Inside the Mind of an Antiquities Looter

Matthew Campbell, a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, spent years digging into sources to write The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy. His book reads like a thriller while laying out the entwined histories of the Cambodian genocide and the rapacious hunger of Western collectors for the images of Hindu and Buddhist deities created by the sculptors of the Khmer Empire during the 9th to 15th centuries CE in what is now Cambodia.

Campbell’s book focuses on Douglas Latchford, an Englishman who moved to Bangkok in the late 1950s and became one of the main conduits for looted Khmer antiquities. He directed every aspect of the trade, from telling looters where to dig to placing the finds with wealthy collectors. Sometimes he kept these buyers in the dark about his sources, but Campbell reveals letters and other evidence showing that Latchford often boasted about exactly where he got his treasures. In 2019, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Latchford with wire fraud, smuggling, conspiracy, and other trafficking charges, but he died a year later at age 88 before his trial could begin.

As an art crime researcher, I’ve long followed Cambodia’s fight to reclaim its sacred heritage from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the museum’s determined resistance (including kicking out a Cambodian dancer trying to honor her gods.) After I tore through my advance copy of The Man Who Stole the Gods, Campbell agreed to an interview via Zoom. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Hyperallergic: How did one of the world’s most significant collections of Cambodian antiquities end up at the Metropolitan Museum?

Matthew Campbell: The museum’s legendary director Thomas Hoving, who basically invented the idea of the museum as we know it today, wanted his institution to grow and change with New York City, which meant, in the 1970s, expanding its tiny Southeast Asian art collection. The Hare Krishna movement had originated in Tompkins Square Park. The Beatles’ guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, had come to speak in the city and set off a craze for Transcendental Meditation. The Met needed to stay relevant.

Hoving hired a curator named Martin Lerner and told him to use the vast resources of the museum to build a collection. He did it spectacularly, and with a particular emphasis on Cambodia, since that’s where he could get large sculptures, the real stunners for the galleries. In the process, the Met came to acquire a lot of pieces with, I think it’s fair to say, wildly illicit origins.

H: We now know that many of the Khmer sculptures that began appearing at the Met, as well as other museums and private collections around the world, were freshly looted from ancient temple sites. They were then smuggled out of Cambodia in violation of its laws, given fake backstories by international dealers, and sold to eager buyers. Some people defend this history as a “rescue” of neglected artifacts that would otherwise have disintegrated. Were the sculptures saved, or were they damaged?

Cover of The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy (Portfolio, 2026) by Matthew Campbell

MC: The pieces in American museums weren’t just teleported in from Cambodia. Some of the sculptures weigh a thousand or two thousand pounds. Many were attached to buildings. They could only be removed with heavy tools, jackhammers, construction equipment, sometimes even dynamite. One of the best accounts we have is the 1998 looting of a site called Banteay Chhmar, right on the border between Cambodia and Thailand. It was an industrial operation, staged with the help of local military commanders. The place was completely cleaned out, with enormous amounts of damage done along the way.

This was a violent process. Violence against objects and violence against people.

H: Much of the looting was carried out by Cambodians who were desperate to earn enough to eat during the chaos of the Khmer Rouge period and the long, slow recovery afterwards. As you write, the looters had been taught to revere the gods buried in the temples, “but hunger had a way of shifting one’s priorities.” Could you say more about the relationship between this conflict and the appearance of Cambodian antiquities in American collections?

MC: The United States Air Force bombed Cambodia in the late 1960s and early 1970s on a truly staggering scale, making Cambodia the second most bombed country in history. Number one is Laos, which was also a subject to a campaign by the US Air Force. Something that everybody has forgotten is that during the 1980s, America provided significant support to the Khmer Rouge. Why? Because the Communist government of Northern Vietnam was fighting them. The enemy of our enemy was our friend.

The US government had a significant role in the chaos that took over Cambodia for almost 30 years, and in that time more and more temples were looted. What really astounded me in my research was seeing how often during the 1980s you could read the latest news from the Cambodian civil war on the front page, and then if you turned to the culture section, you would see a review praising an exhibit of Khmer sculpture that had just appeared as if by magic in New York City or some other American metropolis. No one was asking how those two were connected.

H: One of the main characters in your book is Douglas Latchford. What drove him to create his network of looters, smugglers, and buyers?

Ancient Khmer sculptures repatriated from American institutions on display in Cambodia’s National Museum in Phnom Penh (photo Erin L. Thompson/Hyperallergic)

MC: For me, obsession is the core of this story. Latchford had two things in life that he really, truly loved: Cambodian sculptures and Thai bodybuilders.

From the moment Latchford first encountered a Khmer sculpture in Bangkok in 1956, it totally took over his life. The desire to own these objects, to sell them, to be someone who knew about them, that propelled him for 60 years. My sense of it is that the art served two functions for Latchford. He loved the sculptures; he just wanted to be around them. But they were also a form of social currency.

Like any other niche interest, Latchford found himself part of a community. In this community of dealers, curators, and collectors, Latchford was a celebrity. He was a big fish in that particular pond, which he found immensely gratifying.

H: Latchford’s determination meant that he did nearly unbelievable amounts of damage before he died under indictment in 2020. But you seem to show the importance of obsession from the repatriation side, too, by profiling a series of researchers and activists who are just as determined to bring Cambodia’s gods back home as Latchford was to steal them. Is this right?

MC: A lot of the book follows the story of an American lawyer, Brad Gordon, who has lived in Cambodia for 20 years now. He represents the Cambodian government in its repatriation claims along with its associated investigation into looting. He is definitely obsessed, but in a totally different way than Latchford. He also loves the sculptures, but I think that what really keeps him going is the puzzle, the historical mystery he’s been given to solve: What happened to Cambodia’s treasures? It’s a massive problem, but it’s also limited enough that he might just figure it all out, given another two or three decades.

H: In 2023, the Metropolitan Museum announced that it was launching a “systematic review of the provenance of the Museum’s holdings” while claiming it was already “a leader in the field in providing provenance information on most of our collection.” Is the Met justified in congratulating itself?

MC: The Met has made some very positive moves on provenance. They have a full-time provenance research team, which is great [...] although in a collection of I don’t know how many millions of objects, these researchers could work their whole lives and not get terribly far.

The Met did a great thing by putting its entire catalog online, so everyone can see what they have. Although they did put provenance information on there, it’s very limited. You certainly don’t see primary documents, like bills of sale or the minutes from the meeting where the board approved a purchase. All of that is hidden.

The pyramid at the heart of Koh Ker, an ancient Khmer capital city heavily looted to supply antiquities dealer Douglas Latchford (photo Erin L. Thompson/Hyperallergic)

The Met is a private institution, so they can do what they want. We can’t force them to reveal information. If The Met does want to be the leader in provenance research it says it wants to be, one way would be to publish a great deal more of that material and to lift a veil on the processes by which artifacts from conflict zones ended up in New York.

I can understand the resistance. It’s an uncomfortable topic. I think we need to remember that in many cases the answer to questions about how and why laws were ignored is that it was just the way things were done in the era. There wasn’t some evil conspiracy, it was more that nobody really cared.

Still, issues of provenance are going to dog the Met and other museums indefinitely unless something changes. Some amount of radical transparency would seem like a good solution.

H: In 2021, Cambodia demanded the return of at least 45 “highly significant” artworks from the Met. Your book ends in 2023. What’s happened since then?

MC: The Met has so far returned 16 artifacts. This is significant, but not nearly everything on the list that the Cambodians wanted. As for the others, it’s my understanding that there is a bit of a standoff. The position of the Cambodian government is essentially that the Met, along with anyone else in possession of Cambodian antiquities, has the burden of proof to show that these objects were obtained legitimately by producing export permits and so on, which they probably can’t. But the Met doesn’t see it that way.

For its part, the Met has said that they’ve been cooperating with the Cambodians but are still waiting for more information they haven’t received. They have their own side of the story here, clearly. I wish they told me more of it. They did not substantively cooperate with the book.

Heads of ancient Khmer sculptures at Cambodia’s National Museum in Phnom Penh. (photo Erin L. Thompson/Hyperallergic)

H: What do you think should happen to Cambodian antiquities in foreign collections?

MC: They’re amazing and people should see them. I would never want to be in a world where the Met and other museums are totally emptied of Cambodian antiquities. But the ownership question needs to be settled. If such artifacts are in foreign collections, they should probably be there through long-term loans from the Cambodian government. Ultimately, these sculptures belong to the places for which they were made. You can debate whether this is true for antiquities generally, from other countries where the history of collecting is different. But sculptures that were literally hacked out of temples in the late 20th century, in many cases by people associated with the Khmer Rouge? Then we’re having a different kind of discussion.

H: What type of readers will be interested in this book? And what do you hope they’ll do after finishing?

MC: I’m hoping people who love true crime will pick it up, along with people interested in American involvement in Asia, in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. The book has a lot of wonderful characters like Jim Thompson, the master spy and art collector who disappeared without a trace in Malaysia in 1967. But really, people should want to read this book if they’ve ever gone to a museum, looked at the art, and wondered how it got there. As should other museum lovers who haven’t yet asked these questions!

I hope the book draws attention to art taken from conflict zones and inspires people to ask questions. One of the wonderful things about museums is that you can get involved, with the exception perhaps of the Met, where landing a spot on the board is the Olympian achievement of New York social life. But you can really be heard at smaller institutions. And I don’t think that asking these questions will result in museums with empty galleries. Rather, it opens a path for educating museum publics in a new and exciting way by really engaging with that history.

I’m not a curator, but I think telling stories in the galleries about how these artifacts reached their display cases would be fascinating for museum visitors. Why not tell them about conflict and the underground market for cultural heritage? Why not explain the business of smuggling artifacts and cleaning up their backstories? That’s an exhibit I could spend days in.