Downloaded from YTS.BZ
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ
These are bigger than just regular run-of-the-mill cases.
These artifacts, once they're gone, they're gone forever.
When I walk through a museum today and I look at those statues,
I just know that there's so much history
that the people looking at those statues don't want to know.
They really don't want to know.
If they know, they would go back and ask for a refund.
They'd say, why would you charge us to see these blood antiquities?
Why do you even have these here?
I've been to many archaeological sites.
I've never seen one absolutely completely plundered.
In a very short time period, they fell victim to war profiteers,
they fell victim to greed.
It would seem that it was highly organized
by people who had finances and the power.
It had to be someone in authority.
The networks behind them were very advanced,
the smuggling routes were complicated.
These are difficult investigations.
The illicit trade in art and antiquities is funding organized crime,
it's funding violent extremism.
Death threats, calls in the morning at 3 o'clock.
People have families, they've got kids.
You don't put that stuff at risk.
My daughter and my bodybuilder chef talked to two priests,
independent of one another.
Both of the priests indicated that in some previous life,
I was Khmer,
and that what I collect had once belonged to me.
He would take people like the Lindemanns, who were these billionaires,
Martin Lerner, who at the time was the curator
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
to these remote jungle sites.
It must have been very exciting.
And having someone like Latchford show them around
and have so much knowledge about all of these items,
I'm sure he was very entertaining.
There was a British stone conservator.
Simon Warrack is his name.
He had been working at this beautiful site of Koh Ker,
which used to be the capital of the Khmer Empire.
The statues there are very, very distinct and very different.
This is the site of this beautiful piece that they called the Duryodhana.
And he spotted two pieces of stone on the ground.
These blocks just had the feet attached, and the body was nowhere in sight.
This is pretty much where they were when we saw the feet the first time.
And since then, they've excavated this trench.
He happened to be in a library, and he saw a statue.
He could see by the position of the legs,
he said, "This kind of looks like it might fit one of those pedestals."
And sure enough, he lined them up and he said, "I think this is matching."
A few years later, Eric Bourdonneau, a French researcher,
he was able to do computer modelling
to show that that statue in Adoration and Glory,
said to be owned by a private collection,
was the statue that matched the pedestal.
In 2010, this Belgian widow decided she wanted to sell the Duryodhana statue
that her husband had acquired.
She reached out to Sotheby's,
which is obviously a very elite auction house,
and said, "Look, I really want to sell this."
Sotheby's put that statue on the cover of its auction
of South and Southeast Asian art
for an estimated value of $2 to $3 million.
Cambodia then sent a letter to Sotheby's saying,
"Don't sell it because the feet are found."
"This statue belongs to Cambodia."
Within hours to spare, this auction was stopped.
U.S. authorities said, "Look, this is looted.
"We want to return it to Cambodia."
Sotheby's said, "No, no, no, no, we want to sell it,
"and we have the right to sell it."
And so they, in the search for the provenance,
reached out to Emma Bunker,
who also was a very close friend of Douglas Latchford's.
A lot of the emails between Emma Bunker and Douglas Latchford
were very illuminating.
It was clear that he definitely was the first owner,
because they were then trying to cover for him.
I think that made him a person of interest.
I don't know where they imagined that I owned the piece,
but let me confirm to you first that I did not own the piece.
I had nothing to do with it.
So the Pandora Papers was this cache
of nearly 12 million financial documents
from offshore secrecy havens
that showed basically how wealthy people
and also sometimes criminals conceal their assets.
With the art market in general, you have items worth millions of dollars
that are being sold in a very non-transparent way,
that are changing hands often across international borders.
I ended up working on the Latchford one
and so I was basically going through every single document I could find.
Shortly after the Sotheby's suit,
the Latchfords turned to Trident Trust, which was this offshore service provider.
We were able to see that this guy Latchford is pretty interesting.
Where did the antiquities go? And where did the money go?
We were trying to track both of those things.
What interested us was, about three months after the sale was actually stopped
is when you saw the Skanda Trust being formed.
-So I mean, it could be coincidence. -Certainly not a coincidence!
Start scrolling away some of the artifacts into a trust...
Right, and also some of the finances too,
because that's a lot of money.
Anytime I would see a story about law enforcement or crime,
but in particular the federal agents,
I just knew that's what I needed to be doing.
It was like a calling: "That's what I'm going to do."
Narcotics investigations, money launderers, fraudulent passports.
Over the years I had done all of those types of cases.
I hear rumblings of an agent in our office
who's recovering ancient artifacts, so I sought him out.
He told me he was drowning in cases and could really use the help.
There's been no looking back ever since.
It's been a wild ride.
Whenever we start an antiquities case,
we approach it from two aspects.
Can we prove that the piece is dirty?
And then, can we prove that someone committed a crime?
Did someone knowingly smuggle something illicit?
Two aspects: the piece itself, and then whether someone broke the law.
I knew Latchford was dirty from the Duryodhana case
and seeing pieces that his name was associated with.
What I was trying to figure out is how involved, how dirty was Latchford?
In 2016, I led Operation Indochina Peninsula Plunder,
which was the investigation into Douglas Latchford and his network.
If you're going to allege
that a particular artifact originates in a certain temple,
who's going to know that better than people there on the ground?
My name is Bradley Gordon.
I'm officially appointed to advise the ministry
on repatriations of stolen antiquities.
I walk into a museum, I feel like,
do they have my picture behind somewhere?
"Brad Gordon, don't let this guy in!"
The DOJ said to me, "We're working on a case involving Sotheby's."
"You know about Latchford, right?"
I went to the Cambodian government and said,
"Look, there's someone out there, you should get back his collection."
If you look at Cambodia,
and you're considering the number of temples that these guys raided,
the number of crime sites, the number of statues,
it's an enormous amount.
We were hired to find the looting network.
Our assignment was to come up here
and track down villagers, track down witnesses.
With Naren, the two of us went over the country
and we interviewed many, many people.
In the beginning, I didn't quite know where Latchford fit into the picture.
People were terrified, they were afraid.
They didn't want to talk about who was involved.
They were willing to identify certain statues.
You transform a piece of rock into a piece of art
and then you also embed spirituality,
a sense of divinity in that piece of rock.
They're not just statues.
They're our gods, they are our kings, they are our ancestors.
If we are not careful,
my children, the future generation,
might lose the collective memory of their identity.
I feel very uncomfortable
that we transform a sacred value for people into money.
Blue Tiger is extraordinary.
He was a trusted lieutenant of Lion, the head of the gang.
He has helped us tremendously.
Given what was taken out of Prasat Krachap,
as soon as I heard about the statues that came out of there,
I knew that this was an extremely significant temple.
I now believe it maybe is one of the most important ones in Cambodia.
And Blue Tiger was there
and participated in the removal of the statues.
Khmer Rouge was a communist movement.
They started guerrilla warfare from the early 60s.
You know, in the 60s, President Nixon and his Secretary of State, Kissinger,
planned a secret bombing of Cambodia.
They bombed Cambodia without telling Congress.
More bombs were dropped on Cambodia
than any time before in mankind's history.
I've seen anywhere from 150,000 people were killed and up.
It definitely destabilized the country. There's no question about it.
The Khmer Rouge were empowered by the bombing
because so many people in the countryside joined the Khmer Rouge.
It's April 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers
are surging into Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital.
Widespread panic permeates the streets, as the new government empties the city,
marching the population in to the countryside.
They undertook a very radical transformation of Cambodian society.
They basically tore apart
all the traditions and institutions of Cambodian life.
So they tore apart families, schools, the government,
Buddhism, all these things they tried to destroy.
I think they've estimated between one and three million people died
from either being murdered or from famine or illness.
After the Khmer Rouge fell,
all these people had been separated
from their villages, from their families,
they didn't know who was alive or who was dead.
They had no income.
It was a desperate struggle for survival.
All kinds of looting of artifacts that took place.
Looting, theft, it happens all around the world.
In conflict and crisis zones,
you quite often have a breakdown of the social order.
You have opportunity for criminals,
but also people we wouldn't necessarily think of as criminals,
to take advantage of that situation, maybe to feed their families.
In 2016, Latchford, he's just a blip on the radar screen.
So my first question to myself:
"What is Latchford about?"
Latchford was born in the British Raj in India
and then went to boarding school.
When he was about 20, he moved to Bangkok.
And then he just fell in love with Khmer culture
because, of course, Thailand and Cambodia share a border.
Latchford had a reputation for hanging out with the museum glitterati,
the society people.
He was a very high-profile character around Bangkok.
I was at dinner one evening with François Duhau de Berenx,
who was an interior decorator.
François showed me a stone female torso,
and it immediately had an effect on me that would change my life.
I was smitten and could, from then on,
think of nothing but this wonderful torso.
He fell in love with it and he became this collector.
And he started collecting Khmer antiquity at this voracious speed.
He became one of the most preeminent scholars of Khmer antiquities as well.
He wrote these three coffee table books that really catapulted his name
to the top of people who knew anything about Khmer statuary.
One of my jobs as a journalist in Bangkok
was to write a story about Douglas Latchford.
And he showed me through his place.
Every little nook and cranny of that apartment
had ancient artifacts sitting on it.
He had beautiful artwork on the walls, it was very tastefully done.
Pretty much like you'd see in a museum,
but these were sitting on mantelpieces and shelves.
You could see he had a deep affection for those pieces,
probably more than he did for people.
A fortune teller had told him
that he had once been Khmer in a previous life,
and that's why he loved all these Khmer statues.
It's very interesting because Latchford was both public and very secretive.
On the public side,
he tried to present himself as this adventurer-scholar, in his words.
So this is kind of drawing on those colonial motifs
of a very heroic European man
who goes into the jungle and discovers lost cities.
Somebody who rescued these Khmer artifacts
that had been lost to the jungle.
When I complimented him
on the amazing array of things he had in his apartment,
he laughed and said, "Yeah, but my best stuff
"is at my daughter's place in Mayfair in London."
Douglas owned the entire apartment block that he lived in.
He kept a whole floor for himself.
It's right on a canal in the middle of Bangkok.
There was very heavy security there.
I remember walking up to the window of the security guard there
and there being a number of other security guards
watching me from inside the gate, all bodybuilders.
It wasn't just one or two guys, it was about five or six.
Mini Schwarzeneggers, yeah, Pocket Hercules,
whatever you want to say, but they're all muscle men, bodybuilders,
and obviously very strong.
One of the things I do as a hobby
is to help the Thai Bodybuilding Association.
I was elected as president of Asia earlier this year.
I'm also president of the Thai Bodybuilding Association.
His love of the Thai bodybuilding,
so we're told, had more to do with his lifestyle
than anything to do with sport.
Halfway through the interview, he said "Let's have a pause,"
and he picked up a bell on the table, he rang a little bell.
The door swung open and a Thai guy came in
with a tight shirt on and a tie, a butler-type guy.
The bulging muscles were nearly splitting his shirt
and he came in and said,
"Would you like Earl Grey or English Breakfast?"
It took a long time for them to realize who exactly this man was.
For the longest time, he was just this kind of quirky, romantic figure
who was this bodybuilding aficionado
and probably kind of an interesting, strange dinner conversation companion.
When I went and interviewed some of the looters,
they talk about how they actually met with Douglas Latchford.
So he has direct communication and direct access to the looters.
We sat down with Blue Tiger,
showed the images of artifacts that we were still hunting.
He was able to and another looter was able to identify some pieces
that they were directly responsible for having taken out of the country,
which was so rare.
The entire interview was a wow moment.
We found on Douglas Latchford's computer a photo of this temple
and it showed just the top of that piece up there
and it was labeled "Peacock."
We heard from Lion
how he came here in 1997 and he dug up the peacock.
I had my eyes wide open and my jaw dropped
the entire time we were talking to them
because who, what, where, when, how, right?
That's what you need to prove a case.
We have that from the mouth of the very people involved.
The Skanda on Peacock statue, which sold for $1.5 million,
I was able to successfully track it down and I got it returned to Cambodia.
And then your hunt continues because there are so many of them.
As we come to learn, there are different Khmer Rouge controllers of areas
in between the temple in the forest, the jungle,
and getting it across the border and into Thailand.
He's selling statues for one, 1.5 a piece.
We know Shiva and Skanda he tried to sell for $25 million.
He had another statue, the Durga that's going back to Vietnam,
he tried to sell for $34 million!
Once I realized that Latchford's a bigger player,
Latchford becomes his own board.
Who are his sources? His sources are the looters in Cambodia.
Who is he supplying? Numerous entities.
They're going to supply museums, to supply gallery owners,
to supply private collectors.
Now, Latchford's in the middle,
and you have those arms branching out to all these other people
who have received illicit property from him.
Who else is helping Latchford with provenance?
Who are Latchford's restorers?
And then his resellers, there could be a dozen of them.
Before you know it, you have so many names on the board.
It was simply a matter of: "Okay, what's next?"
You know, among all the many people who aided and abetted Douglas Latchford,
Emma Bunker is probably the most important person.
Emma Bunker was a major co-conspirator of Douglas Latchford's.
Because Emma Bunker was attached to the Denver Art Museum,
Latchford could introduce pieces to a major museum
and have Emma Bunker vouch for the integrity of the pieces
for the purpose of laundering,
so they could turn around and resell it using the name of the Denver Art Museum.
"This piece was just shown at the Denver Art Museum,"
so no one would ever think that there was a problem with it.
She was also a scholar.
I think she never actually finished her PhD,
but she did really want to be well-known as a scholar.
And she helped him co-author
a number of these coffee table books about Khmer statuary,
which authorities later said were essentially used
to launder these looted statues.
Not everything that was photographed in the books was looted,
but that's how it works.
You take some legitimate ones, mix them with ones that are looted
and poof, provenance, right?
Provenance is the history of an artifact,
meaning the ownership history.
A lot of museums don't actually list provenance information.
They would not share those details with us.
There's a number of Latchford pieces
that have an Ian Donaldson reference in the provenance.
Some of them were supposedly written after Ian Donaldson had already died.
It's clearly letters that were cooked up by Latchford
just to be able to show the museum something.
I mean, how cynical is that? You use your dead friend's name
and you imitate, try to fake a signature for your dead friend.
It's really quite sick, isn't it?
There's a list at Homeland Security,
and on that list is maybe a dozen museums
that have Latchford pieces.
The Met was in New York, I was based in New York.
We knew they had some pieces. That would be the next one to go after.
There are some clear signs of looting,
and it's something we look for when we're poring over evidence.
A statue will get broken into smaller parts.
Makes it easier to ship.
Soil deposits are a thing that we look for.
Anything that's exposed to the elements, you start to see some corrosion.
Corrosion is a red flag.
We have security on the front steps.
-Southeast Asia. -Southeast Asia, over there.
There's so many pieces here that we have records on,
I don't even know where to begin.
So this headless female figure,
we had the opportunity to speak with one of the looters in Cambodia,
and he admitted his role in the removal of this piece
and transfer across the border into Thailand.
On the condition report for this piece, it notes burial soil found on the piece.
For this bronze Avalokiteshvara,
we know that it arrived heavily damaged, from the Met's own internal reporting.
We have from Latchford's email source photos,
source photos showing the piece in the condition in which it was found.
This four-armed bronze Avalokiteshvara,
the Met's own condition report states that it arrived heavily corroded.
You can even still see parts of the corrosion
on the top crown and on one of the arms.
So, you know, typical evidence of pieces that were looted,
when they arrive corroded.
I have stuff on this one too.
This standing forum Vishnu has so many discrepancies
in the provenance documents contained at the Met.
We learned the true story of when it was found
and when Latchford acquired it,
and we presented that evidence to the Met.
It completely contradicts the story that they have on their own records,
and we showed the documentation to support that.
This piece has bad provenance and was looted,
like so many others.
It should be a no-brainer for this one to go back.
I didn't run into him very many times, but I knew him.
He's a person you stay away from.
Do you recognize these pieces from the Met Museum?
Either of these?
These are obviously very good pieces, yeah.
Yeah. Did you ever own them?
Because in his emails...
Did I own them? Or...
So in his emails, in Latchford's emails,
he said that you sold those to the Met,
both of those pieces.
-No, certainly not. -You didn't?
Certainly not.
If I would have owned them, I would have kept them.
Evidence has been presented to the Met
that a number of the pieces that they have were looted.
Straight-up looted.
Eyewitness testimony from some of the looters that were involved.
From the late 80s into the mid 90s,
the Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
had to fill an immense new gallery that they were building.
One of the people that could supply that was Douglas Latchford.
The Metropolitan kept saying to me, "Show me your evidence."
And we kept asking them for their provenance documents.
They kept saying, "Look at our website."
There's hardly anything there.
There's some records on some pieces
where they have two conflicting pieces of provenance
for the same piece in their records.
Here's where we got the piece from,
and a completely different story which contradicts that one.
The years are off, the sources, the names are different.
And they're in the same packet for one of the pieces on display.
You'd think that the Met, with the team that they have,
if they see different conflicting provenance and they have those records,
that might raise a red flag for them.
And no one has made the connection that they're different, right?
Or that they conflict each other.
To ignore the issue, I think it's disrespectful.
My name is Sophiline Cheam Shapiro,
and I am the founder and director of Sophiline Arts Ensemble.
Performing at the Met,
it was a form of quiet or silent protest
to bring attention to the issues of looted antiquity.
This is the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I'm more disappointed than I'm angry.
It's the Met! Like, what are you doing?
The Met Gala tickets are $75,000 each.
I know nothing else of the Met Gala except that
Kim Kardashian posed in front of an Egyptian sarcophagus made of gold,
and we seized it!
The old British museums used to argue that,
"If we didn't save these, good lord, they would have just been lost!"
Which probably isn't true,
but it becomes a justification for basically handling stolen goods.
Admittedly, these things were moonlighted out of Cambodia
and wound up somewhere else.
But had they not been,
they would likely have been shot up for target practice by the Khmer Rouge.
My bicycle isn't very well looked after by me,
because I leave it outside all the time,
but someone else always brings their bicycle inside
and therefore it's in much better condition.
That's not a reason for that other person to own my bicycle.
When I buy a piece on principle, I thoroughly research it.
I certainly don't want to buy a piece that's been stolen or anything.
It is true that some of the temples there had pieces stolen,
but it wasn't on a large scale.
Bullshit.
That's not true.
So this is a legitimate profession.
But it's not legitimate
when those restorers are taking in goods that they know are stolen
and repairing them.
Neil Perry-Smith is an art restorer.
I arrested him for his role in restoring stolen and looted antiquities.
Neil Perry was in London,
and the artifacts had to be shipped to London
for Neil Perry to start working on them.
He helped Latchford
to clean up and remove the dirt and other evidence of looting.
Once a finished fully restored artifact is ready to sell,
it's mostly Latchford reaching out to his circle, his crew,
and showing pictures, and oftentimes those pictures show the pre-restoration
and post-restoration photographs.
So he's basically saying,
"Here's when I found it, and here's what it looks like now."
Take an artifact that was worth $100,000 to Latchford
and it gets completely restored to where now he could sell it for millions.
Museums were a little bit easier for us to investigate, the museum items.
Private collectors, it's a whole different world,
and it's very, very difficult as an investigative reporter
because they're basically a black box.
Unless the owners want to showcase
their private collection for some reason,
you might never know that that collection even exists.
Brad sent me this very discreet picture.
He had gotten it from an associate of Latchford,
who gave him no information about it.
"What do you know about this?"
I said, "Oh my gosh, all of these Khmer antiquities
"sitting in this billionaire's living room."
Where did this come from? So we started trying to search.
We found the name of the street,
we found some details about the couple.
Then we were able to kind of triangulate
based on other real estate listings
that had other similar pictures that matched,
that this was actually the Lindemanns'.
We have the Metropolitan Museum of Art and now we have the Lindemanns.
In each of those, the number of pieces they had
was far greater than we thought going in.
George Lindemann Sr. was the patriarch of this family.
He and his wife Frayda have tons of properties, tons of companies.
Access to the looters puts a spotlight on the Lindemanns
because the looters are referencing specific pieces.
And we sat down with Blue Tiger, showed the images.
We decided to do a spin-off investigation.
Why do the Lindemanns have these pieces, and what else can we find?
We started trying to track down any other photographs we could find
of other properties,
including this 2021 Architectural Digest spread,
which we realized was Sloan Lindemann's.
It was this beautiful courtyard
that had these pedestals on it that were empty.
Combing through Peter Marino's website,
the architect who worked with the Lindemanns,
and they found an identical photo,
except these pedestals were not empty, they had heads on them.
And they had these Khmer heads, really beautiful Khmer heads.
To me, that's very suspicious.
We have the picture with the heads,
and then we have the same beautiful courtyard with no heads,
actually photoshopped out.
And we thought, well, this is great.
It's not until we start getting records back
and we're looking and we're like, oh my God,
a massive collection of rare, extremely valuable and important pieces
that needed to go back to Cambodia.
The Lindemanns amassed a collection valued around $35 million.
And people who have that much money, I think they want to be special.
They want to have something special, something that nobody else has.
The Lindemanns, they just weren't as cooperative.
But ultimately, it came down to, you have a choice to make.
We can go the easy way or the hard way.
He certainly felt like he was untouchable,
and so you might have to wonder why he thought so.
One-track minded,
and he had very good friends in high places.
He was protected, and he wouldn't tolerate any competition.
I got an email from Douglas saying he'd like to catch up with me
at the National Museum in Phnom Penh.
They gave him Cambodian citizenship.
The Deputy Prime Minister at the time
conferred Cambodian citizenship on Douglas
because he'd donated so much to that museum.
I have donated I think seven pieces back
and I think these are primarily pieces that they don't have representation of.
And my family and I have decided
that in the future we would like to donate more back to Cambodia.
Deputy Prime Minister Sok An came,
made a speech, and gave me a Khmer title.
A royal title.
So he came, he lied to the Cambodians,
he flashed around a lot of money.
I think he tricked them.
I mean, they probably thought they were doing the right thing.
And in terms of getting these medallions, Boy Scout badges,
yeah, great, knock yourself out.
You know, it just legitimizes him.
He's got his bodybuilders, his lawsuits, his lawyers.
He's got the Bunker family.
He's got lots of money.
He had his addresses in London, museums around the world.
He's got everything he wanted.
With the bodybuilders came the bodyguards.
They had a reputation that scared a lot of people,
in particular local journalists and fixers
who might be working on this type of story.
He was offloading his collection in exchange for diamonds,
in exchange for other antiquities.
Hello? Good morning.
Hi there.
I got your email.
Why are people interfering
and coming to inform you that I sold some bronzes?
Well, I think they were upset that things got sold.
I think they thought that they were sort of important
and it was funny that they were sold.
I mean, I was surprised.
Well, who told you this?
Why were these sold?
I think they were listed as Skanda Trust.
What's it got to do with them?
People get curious when they move around.
-That's all. -Curiosity killed the cat.
-So what else do you know? -Nothing.
Anything new and exciting?
No, everything's quiet here.
Well, is that good or not?
No news is good news.
We see him conspiring
between him and Emma Bunker or him and Nancy
to manipulate the data or the information that's out there
to sort of dance around it.
Their imagination has gone wild.
They've seen too many Indiana Jones films.
Nancy Wiener was huge for the Latchford case.
She was an art dealer in Manhattan,
and she specialized in Asian and Southeast Asian antiquities.
She was already being looked at by Homeland Security.
In March of 2016, her gallery is raided and she's subsequently arrested.
Having access to Nancy's records really is the breakthrough moment
in the case against Latchford, because now we see,
not only is he so blatant in his emails with her
about where he's finding pieces in the field
and the source and the condition that they're coming in,
but he's also blatantly discussing with her how to make provenance.
"What kind of provenance are you going to need to sell this?"
"Is this good enough? I'll write this letter."
He would send her little samples.
So having her records blew the door open.
I've just been offered this Sri Lankan bronze head.
Height: 18 centimeters.
I've compared it with one I had, it's the same.
They're looking for the body, no luck so far.
All they found last week were two land mines.
What price would you be interested to buy it at?
Let me know, as I'll have to bargain.
I've got one fresh out of the ground.
We're cleaning the dirt off it now.
Hold on to your hat!
Just been offered this 56-centimetre Buddha.
Just excavated.
It's still across the border, but wow!
This is smuggling 101.
The looter finds it, sells it to Latchford.
Latchford's gonna turn around, sell it in Manhattan to an art dealer.
For an investigator, you don't often get this smoking gun kind of material.
We used the documentation that we received from Nancy to indict Latchford.
In 2019, Douglas Latchford was finally indicted.
Conspiracy to commit wire fraud,
substantive wire fraud
and smuggling.
Conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States.
Entry of goods by false statements
and one count of aggravated identity theft.
There were so many museums and dealers who dealt with him,
and so if Latchford's being indicted,
where's the shoe going to drop next?
Possibly on them.
And so museums are contacting us and they're notifying us in advance,
they're saying, "We have pieces,
"we don't want to have agents come storming into the museum.
"We want to try and get ahead of this."
At the same time he's indicted,
doctors find him to be incompetent.
I'm not buying any of it.
So I send agents to his hospital room to actually inspect him
and make sure he really is in as poor shape as they say he was in.
And they actually confirmed that he was in pretty bad shape.
Not long after that, his health continued to decline, and he passed.
I would have liked for him to have faced his day in court
and answer for the crimes that he committed.
Douglas Latchford's family made an enormous amount of money from this,
and they continue to hold onto that money.
Julia Latchford is Douglas Latchford's daughter.
Julia signed an agreement with Cambodia
to turn over hundreds of pieces in the Latchford estate.
It didn't make sense for Julia to hold on to pieces
that she couldn't sell because they were tainted,
and potentially she could be in violation of law
for criminal possession of stolen property.
You have the opportunity to come out smelling like roses
and unload all this dirty material.
I think for her, it was a no-brainer.
We had to go through a process of working with a family representative.
I went to London to drive with him to the countryside.
So I went with him and we drove out to a pub.
I took a photo of the pub when I walked up,
just thinking if I disappeared,
somebody could check my iPhone for that photo.
And we went in to have lunch and Julia was there.
And she's like, "Okay, you ready to see the gold?"
She opens the trunk of the car,
and she's got cardboard boxes in there, four cardboard boxes,
and it's the Angkorian jewels.
It's the crowns and the bracelets and the armlets
from the Angkorian Empire
in the back seat of her car.
Not the back seat, the trunk.
But she went and just opened everything and held it up.
Showing me, "This is an earring, this is a bracelet."
And I was deeply saddened and mortified
that the treasures of this great ancient empire
were in the back trunk of a car a couple hours outside of London.
The looting didn't come directly from them.
It came from Douglas Latchford.
People can still do something good,
even when they've done something horrible in their life.
But when they did that when they were kids,
they were in a very difficult position.
It's remarkable, it's beautiful,
and it's not something I would've thought of when I started.
I think it's a beautiful story of redemption.
The U.S. Attorney's Office of Homeland Security
and the Metropolitan Museum of Art had been in negotiations
over which pieces would be returned,
and it was a surprise to me that all of a sudden,
the Met just announced that
we're going to return this batch of their Cambodian antiquities.
The Met have given back these 14,
by and large, because they know that they are connected to Latchford.
If they thought that these were not stolen,
I think they would never have given them back.
I think they would have fought for the rest of my life,
for a couple of generations.
They have done something unprecedented,
given back so many to a country like Cambodia.
But there's no admission, there's no nothing.
I think it's wrong.
If they really want to sincerely help Cambodia heal,
they need to give the provenance documents.
They need to help us with the history.
I believe that they know.
They know the background.
They know why these are blood antiquities.
It's raining so hard.
Is it a sign of joy? Is it tears of joy?
After so many decades, after war,
and so much havoc and damage in the country,
I believe it's wonderful that Cambodia is now being recognized
as a leader for restitution.
This is a beautiful, beautiful message to the world.
Having visited the different temples and seeing the empty spots,
and seeing everything that was missing,
it just made me realize that there's a lot of work to do
and there are a lot of pieces out there still.
To see so many people come together right now
and do something positive,
and to know that this has touched so many peoples' hearts,
it's incredible.
You know, Cambodia, we lived through war and genocide.
If we are not focusing on the positive side of life,
we all are crazy.
It's hard to move on if you focus on the negative side of life.
I know what it's like to have no hope.
I know what it's like to live in fear.
You know, we are not all that.
There was a time, many centuries ago,
that we had built a great civilization.
They have gone, but their work stays.
Past, present, and future can connect.