ASOR 2006 Annual Meeting Plenary Speaker Col. Matthew Bogdanos

Matthew Bogdanos, an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, is a colonel in the U.S. Marine Reserves, middleweight boxer, and native New Yorker. Raised waiting tables in his family's Greek restaurant in lower Manhattan, he holds a classics degree from Bucknell University, a law degree and a master's degree in classics from Columbia University, and a master's degree in Strategic Studies from the Army War College. Commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Marines in 1980, he left active duty in 1988 to join the District Attorney's Office-where New York tabloids call him "pit bull" for his relentless prosecution of criminals such as the 15-year-old "Baby-Faced Butchers" for their 1997 grisly Central Park murder and rappers Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Jamal "Shyne" Barrows for their 1999 shootout.

Recalled to active duty after losing his apartment near the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, he joined a multi-agency task force in Afghanistan and received a Bronze Star for counterterrorist operations against al-Qaeda. He then served in Iraq and the Horn of Africa as the head of that task force and received a 2005 National Humanities Medal from President George Bush for his work recovering Iraq's priceless treasures. He has returned to the DA's Office where he still boxes for the New York City Police Department Widows & Orphans Charity and continues the hunt for stolen antiquities. Royalties from his book, Thieves of Baghdad, go to the Iraq Museum.