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. 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.
