Chasing the Ancient Stolen Statues of Cambodia

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1:37Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. In the spring of 2011, an ancient statue from Cambodia was said to be auctioned at Sotheby's in New York. The five-foot-tall artifact, with its powerful chest and large round eyes, is known as the Duriodana. The Duriodana is a thousand-year-old sandstone sculpture of a warrior from a Cambodian temple called Kokar. Matthew Campbell is a senior reporter and editor for Bloomberg Businessweek. Though the figure was sculpted out of stone, it managed to capture movement, as if the warrior was ready to leap in a duel. The object is significant artistically because it is one of the most amazing stone sculptures that's ever come out of Cambodia, and specifically of this remarkable ancient civilization called the Khmer Empire, which produced, among other things, Angkor Wat.

2:38Sotheby's was aiming to sell the sculpture for as much as$3 million. To collectors, it was a masterpiece. But to U.S. prosecutors who'd been tracking its sale, it was something else. Evidence. What was really significant about it from a legal perspective was no one had seen this object in a long time. It had last been published in 1975. There was no record of where it was before that. For decades, the Duryodhana had seemingly vanished before resurfacing on the other side of the world. Records showed that it was first sold in 1975 in London. Documents tracking its chain of custody beyond that were scant.

3:25But federal investigators who were looking into the statue had one clue they couldn't ignore. When this piece arrived in New York City, In 2010, for sale by Sotheby's, it had no feet. Its feet had been broken off at the ankles. And through kind of a coincidence, feet which matched it had been discovered at a temple site in Cambodia. Investigators believed that the Diridana had been stolen, ripped from an ancient site in Cambodia and working its way through the most exclusive tiers of the fine art world. On the day the statue was about to go under the hammer, Sotheby's unexpectedly pulled it from sale after federal agents warned the auction house the item could be stolen property.

4:13Meanwhile, authorities dug deeper into their case, trying to prove it. So the Department of Justice went into this case with a pretty good idea of where this thing had come from, but not who had stolen it or when. Finding answers to those questions would send investigators on a far-reaching hunt that lasted for more than a decade. That search has consequences for some of the world's wealthiest museums and collectors, with implications for a country whose art had been used to prop up a multi-million dollar industry. When federal prosecutors began working on this, they were of the view that they were looking at a long-term criminal conspiracy, which stretched from the killing fields of Cambodia all the way to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

5:05This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Wan Ha. Every week, we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons, and businesses that drive this ever-shifting region. Today on the show, how Cambodia's stolen gods got scattered around the world, and the unlikely investigation that's helping to bring them home.

5:34For roughly 500 years, beginning in the 9th century, Cambodia sat at the heart of the Khmer Empire, one of the most powerful civilizations of the pre-modern world. Its rulers built monumental temples like Angkor Wat and filled them with grand sculptures in stone and bronze. But by the end of Cambodia's civil war in 1998, many of those treasures were gone, looted during three decades of conflict and upheaval. And the country itself was in shambles. Roughly two million Cambodians, a quarter of the population, died in the few years that the Khmer Rouge was in power in the late 1970s. They were then ousted by Vietnamese forces, but fighting between insurgent groups continued for another 20 years.

6:22The Cambodian Civil War went on very violently, very viciously, all the way to 1998. And wars run on bullets, they run on fuel, but they really run on money. You can't fight a war without money. Matthew Campbell is the author of The Man Who Stole the Gods, A true story of war, obsession, and a global art conspiracy. And in Cambodia, one of the ways to fund yourself is to steal and sell ancient artworks. So all sides in the Civil War were engaged in this. There were also just opportunistic thieves taking advantage of chaos who were not themselves competent in the war. And somewhere amid that chaos, the Diridana disappeared from Cambodia.

7:09Decades later, when Sotheby's tried to auction the statue in New York, the Cambodian government rang the alarm. It asked the U.S. for help to recover it. But first, prosecutors had to prove it had been stolen. One of the critical components is you need to be able to show that looting or stealing this object was illegal in the country where it came from at the time it occurred. In addition to national laws in the U.S. and elsewhere, There is a treaty under the aegis of UNESCO, the United Nations Cultural Heritage Agency, which governs or attempts to govern the movement of what they call cultural property, which is basically art and artifacts around the world.

7:53And the UNESCO treaty is complicated, but generally in, for example, the world of big museums, there's a cutoff in 1970. So if you can show that an object left its country of origin before 1970, it's generally considered fairly safe to acquire. In the case of the Dyrdonna, the where was clear enough, proving the when would be harder. At the time, Sotheby's was confident the Dyrdonna was out of Cambodia before the 1970 cutoff. There was a pretty strong impression by the people at Sotheby's that it had been in the possession pre-1975 of a very prominent art dealer, a British man named Douglas Latchford.

8:37And actually, in Sotheby's internal deliberations, before it agreed to sell this thing, they had reached out to Latchford. He had initially said, yes, I did have it. Then he changed his story and said, actually, I didn't. So the whereabouts of this thing were kind of a mystery. This is an enormous object. It weighs hundreds and hundreds of pounds. It had obviously been removed somewhat violently from the place where it came from. Who took it out? How did they get it to the border? To unravel that mystery, authorities needed someone on the ground in Cambodia. What happened in 2012, I was sitting in my office in Phnom Penh.

9:19I was scrolling through the internet and I came across an op-ed. And it was about the looting of Cambodia. That's Bradley Gordon, an American lawyer living in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The op-ed he came across struck a chord, so he reached out to the authors. Shortly afterwards, I found myself getting hired by the Department of Justice out of New York, the prosecutors there who were working on the Duridana case. And they said, hey, you actually could be helpful to us. Maybe go out and collect some testimonies of villagers and see if you can find an eyewitness. At first, Brad thought the assignment would be fairly straightforward.

10:00But in a country still living with the legacy of war and genocide, finding those answers would prove much harder than he expected. When we went to the village, the first stop, hardly anyone talked to us. They didn't tell us anything. But Brad and his team, some he hired from the village, kept at it. They spent months returning to villages around Kokke, the temple complex where the Duryodhana was taken. And after months of interviews, their search led them to a former child soldier in the Khmer Rouge. One who didn't just have a lead, but who claimed he had stolen more than a thousand Cambodian artifacts.

10:40His name was Deiduk, or Tuktik. We told him he would not be arrested That we would make sure that people he told us about They were not going to get arrested either And I think he really believed in karma He didn't do this for anything But, you know, just improving his chances of maybe a better next life And I think he was very aware of how wrong it was What he had done and he was a very thoughtful person in many ways and very reflective. And I think for him, he saw what an incredible crime this was against the Cambodian people. And I think he wanted to do whatever he could to try to make things right.

11:29Daedook told Brad he built a network of hundreds of looters that targeted ancient sites across Cambodia. The artifacts were then moved through Thailand and into the international art market. Deduk often worked with one particular broker, and he knew that a large chunk of the works were sold to one client. Here's Matthew Campbell again. He understood that there was a Westerner, a man in Bangkok who took tick referred to as Sia Ford. Sia is a Thai honorific. It means Lord or something like that. Lord Ford was Douglas Latchford, the collector who changed his story when Sotheby's first asked about the Giordana.

12:10De Duc said he had been supplying Latchford. That revelation suggested that Latchford's influence extended all the way from the international art market down the chain to the people digging artifacts out of the ground. Latchford was not himself a looter. We don't have any evidence of him in a temple ripping things out. He was a voracious buyer. And Brad also learned that Latchford had sent instructions up the chain. He would tell people what he wanted, what kind of artworks he was looking for. He would say he was looking for bronzes in a certain style or a certain kind of Hindu iconography. That information would reach looters in the field and they would go try and get it.

12:53Brad had helped uncover a sprawling trafficking network that looted Cambodia's ancient sites and fed a global demand for Khmer antiquities. There were looting crews in the field all over Cambodia, all through the Civil War. Actually, the most intense phase of looting was in the mid to late 1990s. You had these industrial-scale raids on certain sites. And I use the word industrial very deliberately. We're talking construction equipment, dynamite, occasionally gun battles between rival looting crews who were after the same stuff. These looting crews would then move artworks to the Thai border where there were brokers who would get them over the border and to Bangkok where Lashford was waiting.

13:38And Lashford was essentially the interface between this looting supply chain I just described and the international market. So he had impeccable relationships with big buyers, both privately and with big museums like the Metropolitan in New York. He was a trusted supplier to all these people. Will Cambodia recover what was lost? And what the discovery means for museums and collectors around the world? That's after the break.

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17:13American lawyer Bradley Gordon helped federal prosecutors uncover a trafficking network that systematically looted Cambodia's ancient temples and funneled their treasures onto the international art market. Then came the reckoning. In 2019, eight years after prosecutors first challenged the sale of the Duradana at a Sotheby's auction, they indicted the man they believe sat at the center of that network, British art dealer Douglas Latchford. As we alleged in that indictment, Latchford lied about the provenance of the Cambodian antiquities he was selling in order to cover up the fact that they were looted.

17:50These artifacts included the Deeridana and many other Khmer antiquities. But the case never reached trial. Latchford died in 2020 at age 88. Here's Bloomberg's Matthew Campbell. In terms of criminal consequences, there have not been that many, honestly. Latchford was charged. Another dealer in New York, Nancy Weiner, was charged. she ultimately pleaded guilty and did not do any jail time in exchange for cooperation with law enforcement. One of the criticisms of these investigations generally is that they don't involve enough criminal prosecution, that it's mostly about what they call forfeiture, taking objects rather than trying to put people in jail.

18:33But nonetheless, they have changed the incentives. They have succeeded in significantly reducing the demand for works like this. As for the Giordana, Sotheby's settled its case with the U.S. and agreed to send back the statue to Cambodia. I am much honored to represent the kingdom of Cambodia. Here's Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Sok An receiving the statue at a press conference in 2014. To receive and bring the statue of Giordana back to our homeland, where he belongs. But that was over a decade ago. And the Deeriodana is just one of thousands of artifacts believed to have been stolen. Many remain scattered across museums, auction houses, and private collections around the world.

19:23It's very hard to value them because, of course, the price of an artwork or of any asset is what someone will pay. There's no mark-to-market here. But we can say with confidence that certainly by the late 90s, early 2000s, the best pieces were selling for seven-figure prices. sometimes$5 or$6 million each. So the size of the whole market would be hundreds of millions. You know, nothing like the market for, say, modern paintings or old masters, but a significant part of the art world. We know that one Silicon Valley billionaire, Jim Clark, co-founder of Netscape, he spent about$35 million on these pieces.

20:03After the Giordano case exposed how that trade worked, a new challenge emerged, figuring out where all the looted objects ended up. Bradley Gordon is doing that work to this day. In 2018, the Cambodian government appointed him to lead a restitution team tasked with tracking down the artifacts. We're doing a lot of work, for example, at Thaprum, which is a very famous temple at Angkor, the one that was in Angelina Jolie's movie Tomb Raider. Brad and his team have been interviewing experts, guards, villagers, and former looters for years. They've compiled a database with more than 2 ,100 objects they believe were likely looted from Cambodia.

20:45Many have ties to Douglas Latchford. Some are currently housed in museums like New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum in London. Roughly another thousand or so are believed to be in private collections. We have quite a few negotiations going on right now with private collectors around the world. And then we're talking to more and more museums. And we're finding that many museums are willing to do the right thing. We do have a number of museums that are very reluctant. According to Brad, at least 300 looted Khmer artifacts have returned to Cambodia in the past decade as a result of his team's work and joint efforts with the U.S.

21:26government. The Met, for example, has returned more than a dozen pieces to Cambodia. Matt says those returns have transformed Cambodia's recovery effort from a handful of isolated victories into one of the most successful repatriation campaigns in the art world. Actually, the National Museum in Phnom Penh is packed to the gills. There is now very little art from this part of the world that is changing hands, at least openly. It would now be very hard, certainly in any public way, to sell a major piece from Cambodia without a lot of questions being asked. The investigation has also reshaped how museums, dealers, and collectors think about provenance and stolen art.

22:11There are people who would basically say museums are, by definition, monuments to theft, you know, and colonialism and looting. I don't totally agree. I think one thing that is striking is that there appears to be a universal urge when a country is on the rise to obtain the treasures of other people. This is why there are Egyptian obelisks in Rome, you know, and that goes back 2 ,000 years. The big challenge, honestly, is that this is still going on. It's happening in lots of other places. Every time a country falls apart, one of the very first things that happens is the museums are hit. Archaeological sites are hit.

22:54Historical monuments are hit. Often by people who know what they're doing, who know what to take, who take the high-quality, saleable objects. Most recently in Sudan, in Ethiopia, in Ukraine, there have been very large-scale thefts of art and artifacts because there is a market. People want them, and they will pay for them. For many Cambodians, these aren't simply relics of the past or works of art. And Brad says that's become evident to him as some of the pieces return home. I can see that for many of the Cambodians, it's like a return of a lost one. It's something they've been earning for, they've been thinking about, somebody they lost during the war.

23:39And the appearance of these statues, to them, they're living. And I feel many times it's like welcoming a family member, a long-lost family member coming home. And I do think it brings back many, many memories of what Cambodia was like before the war and what happened during the war. It's unbelievable how this has touched the hearts of so many people here, and we can see how much it provides healing for the nation.

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