Emma Bunker (00:20):
Hello?
Douglas Latchford (00:22):
Good morning.
Emma Bunker (00:24):
Hi, there.
Ellen Wong (00:27):
In July 2018, two friends of 50 years get on the phone to discuss an ominous development.
Douglas Latchford (00:36):
I got your email. Why are people interfering and coming to inform you that I sold some bronzes?
Ellen Wong (00:44):
Douglas Latchford, one of the world’s foremost dealers in Asian art is talking to Emma Bunker, his collaborator. She’s just emailed saying, authorities in the U.S. are asking questions, but Douglas suspects Emma’s cooperating. It spurred him to start to secretly record their conversations. From his opulent apartment surrounded by antiques and potted plants, classical music playing, Douglas tries to intimidate her.
Douglas Latchford (01:12):
They don’t know so they shouldn’t interfere.
Emma Bunker (01:16):
Probably they were just curious as to where they were now. That’s all.
Douglas Latchford (01:18):
Curiosity killed the cat.
Ellen Wong (01:30):
When you think of art heists, maybe your mind conjures up images of shady characters and black balaclavas, outwitting security systems, and clueless guards, and getting away with a picture or a two, maybe a Picasso or a Renoir. Not our story. This isn’t about the theft of a single work of art. It’s about looting the cultural heritage of an entire nation, the nation from which my parents escaped: Cambodia.
Brad Gordon (02:01):
We’re untangling an epic mess here. This is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, art heist in history.
Tess Davis (02:10):
Latchford, I believe stands alone in that he really plundered this entire civilization.
Douglas Latchford (02:19):
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.
Ellen Wong (02:35):
Over the course of several decades, Douglas Latchford carried out the sustained and systematic theft of some of the most exquisite art in human history. He had a chauffeured Rolls Royce, a Mayfair apartment in London, and was on first name terms with curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which he helped fill with looted treasures. Douglas did all this while Cambodia descended into one of the worst genocides the world has known, the infamous killing fields. Then, his crimes caught up with him, like they do most art thieves.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Douglas Latchford was indicted after allegedly trafficking, stolen artifacts.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Illicit trafficking of art and antiquities.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Trafficking antiquities is a multi-billion dollar…
Speaker 2 (03:25):
In transnational organized crime.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Organized looting networks, including looters affiliated with the Khmer Rouge.
Ellen Wong (03:32):
This is Dynamite Doug from Project Brazen and PRX. And I’m Ellen Wong.
(03:50):
My family fled genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s for Canada. And then, well, I came along and eventually became an actor. So I’m really happy that I get to tell this story and to share it with you because, well, let’s just say, it’s personal.
(04:09):
This is the inside account of how art experts in America and Europe, I’m talking dealers, curators, auction houses, and academics like Emma Bunker, conspired with Douglas Latchford to rob a nation blind. No one in the cozy art world wants to talk. What you’re about to hear over the next six episodes is based on Douglas’s emails reported in their entirety for the first time, as well as over 30 interviews, court documents, and more. We’ll hear from looters themselves, Cambodian government officials, and a band of art sleuths, people like Brad Gordon, an American lawyer who has made it his life’s work to help Cambodia get its treasures back.
Brad Gordon (04:56):
I think in the future, we’re going to see more evidence of just how much a senior member of the Metropolitan Museum colluded with one of the greatest art thieves in history. I think they just lost all sense of good and evil.
Ellen Wong (05:16):
We hear a lot about how the Met and the British Museum are stuffed with antiquities stolen by earlier generations. But our story isn’t ancient history. These thefts are still happening now.
(05:38):
To get a handle on this tale, we have to go back in time to the 1950s. It’s here in the tropics where Douglas’s story begins. Bangkok, 1957. It’s a tropical evening as guests arrive at Connie Mangskau’s teakwood home on the banks of ‘klong,’ one of Bangkok’s canals. Thai waiters circle, handing out cocktails. Beautiful in her late forties, part Thai, part British, Connie’s a socialite and a supplier of ancient treasures to the likes of Jackie Kennedy and the Rockefellers. Connie had spied for the Allies, spent time in a Japanese prisoner camp, and after the war, opened up her own antique shop in a posh hotel. Visitors from abroad stopped by, acquiring a Buddha head or a bronze statue to ship home.
Maryanne Stanislaw (06:34):
The wealthy Americans were traveling, so people came, were expected to be treated like royalty and they were, and they were taken from place to place. And Connie started to develop relationships with a lot of these people. She was the go-to gal and that’s how she ended up in the antique business.
Ellen Wong (06:56):
Maryanne Stanislaw remembers her grandmother as a product of another age, one in which priceless antiques from Thai culture were just lying around temples.
Maryanne Stanislaw (07:06):
There were Buddha heads everywhere. There were shards of pottery everywhere. Some of the big collectors in the world bought these things and the pieces sit in museums today. A lot of those passed through Connie’s hands.
Ellen Wong (07:20):
Tonight at Connie’s home, one of the guests is Douglas Latchford. He’s only in his mid-twenties and recently arrived from India; tall, six foot four, a posh British accent, Thai silk jacket, and gold wristbands. There’s a steeliness to his stare, but he’s charming. He was born in colonial Bombay on October 15th, 1931 to Ellen and Henry Latchford. His father was a British banker, but like many details about Douglas’s life, his early biography is sketchy.
(07:57):
We do know he attended boarding school in Brighton where reading Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, he became obsessed with illustrations of abandoned temples covered in vines. Then, he came to Bangkok in the 1950s to sell pharmaceuticals for a British trading company. He was somewhat of an outsider; young, yet to make his way in the world, but ambitious. He met Connie and became interested in the Thai antiques she was selling. She even supported him to start his own collecting business, Maryanne remembers.
Maryanne Stanislaw (08:32):
He must have come with an introduction to her. I’m not sure how he got there, but Connie just opened her house. And so he was one who did ask for a lot of advice and help from Connie. And I know that Connie loaned him money from time to time.
Ellen Wong (08:50):
Douglas was resourceful. When he worked for the pharmaceutical company, he would ask his clients to pay him with antiques, small stone or bronze Buddhas, rather than cash. Then he’d sell the pieces in Bangkok’s thieves market for more than the cost of the drugs, pocketing the difference, and building his war chest for further acquisitions.
(09:12):
From the get-go, Douglas was a risk-taker, a kind of person who’d rather ride out on a treasure hunt than attend a stuffy society party. And like most non-conformists, his name quickly was on people’s lips. Maryanne, who is writing a book on her grandmother’s life, says that Douglas’s sexuality was a topic of gossip in still bigoted 1950s expat circles.
Maryanne Stanislaw (09:39):
I mean, it was always assumed by everybody that he had a male partner, but whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. And maybe that’s a reason why he didn’t go out in society more.
Ellen Wong (09:52):
Yet Douglas also yearned to enter elite circles. There was a brash arrogance about him. At Connie’s parties, he always tried to impress. He would talk about sculptures as if it had been his life’s work.
Maryanne Stanislaw (10:05):
He was not very well liked, I’m sorry to say, by most people. The impression that one would get is he was a little bit of a show-off and maybe that’s what turned people off. I think he was just one of those people who was, yeah, he had to prove something.
Ellen Wong (10:26):
At Connie’s home, Douglas was drawn to the ancient statues that were on display in every corner. He especially liked pieces from Cambodia, which borders Thailand. At the height of its powers a millennium ago, the Khmer Empire in modern day Cambodia gave rise to the famous Angkor Wat temples. Its statues are among the world’s great artistic achievements.
(10:53):
The Khmer Empire was founded on slaves and the statues of its kings and deities exude raw power; prominent chests, powerful arms carved out of flowing stone or cast in bronze. Later in life as an old man, Douglas described seeing his first Khmer statue in 1950s Bangkok. “I saw a piece on the floor,” he said. “Greek and Roman sculpture is wonderful, but I responded to this on another level.”
(11:28):
Douglas modeled himself as a colonial adventurer, a Churchillian figure with Southeast Asia as his playground. He traveled by Jeep into the jungles of Thailand and Cambodia, often wearing a pith helmet and accompanied by young men for security. With money from Connie and others, he began to acquire art.
Alexander Goetz (11:50):
You could feel that he loved these pieces. The art was his thing, Cambodian art.
Ellen Wong (11:57):
Here’s Alexander Goetz, a friend and fellow dealer.
Alexander Goetz (12:01):
Douglas gets offered a piece, a masterpiece on the Cambodian Thai border. So he jumps in the car with his boys, he always has a bodyguard, and he drives up to the border and he looks at the piece and he wants to buy it. And then he keeps the good one and he crates the other piece and sent them to London. And when he’s in London, they’re already mounted and cleaned and he offers them to Spinks and Spinks buys them.
Ellen Wong (12:37):
Spink & Son is a venerable auction house with roots in the 17th century and a fashionable office in Bloomsbury. Douglas made a connection with a Spink dealer, Adrian Maynard, and impressed him with tales of untold treasures hidden in the jungles of Southeast Asia. No one buying in those days cared about provenances, documentation showing where a piece emanated from and that it had been legally acquired. It was the Wild West, as Douglas explained much later in life in an interview for a documentary.
Douglas Latchford (13:10):
In the fifties, the sixties, this question never arose. But collectors, and I know I did, checked to see whether the pieces had been registered or stolen. And there were one or two books, that was the only way one could check.
Ellen Wong (13:29):
By the 1960s, as the war in Vietnam ramped up, the trade in Asian antiquities also got a boost. This is Angela Chiu, a scholar who has written a book on Thai art and extensively researched Douglas.
Angela Chiu (13:43):
I think this really got an impetus when the U.S. military started to base themselves in Thailand. So this brought in a lot of people and money that led to people wanting to seek souvenirs for a station there, as well as interest by foreign museums in this region and collecting art from the region. So I think Latchford was able to leverage his position in Bangkok to be the conduit via which artifacts could leave Thailand as well as Cambodia and move on to these often very prestigious foreign collections.
Ellen Wong (14:27):
Douglas set up an antique shop on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok, not far from Connie’s home. He built a beautiful house nearby. While some like Maryanne found Douglas aggressive, others were wowed by his success. Robbie Brothers, who worked with him at the drug company, was amazed when Douglas showed him the Khmer statue that he said cost 2,000 British pounds, a fortune at the time.
Robbie Brothers (14:55):
He was a very suave, likable person. I was from the head office and he was older and much wiser than I was, but he was kind to me and helpful, and I always got on with him well.
Ellen Wong (15:12):
Look, it’s hard not to root for Douglas, an underdog in the 1950s and sixties. I mean, he was a drug company salesman who, inspired by the beauty of art through his own initiative, found his way into the stuffy, closed off world of antiquities, and now he was even having some success. Weren’t the expat elites in Bangkok just being condescending, homophobic even? Everyone is taking whatever antiques are available. Wasn’t he just the most entrepreneurial?
Robbie Brothers (15:49):
He probably would’ve done some things which would have not been totally kosher in the art market. But in that, he was aided and abetted by many well-known names, certainly in the UK art market. They knew he had acquired it from his business in the far east, and that in my definition anyway, is not looting. It’s the same sort of story to the Elgin marbles. Lord Elgin purchased those marbles. He didn’t loot them.
Ellen Wong (16:28):
But there’s a problem with Robbie’s analogy. The Elgin marbles were taken from Greece in the early 1800s by Lord Elgin. The British Museum contends it was a legal act of preservation, but that view is looking increasingly untenable. Greece wants them back, and a United Nations advisory committee has urged the British Museum to revisit its stance. Of course, it’s no longer acceptable to take whatever you want from a foreign country. Even in the 1960s, Thailand was changing. The government brought in export licenses to stop the outflow of Buddha heads, bronze statues, and other artifacts. Robbie Brothers remembers that one day at Bangkok’s international airport Douglas’s brother, Trevor, was caught leaving the country with Thai artifacts and no paperwork.
Robbie Brothers (17:22):
He was caught smuggling the Thai art. He was in a sort of rather serious position because of that.
Ellen Wong (17:29):
According to Robbie and another source, Trevor spent time in prison. Rumors started to swirl about Douglas too. His dealership was just across the street from a workshop of a talented copier of Buddhist art named Ya, who sold to unsuspecting tourists. Was Douglas also selling fakes? Helen Jessup, founder of Friends of Khmer Culture and a specialist in the art and architecture of Southeast Asia, says those rumors are backed by the large number of Khmer statues Douglas started selling.
Helen Jessup (18:04):
Suddenly, all of these new amazing pieces, perfect, not a chip, not a scratch, not a dint. Where did they come from? The French were there for a very long time. How come they didn’t see these pieces? I mean, I don’t think so. I think they’re fake and they’re all over.
Ellen Wong (18:26):
More rumors began circulating about Douglas’s practices. There was talk he was overseeing the use of explosives to blow statues off their plinths. People started to call him Dynamite Doug behind his back. He raised eyebrows with his eccentric hobbies as well, having developed a fascination with Thai kickboxing. Later in life, he liked to watch and finance Thai body building competitions, says Lois De Menil, a scholar and honorary president for the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap.
Lois De Menil (18:59):
I thought I would die. It was about the most horrible thing. I just thought it was beyond the pale. And Douglas was reveling in it, just reveling completely.
Ellen Wong (19:13):
But back in the 1960s, Douglas had to appear conventional. He got married to a Thai woman and had a daughter, Julia. He took a Thai name, Pakpong Kriangsak, and became a Thai citizen. In Bangkok, expats kept large households with drivers, cooks, and housekeepers. Douglas was kind to his staff, paying for their kids’ education and medical bills. And for those he trusted, he was a loyal friend, taking an international flight just to turn up for someone’s birthday. But Douglas’s brash ways and the rumors about him were causing tensions with Bangkok’s old guard.
Maryanne Stanislaw (19:56):
He built a very large house next to Connie’s beach house and she said, “Oh, everybody always wants to outdo me.”
Ellen Wong (20:06):
But what did Douglas care for the approval of Bangkok society. I mean, his antiques business had surpassed Connie’s and he was about to make the find of his young career. Buriram, Thailand, 1964.
Angela Chiu (20:26):
Okay. Well, in the mid 1960s, a very interesting article appeared in a popular magazine called Illustrated London News. There was a reporting in there about a set of bronze statues that were found on the border of Cambodia and Thailand under the ruins of a temple. And some peasants had found it. The article had a couple of photos of some of the statues that were found.
Ellen Wong (20:53):
A photo of the temples, the jungle encroaching taken at the time is straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.
Angela Chiu (21:01):
And it was all very mysterious and odd because Thailand does have laws that forbid the export of ancient artifacts without an export license. And there’s no indication here of any kind of official excavation or any kind of permits ever being issued for these statues. So the circumstances of how they were found and distributed in the 1960s is something quite disturbing.
Ellen Wong (21:35):
Douglas’s fingerprints were all over the bronze statues. First, his favorite dealer, Spink, handled the sale. Another clue, some of the bronze statues ended up with John D. Rockefeller III, from one of the world’s richest families whom Douglas named as a client.
Angela Chiu (21:56):
Subsequently, it was revealed that many of these statues were sold to very wealthy private collectors and to museums as well.
Ellen Wong (22:08):
And crucially, Douglas supplied a photo of the site to an ambitious academic in Denver, Emma Bunker.
Angela Chiu (22:17):
And then we had the article that was published in the United States by Emma Bunker, who we now know was a close collaborator of Douglas Latchford. And that article in the U.S. was very important because most of the statues had gone to the United States.
Ellen Wong (22:34):
Douglas needed a scholarly validation for what he was selling. The bronze sales were his first big payday, putting him on the map. And for Emma, whose academic career was going nowhere, the connection to this artistic find was electrifying. Her life was about to become entwined with Douglas’s, for better or for worse.
Helen Jessup (22:59):
I don’t see her as a deliberate international art criminal. Not at all. But she certainly, with no way about it, she colluded.
Ellen Wong (23:13):
Coming up this season on Dynamite Doug.
Brad Gordon (23:17):
He was very charming and very likable. And he made me laugh.
Sharon Cohen Levin (23:21):
Douglas Latchford was the premier expert on Khmer art. He was a hero in Cambodia.
William Heidt (23:28):
And then it started to change.
Dawn Rooney (23:30):
The only thing you heard were Khmer Rouge gunfire going off.
Alexander Goetz (23:35):
He’s an extremely kind and funny person, but if you do anything wrong, he lets a sledgehammer down. No mercy.
Tess Davis (23:44):
I think the story is much darker than, again, any of his critics even suspected at the beginning.
Ellen Wong (23:57):
Dynamite Doug is a production of Project Brazen in partnership with PRX. It’s hosted by me, Ellen Wong. Tom Wright and Bradley Hope are executive producers. Sandy Smallens is the executive producer for Audiation. Tom Wright wrote the script with reporting from Timothy McLaughlin and Evan Moffitt. Joanne Levine is the story editor. Mariángel Gonzalez and Nicholas Brennan are senior producers. Matthew Rubenstein is the producer.
(24:28):
Mix and Music by Bang Music and Audio Post. Theme by Paul Vitolins. Underscore by Timo Elliston, Brian Jones, and Paul Vitolins. Lucy Woods is head of research. Ryan Ho is the creative director for the project. With cover art design by Julien Pradier. The production coordinator for Audiation is Selena Seay Reynolds. Voice actors are Sok Sambath, Jeremiah Putnam, Lois Allen Lily, and Richard Trapp. If you liked this episode, please be sure to tell a friend, or rate and review it wherever you listen.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Audiation.
