Whether present in a revered museum or a billionaire’s mansion, it’s probably that any given Khmer sculpture within the West was, sooner or later, ripped from an historic temple complicated and trafficked out of Cambodia. There can also be a affordable probability it handed via the arms of a British man known as Douglas Latchford.
To his prospects, the antiquities dealer was a respectable determine — a trusted vendor, distinguished (albeit largely self-taught) artwork scholar and writer of a number of books on sculpture from the Khmer Empire, a civilization that prospered in what’s now Cambodia and different elements of Southeast Asia between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. From the Nineteen Sixties till his demise in 2020, Latchford provided collectors with ornate friezes, temple carvings and statues of Hindu gods, Buddhas and bodhisattvas.
That these deities had been generally lacking limbs or crudely severed on the ankles, or had been nonetheless coated in grime when he photographed them, barely raised eyebrows till the top of his life. When they did, the well-connected dealer normally had paperwork or cowl tales to assuage patrons’ considerations. But in his later years, as US authorities started investigating artifacts spirited out of Cambodia in the course of the nation’s civil struggle and genocidal Khmer Rouge era that adopted, the proof in opposition to Latchford mounted.
It now seems that a lot of Latchford’s stock had been illegally pillaged from deserted archeological websites like Angkor Wat and Koh Ker. Small-scale looters, generally with the assistance of native army personnel, would take away the works with shovels, chisels, picks and even dynamite earlier than transporting them, typically by oxcart, to the Thai border. The objects then discovered their approach to the Bangkok-based dealer who, whereas now lengthy useless, stands accused of laundering them onto the worldwide artwork market utilizing falsified data. Some of the artifacts later appeared at main public sale homes or joined the collections of museums together with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The yr earlier than he died, 88-year-old Latchford was indicted by US prosecutors on prices together with wire fraud, smuggling and conspiracy. Federal investigators declare he knowingly constructed a profession as a “conduit” for plundered antiquities. By then, nevertheless, the dealer was in such poor well being in Thailand that it’s questionable he was even conscious of the fees — not to mention in a position to reply them in a New York courtroom 8,600 miles away.
Much of the artwork world has, nonetheless, made up its thoughts. The dealer’s title is now so poisonous that any object he’s recognized to have dealt with is actually untouchable. In current years, personal collectors and main establishments, together with the Met, Denver Art Museum and the National Gallery of Australia, have despatched objects linked to Latchford again to Cambodia. This has all however “ended the market” for Khmer artwork, mentioned Canadian journalist Matthew Campbell, whose new e book “The Man Who Stole the Gods” lays out the case in opposition to Latchford in unflinching element.
“There are going to be one-offs — things will get sold privately between two parties. You could do a deal, sure. But Sotheby’s cannot put a big Khmer statue on auction in New York anymore. That’s over,” Campbell mentioned, including: “The effective sale value of these pieces today would be zero, because you can’t sell them.”
Latchford at all times denied allegations of wrongdoing. In 2010, he claimed to the Bangkok Post that “most of the pieces I have come across have been found or dug up by farmers in fields.” As the questionable origins of his antiquities grew to become more durable to disclaim, he pleaded ignorance or argued that they confronted a worse destiny at house. “Admittedly these things were moonlighted out of Cambodia and wound up somewhere else,” he instructed the New York Times in 2013. “But had they not been, they would likely have been shot up for target practice by the Khmer Rouge.”
Today, nevertheless, nobody — even these closest to him — is coming to Latchford’s protection.
One of his former associates, the disgraced artwork dealer Nancy Wiener, pleaded responsible to her personal prices of conspiracy and possession of stolen property over objects she purchased from Latchford. His daughter Julia, who additionally goes by the Thai title Nawapan Kriangsak, in the meantime returned greater than 100 Khmer artifacts she inherited from him to Cambodia’s authorities. While she has by no means mentioned her father is responsible (and declined to talk for this story), she told NCS in 2021 that repatriating his data and artwork, “irrespective of origin,” was “the best way to deal with” his complicated legacy. Two years later, she agreed to settle a US civil court docket motion that noticed her father’s property forfeit $12 million over cash he had derived from promoting stolen antiquities.
In the absence of a felony conviction in opposition to Latchford, this may increasingly all represent a decision of kinds. But with tons of, if not 1000’s, of Latchford’s objects nonetheless abroad, and a number of the looters themselves nonetheless at massive, what does the search for justice seem like now?
Born in British India in 1931, Latchford arrived in Bangkok as a younger, adventurous businessman within the mid-Fifties. Navigating expatriate and aristocratic Thai circles with ease, he constructed sizable social networks whereas working native operations for a cosmetics and prescription drugs distributor, in response to Campbell, who interviewed pals of Latchford’s courting again to the Seventies. He developed a fixation with the opulent Khmer Empire and started buying the sculptural artifacts, each Hindu and Buddhist, that its artisans produced.
From the Nineteen Sixties, Latchford set about exploring Cambodian temples and embarking on shopping for journeys to Khmer archeological websites. With Western collectors and museums more and more fascinated with Asian artwork, he noticed an alternative to show his interest into a enterprise, Campbell writes. In a discipline — Khmer sculpture — that was, then, of little curiosity to international academia, he additionally noticed a probability to ascertain himself as a main scholar, regardless of his lack of formal arts schooling, the writer mentioned.
“His passion for these objects was very genuine,” mentioned Campbell, whose e book depicts Latchford as an mental outsider amongst Bangkok’s Oxbridge-educated expat elite. “But he was a born salesman and got a real rush out of making these deals.”
The outbreak of civil struggle in 1967 ended, for 3 a long time, Latchford’s (and virtually each different foreigner’s) journeys to Cambodia. Amid secret US bombing campaigns that spilled out from the Vietnam War, Cambodian ruler Prince Sihanouk was ousted in a coup earlier than Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge social gathering seized energy in 1975. The communist group’s barbarous regime wreaked havoc on Cambodia — abolishing cash, persecuting the educated lessons, decimating the nation’s agriculture and committing a genocide that killed between 1.5 million and three million individuals (then about a quarter of the nation’s inhabitants).
Amid the pandemonium, heritage safety took a backseat. Local anti-export legal guidelines arguably existed since colonial occasions, as did a 1970 UNESCO conference prohibiting the “illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property.” But Cambodia had virtually no technique of implementing both. Even after the Khmer Rouge was eliminated from energy by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, archeological websites lay deserted, suffering from landmines or used for canopy by militant guerillas. According to Campbell’s e book, when the Khmer Rouge fell, simply three archaeologists remained alive in your entire nation.
Among the Cambodians to take advantage of the instability was Toek Tik, a once-impoverished former Khmer Rouge foot soldier whose confessions helped investigators substantiate a few of their claims in opposition to Latchford.
As Campbell lays out in his e book, Toek Tik labored odd jobs after Cambodia’s liberation earlier than realizing that promoting statues, relatively than the cattle he was bartering with, may earn him exhausting money. Having hidden within the mountains round Koh Ker as a combatant, he knew the temple complicated effectively. The work was troublesome and harmful however provided safety in economically determined occasions. Initially working solo, he expanded operations in the course of the relative peace of the Nineteen Nineties, ultimately working a hundreds-strong crew of looters that trafficked artifacts to brokers on the Thai border, in response to court docket paperwork.
Speaking to the New York Times shortly earlier than his demise in 2021, Toek Tik, a father of 8, said he by no means made greater than a few hundred {dollars} for any merchandise. That was vital cash for rural Cambodia on the time. But he and his crew of looters had been to date eliminated from the worldwide artwork commerce that they had been largely oblivious to how rather more the artifacts commanded on the international market, Campbell writes. While reporting in Cambodia, Campbell met one among Toek Tik’s associates, who believed the artworks may fetch “tens of thousands” of Thai baht abroad (10,000 baht is round $300). “So, he was off by a factor of 30,” the writer mentioned.
Toek Tik didn’t know precisely the place his loot ended up after leaving Cambodia. But he heard that demand was pushed by a Bangkok-based purchaser often known as “Sia Ford” (or “Lord Ford”), writes Campbell. According to prosecutors, Sia Ford was one among Latchford’s aliases. “I don’t blame him at all, actually,” Campbell mentioned of Toek Tik, who is taken into account one among Cambodia’s most prolific looters. “If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else… I don’t think any of us can say with confidence what we would or wouldn’t have done in those circumstances.”
The looter’s story solely got here to gentle due to Bradley Gordon, an American lawyer based mostly in Cambodia who has spent a lot of the final 14 years investigating the plunder of Khmer cultural heritage.
His curiosity initially piqued by a 2012 NCS op-ed on Cambodian “blood antiquities,” Gordon was employed to seek the advice of for the Southern District of New York, which was then investigating an merchandise linked to Latchford. He started visiting villages near temple websites alongside native colleagues from the legislation observe he runs within the capital metropolis, Phnom Penh. (Struck by the sheer scale of Twentieth-century looting, the Connecticut-born lawyer mentioned he later felt obliged to supply his agency’s companies, professional bono, to Cambodia’s tradition ministry, which formally appointed him in 2018. “I felt like it was the right thing to do,” mentioned Gordon, who now lobbies abroad museums and collectors on behalf of Cambodia’s authorities, on a video name from Phnom Penh.)
Seeking eyewitness testimonies, Gordon’s crew tracked down Toek Tik, whom the lawyer befriended and in the end persuaded to speak on the file. During hours of interviews and temple visits, the previous smuggler recounted his exploits in meticulous element. Gordon would cross-reference his anecdotes with Latchford’s stock, discovering that Toek Tik acknowledged many objects within the dealer’s books as a result of he had ripped them off temple partitions, or from stone pedestals, himself.
Realizing the harm he had precipitated, Toek Tik believed he had “very bad karma” and may disclose what he knew “to improve it,” Gordon mentioned, including: “He did something amazing at the end of his life. Can we forgive him for his crimes? No. But we can try to understand why certain things happened.” Toek Tik, who was by no means formally charged with any crimes, expressed “regret” to the New York Times earlier than his demise, saying: “I want the gods to come home.”
Gordon labored with archeologists to match statues to particular websites that Toek Tik raided, mapping out looting networks. His on-the-ground analysis helped US investigators construct their case in opposition to Latchford. But the fees in opposition to the dealer had been as a lot about how he offered the objects as how they had been acquired.
Latchford, a naturalized Thai citizen who additionally glided by the title Pakpong Kriangsak, constructed his credibility fastidiously, opening a gallery in downtown Bangkok in 1974. In the Eighties, he donated Khmer artifacts to the British Museum and the Met, which on the time was aggressively increasing its Asian artwork assortment. Among them was the top of a Tenth-century stone Buddha and two kneeling figures that famously flanked the doorway of the Met’s Southeast Asian galleries.
Campbell argues that Latchford’s donations helped bolster his credibility as a scholar by associating his title with prime establishments. This, in flip, reassured future patrons that his artifacts had been legitimately sourced. The Met was Latchford’s “most powerful marketing tool,” the writer writes.
In a assertion to NCS, the Met mentioned it “remains committed to collaborating with Thailand and Cambodia on the study of works in The Met’s collection.” Citing a provenance analysis initiative launched in 2023, the assertion mentioned the museum has “since devoted substantial resources” towards an “in-depth review of its collection,” including: “The Met has a long and well-documented track record of working collaboratively with countries of origin when questions arise about an object’s prior history.” The British Museum didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark.
It was an period when fewer questions had been requested. And Latchford had solutions for people who had been. Many patrons wished to know that artifacts had left Cambodia earlier than the 1970 UNESCO conference, which gave international locations a authorized framework to get well looted cultural heritage. The dealer allegedly used falsified invoices, transport paperwork and letters to reassure his prospects. (Authorized exports had been, the truth is, so restricted in trendy Cambodian historical past that the notion of a legally sourced Khmer artifact is nearly not possible, Campbell mentioned. “Everything is, almost definitionally, looted,” he added.)
Conveniently, a deceased businessman known as Ian Donaldson appeared to repeatedly affirm, by way of letters, that he had acquired Latchford’s objects exterior Cambodia — in both Hong Kong or Vietnam — within the Nineteen Sixties, earlier than the UNESCO treaty was adopted. While Donaldson was a actual individual, who had died in 2001, US investigators allege that the letters had been faked by Latchford — dubbing Donaldson the “false collector” in court docket paperwork. Yet, the deception was not notably elaborate as a result of, on the time, it didn’t have to be. “I don’t think he expected anyone to look into this,” Campbell mentioned. “And why would you? No one ever had.”
This would change dramatically when Sotheby’s unexpectedly pulled a Tenth-century Khmer determine from sale on March 24, 2011 — the day it was resulting from be auctioned.
Federal investigators alleged that Latchford’s account of the statue’s origins (particularly that it had left Cambodia and was in London by the late Nineteen Sixties) was false. The sandstone artifact, which depicts the Hindu epic character Duryodhana, had the truth is been looted from Koh Ker in or round 1972, after the all-important UNESCO conference.
A two-year authorized battle ensued, and Sotheby’s ultimately agreed to a settlement, having persistently denied wrongdoing or information of the merchandise’s origins. In a assertion supplied to NCS, the public sale home mentioned it had “acted in good faith” and in accordance with its personal “rigorous standards” all through the dispute. “We remain committed to thorough due diligence, close cooperation with law enforcement, and the responsible stewardship of cultural property,” Sotheby’s added.
The statue was returned to Cambodia. And the case set a highly effective authorized precedent, laying naked how one man’s mistruths may journey via the artwork market. Separate from the Duryodhana controversy, Sotheby’s had often listed Southeast Asian objects with out provenance, in response to one peer-reviewed study, which discovered that greater than 70% of the 377 Khmer items it put up on the market between 1988 and 2010 had no printed possession historical past. Sotheby’s assertion to NCS didn’t touch upon the discovering.
At a time when cultural heritage was more and more being scrutinized as a matter of social justice, the Duryodhana case additionally turned an uncomfortable highlight on the museums that had handled Latchford, instantly or not directly. In May 2013, the Met returned the aforementioned kneeling figures that had lengthy guarded its Southeast Asian artwork wing. At the time, the museum mentioned in a short statement that it had “recently (come) into possession of new documentary research that was not available to the museum when the objects were acquired.”
After Latchford’s indictment and demise, different establishments adopted go well with. The floodgates have, now, opened. In the final three years, the National Gallery of Australia has returned three bronze sculptures it had bought from Latchford for $1.5 million, and Denver Art Museum introduced that it was repatriating 11 items linked to Latchford — together with a number of recognized by looter Toek Tik as objects he had stolen. California’s Asian Art Museum and Norton Simon Museum are among the many different establishments to voluntarily repatriate Latchford-linked objects to Cambodia.
In 2023, ten years after relinquishing the kneeling figures, the Met gave a further 14 items from its assortment again to Cambodia. This time, the museum explained its place in better element. Director Max Hollein mentioned the Met had been “working diligently for years” to “resolve questions” round artworks related to Latchford. “This complex work takes time, and we are committed to doing the right thing,” he wrote.
Billionaire collectors confronted rising strain (and visits from investigators), too. Among them was Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, one among Latchford’s greatest prospects, who in 2022 voluntarily forfeited 35 Southeast Asian objects from his artwork assortment. Clark told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that he had willingly turned over the objects after investigators offered him with proof of Latchford’s alleged crimes. The subsequent yr, the household of late US billionaire George Lindemann agreed to return 33 Khmer objects — a few of which had first come to investigators’ consideration by way of an Architectural Digest function exhibiting them adorning his Palm Beach house. Neither Lindemann nor Clark, who’re each estimated to have spent over $30 million on their forfeited artifacts, had been named in court docket paperwork or accused of wrongdoing.
Gordon estimates that at the least 300 looted Khmer artifacts have returned to Cambodia as a direct results of his crew’s work. He believes he’ll deliver house at the least 100 extra this yr. (Cambodia lately gave the American lawyer citizenship, and the equal to a knighthood, in recognition of his efforts.) Yet these figures are solely “scratching the surface,” he mentioned.
The variety of Khmer treasures exterior Cambodia won’t ever be recognized, however Gordon has compiled a database of round 2,000 museum objects and “as many, if not more” in personal collections. He estimates that at the least a quarter touched Latchford’s operation “in some way.” On his listing are objects housed in round a dozen US museums, together with some which have beforehand cooperated with Cambodian requests. Gordon hopes that Campbell’s e book “puts more pressure on those museums to do the right thing.”
There stay many unanswered questions — together with the identities of individuals on the felony meals chain between looters like Toek Tik and Latchford. “Who are the people in Thailand, between that broker and Latchford?” requested Campbell. “That, I never got great answers to.”
That Latchford died with out ever showing in court docket is an injustice Gordon mentioned he feels acutely. “He should have been flown to New York. I don’t care if he was 80 or 85, he should have gone to jail.” The lawyer hopes that extra solutions will outcome from the “huge number of leads” contained throughout the tens of 1000’s of emails, invoices, consumer lists, inventories and pictures that Latchford’s daughter handed over to Cambodia after his demise. “I think if we didn’t have that archive, I would be extremely bitter.”
Gordon additionally finds solace in serving to return sacred objects to a nation through which many individuals take into account spiritual statues not simply depictions of deities however dwelling embodiments of the gods. Speaking to NCS in 2021, after asserting that Latchford’s daughter would return her inherited artwork, Cambodia’s Minister of Culture and Fine Arts, Phoeurng Sackona summed up this sense.
“Our culture and our statues are not just wood and clay,” she mentioned, including that the nation plans to broaden its nationwide museum to accommodate the move of returned objects. “They possess spirits, and they have senses.”
“The Man Who Stole the Gods,” printed by Penguin, is out there now.