How a British antiquities dealer made millions from an international looting network

Trusted by museums, auction houses and billionaire collectors, the late dealer Douglas Latchford is now among the art market’s most toxic names. Illustration by Leah Abucayan/CNN/Reuters/Getty/Sipa/Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts via CNN Newsource

Whether found in a respected museum or a billionaire’s mansion, it is likely that any given Khmer sculpture in the West was, at some point, ripped from an ancient temple complex and trafficked out of Cambodia. There is also a reasonable chance it passed through the hands of a British man called Douglas Latchford.

To his customers, the antiquities dealer was a respectable figure — a trusted vendor, prominent (albeit largely self-taught) art scholar and author of multiple books on sculpture from the Khmer Empire, a civilization that prospered in what is now Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia between the 9th and 15th centuries. From the 1960s until his death in 2020, Latchford supplied collectors with ornate friezes, temple carvings and statues of Hindu gods, Buddhas and bodhisattvas.

That these deities were sometimes missing limbs or crudely severed at the ankles, or were still covered in dirt when he photographed them, barely raised eyebrows until the end of his life. When they did, the well-connected dealer usually had paperwork or cover stories to assuage buyers’ concerns. But in his later years, as US authorities began investigating artifacts spirited out of Cambodia during the country’s civil war and genocidal Khmer Rouge era that followed, the evidence against Latchford mounted.

It now appears that much of Latchford’s inventory had been illegally pillaged from abandoned archeological sites like Angkor Wat and Koh Ker. Small-scale looters, sometimes with the help of local military personnel, would remove the works with shovels, chisels, picks and even dynamite before transporting them, often by oxcart, to the Thai border. The items then found their way to the Bangkok-based dealer who, while now long dead, stands accused of laundering them onto the global art market using falsified records. Some of the artifacts later appeared at major auction houses or joined the collections of museums including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The year before he died, 88-year-old Latchford was indicted by US prosecutors on charges including wire fraud, smuggling and conspiracy. Federal investigators claim he knowingly built a career as a “conduit” for plundered antiquities. By then, however, the dealer was in such poor health in Thailand that it’s questionable he was even aware of the charges — let alone able to answer them in a New York courtroom 8,600 miles (13840 kilometres) away.

Much of the art world has, nonetheless, made up its mind. The dealer’s name is now so toxic that any object he is known to have handled is essentially untouchable. In recent years, private collectors and major institutions, including the Met, Denver Art Museum and the National Gallery of Australia, have sent items linked to Latchford back to Cambodia. This has all but “ended the market” for Khmer art, said Canadian journalist Matthew Campbell, whose new book “The Man Who Stole the Gods” lays out the case against Latchford in unflinching detail.

“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 said, adding: “The effective sale value of these pieces today would be zero, because you can’t sell them.”

Latchford always 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 became harder to deny, he pleaded ignorance or argued that they faced a worse fate at home. “Admittedly these things were moonlighted out of Cambodia and wound up somewhere else,” he told 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, however, no one — even those closest to him — is coming to Latchford’s defense.

One of his former associates, the disgraced art dealer Nancy Wiener, pleaded guilty to her own charges of conspiracy and possession of stolen property over items she bought from Latchford. His daughter Julia, who also goes by the Thai name Nawapan Kriangsak, meanwhile returned more than 100 Khmer artifacts she inherited from him to Cambodia’s government. While she has never said her father is guilty (and declined to speak for this story), she told CNN in 2021 that repatriating his records and art, “irrespective of origin,” was “the best way to deal with” his complex legacy. Two years later, she agreed to settle a US civil court action that saw her father’s estate forfeit US$12 million over money he had derived from selling stolen antiquities.

In the absence of a criminal conviction against Latchford, this may all constitute a resolution of sorts. But with hundreds, if not thousands, of Latchford’s items still overseas, and some of the looters themselves still at large, what does the quest for justice look like now?

Decades of plunder

Born in British India in 1931, Latchford arrived in Bangkok as a young, adventurous businessman in the mid-1950s. Navigating expatriate and aristocratic Thai circles with ease, he built sizable social networks while running local operations for a cosmetics and pharmaceuticals distributor, according to Campbell, who interviewed friends of Latchford’s dating back to the 1970s. He developed a fixation with the opulent Khmer Empire and began acquiring the sculptural artifacts, both Hindu and Buddhist, that its artisans produced.

From the 1960s, Latchford set about exploring Cambodian temples and embarking on buying trips to Khmer archeological sites. With Western collectors and museums increasingly fascinated with Asian art, he saw an opportunity to turn his hobby into a business, Campbell writes. In a field — Khmer sculpture — that was, then, of little interest to international academia, he also saw a chance to establish himself as a leading scholar, despite his lack of formal arts education, the author said.

“His passion for these objects was very genuine,” said Campbell, whose book depicts Latchford as an intellectual outsider among 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 war in 1967 ended, for three decades, Latchford’s (and practically every other foreigner’s) trips to Cambodia. Amid secret US bombing campaigns that spilled out from the Vietnam War, Cambodian ruler Prince Sihanouk was ousted in a coup before Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge party seized power in 1975. The communist group’s barbarous regime wreaked havoc on Cambodia — abolishing money, persecuting the educated classes, decimating the country’s agriculture and committing a genocide that killed between 1.5 million and 3 million people (then about a quarter of the country’s population).

Amid the pandemonium, heritage protection took a backseat. Local anti-export laws arguably existed since colonial times, as did a 1970 UNESCO convention prohibiting the “illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property.” But Cambodia had practically no means of enforcing either. Even after the Khmer Rouge was removed from power by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, archeological sites lay abandoned, littered with landmines or used for cover by militant guerillas. According to Campbell’s book, when the Khmer Rouge fell, just three archaeologists remained alive in the entire country.

Among the Cambodians to exploit the instability was Toek Tik, a once-impoverished former Khmer Rouge foot soldier whose confessions helped investigators substantiate some of their claims against Latchford.

As Campbell lays out in his book, Toek Tik worked odd jobs after Cambodia’s liberation before realizing that selling statues, rather than the cattle he was bartering with, could earn him hard cash. Having hidden in the mountains around Koh Ker as a combatant, he knew the temple complex well. The work was difficult and dangerous but offered security in economically desperate times. Initially operating solo, he expanded operations during the relative peace of the 1990s, eventually running a hundreds-strong crew of looters that trafficked artifacts to agents on the Thai border, according to court documents.

Speaking to the New York Times shortly before his death in 2021, Toek Tik, a father of 8, said he never made more than a few hundred dollars for any item. That was significant money for rural Cambodia at the time. But he and his team of looters were so far removed from the global art trade that they were largely oblivious to how much more the artifacts commanded on the international market, Campbell writes. While reporting in Cambodia, Campbell met one of Toek Tik’s associates, who believed the artworks could fetch “tens of thousands” of Thai baht overseas (10,000 baht is around US$300). “So, he was off by a factor of 30,” the author said.

Toek Tik did not know exactly where his loot ended up after leaving Cambodia. But he heard that demand was driven by a Bangkok-based buyer known as “Sia Ford” (or “Lord Ford”), writes Campbell. According to prosecutors, Sia Ford was one of Latchford’s aliases. “I don’t blame him at all, actually,” Campbell said of Toek Tik, who is considered one of 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.”

Following the trail

The looter’s story only came to light thanks to Bradley Gordon, an American lawyer based in Cambodia who has spent much of the last 14 years investigating the plunder of Khmer cultural heritage.

His interest initially piqued by a 2012 CNN op-ed on Cambodian “blood antiquities,” Gordon was hired to consult for the Southern District of New York, which was then investigating an item linked to Latchford. He began visiting villages close to temple sites alongside local colleagues from the law practice he runs in the capital city, Phnom Penh. (Struck by the sheer scale of 20th-century looting, the Connecticut-born lawyer said he later felt obliged to offer his firm’s services, pro bono, to Cambodia’s culture ministry, which officially appointed him in 2018. “I felt like it was the right thing to do,” said Gordon, who now lobbies overseas museums and collectors on behalf of Cambodia’s government, on a video call from Phnom Penh.)

Seeking eyewitness testimonies, Gordon’s team tracked down Toek Tik, whom the lawyer befriended and ultimately persuaded to talk on the record. During hours of interviews and temple visits, the former smuggler recounted his exploits in meticulous detail. Gordon would cross-reference his anecdotes with Latchford’s inventory, finding that Toek Tik recognized many items in the dealer’s books because he had ripped them off temple walls, or from stone pedestals, himself.

Realizing the damage he had caused, Toek Tik believed he had “very bad karma” and should disclose what he knew “to improve it,” Gordon said, adding: “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 never formally charged with any crimes, expressed “regret” to the New York Times before his death, saying: “I want the gods to come home.”

Gordon worked with archeologists to match statues to specific sites that Toek Tik raided, mapping out looting networks. His on-the-ground research helped US investigators build their case against Latchford. But the charges against the dealer were as much about how he sold the items as how they were acquired.

Latchford, a naturalized Thai citizen who also went by the name Pakpong Kriangsak, built his credibility carefully, opening a gallery in downtown Bangkok in 1974. In the 1980s, he donated Khmer artifacts to the British Museum and the Met, which at the time was aggressively expanding its Asian art collection. Among them was the head of a 10th-century stone Buddha and two kneeling figures that famously flanked the entrance of the Met’s Southeast Asian galleries.

Campbell argues that Latchford’s donations helped bolster his credibility as a scholar by associating his name with top institutions. This, in turn, reassured future buyers that his artifacts were legitimately sourced. The Met was Latchford’s “most powerful marketing tool,” the author writes.

In a statement to CNN, the Met said it “remains committed to collaborating with Thailand and Cambodia on the study of works in The Met’s collection.” Citing a provenance research initiative launched in 2023, the statement said the museum has “since devoted substantial resources” toward an “in-depth review of its collection,” adding: “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 did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

It was an era when fewer questions were asked. And Latchford had answers for those that were. Many buyers wanted to know that artifacts had left Cambodia before the 1970 UNESCO convention, which gave countries a legal framework to recover looted cultural heritage. The dealer allegedly used falsified invoices, shipping documents and letters to reassure his customers. (Authorized exports were, in fact, so limited in modern Cambodian history that the notion of a legally sourced Khmer artifact is almost impossible, Campbell said. “Everything is, almost definitionally, looted,” he added.)

Conveniently, a deceased businessman called Ian Donaldson appeared to repeatedly confirm, via letters, that he had acquired Latchford’s items outside Cambodia — in either Hong Kong or Vietnam — in the 1960s, before the UNESCO treaty was adopted. While Donaldson was a real person, who had died in 2001, US investigators allege that the letters were faked by Latchford — dubbing Donaldson the “false collector” in court documents. Yet, the deception was not particularly elaborate because, at the time, it didn’t need to be. “I don’t think he expected anyone to look into this,” Campbell said. “And why would you? No one ever had.”

Wave of repatriation

This would change dramatically when Sotheby’s unexpectedly pulled a 10th-century Khmer figure from sale on March 24, 2011 — the day it was due to be auctioned.

Federal investigators alleged that Latchford’s account of the statue’s origins (namely that it had left Cambodia and was in London by the late 1960s) was false. The sandstone artifact, which depicts the Hindu epic character Duryodhana, had in fact been looted from Koh Ker in or around 1972, after the all-important UNESCO convention.

A two-year legal battle ensued, and Sotheby’s eventually agreed to a settlement, having consistently denied wrongdoing or knowledge of the item’s origins. In a statement provided to CNN, the auction house said it had “acted in good faith” and in accordance with its own “rigorous standards” throughout 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 powerful legal precedent, laying bare how one man’s mistruths could travel through the art market. Separate from the Duryodhana controversy, Sotheby’s had regularly listed Southeast Asian items without provenance, according to one peer-reviewed study, which found that more than 70 per cent of the 377 Khmer pieces it put up for sale between 1988 and 2010 had no published ownership history. Sotheby’s statement to CNN did not comment on the finding.

At a time when cultural heritage was increasingly being scrutinized as a matter of social justice, the Duryodhana case also turned an uncomfortable spotlight on the museums that had dealt with Latchford, directly or indirectly. In May 2013, the Met returned the aforementioned kneeling figures that had long guarded its Southeast Asian art wing. At the time, the museum said 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 death, other institutions followed suit. The floodgates have, now, opened. In the last three years, the National Gallery of Australia has returned three bronze sculptures it had purchased from Latchford for US$1.5 million, and Denver Art Museum announced that it was repatriating 11 items linked to Latchford — including several identified by looter Toek Tik as items he had stolen. California’s Asian Art Museum and Norton Simon Museum are among the other institutions to voluntarily repatriate Latchford-linked items to Cambodia.

In 2023, ten years after relinquishing the kneeling figures, the Met gave a further 14 items from its collection back to Cambodia. This time, the museum explained its position in greater detail. Director Max Hollein said the Met had been “working diligently for years” to “resolve questions” around artworks associated with Latchford. “This complex work takes time, and we are committed to doing the right thing,” he wrote.

Billionaire collectors faced growing pressure (and visits from investigators), too. Among them was Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, one of Latchford’s biggest customers, who in 2022 voluntarily forfeited 35 Southeast Asian items from his art collection. Clark told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that he had willingly turned over the items after investigators presented him with evidence of Latchford’s alleged crimes. The next year, the family of late US billionaire George Lindemann agreed to return 33 Khmer items — some of which had first come to investigators’ attention via an Architectural Digest feature showing them decorating his Palm Beach home. Neither Lindemann nor Clark, who are both estimated to have spent over US$30 million on their forfeited artifacts, were named in court documents or accused of wrongdoing.

Gordon estimates that at least 300 looted Khmer artifacts have returned to Cambodia as a direct result of his team’s work. He believes he will bring home at least 100 more this year. (Cambodia recently gave the American lawyer citizenship, and the equivalent to a knighthood, in recognition of his efforts.) Yet these figures are only “scratching the surface,” he said.

The number of Khmer treasures outside Cambodia will never be known, but Gordon has compiled a database of around 2,000 museum objects and “as many, if not more” in private collections. He estimates that at least a quarter touched Latchford’s operation “in some way.” On his list are items housed in around a dozen US museums, including some that have previously cooperated with Cambodian requests. Gordon hopes that Campbell’s book “puts more pressure on those museums to do the right thing.”

There remain many unanswered questions — including the identities of people on the criminal food chain between looters like Toek Tik and Latchford. “Who are the people in Thailand, between that broker and Latchford?” asked Campbell. “That, I never got great answers to.”

That Latchford died without ever appearing in court is an injustice Gordon said 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 more answers will result from the “huge number of leads” contained within the tens of thousands of emails, invoices, client lists, inventories and photographs that Latchford’s daughter handed over to Cambodia after his death. “I think if we didn’t have that archive, I would be extremely bitter.”

Gordon also finds solace in helping return sacred items to a country in which many people consider religious statues not just depictions of deities but living embodiments of the gods. Speaking to CNN in 2021, after announcing that Latchford’s daughter would return her inherited art, Cambodia’s Minister of Culture and Fine Arts, Phoeurng Sackona summed up this feeling.

“Our culture and our statues are not just wood and clay,” she said, adding that the country plans to expand its national museum to accommodate the flow of returned items. “They possess spirits, and they have senses.”

Oscar Holland, CNN