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 per
son 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
THE 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.
The lobby is bland and bureaucratic. Everything is corporate clean. Agents in suits and security tags hustle through the turnstiles. The only pictures on display are a series of portrait photographs: the Top Ten Most Wanted Men. Most of the pictures are grainy shots with block text under the mugs offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to their capture. The top left-hand picture when I visit is of Osama bin Laden. For him the government is offering $25 million, plus a $2-million bonus from the American Pilots’ Association and the Air Transport Association.
Bonnie Magness-Gardiner meets me at visitor check-in. She’s a slender woman, in her early fifties, wearing a blazer, blouse, and slacks, with glasses and chin-length greying hair. She looks distinctly like an elementary-school principal. If you saw her on the street you would never guess she leads the bureau’s battle to fight international art crime.
The FBI unveiled its Art Crime Team in March 2005. Its official rationale for devoting resources, money, and agents to the cause of stolen art was the looting of Iraq’s National Museum and the spread of that loot to American shores. The media’s mourning of the ancient treasures had put a spotlight on the recovery efforts by Matthew Bogdanos and his team. The FBI and the cia had taken equal shares of the blame for being unable to prevent the 9/11 attacks, and it’s possible that the FBI was searching for some much-needed positive pr. By mid-decade, the bureau was allocating much of its resources to counterterrorism, so it seemed an awkward moment to introduce a new cultural property squad. But that’s exactly what the bureau did. My hunch is that Robert Wittman must have done some politicking, but the agent told me, with a smile, that he was sticking to the official explanation.
To launch the Art Crime Team, the bureau employed the tactics of a media-savvy corporation unveiling a new product. There was a cool new logo—a badge-sized circle with images of famous stolen art: the tormented head of Edvard Munch’s The Scream in the bottom left, a stolen Iraqi antiquity near the top. At its centre sat the serene face of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder, the mother of Christianity holding her baby Christ. Stamped across the circle were three letters ACT emblazoned in a comic-book burnt orange. The outer rim of the circle was trimmed in a more conservative font and read “Federal Bureau of Investigation Art Crime Team.”
Over the next year, stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and dozens of other newspapers around the world carried the intended message: eight agents had been handpicked from hundreds of applicants for the new team and were supported by special prosecutors to handle the complexities of these cases—a fact undoubtedly noted by art thieves and by crooked dealers and collectors, who rarely saw the interior of a courtroom, much less a smear of their reputation, conviction, or a prison sentence.
The FBI also rolled out a new website. Its pages included a stroke of bureaucratic genius—the Top Ten List of Most Wanted Stolen Art. The “Top Ten” concept had worked wonders for most-wanted fugitives, so why not for paintings? It was sexy, by government standards, but it didn’t quite work. Paintings and sculptures, after all, don’t have the same allure as those grainy black and white mug shots of tough men out to destroy our pursuit of happiness.
Still, the announcement, the team of agents, the legal support, and the new website did more to focus attention on the problem of international art theft than any other law enforcement agency in the world ever had. This was the famous FBI, after all, which had busted Al Capone, killed John Dillinger, and, ultimately, infiltrated the American imagination. It was now officially hunting art thieves.
“Art and cultural property crime—which includes theft, fraud, looting, and trafficking across state and international lines—is a looming criminal enterprise with estimated losses running as high as $6 billion annually,” stated the FBI’s website.
Although the Art Crime Team may have been a political pr manoeuvre, it gave Wittman a more secure position, a larger budget, a group of agents to work with, and more influence. There were now agents in cities across the United States being trained to investigate art crimes while they tended to their other caseloads. Wittman also got a dedicated manager.
Magness-Gardiner, a trained archaeologist, had served ten years with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs before taking over the FBI’s Art Crime Team. After the invasion of Iraq, it was Magness-Gardiner who was tasked with keeping an eye on that country’s cultural heritage—including the National Museum and the ten thousand archaeological sites left unguarded during the war. “I talked to a lot of generals. They weren’t always particularly interested in what I had to say,” she said delicately. She switched departments, was issued her FBI identification, and dug in at the Hoover Building.
Magness-Gardiner is not a field agent. She coordinates the act operation, analyses information, and, once a year, gathers her FBI team together to trade information. Agents like Wittman may crawl the globe busting art thieves, but it’s Magness-Gardiner who is the guardian of the data they bring home to the bureau. The National Stolen Art File, which the FBI has been building for three decades, sits in a laptop under her desk.
“It was started in 1979, with cards in a drawer, not long after IFAR’s list was created. In 1995, those cards were converted into electronic info.” The act manager told me that she accessed the database on a weekly basis, and added new items on a monthly basis. Compared to the Art Loss Register, which holds over 200,000 stolen works, the FBI’s National Stolen Art File is relatively small, about 6,500.
Magness-Gardiner also dispenses and gathers information from across the globe. When we met, she’d recently spent a week in Macedonia, where members from a dozen different Eastern European police forces gathered to learn from her experience—officers and detectives from Romania, Poland, Albania, Serbia, Bosnia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Montenegro. “These are source countries,” she said, meaning they were exporters of looted art that usually had to cross a number of international lines to get to the buyers in Paris, London, and New York.
“Often their art is passing through other countries to move on. So these people meet, and they build a network.” The year before, she had trained a group of South American law-enforcement personnel in Bolivia. “And it’s good for us, too, to make contact with those investigators. A lot of art crime in the U.S. has an international component,” she said.
It was Bonnie Czegledi who first mentioned Bonnie Magness-Gardiner to me. The two Bonnies had met at international conferences while Magness-Gardiner was with the State Department. They struck up a professional relationship. When Magness-Gardiner took over the Art Crime Team, I got her contact information from Czegledi. “She knows a lot,” Czegledi told me. “She is definitely someone you need to talk to.” After I exchanged emails with the FBIPR department, Magness-Gardiner agreed to a series of phone interviews over several months. I then requested an in-person interview. We met in the fall of 2009, in Washington, D.C., just days before the U.S. capital was paralyzed by snowstorms.
That interview was a chance for me to cross-check information from interviews with Paul Hendry, Donald Hrycyk, and Robert Wittman. They were players working ground games, whereas Magness-Gardiner had the intelligence job. My questions to her focussed on the challenges of understanding and policing the enormous black market.
I asked Magness-Gardiner if it was fair to s
ay that no one had a handle on how large the black market in stolen art had become. “Yes, that’s fair to say,” she answered. “It’s an illicit trade, and we don’t really have very good statistics. Not all art thefts are reported, but roughly, it’s a $4- to $6-billion industry globally. Those numbers were produced by British-based insurance companies a decade ago. It would be extremely difficult to come up with any solid number,” she explained. “When we say ‘black market,’ really what we mean are those stolen items that are in the legitimate market and shouldn’t be there. The black market isn’t separate. So we’re talking about items that have no history. The collectors, the museums, and the dealers all partake on some level.”
Magness-Gardiner was hinting at the unregulated art market. Czegledi had driven home that point in our early interviews; thieves like Paul and agents like Wittman had agreed. But I wanted to hear the head of the FBI Art Crime Team state it clearly, and she did.
“Art is one of the biggest unregulated markets in the U.S. The business of art tends to be very closed and secretive. It is still business done on a handshake. Financial transactions are quite difficult to track, because you don’t have a paper trail. How art is bought, sold, and moved is a challenge in itself to understand. When a piece of art is bought or sold, there is the movement of the physical object from one location to another. There is also the transfer of money from one bank account to another. There is nothing to link those two events.” She was confirming Hrycyk’s observation that some art dealers act like drug dealers.
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