Supplied
- Title: The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy
- Author: Matthew Campbell
- Genre: Non-Fiction
- Publisher: Portfolio
- Pages: 412
In the good old days in Southeast Asia, the expats used to joke that Bangkok was a first-rate place for second-rate people. Foreigners with few professional qualifications could find well-paid work: One of them was Douglas Latchford, a young Englishman who had grown up in India and at a British boarding school, and skipped university to follow his older brother to Thailand in the 1950s. In Bangkok, he rose rapidly in one of the many local import agencies serving foreign multinationals.
He soon became interested in traditional art of the region, entranced by the gracious, naturalistic sculptures of gods and heroes from neighbouring Cambodia. He began to collect for himself, then to resell and finally, by the 1970s as Cambodia descended into civil war and faced the genocidal horrors of the Khmer Rouge, to plunder. Western collectors and institutions as prominent as New York’s Metropolitan Museum would turn a blind eye to the source of these wondrous stone and bronze figures, and Latchford enriched himself immensely stealing the cultural heritage of a tortured people.
That, in a nutshell, is the story, both gripping and shocking, that Matthew Campbell recounts in The Man Who Stole the Gods. Campbell, the Canadian-born journalist who writes for Bloomberg Businessweek and lives in Singapore, is a master storyteller. Especially in the book’s early chapters, the tale of Latchford’s rise is a can’t-put-it-down narrative following the unscrupulous character playing middleman between buyers in New York and London, and desperate Cambodian looters ready to hack sculptures from temples hidden in the jungle.
Campbell is less of a psychologist, however, and never exposes the tension between an art lover who revered the creations of the Khmer empire, typified by the 12th-century Hindu-Buddhist temple at Angkor Wat, and a thief who didn’t seem to care what he took from contemporary Cambodians. To this day, many Cambodians venerate the medieval statues as embodiments of their ancestral gods and still worship at the Buddhist temples.
The Hindu-Buddhist temple of Angkor Wat typifies the 12th-century Khmer culture that so fascinated looter Douglas Latchford.-/AFP/Getty Images
There’s only a good suit separating many a dealer, collector or art curator from a commonplace hoarder, but Campbell also doesn’t fully explain Latchford’s hold on Martin Lerner of the Met, the curator who built up the museum’s spectacular Khmer collection by accepting dubious provenance documents. As questions finally began to emerge in the 2000s, Latchford routinely produced letters from one single British collector who died in 2001 affirming that had seen an object outside of Cambodia prior to 1970, conveniently putting it beyond the reach of legislation on cultural heritage.
Was this only about greed and ego? What was the specific attraction for Latchford in the finely wrought figures that once lined the terraces and porches of magnificent temples? Like Jim Thompson, the American who re-established the traditional Thai silk industry and also collected Asian art extensively, Latchford treated the objects as exotic bibelots. After Thompson’s mysterious disappearance on a holiday in Malaysia in 1967, Latchford became the new expert on Southeast Asian art and published several illustrated books. Yet, in private homes and museum galleries, the Cambodian pieces he had sold were displayed out of context and often misidentified.
One of Bangkok’s attractions for Latchford was a more relaxed attitude to homosexuality than he would have encountered back in England in the 1950s and 60s. Campbell speculates discreetly as to an aesthetic connection between his middle-aged interest in Thai body builders and his love of the Khmer stone gods, both perfect specimens of human form, but the book could certainly use more explanation of the art’s impact. Latchford did briefly marry – his Thai wife accused him of impotence and emotional abuse on her way out the door – and the marriage produced a daughter, Julia Latchford. She is the one who ultimately had to deal with returning her ailing father’s ill-gotten art to Cambodia in an era finally ready to repatriate colonial spoils.
Here the book becomes a legal drama, partly dependent on the New York Times coverage of the case in the U.S. (Campbell credits the reporting of Tom Mashberg and Graham Bowley in his acknowledgments.) He follows federal prosecutors in New York as they doggedly pursue antiquity dealers, collectors and museums for the possession of stolen goods, and the American ex-pat lawyer Bradley Gordon in Phnom Penh as he tracks artifacts for the Cambodians. In several cases, in private collections and public museums, a statue could be shown to be looted because its feet and base remained in place back at a Cambodian temple.
The hero now is a reformed character from the early chapters: Toek Tik was a child soldier in the Khmer Rouge army when he escaped into the jungle, living by his wits around the temples that he eventually learned how to loot, building a business shipping statuary to the Thai border. Years later, he came to regret the damage he did in service of a client known as Sia Ford, or Lord Ford. Increasingly co-operative, he helped archeologists and law enforcement match sculptures with their original temples before they were moved to the National Museum in Phnom Penh.
Repatriation continues, but Latchford died in 2020 before he could be brought to justice.