How this looted Cambodian statue revealed a vast smuggling network

Armed with cameras, notebooks and measuring equipment, all eyes – at least the two pairs of human ones – locked onto pieces of the expected Shiva statue’s arms and hands, now scattered on the ground.

As Davis wandered around, she shook her head, lamenting the jagged pits where looters had tried to dig their way into the temple structure’s foundation deposits. Nearly every temple had similar burrow holes, as well as evidence of stolen artefacts.

French explorers in the late 1800s described Koh Ker as an open-air museum, relatively well preserved due to its isolation up to the mid-20th century. But by the early 21st century, it was clear to Davis that the site had been pillaged, and seeing the destruction of this national cultural heritage would leave an indelible impression on the young archaeologist.

As Davis explained to me in October 2022, “there was next to nothing free-standing left”.

Fast-forward almost two decades, to March 17, 2023, and the long-awaited return of looted antiquities from the United States to Cambodia.

At a welcoming ceremony at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh, Prime Minister Hun Sen unveiled a slew of stolen statues and jewellery, safely home at long last. Among these were the five-foot-tall Hindu god Ganesha, and the magnificent Skanda on a peacock – the Hindu god of war astride his divine bird.

Both statues were believed to have been looted from Koh Ker, and passed through the hands of accused antiquities smuggler, the late Douglas Latchford, before ultimately landing in private collections.

From Greece, with its looted Elgin Marbles displayed in London’s British Museum, to Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes, also stolen by the British Empire in 1897 and distributed around the world, many countries, particularly those once subjugated under colonial rule, are demanding their cultural property back. And Cambodia is no exception.

Over the past decade or more, this Southeast Asian nation has made a concerted effort to track down and repatriate looted statues, often with the help of the US government, which signed a landmark cultural property agreement with Cambodia in 2003.

Many individuals have been involved in the fight, notably American lawyer Bradley Gordon and his team of Cambodian researchers and archaeologists. Davis, however, has been there from the beginning, battling auction houses and assisting the Royal Government of Cambodia, especially in recovering one particular statue stolen from Koh Ker, of the Duryodhana, a mythic warrior from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata.

The return of this particular piece would lead to the discovery of an international smuggling ring involving tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Cambodian relics, allegedly run by Latchford, who has emerged as one of the biggest suspected antiquities smugglers in the region.

Davis’ efforts would earn her the Royal Order of Sahametrei, the equivalent of a Cambodian knighthood, in 2015. A year earlier, in an article in The Diplomat, veteran Cambodia-based journalist Luke Hunt dubbed her “Indiana Jane”.

A demure 13-year-old middle-schooler stuffed her hand into a hat, stirred the assorted pieces of paper, pulled one out and stared at the single word written on it.

“Kampuchea!?” exclaimed young Tess Davis in her southern drawl. She had never heard of the word, and scrambled to look it up in an encyclopaedia with the help of her teacher. Discovering it was the ancient name of modern-day Cambodia, it was now the country assigned to her for a year-long research project.

Davis had longed to explore the secrets of the past, and her first dive into Cambodia would lead her to a scholarship to Boston University, home to the only independent archaeology department in the country at the time.

Ricardo Elia, associate professor of archaeology at the university, told me in January that he recalls Davis giving a presentation at a national archaeology conference as an undergraduate and holding the room enraptured, at which point he “knew this kid was a star”, and that Davis was “the type of student you see once every 10 years”.

In November 2003, almost a decade after turning in her fateful middle-school project, Davis attended a guest lecture at Boston University given by visiting archaeologist Dougald O’Reilly, who at the time was teaching archaeology at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh.

It was at that institution that the Canadian-born scholar founded Heritage Watch, a project dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage. Davis approached him after the lecture, and eventually applied for a position in this new organisation.

As O’Reilly told me in November 2022, Davis nailed the interview, and moved to Phnom Penh, where he put her in charge of numerous projects, including writing a Khmer children’s book, heading into communities to teach about heritage theft, and developing the Database of Historical and Archaeological Regulations for the Management of Antiquities (DHARMA), focused on Cambodian and other Southeast Asian countries.

After the 2005 visit to Koh Ker, along with other temple sites such as Preah Khan Kompong Svay, an equally isolated – and completely ransacked – site 47km (29 miles) southeast of Koh Ker, what struck Davis most was the social impact of antiquities trafficking.

As she explained to me in October 2022, “Koh Ker should be a very rich community today. Tourists should be coming from all over the world to go there and it’s never going to happen because you can’t put these pieces back now.”

Without doubt, the most well known and visited destination in Cambodia is Angkor Wat, where in 2022, annual revenue from ticket sales was US$11.5 million. At its pre-pandemic peak, in 2018, Angkor Wat drew 2.5 million visitors who spent US$116 million on tickets alone. Koh Ker, meanwhile, made US$90,450 from ticket sales in 2022.

Not only are the temple statues and artefacts part of the allure for tourists, these antiquities are considered living spirits by Cambodians, and during Davis’ time at Heritage Watch, in conversations with journalists, archaeologists and cultural heritage experts about them being looted and sold, often in hushed tones, one name kept on coming up – Douglas Latchford.

“There’s another one at the shop where I bought this,” said François Duhau de Bérenx, a stalwart of Bangkok’s expatriate community in the 1950s. He had noticed his dinner guest, a British sales manager called Douglas Latchford, admiring a 24-inch stone torso on the floor of Bérenx’s home in the Thai capital.

The French aristocrat probably didn’t think much of his comment at the time, but that stone torso, and the promise of another one like it, would set Latchford on the path to becoming a prolific collector, and allegedly, equally invested looter and smuggler of Cambodian cultural property.

In an interview with London’s Apollo magazine in 2008, Latchford described approaching his bank manager for a loan the day after the dinner party, then heading to Bangkok’s Woeng Nakhon Khasem, the “thieves market” – a bustling thoroughfare known for its stolen goods – and buying an identical piece to the one in Bérenx’s house for about US$700, roughly US$8,000 today.

With that initial purchase, Latchford began his quest to become the premier collector of, and dealer in, Cambodian antiquities. He would reveal in his 2008 book, Khmer Gold, that the statue at Bérenx’s house “had an immediate effect on me that would change my life. I was smitten and from then on could think of nothing but this wonderful torso”.

Born on October 15, 1931, in British Bombay, Latchford was fascinated with lost jungle temples and drawn, like countless other children of the Raj, to the works of Rudyard Kipling, with their exotic settings, adventurous characters and colonial sensibilities.

After attending a British boarding school, he returned to India following independence, in 1947, and, in 1955, moved to the Thai capital.

As reported in the Bangkok Post in 2010, Latchford worked as a general manager for a large British import company called the Anglo-Thai Corporation, which sold pharmaceuticals, chemicals and an array of other imported goods.

Other details of Latchford’s ascent in the 1950s and ’60s are sparse, but recent interviews in the “Dynamite Doug” Project Brazen podcast suggest that while he worked for Anglo-Thai, Latchford cultivated a side hustle in acquiring Cambodian and Thai antiquities, and set up an antique shop in Bangkok.

He also developed a relationship with London auction house Spink & Son, and as he amassed his collection, arbitraged his way to healthy profits, especially as American influence in the region began to rise, bringing interest from Western collectors for Southeast Asian art.

He also became entrenched in Thai society, taking a Thai name, Pakpong Kriangsak, and marrying a Thai woman.

As Latchford’s profits accumulated, he expanded his operation and buried the proceeds of his alleged looting in other investments.

It was intimated in an investigative report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), published in The Washington Post, in October 2021, that Latchford laundered some of his alleged ill-gotten gains in luxury real estate through an offshore company.

Open-source documents provided to me in May by former Goldman Sachs executive turned independent art scholar Angela Chiu show that Latchford registered an offshore corporation in Hong Kong, Fleetwing Estates, in 1978.

As Chiu explained to me, this likely allowed him to conceal his assets from government authorities, since Hong Kong requires almost no financial disclosure by private companies.

As a Hong Kong company, Fleetwing owned, at various times, multiple flats at 12 Charles Street and a penthouse at 1 Carlos Place, both in London’s ultra-exclusive Mayfair area. Land Registry data and title deeds show that flat 1 at 12 Charles Street, owned by Latchford and subsequently his daughter, Julia, sold for £4.6 million (US$5.8 million) in 2019.

The ICIJ, whose investigation was based on the Pandora Papers leak, reported that Latchford had created the Skanda Trust, another offshore vehicle registered in Jersey in the Channel Islands, where antiquities he owned were held, sheltered from government investigation. The Skanda Trust took over control of Fleetwing in 2011.

As an established collector by the 2000s, Latchford cultivated relationships with the National Museum of Cambodia, and with museums worldwide by lending, selling and donating Khmer statues to them.

As Chiu, with a PhD in Thai Buddhist art history and literature, explained in an email in December 2022, “Museums are at the top of the food chain in the art world. When a museum displays an artwork, the object is legitimised and authenticated. A dealer’s reputation is enhanced whenever a museum accepts one of their objects.”

According to US prosecutors, Latchford also allegedly provided stolen Khmer pieces to prestigious auction houses like Spink & Son as well as prominent art dealers such as Manhattan-based Nancy Wiener, who pleaded guilty to felony charges of criminal possession of stolen property and conspiracy in 2021.

Through these channels Latchford’s looted antiquities would surface on the international art market and make their way to museums or private collections.

He enhanced his public image as an expert in Khmer antiquities when he wrote and self-published, alongside art scholar Emma Bunker, three glossy books between 2004 and 2011: Adoration and Glory, Khmer Gold and Khmer Bronzes.

As reported by Sam Tabachnik in The Denver Post in March, the late Bunker was a Denver-based expert in Khmer art with a master’s in fine arts from New York University, and held a visiting professorship at Colorado College.

She became acquainted with Latchford in the 1970s and they developed a close personal and working relationship. Bunker often vouched for Latchford, her standing in the art community serving to burnish Latchford’s reputation, and it is suspected that Bunker was complicit in many of Latchford’s alleged misdeeds.

Personal emails sent from Bunker and obtained by Tabachnik imply that she was complicit in altering provenance or the historical records attached to particular antiquities.

Bunker died in February 2021, without issuing any statement in regard to these allegations.

All three volumes feature pieces from Latchford’s private collection, as well as those of others. Chiu points out that, in seeking legitimacy, “publication of artworks was another tactic. In the art market, publication generally increases the pricing of an artwork, even if the publication is of low quality; thus the three [books] were very valuable to his marketing efforts”.

Latchford was also, oddly enough, a leading figure in the bodybuilding world, assuming the position of president of the Thailand Bodybuilding Association from the early 2000s. He even had a competition named after himself, the Latchford Classic, in Bangkok.

The local gossip was that his proximity to bodybuilders provided Latchford with muscled young men for protection and intimidation. Alan Parkhouse, a former managing editor of The Phnom Penh Post who interviewed Latchford in 2010, told me in a series of email exchanges in May that “Latchford employed bodybuilders as his security guards at the apartment building he owned”.

When asked if he thought Latchford had used violent means to suppress unwanted probing, as was rumoured, he said, “Latchford could certainly be intimidating, but I never heard of anyone getting roughed up”.

The unravelling of Latchford’s alleged smuggling network began in 2007, when stone conservator Simon Warrack, working for a German organisation, noticed two sets of stone feet on the ground outside the Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker, one of the temples Davis and O’Reilly were investigating in 2005. (Davis admits in her own writing for Bostonia magazine in 2014, that on the trip with O’Reilly, she had missed seeing these feet.)

Warrack found that one of the sets of feet seemed to match the Dvarapala statue that appeared in Latchford and Bunker’s 2004 book, Adoration and Glory. Warrack then digitally superimposed the statue in the book onto a picture of one set of feet in situ, and they seemed a perfect match.

Warrack traced the missing statue to the Norton Simon Museum, in California, which had called it “the temple wrestler”.

Warrack then sent a report to the Unesco office in Cambodia, informing it of the find. In May, I contacted Unesco in Cambodia, which referred me to its 2007 director for clarification of what Unesco’s response was to the report, but I did not receive a reply.

In 2009, Eric Bourdonneau, French archaeologist and lecturer at the French School of Asian Studies, based in Paris but founded in Saigon, visited Koh Ker, and, like Warrack, noted the same two sets of stone feet located at the western entrance of the Prasat Chen temple.

He concluded that the second set of feet belonged to a partner statue, the Duryodhana. This meant that the Norton Simon piece, “the temple wrestler”, was actually Bhima, one of the five brothers central to the Mahabharata.

Bhima, who was known for his strength and mastery of the mace, had been locked in battle with his bitter foe, Duryodhana, at the Prasat Chen temple in Koh Ker.

Hindu iconography in Khmer temple structures is nearly ubiquitous, being as it was the dominant religion during the Khmer empire, which began in AD802.

Hinduism and Buddhism slowly diffused through pre-Khmer Cambodia via what is referred to by historians as the Indianisation of Southeast Asia, a result of centuries of trade with and exposure to Indian merchants, since Cambodia lay at the midpoint of the maritime trade route between India and China.

Jason Felch, co-author with then-Los Angeles Times colleague Ralph Frammolino of the 2011 book Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum, interviewed Bourdonneau in 2014 for his Chasing Aphrodite blog.

During the exchange, Bourdonneau revealed that the footless Duryodhana’s location remained a mystery until 2011, when a collector accidentally informed him of a “Koh Ker-style” statue about to go to auction by Sotheby’s in March of that year.

The Duryodhana featured on the cover of the sales catalogue had an estimated price of US$2 million to US$3 million. Bourdonneau immediately put together a report making the case, based on dimensions, position and style, that the Sotheby’s Duryodhana had been taken from Koh Ker, and sent it to the director of Unesco in Phnom Penh, Anne Lemaitre.

As reported in the Los Angeles Review of Books, by Dustin Roasa, in 2013, Lemaitre, already aware that the statue would be coming onto the auction block, found Bourdonneau’s analysis compelling.

With only a few days until the auction, Pierre Baptiste, a curator at the Guimet museum in Paris, found a transaction record for the sale of a statue exactly like the one up for auction, showing it had been put up for sale in 1975 by Spink & Son.

With that, Lemaitre knew it wasn’t a forgery, and made the case to Cambodian government officials that Sotheby’s was in possession of their statue.

In a letter dated March 24, 2011, the Cambodian government requested Sotheby’s stop the sale of the Duryodhana, claiming the statue was unlawfully looted. With hours to go before the auction, the Duryodhana was pulled from sale. Negotiations then began, with Sotheby’s demanding that, if relinquished, the Cambodian government pay for the statue’s return.

Meanwhile, Davis, now the executive director for the non-profit Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation, would be pulled into the fold by an odd twist of fate.

Our Indiana Jane knew little about the details of the Duryodhana at the time, other than its sale being halted. But as it turns out, her 2011 research paper, published on July 11, just a few months after the scheduled auction, in the US-based peer-reviewed journal Crime, Law and Social Change, analysed all the Sotheby’s catalogues related to South Asian art from 1988 to 2010, and found that more than 70 per cent of the 377 lots of the house’s Khmer antiquities had no provenance or history of ownership.

If that were not damning enough, sales of these items on the international market were shown to skyrocket during periods of instability in Cambodia, such as at the end of the Vietnamese occupation, in 1989, and the Khmer Rouge surrender, in 1998, further suggesting they were illegally taken.

As Davis states in her conclusion, “If the countless antiquities plundered from the country have not ended up on the international art market, where have they gone? If pillaged sites are not the source of Sotheby’s auctions of Khmer artefacts, then what is?

“Unless these pieces are forgeries, they simply must have come from archaeological sites at some point in their history.”

Unbeknown to Davis, a journalist in Cambodia was somehow able to get a pre-edited, pre-print copy of her research before publication. On August 11, 2011, Davis, who was in Phnom Penh at the time, opened a copy of the Cambodia Daily and was shocked to see the headline: “Sotheby’s traded hundreds of looted artefacts, study says.”

In late August, just over two weeks since the Cambodia Daily piece went to print, a look of dismay came over Davis’ face as she gazed at a letter with the Sotheby’s logo in the left corner.

The letter, from Jane Levine, senior vice-president and worldwide compliance director at Sotheby’s, read: “A private apology is hardly sufficient to repair the damage done by your paper; your paper lacks conceptual rigour, is riddled with false statements and inaccuracies, and reaches a false conclusion. It should be withdrawn.”

This was just the first of Sotheby’s’ numerous attempts to pressure Davis into retracting her research, which she revealed to me in a series of emails from Levine, who had previously been employed as a US attorney in the Southern District of New York prosecuting art fraud.

As they continued to lash out over the subsequent months, Davis contacted a colleague, Marc Masurovsky, an expert in Nazi-looted art.

In a video interview with Masurovsky in April, he told me he recalls offering his support at the time saying, “No offence, Tess, but no one who buys these antiquities is reading your research paper. This doesn’t make sense from a business point of view.

“If they [Sotheby’s] are going to invest in these amounts of legal resources to make you retract your paper, they must be trying to hide something.”

And he was right. Sotheby’s was attempting to deflect attention from the Duryodhana, but Davis and her publishers refused to retract the paper, and eventually Sotheby’s backed off.

In 2012, a year after the Duryodhana sale had been stopped, the private negotiations between Cambodia and Sotheby’s were at an impasse.

Sotheby’s’ position was that the statue was removed from Cambodia at an unknown time and brought to London, where it was acquired legally by a Belgian businessman in 1975 from a London auction house. His widow then consigned it to Sotheby’s for sale in 2011.

Levine, in an interview with The New York Times in 2012, stated the statue “could have been taken anytime in the last thousand years” and that because “the statue was imported long before the passage of a 1993 Cambodian law that nationalised cultural heritage” there were no restrictions on its sale or auction.

The Cambodian government, without much recourse, enlisted the help of the US government, which agreed to initiate an investigation involving the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

Davis walked briskly down Oknha Hing Penn Street in Phnom Penh’s old French quarter, having spent days looking for legal evidence to bolster Cambodia’s claim to the Duryodhana.

She approached an off-yellow French colonial building and entered Cambodia’s National Archives with a single purpose – to find cultural property laws, perhaps buried in the archives, that establish Cambodia’s ownership of the Duryodhana.

For US prosecutors to prove the Duryodhana was stolen, they would have to show that Cambodia had ownership of the statue under its own laws.

As Davis wrote in Bostonia in 2014, “There had been an extensive legal protection framework for cultural heritage in the colonial period and the early years of independence.

“However, by the beginning of the 21st century, most of Cambodia’s intellectuals, including its archaeologists and legal experts, were long gone, having lost their lives in the killing fields in the 1970s. Archives, libraries, and universities had been abandoned or razed.

“Cambodia’s once stellar cultural heritage and legal systems were eradicated along with direct knowledge of them.”

Walking across the brown-and-white chequered floor, past curtains billowing from multiple fans circulating the humid air, Davis came to a large dark wooden table stacked with documents, steeling herself for a long session of searching.

Then, after days of rifling through files, there it was. Davis had uncovered decrees from 1900 and 1925 that established a baseline level of protection for art and archaeology in Cambodia. These decrees specifically recognise statues as being part of the national domain and recognised Prasat Chen as protected.

This discovery had massive implications for the Duryodhana case and for future disputes over ownership in Cambodia, as the dividing line for ownership would now be 1900 rather than 1993.

Tom Mashberg and Ralph Blumenthal of The New York Times had been following the saga, and broke the story on the front page of the paper’s arts section on February 28, 2012.

They identified Davis as the scholar who “dug out the law” that would bolster the US investigators’ supposition that the statue was owned by Cambodia at the time it was removed from Koh Ker, as it was sold to the Belgian businessman in 1975, and suspected of leaving the country sometime in the 1960s or ’70s.

With international attention now focused on Sotheby’s, Davis was sure the auction house would relinquish the Duryodhana without the US resorting to a legal skirmish. She was wrong.

With this information, the Americans’ case was improved and on April 4, 2012, an oddly named civil forfeiture suit, United States v. A 10th Century Cambodian Sandstone Sculpture, was filed in the Southern District of New York.

This was an “in rem” action, meaning it was filed against the statue itself, and the US would seek the right to seize it from Sotheby’s. And so began a nearly two-year back-and-forth between the auction house and the Royal Government of Cambodia.

During the pre-trial proceedings, Latchford’s name came up in internal Sotheby’s emails as the original seller of the Duryodhana, and in court papers filed on April 9, 2013, by the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, prosecutors laid out what they believed to be the path of the Duryodhana: stolen from Prasat Chen in 1972 by a local looting network, then through a series of middlemen, made its way to Thailand to be purchased by “The Collector”, who the US prosecutors understood to be Latchford.

According to court documents, The Collector was aware the statues had been looted, and then consigned the Duryodhana to Spink & Son. It was alleged that the auction house conspired with Latchford to obtain fraudulent export licences and succeeded in selling the statue to a Belgian businessman, Ruspoli Di Poggio Suasa, in 1975. His widow then consigned Sotheby’s to auction the piece in 2011.

In a series of emails between Bunker (who was asked by Sotheby’s to do the auction write-up for the Duryodhana) and a Sotheby’s employee in 2010, Bunker revealed that the statue was likely stolen.

Not only would the US assert that the statue was stolen, but that Sotheby’s knew the Duryodhana was stolen yet still put it on the auction block.

“I have been doing a little catch up research on Koh Ker, and do not think you should sell the Dvarapala [Duryodhana] publicly,” wrote Bunker in that exchange. “The Cambodians in Phnom Penh have clear evidence that it was stolen from Prasat Chen at Koh Ker, as the feet are still in situ.”

Davis sat with Cambodian research assistant Thanaren Than and a welcoming but contrite villager in a traditional rural wooden house built on stilts, in a village outside Koh Ker.

A sinewy, bespectacled man with dark skin, Toek Tik, nicknamed the Lion, began to leaf through Adoration and Glory, which Davis had brought along. He identified many objects immediately, and told them how he remembered looting them, recounting his story as Thanaren Than translated: Toek Tik was forced to be a child soldier at the age of 11 by the Khmer Rouge, during the early years of the civil war before the brutal regime took power.

His ability to ride a horse earned him the post of Khmer Rouge messenger and, as a teen, he rose through the ranks and was forced to participate in the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal campaign.

Finally, he fled into the jungle, where he remained in hiding until the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

Toek Tik would go on to become the leading regional broker and told Davis and Thanaren Than that he had trafficked thousands of statues.

These statues would be transported to middlemen near the Thai border and then, often with the help of the Thai military, delivered to Bangkok, primarily to Latchford, who would sell them on to dealers or auction houses.

Not only would Toek Tik reveal this to Davis, but also to US prosecutor Sharon Cohen Levin, who interviewed him and used this information to aid the civil case.

In the March 2022 Dynamite Doug podcast produced by Project Brazen, Cohen Levin recounts, “We were just fortunate that people in the looting network were still alive and willing to speak with us. And then the most amazing piece, Brad Gordon had located one of the looters, somebody known as the Lion.”

In March, Davis told me that, “Looting and trafficking is often described as a victimless, white-collar crime; I wish that anyone buying these pieces could have these face-to-face conversations with the victims, and in many ways, they include the looters themselves.

“I was honoured to meet [Toek Tik] and he does put a human face on the cost of things. Here was a man who was forced to do horrible things, to be a child soldier in the Khmer Rouge, and got into looting out of necessity, because he thought this was more ethical than killing.

“He had become convinced that he had cursed himself and his family for taking all the gods from Koh Ker. Because people want these objects on their mantel, there are entire impoverished communities and people living with the weight of this harm, day in and day out.”

Toek Tik’s detailed knowledge of which pieces he looted has become central to Cambodia’s ongoing pursuit of its cultural artefacts.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is thought to currently have a number of statues that the Cambodian government believes belong to its country. According to The New York Times, in October 2012, the Lion identified 33 items from the Met that he personally plundered and sent up the trafficking chain.

As reported by Mashberg, in The New York Times in November 2021, “The authorities have become convinced, in part, by Toek Tik’s ability to pinpoint the exact location of feet, bases and other remnants of statuary he says he once stole.”

The interview with Toek Tik was one of dozens that Davis and her research partners, Simon Mackenzie and Thanaren Than, would conduct with villagers, looters, middlemen and collectors over three months in the summer of 2013, traversing Cambodia and Thailand deciphering how objects were looted and moved to personal collections, or laundered and sold by elite auction houses in New York and London.

Davis and Mackenzie would publish these findings in 2014, in a landmark paper, “Anatomy of a Statue Trafficking Network”, in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Criminology.

A breakthrough came on December 13, 2013.

In settlement court papers filed on that day, Sotheby’s had determined that “further litigation of this action would be burdensome and would require disputed resolution of factual issues and issues of US, Cambodian, French and other law” and that “Sotheby’s and Ms Ruspoli have voluntarily determined, in the interest of promoting cooperation and collaboration with respect to cultural heritage, to arrange for the statue to be transferred to the kingdom of Cambodia.”

Traditional Cambodian dancers moved gracefully as the Duryodhana and Bhima were showered with jasmine blossoms. Davis, Bourdonneau, Warrack and Lemaistre looked on as the gods were welcomed home by the deputy prime minister of Cambodia, Hor Namhong, and other dignitaries. It had been many years, but the great warriors had finally returned.

As Davis explains in the 2014 documentary The Stolen Warriors, “It’s not just about art, it’s more important than that, this is one chance for us to right just one of the many, many wrongs that have happened to Cambodia.”

The Duryodhana case placed Latchford squarely on the radar of US investigators. By 2018, four years after the warriors had been returned to Cambodia, the US government, with Davis as a consultant, had collected enough evidence to indict Latchford for wire fraud.

Seemingly, every Khmer antiquity had his fingerprints on it. By some estimates, he was suspected of being the greatest plunderer of cultural heritage in the past century. Latchford always denied these allegations.

In a rare interview in The Stolen Warriors, Latchford said, referring to the prosecutors, “Their imagination has gone wild. They’ve seen too many Indiana Jones films. As far as I know there is no such thing as a smuggling network, and I certainly don’t belong to any smuggling network.”

Latchford was 88 years old when he died in Bangkok on August 2, 2020, before he could stand trial. His daughter, Julia, pledged Cambodia his private collection and, in some respects, attempted to rectify her father’s purported misdeeds.

US investigators and Gordon even gained momentum post-Duryodhana. A major collection was traced back to Netscape co-founder James Clark.

Unaware of the dubious provenance and trusting Latchford, Clark amassed a significant collection, estimated to be worth US$35 million. This was voluntarily returned and in August 2022, Davis and several officials gathered in New York for the restitution ceremony before the items were returned to Cambodia in March this year.

Toek Tik died in Cambodia from pancreatic cancer in 2021, but not before changing the narrative of his legacy by working with Cambodian and US officials to track down objects he had looted.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2021, he said, through a translator, “I regret what I did and I want the gods to come home.”