Crime of the Centuries

A network of tomb raiders, crooked art dealers, and museum curators fed MICHAEL STEINHARDT's addiction to ancient artifacts. Many also happened to be stolen.

- GREG DONAHUE

JUST BEFORE DAWN on January 5, 2018, a team of armed federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations arrived at 1158 Fifth Avenue, a luxury co-op overlooking Central Park. After securing the building's exits and entrances, the agents headed to the top floor, where they positioned themselves around the door to the penthouse apartment. At the head of the column, Matthew Bogdanos, a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney's office, listened for movement before knocking.

The apartment belonged to Michael Steinhardt, a retired billionaire hedge fund manager and one of the world's most powerful philanthropists. Born in Brooklyn to a high-stakes gambler with ties to the Gambino crime family, Steinhardt had become one of the most influential investors of his day, competing for top earnings with the likes of George Soros and Julian Robertson and battling with Warren Buffett for control of entire airlines. His fortune had bought him a taste of immortality. Steinhardt's name decorated the walls of some of New York's most famous institutions: a gallery of Greek art at the Met, a conservatory of Old and New World plants at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and a school at NYU. In Israel, he established a natural-history museum in Tel Aviv designed to look like Noah's ark and co-founded Birthright Israel, a nonprofit that has sponsored free trips for some 800,000 young adults. Over the years, he also had multiple run-ins with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but on that January morning, those allegations weren't what had drawn the authorities to his apartment. It was his art collection.