S3 Ep10: Interview: The Man Who Stole the Gods | Douglas Latchford & Cambodia’s Looted Khmer Art with Matthew Campbell

Matthew Campbell, award-winning journalist for Bloomberg Businessweek and author of The Man Who Stole the Gods, joins Lachlan Peters to discuss Douglas Latchford, the extraordinary plunder of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer antiquities, and the international art market that helped move stolen treasures from Cambodian temples into private collections and some of the world’s leading museums.

The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and the World’s Biggest Art Heist traces more than half a century of looting, smuggling and collecting. At the centre of the story is Douglas Latchford, a British-born antiquities dealer based in Bangkok who became one of the world’s best-known authorities on Khmer art while building an enormous collection of his own. In 2019, US prosecutors charged Latchford with trafficking looted Cambodian antiquities and using false provenance documents to disguise their origins. He died in 2020 before the case could go to trial.

Campbell’s investigation, based on years of reporting and more than 100 interviews, follows the story from Cambodia’s civil war and the Khmer Rouge era to Bangkok dealers, London auction houses, wealthy American collectors and institutions such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It explores how masterpieces of the Khmer Empire were removed from archaeological sites, how questionable histories were created for them, and how Cambodia has spent decades trying to identify and recover its cultural heritage.

The consequences of that trade are still unfolding. In recent years, major collections of Khmer antiquities connected to Latchford have been returned to Cambodia, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to repatriate fourteen sculptures to Cambodia and two to Thailand associated with him. In 2023, US authorities also reached a $12 million forfeiture settlement involving proceeds from Latchford’s antiquities sales.

In this interview, Lachlan and Matthew discuss Douglas Latchford’s remarkable life, the destruction and dispersal of Cambodia’s archaeological heritage during decades of war, the mechanics of the international antiquities trade, the collectors and museums that bought Khmer masterpieces, and the ongoing effort to bring Cambodia’s stolen gods home.