Hi, I'm very good.
My name's Bradley Gordon,
and I'm an advisor to the the Cambodian government
to the Ministry of Culture.
I understand that back in '94, your company had an auction
of Khmer antiquities, and we're just trying to figure
out where those pieces ended up.
One of them is extremely important to Cambodia
and it was looted from a temple
and we've collected a lot of testimony about it.
What we've been doing the last two weeks, three weeks,
we've been going around the States
and we've been visiting museums.
We went to about 12 museums.
We went to Asian Art Museum and Museum of Fine Arts
in Boston and Brooklyn Art Museum and so on.
Okay.
I mean, totally.
I mean, super appreciate that.
That's fantastic.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Okay. Okay.
Take care.
As far as what, like confiscating it
or buying it from us or?
We don't buy stolen statues.
So it's basically confiscating it.
Um.
You probably don't wanna use that word,
but basically that's the word. Right?
Look, one of the dealers who probably brought,
brought many of these to the auction,
he died about two years ago.
Who was that?
Douglas Latchford.
I don't know if you've heard of him.
The statues need to go back home because the statues
symbolize Cambodian ancestors,
Cambodian gods.
Every time you go to temple, we expect to
see the god over there, to see our ancestor over there.
But when we go to the temple,
we didn't see anything over there.
People chop it out and then cut the neck,
cut the legs, and then move away from,
from the temple and then to the broker and to the dealer
and to collectors.
This country was racked by civil war for a 30 year period,
from the late 60s to the late 90s.
Millions died, millions were made refugees.
And in that time this cultural heritage was stolen
at huge scale.
The temples are some
of the most spectacular ancient sites you can encounter.
The one most people are familiar with is Angkor.
I believe it's right to call it the largest
religious complex in the world.
It is absolutely enormous.
These very large statues they're, you know,
four and five feet tall, some of them.
They're incredibly beautiful.
They're the product, obviously, of immense skill
and a lot of really impressive artisanship.
Most people, however, would only have seen them
in museums because the statues are all gone
and that's because they were all stolen.
The Denver Art Museum is now returning four artifacts back
to Cambodia after they were linked to a man who was indicted
by prosecutors two years ago.
Douglas Latchford was indicted
after allegedly trafficking stolen artifacts.
Douglas Latchford was a British businessmen,
who lived really his entire adult life in Bangkok,
who made a lot of money
in pharmaceuticals and real estate and was also
the world's most prominent, and arguably,
most prolific dealer of Cambodian statues.
Douglas was known derisively among heritage activists
as Dynamite Doug.
And that was for the rumored means by which
some of his objects were extracted from temples.
Douglas used this term for himself, describing himself
as an adventurer scholar,
which is is obviously calculated
to create a kind of Indiana Jones vibe.
That was not really him.
But in fact, Douglas was a guy who liked five star hotels
and bespoke suits and nice restaurants.
This is not someone who was ever trooping
around the jungle in search of lost treasures.
He got involved with something called
the Thai Bodybuilding and Physique Sports Association
which is the official national organization
for bodybuilders in Thailand.
And Douglas, who, by this point, was quite wealthy,
bankrolled the association.
He ultimately served as the president.
He was a businessman and he did most
of his business from the comfort of his home in Bangkok.
Items that, in one way or another,
passed through Latchford's hands ended up
in the collections of some very wealthy people,
ended up in the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
in the Norton Simon in Pasadena, California,
in the British Museum, the National Gallery of Australia.
We don't actually know how many pieces he bought and sold.
Certainly in the hundreds, perhaps in the thousands.
We went into The Met and we took 3D images
of every Cambodian piece that's on display
and fully documented what is here.
We will be bringing that back home and discussing
with the team back in Phnom Penh to analyze
and closely scrutinize, you know,
the details of these objects.
There's been a big evolution in thinking
around cultural heritage and who it belongs to.
In 1970, there was a convention that was put together
through UNESCO, which is the
the UN body for cultural heritage,
that laid down some ground rules for how statues,
you know, paintings, cultural objects,
essentially, can be removed from their country of origin.
And the basic principle is, post 1970,
you are supposed to show
that you have permission from the government
of the country where an object originated to remove it.
There's no indication that that Latchford had permission.
The Cambodian government certainly never granted permission
for the removal of any of these objects.
Today, I am proud to announce
that we are returning 30 ancient works of art
to the Kingdom of Cambodia.
Organized looting networks, including looters affiliated
with the Khmer Rouge, sent these statues
to a well known antiquities dealer,
Douglas Latchford.
The looters would go get what they could find
and they would bring it
to the brokers who would get it into Thailand.
And then ultimately it would find its way to Douglas.
So there is a large team of researchers centered
on an American lawyer named Bradley Gordon who lives
in Cambodia, who are now trying to track
down objects that were looted from Cambodia.
This team are interviewing these looters in great detail,
going through step by step, everything they remember.
They will have Cambodian government archeologists dig
up a temple and look for fragments,
look for broken feet or pieces of pedestals.
You can 3D match these fragments
to what is known to be in museum collections,
or the collections of private collectors.
If that works, you've found a crime scene,
and that, as you can imagine,
provides a basis to demand that these pieces be given back
because they're stolen property.
When I started, I was hired by
the US Department of Justice.
I went out with Cambodians and we went
around the countryside and we met maybe 100,
200 witnesses and we spoke
to them and we found one gentleman in particular
we call him The Lion.
He moved up to become the head
of a major gang and he had more than 300,
400 people working for him across the country.
And he told me
that the one thing that kept him going was the demand
that people in Bangkok,
and one person in particular named Sia Ford,
who was Latchford, was eager to get Khmer antiquities.
When I met The Lion, I brought one
of the books that Latchford had published
and he got very excited when he saw the front cover
he saw Shiva and Skanda,
a father and child statue, extremely important statue.
And he was excited and saying to his wife
"I know this statue, I know this statue."
And later he showed me the spot where he found it
and we dug and we found the arm and we found the ear.
I think looters, now, they want to help us
because they feel more likely, they feel guilty.
They feel so sad when everything just gone.
They know also that those antiquities gone from Cambodia
and it's results from their activity,
from their mistake, also.
Today I'm at the stone laboratory of the National Museum
in Phnom Penh.
And behind me is Shiva with a statue of Skanda.
We brought one of Lion's lieutenants to this very room
a couple months ago and he saw Shiva and Skanda,
and he touched it.
And he said, "I believe you now.
"I understand what you're doing.
"And I see the results."
And they continue to help us.
From about 2016, when a very prominent New York
antiquities dealer named Nancy Wiener was charged criminally
with possession of stolen goods,
Douglas knew that he was in the crosshairs,
and he began working to try and head it off
through these negotiations with the Cambodian government.
And his ask of the Cambodian government
was that in exchange for me giving back my collection
I want you to ask the Americans not to prosecute.
One day, a couple years ago, my phone rang
and I answered the phone and it was Douglas.
He had instructions not to talk to me at that stage.
So he called me and he said, I'm back from the dead.
And he started laughing and we started talking.
He was an extremely charming man, and a very good salesman.
And there's no question about that.
And I said to him, look, Douglas,
we need your collection to come home.
And if you truly love the Cambodian people,
this would be the right thing to do.
And he laughed.
And he said, "Yes, I would like to give back to Cambodia."
I now have access to a lot of his correspondence.
And I see that, sadly,
he was actually selling his collection.
He was trying to get rid of it
and putting it in other people's hands.
You know, he was extremely busy trying to
move his collection right up until the end.
It's kind of sad, you know, for us as Cambodians,
who have a very long, very great history,
but now we seem to lose it.
We become someone who have nothing.
The antiquities [are] important because
they are not the statue,
they are not the object,
they are belong to, and our ancestors.
So that is important that the statues,
that the antiquities, came back,
our ancestors came back to us,
and then we can continue our practice, our worship.
In many ways, our work is just getting started.
We're tracking more than 100 museums with more
than 2000 objects.
Now there are some major collections out there.
So we're taking a strong line when we're talking to museums
and we're talking to private collectors, we're saying,
prove to us you have a right to have it.
It's stolen.
We know it's stolen.
Some of the museums are being very transparent
and forthcoming and friendly about the situation
and open to the discussion.
Others are stonewalling.
They don't want to talk to us.
The US government has contacted private collectors
and they've had a lot of incredible successes.
You know, we had Jim Clark returning a collection
that he paid more than $35 million for.
Returning this artifact is like returning our pride,
returning our soul back to our peoples.
It's been very frustrating
because we're doing all this work here in Cambodia,
in a country that is still developing
without full cooperation
from extremely sophisticated and wealthy institutions
and without the help of private collectors,
many of them are billionaires.
These individuals, a hundred of them, I know their names.
I have their email addresses.
They're out there.
They are completely silent.
None of them are coming forward
and providing us information.
If we had all that information,
I think we could prove to almost every museum in the world
most of their collection is stolen.
It needs to come home.
So when I walk into Met museum
and I saw this female statue, Kok Ker style.
So I feel very, very proud,
feeling like [we] miss each other,
like my heart, like show up.
I love this statue so much.
When I see it, I never think about
I have chance to see this statue.
Do you feel sad?
Yes. Very upset.
If I don't have chance to visit here,
I don't know where this statue gone
and also Cambodian young generation, new generation,
no chance to see the real statue in our country.