The looters traveled through the jungle to Prasat Krachap, a stone temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. They walked in a straight line. Some of the looters had watched a cow being blown up by land mines in the country.
Prasat Krachap was selected carefully by the leader of the band. He was forced to serve as a child soldier. He vanished into the forested slopes of a nearby mountain in the 70s. He used temples as shelters while on the run. He believed that this one was promising.
The civil conflict in Cambodia ended in 1997. The men were marked by the violence. He fought with the Khmer Rouge, the party that ruled the country from 1975 to 1979. The contest for political control was fought between the remnants of the Khmer Rouge against the more moderate socialists and the Cambodian royal family.
The looters began to dig in the central shrine of Prasat Krachap, paying attention to the sound of a shovel hitting stone instead of dirt. Several humanlike figures came to be. The men used pieces of wood as levers to pull the objects out of the ground. Shiva, his lips in a hint of a smile, sitting cross-legged across from Skanda, who was rendered as a small boy extending his hands upward to clasp his father's, was depicted in one of the sculptures. A statue of about the same height showed Skanda as a god of war, sitting astride Paravani, a peacock, carved in such detail that each feather was distinct. The first people to look at these works were Toek Tik's men.
The artifacts were loaded onto oxcarts. They would transfer the items from the rutted country roads to the antiquities broker near the Thailand border. The looters would get about 15,000 Thai baht. The Peacock and Skanda and Shiva were purchased by a British businessman named Douglas Latchford. Latchford sold The Peacock to a collector for over a million dollars. He had his own collection of statues.
The world's foremost dealer of Cambodian antiquities was Latchford. An energetic salesman, he invigorated a once-sleepy corner of the art market, securing seven-figure prices for objects that previously had modest commercial value and landing them in the collections of institutions. His activities are at the center of a complex art market investigation. Government officials and lawyers in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, academics in Paris, heritage advocates in Washington, and federal prosecutors in New York City are all involved in the investigation of the theft of Cambodia's archaeological treasures.
Thousands of pieces were taken, which robbed Cambodians of relics that are seen as physical manifestations of their ancestors. These artifacts were torn from their pedestals and scattered around the world to be used in museums and living rooms in New York, London, and Palm Beach. Since he died in 2020 at the age of 88, the investigators have accelerated their efforts to locate and return what Latchford sold before he faced federal fraud and conspiracy charges.
It is not clear if he ever had direct contact with those who stole ancient sites. Some of his fellow dealers say he has been unfairly vilified for operating in a system that he thought was ethical. It wouldn't be wrong to say that when Latchford began collecting and selling Cambodian antiquities, most people wouldn't care where they came from. Artifacts from poor countries were seen as fair games.
His unique position made him more responsible to those trying to understand him. The executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washington-based group that combats trafficking in artifacts, once described Latchford as a "Janus" for the two-faced Roman god. The business model of antiquities theft would fall apart without someone moving objects.
He was one of the main organizers of the mass loot of Cambodia in the second half of the 20th century. It wasn't a secret at all. It was a terrible thing to be doing and we knew there was a man in Thailand doing it.
He described himself as an explorer-scholar in the back flap of Adoration and Glory. The truth was a bit more straightforward. Latchford didn't spend a lot of time in the jungles to look for lost treasures. He came to Thailand in the mid-1950s to work for a company that imported cosmetics, chemicals, and other goods and later focused on the pharmaceutical business. He said he saw his first statue from Cambodia at a dinner party hosted by an art adviser to the tobacco magnate. He changed his life. He told an interviewer that he responded to Greek and Roman sculpture on another level. After buying one piece of his own, Latchford bought many more.
He was hooked before he went to Cambodia. The capital of the Khmer Empire was an ancient city that encompassed present-day Cambodia as well as much of Thailand and Vietnam. It wasn't until after the 1200s that Theravada Buddhism became Cambodia's dominant religion, and they demonstrated their power by building ever-grander temples and religious statuary. It is difficult to imagine what it would have been like for Latchford to visit the site as it was when he first saw it, as it was remote, overgrown, and almost devoid of visitors.
Latchford was able to accelerate his acquisitions in Thailand because of the success of his drug company and investments in the city's real estate market. Jim Thompson, the swashbuckling American spy who became a noted collector of Asian art before he vanished without a trace in 1967, was a man he admired. As a collector and dealer, Latchford worked with Spink, a London auction house later acquired by Christie's. He had a Condominium in the heart of the Thai capital that was a museum of Khmer statuary. Some of the artifacts for sale were obtained from runners who crossed the border. He lived in a luxurious apartment in London.
The Thai national bodybuilding association was being funded by Latchford. He was the president for a time and helped Thailand win a lot of gold medals at international competition. Latchford was surrounded for most of his life by a group of young Thai people. He had a brief marriage to a Thai woman with whom he had a daughter, Julia, but he became more open about his sexuality over time, and some of the people he was with may have been his lovers. Others were trusted to travel to the Cambodian border to look at statues being sold. Latchford claimed that his chef had won a gold medal for his class at the Asian Championships. A long time friend of Latchford told me that he was a visual man. He liked to have these guys around to look at the works of art.
The country that obsessed Latchford the most was off limits for most of his life. One of the worst periods of the 20th century was started by Pol Pot. People were forced to work under slavelike conditions in the countryside and agriculture was collectivized. Anyone suspected of having ties to capitalism or foreign cultures was targeted by the militant group. There were more than 1.5 million deaths. When invading Vietnamese forces installed a proxy government in 1979 the rule of the party was over. The Khmer Rouge launched a stubborn insurgency despite the fact that they had stopped fighting.
The Cambodian countryside was covered with millions of land mines. The violence of the 1990s made it easier for looters to operate. The period is thought to be a good time for antiquities theft. A storehouse of artifacts in Cambodia's second city was attacked at least three times by looters. A guard was killed in the process of a group of 300 raiders taking 31 statues. While the surrounding areas were secured, few other temples were built, and thieves stole thousands of objects from the country.
The cultural damage done to Cambodians was huge. Phoeurng Sackona, Cambodia's minister of culture and fine arts, asked what kind of greed and stupidity would cause someone to destroy the stone. I need to comprehend the situation. The economy had been devastated by decades of conflict. It was hard for some to resist the incentives for theft created by the international market.
In the early 2000s, stability returned under the authoritarian leadership of Hun Sen, a onetime Khmer Rouge soldier who had switched sides and served in the Vietnam-backed government of the 1980s. Human-rights groups condemn the government led by Hun Sen. As long as you didn't wander around in heavily mined rural areas, Cambodia was growing more accessible. He helicoptered in with Emma Bunker, a Colorado-based researcher, in 2002 on a trip to the island.
It was the capital of the Khmer Empire for less than two decades. The style of the statues created by the sculptors was different from the statues seen in other Cambodia. Their figures have full lips and are very sexy. Some of them are depicted in motion, as if they are about to leap. He bought them when he was able. James Clark spent $35 million on more than 30 pieces from Latchford. It's believed that others ended up in the Palm Beach home of the billionaire. His son didn't respond to questions about his father's death.
Adoration and Glory was written to show how many Cambodian statues had passed through his hands. The book featured finely staged photographs of almost 200 works, mostly resident in Western museums or private collections, and many of them appeared to belong to Latchford. He had cultivated three of Cambodia's most senior cultural officials by donating money to improve the National Museum. Hab Touch, the museum's deputy director at the time, marveled at the breadth of what Latchford had put together. While working with Khmer art every day, he realized that he had only seen a small portion of what existed.
A British stone expert named Simon Warrack was working at the time. He spotted a pair of stone feet on the ground while walking around the Prasat Chen temple. Warrack was interested in the find, but he didn't pay much attention to it.
He found Adoration and Glory in a library in Cambodia. Warrack said that there was a huge statue with no feet. Something happened in my mind. The statue was listed as a museum in California. Warrack took a picture of the page and merged it with a picture of the feet from the island. He said that it fit at all three points.
Warrack was able to locate a crime scene because looters left the feet behind. He wrote a memo that was sent to Unesco, the United Nations agency responsible for cultural heritage and the overseer of a 1970 treaty that allows governments to demand the return of objects removed without authorization. Warrack was of the opinion that a more detailed investigation was needed.
Warrack and another pair of feet were found close to each other, but Eric Bourdonneau was interested in the same pair of feet. TheNorton Simon statue, which had been in the collection since the 1970s, was thought to be a representation of Bhima, the main character of the Mahabharata. The warrior Duryodhana fought Bhima in one of the poems key battles. The Duryodhana statue had gone, but Bourdonneau didn't know where it was. He was taken aback when he saw the promotional materials for the auction that was going to be held in New York. The Duryodhana is a 5-foot- tall stone warrior. It had been purchased by a Belgian businessman in the 1970s and was put up for sale by his widow.
The attitudes towards the origin of artworks in international collections were changing. By the 1990s, museums began to require more detailed provenance information in order to establish a full chain of ownership. The year of the Unesco treaty was thought to be the cutoff for dealing in Cambodian statues. The sale of an artifact would be illegitimate if the seller could not prove that it was abroad earlier. Poor countries without the resources to press their claims were often ignored. The study analyzed 377 pieces from 1988 to 2010 that were put up for sale. She found that a lot of the information was not published.
The Department of Homeland Security, which has jurisdiction over imports to the US, was starting to pay more attention to looted art. The statue could be stolen after the DHS agents contacted the auction house, warning that the statue could be taken. It was possible for the Cambodian government to purchase the sculpture in a private sale.
The federal prosecutors in New York disagreed with the claims made by him. The government launched a forfeiture action and demanded that the auction house give up the Duryodhana so it could be returned to Cambodia. It would have been protected by Cambodian law even before the early 1970s, according to the prosecutors. After being taken out of the country, the Duryodhana and its counterpart, theNorton Simon's Bhima, were obtained by a well-known collector. The British auction house that sold the Duryodhana to the Belgian buyer was the one that the collector tried to sell it to.
Everyone knew that the collector was Latchford. He told the New York Times that he wasn't the owner of the Duryodhana. He was on the radar of US law enforcement in a way he hadn't before.
Brad Gordon was chosen by the US Department of Justice as a consultant for the Duryodhana case. Gordon, the head of a firm that worked with investors trying to get a piece of the country's economic revival, was one of a few internationally connected attorneys in Phnom Penh. He was asked by the American prosecutors to add to the evidence of the theft that they were accumulating through corporate records and interviews. Gordon wasIntrigued by the challenge and began searching for people who remembered the Duryodhana. A man said he saw it on an oxcart when he was a teenager. The man said he had a love affair with a girl from another village who was killed by the Khmer Rouge.
Gordon tried to find older residents who might be willing to talk when he visited the Buddhist temple that the witness had become the caretakers of. He was directed to a man who was knowledgeable about ancient sites. Gordon didn't have an exact address but he did have a translator with him. A woman answered the door and said that the person Gordon was looking for was inside. Gordon was told by the translator that he was interested in antiquities and wanted to buy land in the area. Gordon was introduced to a middle aged man. The man was named Toek Tik.
Gordon had a copy of Adoration and Glory in his hand. The book had an image of Skanda and Shiva on the cover and Toek Tik was excited to see it. He yelled, "I know this, I know this!" He smiled after flipping through the pages.
Gordon had suspicions about how much Toek Tik knew about Khmer Empire statuary. He and the translator agreed to keep in contact with the antiquities in the book. Gordon told me that they didn't realize that he stole so many of them. They met a few more times and he began to reveal more of his past. He was too young to have been involved in the theft.
In New York, the case was gaining steam. The Kneeling Attendants, a pair of sandstone figures flanking the entrance to its Southeast Asian galleries, were returned to the Metropolitan Museum after Cambodian officials presented evidence that they had been taken from the same location as the Duryodhana. The statue of the Duryodhana was agreed to be returned to its rightful owner later that year. The Bhima would be returned by the SimonNorton within months. The items would be displayed in Cambodia's National Museum.
In the community of antiquities, Latchford was associated with the loot of the island. He donated the torsos and one of the heads of the Kneeling Attendants to the Met. The nickname "Dynamite Doug" was given to him by heritage activists because of his statues being removed from temples.
Latchford was aware that his reputation was at risk and began informal talks about returning some of his collection to Cambodia. The Cambodians decided that he wasn't serious. Kong VIreak, a former National Museum director, said that he was defensive at that time. He wanted the government of Cambodia to make a public declaration that he was clean. He would come back with a few objects. We said that it wasn't fair.
Latchford continued to make sales. The B. Grimm Group is one of Thailand's largest conglomerates. Link was bombarded with sales pitches for statues. Provenance wasn't mentioned in the messages; instead, Latchford focused on aesthetic aspects. He wrote about the bare-breasted woman in one of the statues. You will dream of her all night before you go to sleep.
Link paid about $870,000 for a stone sculpture of a kneeling Khmer queen from the 12th or 13th century. The sale of a kneeling female figure in bronze to Link was recorded in a document from the previous year. Link said in an interview that he wasn't aware of the allegations against Latchford.
The DHS agents and prosecutors were close to Latchford. Nancy Wiener, a prominent Manhattan antiquities dealer, was arrested in December of 2016 for possession of stolen property. One of the best sources for ancient works in New York was the Upper East Side gallery owned by Wiener's mother. According to the criminal complaint against Wiener, prosecutors viewed her as part of a larger network, and they talked about her interactions with two people. According to the complaint, both worked with Wiener to create false information.
Parkinson's disease and heart problems were afflicting Latchford. He was no longer able to travel easily and needed help. Gordon, who is now advising the Cambodian government on its discussions with Latchford, explained in a memo to the US ambassador in Phnom Penh that the elderly dealer had an opportunity to get back a huge collection of stolen antiquities. Latchford wanted assurances that he wouldn't face US charges and a similar guarantee for Bunker. The children didn't respond to requests for interviews about their mother's work with Latchford.
As long as he returned everything he owned and provided detailed information about past sales, Cambodia would be willing to request leniency for Latchford. Several people involved in the negotiation said he was a very unpredictable partner. He may be willing to give everything over one day. He insisted that he was willing to part with only a few statues.
Gordon was able to get a promise from the government that they wouldn't prosecute him for what he said. Toek Tik described a long career as a looter. He had little knowledge of what to steal or how to sell it when he entered the business in the 1980's. He built a network of hundreds of men who could be called upon to move artifacts from one place to another. There, Toek Tik would give the objects to a broker who would take them to Thailand. He estimated that he had taken more than a thousand pieces. Toek Tik said that the top buyer was a foreign collector in Thailand. Siam is a Thai word for a wealthy businessman.
Gordon couldn't put Toek Tik's account to Latchford. He was in intensive care at a hospital in Thailand in the summer of 2019. He was intubated and barely able to communicate when the indictment he was afraid of was about to be made public. According to the document, the US prosecutors said that Latchford had engaged in a scheme to sell Cambodian antiquities on the international art market, and that they had lied about the origin of the statues to make them appear American.
They said that he had been dealing in stolen statues for a long time after he should have known it was wrong. He told the New York dealer that the bronze head was recently found in northeastern Cambodia. He wrote, "They are looking for the body, no luck so far, all they have found are two land mines..." What would you be willing to pay for it? He was so excited about the statue of Buddha that it was still covered in dirt when he received it. Even though it is still across the border, it is amazing.
Prosecutors said that Latchford would create fake provenance records to hide the origin of objects. He instructed a collector in Singapore to make false documentation for a piece that had been in his collection for 12 years. A doctored invoice and letter of provenance was used to hide the connection to Latchford. In order to facilitate other sales, he provided letters of provenance supposedly supplied to him by a collector who might claim to have purchased a piece in Vietnam or Hong Kong in the 1960s. After Ian Donaldson died in 2001, Latchford kept doing this.
The US government tried to extradite him to New York, but he was too sick to stand trial. He died from organ failure in August 2020
Julia moved quickly to conclude an agreement with the Cambodian government to return hundreds of artifacts owned by the family after her father died. According to Charles Webb, a British consultant who advised on the deal, she had concluded that her father had misled her about the nature of his business and that a complete return of the objects was the only way to escape the controversy surrounding him. Julia wouldn't comment on the story.
Julia agreed to give access to the records of transactions involving dealers, collectors, and cultural institutions all over the world, which Gordon was interested in. Cambodia would need evidence that would be harder for the current owners to ignore to get those statues back. Gordon was working for the Cambodian government and he became obsessed with getting the works back. He said it was the biggest art theft in history.
Gordon still relied on Toek Tik. They went through Adoration and Glory, and Toek Tik drew maps of precise locations where he claimed to have taken statues. He was with Gordon and Cambodian researchers as they went over what the lawyer had done. Gordon helped Toek Tik out by covering medical expenses. Gordon didn't think Toek Tik was revealing anything. Gordon said that the man was in love with the idea that the statues would be brought back. He felt like he was doing something wrong.
A group of Cambodian government archaeologists began a project in late 2020 to test Toek Tik's recollections. The team began excavating and cataloging every fragment they found after he showed them the spot where he remembered taking The Peacock and Skanda and Shiva. There were pieces of the Skanda that had been replaced after they were dug up. A large base that looked like it was for The Peacock was found by the archaeologists. The excavation and testimony of Toek Tik were cited by US prosecutors in a forfeiture filing.
Gordon was spending a lot of his time with the former looter. A few months later, Toek Tik began complaining of back pain, which made it hard for him to sit for extended conversations or drive long distances to visit remote temples. Gordon arranged for him to see a doctor who told him that Toek Tik had advanced Pancreatic Cancer. Gordon asked specialists in Singapore if he could take Toek Tik out of the country for treatment, but they said no. Everyone could do nothing to alleviate his pain.
Gordon told me that it went up quickly from there. We stopped interviewing him and just spent every day interviewing Toek Tik. On some days, Toek Tik could talk for a long time, but on other days, he had to lie on the floor. Instead of taking him to temples, Gordon projected maps onto the wall, trying to remember the sites. When Toek Tik contracted Covid-19, they continued. Soon after, he died. Gordon said they didn't have enough time
Thanks in part to Toek Tik, there is now a gradual flow of artifacts coming back to Cambodia. In a deal announced early this year, Clark, the Netscape co- founder, agreed to give up $35 million worth of statues he had bought from Latchford, after DHS agents showed him evidence that they had been stolen. Skanda and Shiva have been returned by the Latchford family after a different collector agreed to give up The Peacock. Cambodia wants a long list of cultural institutions to prove their Cambodian objects were legitimate. The statues are important to Cambodians, even though they are far from the day-to-day concerns of most Cambodians. It is the heritage of hundreds of years of ancestors. The culture minister said that they saw that material and spirit. There are many people who love the statues, but they are not spiritual.
Gordon is still looking for former looters in Cambodia who will not be prosecuted if they share information. Most of the interviewers he works with are women and they tend to have a better relationship with looters who are older than them. Gordon's team has built a database of more than 2,000 likely looted objects, a significant proportion of them with connections to Latchford. He said that sometimes he feels like he doesn't understand his network.
I traveled with Gordon and his team to see their work in action. At Prasat Krachap, a crew of archaeologists in hard hats and matching blue polo shirts were looking for statues. They formed a trench around the temple's central chamber. There were octagonal stone columns decorated with intricate patterns, and an elaborately carved roof pediment, similar to the statue that had been taken from just a few feet away. The head of the excavation team hopes to repair some of the damage done by temple robberies. Water can get in and cause erosion when looters dig. The structure needs to be strengthened.
Gordon showed me the product of another effort by his team. According to Toek Tik, there were three statues that were stolen from the complex: two female figures and one male. Gordon sent a sketch from Toek Tik to an archaeologist who thought one of the females resembled a piece on display in the Met.
The Cambodian government gave the go-ahead for the excavation. Blocks of laterite, an iron-rich material found in tropical climates, were used to build the square chamber. A sculpted foot, hacked off cleanly at the ankle, was seen at the center of the stone pedestal. The stone blocks around the foot were removed and placed in the sun. Gordon and his colleagues were confident that they matched. He said that it was crazy. The Met is looking forward to constructive dialogue with Cambodia after they asked for detailed provenance records for all of their objects.
Gordon was introduced to many of the looters he worked with. We met with one of them on the terrace of the hotel. Gordon referred to living looters with code names as a precautionary measure. The man with the sun-worn face was called Blue Tiger. Blue Tiger said that he stole statues in 1993. He was familiar with the area's temples. A group of Frenchmen were hunting for artifacts decades ago.
The autumn 1997 operation that unearthed The Peacock and Skanda and Shiva was Blue Tiger's last full-time job. He and his colleagues traveled around the country in groups of up to 12 people. In the past, two crews of looters began shooting at each other with Kalashnikov rifles in order to protect themselves. After hearing about the battle, Toek Tik told them to stop using the walkie-talkie.
Sometimes, instead of removing an object immediately, Blue Tiger's team would take a photograph, which was passed up the chain of buyers connecting looters in the field to foreign markets. Blue Tiger would dig it out if someone said they wanted it. He said that all the objects went to Thailand. She was the top buyer. He didn't feel like he was doing anything wrong. I feel bad now. These things belong to Cambodia. Our ancestors made them.
He said he remembered the largest work he had done. He said it was a stone figure from a temple. The statue was as tall as two meters and had a third eye and four arms. The harihara is a deity depicted in Khmer sculpture. Gordon was sitting upright. He smiled and said that it would be a new thing. A person passed a notebook and a pen to Blue Tiger.
Gordon should ask archaeologists about the plausibility of Blue Tiger's recollections. They would have to find the location and try to find a remnant. It was a lead and there was no guarantee it would help recover something.
Gordon said that everyone thought the stones wouldn't speak. The stones are saying something.
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