 where Kim gets her ass x-rayed to prove that she doesn’t have implants in her butt. There’s also the one where Kim swings a handbag at Khloé for being mean about her, yelling: “Don’t be fucking rude! I’ll fucking hurt you!” And there was the time she gets into a fight with Kourtney and delivers a devastating verbal blow: “She’s the least interesting to look at.” So it might come as a surprise that Kim Kardashian, reality TV star and Instagram queen, played a significant part in exposing a murky network of international antiquity smugglers.

At the Met Gala of 2018, where the biggest celebs in the world gather to preen on the red carpet outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Kim posed for a photo that cracked open a years-long investigation into looted artefacts. She stood, clad in a shimmering gold chainmail dress that she co-designed with Donatella Versace, next to the coffin of Nedjemankh, a high-ranking Egyptian priest from the 1st Century BC who served the ram-headed god Heryshef of Herakleopolis. Kim’s dress sparkles with two crucifixes, Nedjemankh is covered with inscriptions of gods and spells for the dead.

Shortly after Kim was papped at the Met, Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, received a tip-off. Bogdanos, a former colonel in the Marines who tracked down thousands of treasures stolen during the invasion of Iraq, is the head of the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. This team is composed of two groups of people so distinct they merit their own sitcom: urbane analysts with “advanced degrees” and New York City detectives with “grit and determination and street smarts”. What a combo.

The message Bogdanos received came from a thief who had been double crossed on a deal to smuggle Nedjemankh out of Egypt, and having seen the photos of Kim next to his prize, decided to turn on his former partners in crime. It ultimately led Bogdanos to blow a far-reaching ring of smugglers who spirited this 2,000-year-old treasure out of the Nile Delta and into the hallowed halls of the Met, where Hollywood stars could pout next to it.

This whole fiasco is thrillingly retold in 

, a podcast by Ben Lewis, which documents how the Met – the most prestigious museum in America, if not the world – greedily paid $4 million for Nedjemankh’s gold coffin. Lewis snags a long interview with Bogdanos, whose wonderfully gravelly New York accent belongs in a special exhibit, and describes how the Met’s curators fell for what turned out to be a really obvious fraud.

Antiquities looting flourishes in the wake of geopolitical upheaval, and the Arab Spring heralded open season on Egypt’s treasures. Nedjemankh was hauled out of his resting place in the Minya region of southern Egypt, his mummified remains dumped into the Nile, and his coffin sent – amazingly – by Fed Ex to Germany, disguised as Greco-Roman tat. In Hamburg, the process to turn Nedjemankh from stolen relic to legitimate museum piece began.

A fake export licence was forged to claim Egypt had authorised the coffin’s transit to Germany, where it was stored – and yet never exhibited, never photographed – for more than 50 years. If that wasn’t enough to rouse the suspicions of the expensively educated curators at the Met, they should have smelled a rat from the documentation. It was dated May 1971 and bore the authenticity stamp of the Arab Republic of Egypt, a country that did not yet exist because Egypt at that time was officially known as the United Arab Republic. “Are you kidding me?” Bogdanos asks of Lewis in 

. “A neon sign flashing STOLEN would have been less subtle.”

Bogdanos and his team of post-grad classicists and hardboiled detectives had been tracking this smuggling ring for five years. The gang operated out of Germany and Bogdanos had put them under electronic surveillance but he was unable to pounce until he had proof of malfeasance in New York. The stroke of luck was the tip-off, all because of Kim’s picture. Bogdanos could prove that Nedjemankh’s coffin matched photographs of the one dug up and photographed in Egypt, covered in millennia-old mud. Years of investigation had paid off. He then had the rare joy of taking this priceless artefact out of the Met’s banner exhibition, which had been advertised on buildings and buses and taxis, and storing it in the DA’s office in downtown Manhattan, before returning it to the Egyptians. It went home in style – a motorcade to the airport, a private jet back east.

With the rhetorical panache of a true New Yorker, Bogdanos recalls, in the podcast with Lewis, the speech he gave to his team after this monumental victory. “I told my team members, I said: ‘Stop right now! Freeze this moment in time. Look left, look right. This is why we do what we do. We do it because of moments like this. And you know what? For every time we succeed, we fail a dozen different times. Sure, it was a gold coffin, it was an extraordinary, legendary work of art. I get it. It was more what the moment represents. This is what we do. Enjoy it. Celebrate it. Take five minutes. Now roll up your sleeves and get back to work, because what have ya done for me lately? We’ve got another piece tomorrow, and another piece after that.’” The HBO script writes itself.

In Europe, charges and arrests are trickling in for the ring, which is estimated to have sold half a dozen pieces to the Met and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi for more than £42 million. Lewis, in his assessment, is amazed that the Met’s team of antiquity curators wasn’t rolled up by Bogdanos’s investigation. Lewis says the Met curators were “very lucky” not to have been criminally charged, and finds it stunning that they still have their jobs.

The Met’s top brass claimed it was a “victim of fraud” and “unwittingly participated in the illegal trade of antiquities”. Max Hollein, the director of the Met, said he would lead a review of the museum’s acquisitions process “to understand what more can be done to prevent such events in the future”. As Lewis makes clear, as long as there is a lucrative appetite for headline-stealing exhibitions and political upheaval in any country with a popular ancient history, the smuggling of precious artefacts is extremely hard to stamp out. Even if Kim Kardashian is on your side.

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