flowers in the sculpture's hand and filled his briefcase with them. A note on one of the bouquets read, “In memory of those who gave their lives to try and save so many.”

MATTHEW BOGDANOS
lived one block from the World Trade Center, and on September 11, 2001, he was at his office in Lower Manhattan when he heard the first plane hit. Bogdanos held a degree in classics and was a sometime boxer and a dedicated Marine. The U.S. military had paid his way through law school, and just a few days after leaving his Marine unit in 1988 he'd signed with the New York District Attorney's Office. He worked as an assistant U.S. district attorney, but he was also a Marine reservist, and on the morning of September 11, he ran from his office back through the chaos and dust to his apartment, where he found his family, safe. That night Bogdanos phoned his military superior and left a message: “I want in. Big time.”

Eight months earlier, the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban government of Afghanistan had destroyed hundreds of ancient statues, including two giant Buddhas carved into the face of a mountain in the sixth century ce. Men stood in the desert with rocket launchers and tanks and aimed missiles at their serene faces. Afghanistan's information minister confirmed that the fighters were acting on direct orders from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who defended the cultural warfare by saying, “All we are destroying are stones. I don't care about anything else but Islam.” The statues had been Afghanistan's most popular tourist attraction.

In October 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, and the mullah and the Taliban fled into the mountains. Matthew Bogdanos was there with the U.S. forces, working counterterrorism. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Bogdanos followed the war on terror, initially to work counterterrorism, as he had done in Afghanistan. But he inadvertently took charge of the largest museum theft so far in the twenty-first century.

In April 2003, Bogdanos was camped in the southern city of Basra when news broke that the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad was being trashed. Bogdanos was enraged. He made a phone call to his superior with a special request: assemble an elite unit, secure the Baghdad museum. There was some resistance, according to Bogdanos, but he is persuasive and charming.

When he arrived at the gates of the National Museum, the institution was in shambles. Amid the clashes in Baghdad, the museum's staff had fled and the collection was left unguarded for two days. Gangs of thieves had access to the building's galleries and underground chambers for just over forty-eight hours, between April 10 and 12. The criminal interlopers ranged, according to Bogdanos, from sophisticated mercenaries with assigned shopping lists of ancient items to frustrated citizens who saw a chance to steal a piece of their heritage that they could sell or save. Under Saddam Hussein the penalty for illegally exporting cultural property was death; now it was a free-for-all, because no one was in charge.

Together, the museum-crashers stole thousands of ancient Assyrian and Babylonian sculptures, jewels, and artifacts. These were treasures from the cradle of human civilization, some of them preserved for more than five thousand years. Bogdanos was in a race against time, and his theory was that much of the stolen treasure was rapidly being smuggled through Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel en route to London, Paris, and New York City.

The media attention was intense: “It's as if the entire Mall— the National Archives and the Smithsonian—had been looted, along with the Library of Congress,” lamented the
Washington
Post
. Article after article detailed the travesty. The United States was the main culprit, many speculated. It had invaded but had not planned to protect the museum. Art theft, on a massive scale, was suddenly intertwined with the war. According to Bogdanos, just a handful of the museum's stolen loot could easily form the curriculum of “a year's course in art history. But now they were history—vanished.”

Over the next few months Bogdanos led what proved to be one of the most complex art theft investigations in history. His team tracked thousands of stolen items moving quickly across a fierce war zone. Prized missing pieces included the Gold of Nimrud, a thousand-piece collection of gold jewellery and precious stones dating to the eighth and ninth centuries bce; the Sacred Vase of Warka, humanity's oldest carved-stone ritual vessel (circa 3100
BCE
); and the Mask of Warka, the first naturalistic sculpture of a face (also circa 3100
BCE
).

After assembling his elite special-forces team of thirteen, Bogdanos actually moved into the abandoned Iraqi museum; he slept, ate, and worked there—got to know it as no other Westerner ever had. Half of its staff returned to work, and a few cried when they saw the state of the museum. That was just the beginning. Over the course of what became his six-month residency, Bogdanos had to contend with an international media prone to sensationalism, reporting that 170,000 pieces had been stolen. His team calculated 14,000. Bogdanos tried in vain to find international support for his mission, but everyone was busy or outright scornful—one un official who came to appraise his efforts told Bogdanos outright, “I'm here to watch you fail.”

It was an impossible assignment. Bogdanos had to secure a crime scene smack in the middle of urban combat and conduct interviews in a foreign language, with dwindling political support, an insurgency about to explode, and no accurate catalogue of the museum's inventory. He eventually came to feel overwhelmed about the investigation. “I thought it would be linear. I thought it would be sequential,” he told me. “I can do a crime scene investigation in my sleep; I've done thousands. I thought the mission would take three to five days. Obviously I was exactly wrong.”

His team recovered more than five thousand missing pieces, but for Bogdanos, the ratio of recovered to missing antiquities wasn't good enough. “I consider the mission a failure. And I don't use the word
failure
lightly. Name someone who could be wrong, more often than I am,” he said to me, alluding to a list of assumptions he made during his recovery mission at the Iraqi museum. “I thought the investigation would be relatively easy and the recovery would take years. In fact, the recovery was immediate and the investigation will take years. I thought the international community, who were the loudest in condemning the losses, would be the first to line up to do something. Oops. un? unesco?”

Bogdanos thought countries that had preached a love and appreciation for the preservation of art would be the first to help out. “France? Zero recoveries or personnel sent to Iraq to help. Switzerland? Zero recoveries or personnel sent to Iraq to help. Germany? Zero recoveries or personnel sent to Iraq to help. Turkey? Ditto. Iran? Ditto. I thought antiquities transcended politics. Big oops.”

In fact it was difficult for Bogdanos to muster support from anyone within his own government either, he said. The U.S. troops on the ground were skeptical of his assignment and had little interest in helping his small team. Bogdanos had requested aid from the
FBI
. The Bureau sent one agent to the museum, for one day. By sunset, the agent said there was nothing the
FBI
could add to his investigation. Bogdanos and his team were on their own.

Despite the frustrations, Bognados's efforts managed to drag a much-needed spotlight onto the problem of art theft. When he left Iraq, he wrote a book about his experience there,
Thieves of Baghdad
. He dedicated his royalties to the rebuilding of the museum and toured aggressively.

One afternoon in March 2004, I went to New York to hear Bogdanos speak at the Plaza Hotel about his experience in Iraq. He was addressing the Art & Cultural Heritage Law Committee of the American Bar Association, and his audience was mostly lawyers of two breeds: those who believe that the market for art should be regulated and those who think it works as it is. The session he was taking part in was titled One Year After the Looting of the Iraq Museum and had been organized by Bonnie Czegledi and Patty Gerstenblith, co-chairs of the committee. It was Czegledi who'd encouraged me to travel to New York for the conference.

Bogdanos was part of an impressive list of guests, including Zainab Bahrani, professor of archaeology at Columbia University. Bahrani was the first speaker, and she noted about Iraq, “Antiquities are sold on the black market. Looting is now an export business. In 3400
BCE
the first system of writing was invented. Beer was another wonderful invention of the Meso-potamians. Music, writing, visual arts,” she continued. “These moments are comparable to the Enlightenment or the Renaissance.” Bahrani provided the context for what had been stolen. She did not mask her utter disappointment and frustration at the situation.

When Bogdanos stood up, he took command of the room and conjured up the image of Iraq, post–American invasion, and the broken-down museum. The colonel is five-nine squared with a near buzz cut, rank and stars pinned to shoulders and breast. His mission on the ground was to recover more than fourteen thousand looted pieces of antiquities.

He described his methodology: “We decided it was more important to recover items than prosecute offenders.” His etiquette was simple: “It is considered rude not to accept tea when it is offered. I drank more tea than I thought was humanly possible. I decided not to wear my helmet or body armour. I wanted to earn trust.”

His strategy: “We established an amnesty program.” This meant that Iraqis could simply return the precious cultural heritage of their country to the museum, no questions asked. Bogdanos then went on to chastise the
New York Times
for erroneously reporting that a sacred vase that had been returned in the trunk of a car had been broken into sixteen pieces during the looting. “It was recovered in sixteen pieces,” he noted, “because it was always in sixteen pieces.” The vase had survived from 3200
BCE
.

The museum itself had been damaged, but not as badly as the media reported, he said: “Of 451 display cases, only 28 were damaged. Many Iraqis viewed this as Saddam's private museum. It had the finest collection in the world of 100,000 Greek and Arabic coins.”

He added, “It is inconceivable that this wasn't partly an inside job. So we're looking at professional thieves and random looters.” This followed Wittman's logic on museum theft. Bogdanos knew that some of the stolen items had been in a basement vault, and whoever found them would have done so in the dark.

His final message, probably delivered with the blessing of his U.S. military commanders: the looting could have been a lot worse. Despite Bogdanos's recovery successes, he knew that most of the stolen treasures would follow the established pattern of art thefts—the items that had slipped away would spread across the globe from thief to middleman to dealer to collector. It was almost impossible to track them as they moved to hot spots in the art market, where dealers would sell to collectors willing to pay small fortunes to own a piece of ancient Babylonian or Assyrian history.

When I asked Bogdanos about the state of global law enforcement and its capability for dealing with the international black market in stolen art, he answered, “To say that there is an international law enforcement community organized around stolen art is not only misleading, it's an oxymoron. There is no such thing. It is fair to say we have an international law enforcement community in regard to fugitives. But we don't with regard to art. It is really everyone in their own discrete worlds, in some cases doing a very good thing, but limited in their scope.”

In 2008, I visited Bogdanos at the Manhattan District Attorney's office. He was his usual high-energy self, trim, with those boxer's shoulders. He was, in fact, carrying athletic gear for a softball game between the
DA
's team and the police. His office was adorned with awards and photographs. He said that he'd heard no recent news of any Iraqi antiquities. “It's gone quiet,” he said. “Not a whisper.”

I asked him again about the lack of information and how that affected the ability of any government or law enforcement agency to continue hunting down the missing antiquities from the museum, or any other stolen art. From across his desk, Bogdanos cocked his head.

“Do you understand the difference between information and intelligence?” he asked. “Information is just what comes from out there.” He opened up his arms and gestured out the window to New York City. “Information is facts, little pieces, whatever is floating around. Intelligence is what happens to information when it passes through a human source, someone who knows something about the subject, who can make sense of that information, make it useful. There's very little information, and even less intelligence,” he said.

In Washington, D.C., there was, in fact, one person who was responsible for gathering and analyzing information related to international art theft.

13.

INTELLIGENCE

“Nobody wants to be regulated. Anyone who is faced with regulation will resist it.”
BONNIE MAGNESS-GARDINER

T
HE WHITE HOUSE
hovers in the mist. Just a few blocks away, at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, sits the hulking brownstone block of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the national headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This morning the Hoover Building is flanked by lines of police cruisers coated in a light rain; men in dark raingear cradle machine guns in front of the entrance to the garage.