[1] Much of the book is an accounting of how his unit set up camp in the library of the Iraq museum in April 2003 and tried to recover lost artifacts.

He developed relationships with museum staff, and, drawing on his knowledge of ancient civilizations, as well as his knowledge of police work, having been a criminal prosecutor in New York for many years, tells how he and the team were able to recover a huge amount of priceless antiquities which had been looted from the museum in the past days, and even years.

He goes into great detail about the theme that the US let the museum be looted while it protected the oil ministry... a version of events that was widely reported.

A great deal of the end of the book is spent discussing and analyzing the problems of stopping the illegal trade in antiquities.

He also lays out a plan for how he would reform the system... One part of his plan includes having a single binding agreement, somewhat like the ABA code, that standardizes what constitutes 'legal' provenance for antiquities, to be used amongst archaeologists, collectors, dealers, museums, academics, law enforcement, customs, etc.