Kim Kardashian’s Met Gala photo unexpectedly helped solve decades-long criminal case

You may have dismissed the Met Gala as your standard schmoozy A-lister bash, but it turns out it can offer so much more than that... including some casual crime-solving.

Let’s take you back to 2018's event, which had the memorable theme of Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.

Kim Kardashian rocked up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art wearing a figure-hugging gold Versace dress embellished with two crosses, which was paired with two gold cross necklaces, Versace shoes, and a chic high ponytail.

On the night, photographer Landon Nordeman snapped the reality star posing next to the coffin of Nedjemankh, a priest of the ram-god Heryshaf, for the New York Times.

While the picture was iconic in its own right, with Kardashian’s glittering full-length gown mirroring the gilded grandeur of her prop, it ultimately proved to be much more powerful than a huge fashion serve.

Kardashian in her gold Versace dress (Kevin Mazur/MG18/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)

The coffin, which dates back to the 1st Century BC, was dug up from Egypt’s al Minya region in 2011, during a revolution.

Several years later, after Kardashian’s photo did the rounds, it caught the attention of a former smuggler who had been double-crossed by his partners.

In a very sly move of vengeance, they sent the photo to Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos, who was investigating the illegal antiques trade.

The informant had been frustrated they were never paid for unearthing the coffin, which had been sold to the Met for $4 million.

“There’s no honour among thieves,” Bogdanos told The Times, which quotes him saying in a 2019 letter to Khaled El-Enany, Egypt’s minister of antiquities, that his office ‘had proved that the gold coffin was looted from Egypt by members of an international antiquities-trafficking organisation’.

“This office seized material connected to the Germany-based antiquities dealers Roben Galel Dib and Serop Simonian,” Bogdanos wrote.

“Both Dib and Serop Simonian have previously been the subject of criminal investigations in multiple countries resulting in the seizure of hundreds of pieces of stolen cultural property.

“The material this office obtained consisted of thousands of images and videos — many of which depicted dirty or damaged antiquities.

“This material included six images of an object that this office later determined to be the gold coffin.”

This coffin is now on display at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Cairo (AMIR MAKAR/AFP via Getty Images)

After gathering further evidence, Bogdanos was able to open a grand jury investigation, which found how looters had dug up the coffin, which was then sent to Hassan Fazeli, an antiquities dealer in Sharjah, a city in the United Arab Emirates.

According to the podcast Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of the Art World, Fazeli mislabelled the artifact, saying it was a Greco-Roman item to cover up the real origins.

It was sold to Roben Dib, manager of the Dionysos Gallery in Hamburg, Germany, who allegedly faked an Egyptian export license that claimed it was legally exported in 1971, before it was shipped to French antiquities scholar and dealer Christophe Kunicki and his colleague Richard Semper – the duo who sold it to the Met for millions.

Bogdanos had learned that the looters tossed the mummy from inside the coffin into the Nile, but in their haste left a finger bone attached to the inside of the casket, a detail that was still there when it arrived at the museum in New York.

Dib was arrested by German police in August 2020 and transferred to Paris and charged two years later, but claimed ‘all the export documents were legit’, while Simonian was arrested in November 2023 – also denying all wrongdoing, and was recently allowed to leave France and return to Germany for his pre-trial detention on health grounds.

The Art Newspaper, citing sources close to the investigation, reported earlier this year that the pair ‘have blamed each other for these transactions’.

A total of eight German and French dealers and curators have been charged in the case, including former Louvre chief Jean-Luc Martinez, who was charged for ‘complicity’ after his involvement in the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s acquisitions.

The coffin itself was returned to Cairo in 2019, with the Met’s director, Max Hollein, saying the museum would ‘learn from this event’ and that he would be leading a review into the museum’s acquisitions policies to ‘understand what more can be done to prevent such events in the future’.