Chasing the Man Who Stole The Gods

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1:54Our amazing colleague is here. Matthew, thank you so much for coming on. It's a great title, Matthew Campbell. It is The Man Who Stole the Gods. Who is the man? What did he steal? And how did you get turned onto this story? So this is a stolen art caper that unfolds against the backdrop of basically the Cold War in Asia. And a lot of the products of all this stealing ended up here in New York City, just a short distance up Park Avenue from where we're sitting right now. and basically the man who stole the gods was a british art dealer douglas latchford who was the foremost dealer of art from cambodia in the world selling huge volumes of what turned out to be stolen artworks into wealthy people in the u.s and museums here it's got an incredible cast of characters it's a new book it's called the man who stole the gods it comes out next week but uh we can pre-order it now and we can read an excerpt that we're referring to on the bloomberg Terminal and at Bloomberg.com.

2:50It is today's big take. It's one of the most read stories on the terminal. The thing that I think is so relevant for the Bloomberg audience is that immediately, at least in this excerpt, you're drawn into sort of modern times, like Christie's and Sotheby's take center stage, again, at least in this excerpt, because, you know, in the last decade plus, they were involved in selling at least the work that is focused on in this part of the book. These were trophy pieces that wealthy people here in New York, in Palm Beach, in other kind of centers of American financial achievement wanted. We actually just found out from the Epstein files that Leon Black is a big collector of art from Cambodia.

3:30Others, Jim Clark, the co-founder of Netscape, was a huge buyer. The Metropolitan Museum was a huge buyer, all connected in different ways to this dealer, Douglas Latchford. Can you describe the art in question? It's described beautifully in the piece. So a thousand odd years ago, there was this civilization called the Khmer Empire in what's now Cambodia, also much of Thailand and Vietnam. These are the guys who built Angkor Wat, right? Yeah. This is, for those of you who can't picture it, it's the Tomb Raider place. Yeah, precisely. And Angkor Wat is the site people have heard of. There are something like 3 ,000 other sites, most of them not quite as big, but many of them really, really impressive all over Cambodia.

4:06They used to be full of stuff, full of these amazing life-size stone sculptures. Right, because all these temples are like empty when you go in them now, right? Exactly. Everything is gone, all cleaned out. People think it was taken by the French, which is a little bit true. But actually, the really industrial scale looting was much later, 80s and 90s. And that's when these trophy pieces came into the US. How was that looting done? And why? Well, it was done like any illicit market, whether it's drugs or guns, it's demand. People wanted this. It became a status symbol. And as a result, there were these bands of looters, many of them connected in one way or another to the Khmer Rouge, who would go into these sites with, at one end of the scale, shovels and chisels, and at the other, dynamite and construction equipment to blast this stuff out from where it was in situ.

4:55It then gets smuggled across the border into Thailand, to Bangkok, and then onto global markets. How did this fit with kind of the politics of the moment and how the Khmer Rouge wanted to rewrite or refocus the story of the history of that country, because you can't really facilitate this on this biggest scale without complicity of these governments. There were people in power in Cambodia involved in this all the way through, absolutely. And the simple reason for that is Cambodia had a civil war that lasted for 30 years from 1968 to 1998. And for the combatants in that civil war, there were basically three ways to fund yourself.

5:30One was timber, it's a lot of forest, one was gemstones, and the other was stealing artifacts and stealing artifacts was quite lucrative. As I mentioned, there's an incredible cast of characters in the excerpt in the book. Tell us about Bradley Gordon. The central figure of the book, the protagonist more or less, is an American lawyer, Brad Gordon, who I met in 2022. He was hired by the Cambodian government to investigate historical looting as kind of a one-off assignment. But it's something that ultimately took over a huge amount of his life. He became obsessed with this challenge of tracking these artworks all over the world and ultimately getting people to give them back.

6:12And he's had a lot of success in that with the help of U.S. law enforcement. As you look around the world, I'm thinking of the big museum they just opened in Giza in Egypt with the Egyptian government getting back a lot of these artifacts from the British Museum, even some from the U.S., and taking kind of hold of their cultural heritage. You talk a little bit about why there's a new generation of Cambodians who this really matters to and they really want this stuff back. Why is that change happening and is it making it a more relevant conversation for folks who are trying to rehome these artifacts?

6:44It's really interesting to see these pieces in Cambodia where a lot of them have now been returned thanks to these investigations because to us they're just beautiful. They're something that's interesting to look at. They're very cool. But Cambodians, these are part of a living religious culture. A lot of Cambodians when they see them will start praying or they will bow or They will leave little offerings. And in some cases, they're leaving offerings at pieces that were literally in like penthouses in Miami until a few short years ago. So in a different context, it's just a totally different discussion.

7:17We're speaking with Matthew Campbell. He's a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek. He's usually based in Singapore. He's here in New York City because his brand new book is coming out. It's called The Man Who Stole the Gods. He joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio. uh the the the backdrop of this and and and one thing that i thought was really interesting in in the excerpt was the explanation for sort of what qualifies as as in your words christina rehoming this this art and like how countries are able to do it and use the example of turkey and the ottoman empire like just because something belonged to turkey when turkey had borders that where the Ottoman Empire doesn't necessarily mean that Turkey can go out and lay claim to that piece of art.

8:03How does that work today? The way this works in the U.S. is a piece of legislation called the National Stolen Property Act. Pretty clear. Which is pretty clear. And it's actually, it was passed in the aftermath of Bonnie and Clyde. And the idea was it essentially made it a crime to knowingly possess stolen property. When that's a stolen car, it's kind of easy to get your head around. With a thousand-year-old artifact, it's more complicated. So there are a series of legal tests that have to be passed. One of them, as you allude to, is a piece has to come from the country that wants it back, basically.

8:37So Turkey can't say, you know, I don't know, Armenia or some other distant part of the Ottoman Empire, oh, that's ours. That doesn't work. It has to be from the actual territory. Today's borders? Today's borders. Okay. But how do you prove that is an interesting question. In the case of a lot of the Cambodian pieces, you could prove that because ultimately archaeologists found the exact spots where these things were taken from by, for example, matching broken feet to statues that arrived in Manhattan without their feet. There's also been an argument for a while among a lot of powers who were more colonial nations who plundered a lot of these places that these countries didn't have the capacity or the wealth or the infrastructure to care for these items, that they were saving them.

9:21Now, that's a very controversial opinion. We don't need to dig into that. But it seems to me like you've seen, again, I go back to Egypt and some other places throughout Africa, countries really investing in museums in ways to preserve and show this heritage. Why does that matter? Why is it important to Cambodia now? And why are these artifacts in some way or another always a little bit political? There is a political weight to this always. People in the UK are very familiar with the case of the Elgin Marbles, which have been a debate for a good hundred years now with the Greek government demanding these sculptures back.

9:55But yes, the excuse you often hear, or the argument you often hear is, these pieces are better off wherever it is in the Met, in the British Museum, than they are in their home countries. And there are certainly cases, or at certain times, where that may be true. But it's not true forever. And when things change, that argument melts away. You mentioned Jeffrey Epstein and something that we learned in the Epstein files. Who are some of the prominent collectors in the U.S., around the world? You mentioned Miami, New York City, who liked this type of art? So Leon Black is one, a very large collection, which is still in his possession as far as we know.

10:34Jim Clark, who was the co-founder of Netscape, was a very big buyer. The Lindemann family in Florida, George Lindemann, who was a kind of private equity dealmaker, very wealthy, had a big collection, was actually found by the Cambodians through an architectural digest spread. And then the other big US collection, and it's one that a lot of the book focuses on, was at the Met. Wow. Hey, real quick, we only have about a minute left, less than a minute. The reporting process for this book, usually you're based in Singapore. Talk to us just about the reporting process and how you reported this out?

11:09A lot of travel. I was in and out of Cambodia probably a dozen times, a lot to Bangkok, which is where much of the book takes place, a few times to New York. And also, there's a huge documentary record through the legal process in the US. There's been a lot of litigation around this subject. And also, Douglas Latchford, this art dealer, died in 2020. And a lot of his correspondence is now accessible. Well, it makes just a fantastic read. And Matthew, you congratulations on the book uh thank you so much for joining us and thanks for sharing it with our audience Matthew Campbell the author of the man who stole the gods the book is out next week you can check out the excerpt at bloomberg.com and of course on the Bloomberg terminal really fascinating making us both feel like huge underachievers here it's it's quite the accomplishment I'm I'm more than just a little jealous this is uh Matthew's second book by the way I don't want to talk about it I don't want to talk about it Matthew you can't come back anymore You're just making us feel like we're not doing enough work here.

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