Ellen Wong (00:06):
Previously on Dynamite Doug.
Blue Tiger (translator) (00:11):
They cut the brick a little and we saw the legs come out. They scratched, then saw the body.
Tess Davis (00:18):
These pieces in some cases were safe in Cambodia for a millennia and then disappeared in a matter of years.
Ellen Wong (00:32):
Angkor Wat, Cambodia, 1991.
Dawn Rooney (00:35):
I guess what really was eerie is that Angkor had always been a place of lots of natural habitat and birds and monkeys and butterflies. It was eerie because it’s total silence. The only thing you heard were Khmer Rouge gunfire going off in the greater region.
Ellen Wong (01:01):
Dawn Rooney, the art historian specializing in Southeast Asia, was getting ready to lead a group of historians and art experts back to the ancient Khmer capital of Angkor Wat. The group included Doris Wiener, now in her late sixties, and her daughter Nancy, who was involved in her mother’s Fifth Avenue art dealership. After years scarred by brutal fighting, this renowned temple had just reopened to foreigners. It was, however, still dangerous to go there. Just before the flight to Cambodia from Bangkok, Doris Wiener was frantic. More at home in her Fifth Avenue gallery, she was about to fly into a war-scarred nation on the edge. Added to that, she’d just been told that Dawn, a foreigner and a woman, was in charge of the trip, and that made Doris nervous.
Dawn Rooney (01:50):
And so Doris stood up and said, “I’m not going to Cambodia with her.”
Ellen Wong (01:55):
A man on the trip asked, “Why?”
Dawn Rooney (01:57):
“Because she’s a female.” She said, “These are dangerous times.”
Ellen Wong (02:01):
Despite her reluctance to travel without a burly man as a guide, Doris was cajoled onto the plane for the short flight into Cambodia. From there, they traveled to Siem Reap, the town near Angkor Wat, the ancient Khmer site. As the group drove into town, the scene was desolate.
Dawn Rooney (02:20):
Well, it was barren. Provisions were limited. Hotels were practically derelict, the food was terrible.
Ellen Wong (02:30):
While some of the group on the trip were academics, there to take stock of the ancient site after years of war, Doris and Nancy Wiener and a number of other participants had altogether different objectives.
Dawn Rooney (02:43):
They were dealers. They held one of the members at immigration because she was carrying 10,000 US dollars in cash. She wanted to buy art.
Ellen Wong (02:53):
The country was open to collectors again, even as war orphans maimed by landmines begged on street corners. This enabled the Wieners to return treasures to sell in their swank Manhattan galleries. Later in the decade, Martin Lerner, the Met curator, and Emma Bunker would also make their first trip to Cambodia. As for Douglas and Emma, they were becoming inseparable and newly opened Cambodia was their playground.
(03:28):
This is Dynamite Doug, a podcast from Project Brazen and PRX. And I’m Ellen Wong.
(03:49):
Angkor Wat, Cambodia, 1997. After spending a day out on the still water at Tonle Sap lake, Douglas, Emma, and a group of friends wanted to make one last stop. As the van traveled through the jungle, Douglas peered out. Then he spotted what he was looking for, an ancient Khmer monastery.
Chea Bunant (04:18):
So they asked me to stop. Then they visited the monastery.
Ellen Wong (04:26):
Chea Bunant, the group’s tour guide, had grown up in Cambodia and became Douglas’s favorite chaperone.
Chea Bunant (04:34):
I worked with this group at least about 40 times.
Ellen Wong (04:38):
In 1991, the UN-backed Peace Accords brought an end to decades of war in Cambodia. Yet, Khmer Rouge fighters remained in the jungle. Landmines were everywhere, as they still are today, but Bunant was happy to have a job as a tour guide as foreigners began to return. He led Douglas, Emma, and the others of the steps into the monastery. They found it in disrepair. Littered all over the floor were pieces of the statues and lintels, beams that once supported the majestic architecture of the temples.
Chea Bunant (05:16):
I thought these are not high value because they were broken pieces.
Ellen Wong (05:24):
The group spent an hour photographing the pieces and then returned to the Raffles Hotel where they were staying. They came back soon after and sent Bunant to find a receptacle of some kind.
Chea Bunant (05:35):
I bought a basket from the fisherman.
Ellen Wong (05:39):
Douglas, Emma and the group were soon down on the ground picking up the statues.
Chea Bunant (05:45):
They like the broken pieces. They tried to collect one big basket, I remember.
Ellen Wong (05:55):
Back at the Raffles, they transferred the loot into a plastic bag.
Chea Bunant (05:59):
I saw them, they put in the plastic bag, and they gave to Emma Bunker.
Ellen Wong (06:05):
In a speech many years later, Emma would remember visits to Cambodia in the 1990s with longing.
Emma Bunker (06:12):
I was always fascinated when I first went to Cambodia because somebody would always give me a lei or a circle of jasmine flowers, which I thought was terribly romantic and beautiful. Nobody’d ever welcomed me to a country quite as florally.
Ellen Wong (06:30):
By the nineties, Emma had come a long way from her first thin paper on Thai bronzes decades earlier. She had transformed into a world expert on Khmer statues and bronzes under Douglas’s tutelage, publishing essays and catalogs from museums, and now traveling with him into the jungles of newly opened Cambodia. But she never mentioned anything about stealing the country’s cultural heritage. Pieter Myers, a Dutch chemist who served as the head of conservation for LACMA, the LA County Museum of Art, first met Emma in the 1970s.
Pieter Meyers (07:10):
I’ve gotten to know Emmy Bunker as a good friend. She’s one of the best scholars that I’ve ever had the pleasure to be associated with, extremely knowledgeable.
Ellen Wong (07:21):
Emma had become an expert in her own right, but she was still overshadowed by Douglas, who was becoming more lordly as his power increased.
Pieter Meyers (07:30):
He thought very highly of himself, was very decisive.
Ellen Wong (07:36):
Emma’s scholarship was useful for Douglas, and it helped keep people like Pieter in the dark for years.
(07:44):
As Cambodia stabilized, UN officials began to take stock of the theft of art that had gone on under the Khmer Rouge. In 1993, UNESCO published the Art world’s equivalent of a most wanted list, “100 Missing Objects: Looting in Angkor.”
(08:06):
Back in New York at the Metropolitan Museum, Martin Lerner was shocked as he leafed through the UN’s booklet. Staring back at him was a 10th century stone head of Shiva, one of his museum’s prized statues. Martin was at the height of his powers, about to open a new Southeast Asian wing in the Met, 18 new galleries that ran the length of two city blocks. This was a nuisance.
(08:35):
Rather than promptly return the statue, the Met did nothing for years. Despite the UN’s concerns, neither Martin nor other curators raised any questions about the origins of its Cambodian collection, many pieces of which had come via Douglas.
Jason Felch (08:52):
What should happen is that should trigger a reckoning within the institution. If this object was stolen, what else might be stolen that we have?
Ellen Wong (09:01):
Jason Felch, an author who runs the art theft blog, Chasing Aphrodite, has a good explanation for why this didn’t happen.
Jason Felch (09:09):
Curators and museum officials knew that much of their collection had been acquired through similar means, and that if they began aggressively confronting those questions, the museum would be forced to disgorge many objects in their possession.
Ellen Wong (09:26):
Four years later, Martin was forced to take the Shiva head back to Cambodia, a rare case of the Met returning looted art. At the time, Martin said, “It is my hope that this will serve as a precedent and an example for other sculptures to make their way back where they belong.” He didn’t respond to our questions.
(09:52):
Now, as he heard in the last episode, the Met told us in a statement it had, and I quote, “returned many pieces based upon thorough review,” unquote, to countries around the world. But on the same visit to Cambodia to return the Shiva head, Martin was accompanied by US Oil billionaire George Lindemann and his wife, whom he introduced to Douglas.
(10:15):
In a photo from the trip, Martin is standing with the Lindemanns. Douglas and Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh. Shortly after the trip, the Lindemanns donated a statue of demons riding an elephant to the Met. According to Cambodian authorities, a former looter said he’d stolen the piece and sold them to a supplier known to deal with Douglas. So Martin returned the Shiva head. But at the same time, another priceless artifact was spirited out of Cambodia. The looting continued. And that piece, yes, it too remains on display in the Met until this day, Douglas had avoided appearing in the news, but there was more scrutiny than ever before. Under pressure from UNESCO and officials in Phnom Penh, the US restricted the import of antiquities that had left Cambodia after 1999. Douglas was in need of a new kind of deception, and he would call upon Emma to make it happen.
(11:26):
The pair started to work together on a book that would legitimize their trade in stolen artifacts. The result published a few years later was Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art. Filled with photos of artifacts, many of which had passed through his hands, it was hailed as a major study.
(11:54):
In Bangkok, Thai television covered the book’s launch party, which featured Douglas’s bodybuilding friends modeling jewelry from his collection. Emma once again turned a blind eye to where Douglas had secured the art. The books were The crowning achievement of Emma’s career, says Lois De Menil, the president of the Center for Khmer Studies, an historian and a friend.
Lois De Menil (12:20):
She was so proud of writing those books, and Douglas was financing them, and he was providing so much of the background information and telling her what to do. And she was doing the scholarly part, which was researching the provenance.
Ellen Wong (12:35):
But she was looked down upon by serious scholars of Asian art.
Lois De Menil (12:39):
She felt shunned by them, and it was a kind of consolation to be able to write these wonderful books, which she would not have been able to do alone. She did need Douglas to do it.
Ellen Wong (12:51):
But the book was hardly serious. Of the 180 Khmer pieces featured, 115 items were contributed from private collections without owners listed, raising questions from scholars about where they came from and why they had never been seen before.
(13:10):
No matter, Douglas would soon be using the book to push through new sales of stolen loot. And Emma? On the surface, she was a successful scholar with a loving family. Now in her 70s, Emma was a matriarch to her seven children and 19 grandchildren.
Lois De Menil (13:30):
Emmy was a dedicated grandmother. She had trouble coming to our meetings in January because she went skiing with her grandchildren. She was just a good sport and a nice companion to have around and wonderful to her own family.
Ellen Wong (13:46):
But scratch a little and a more complicated picture emerges. Dawn remembers.
Dawn Rooney (13:53):
I don’t think her mothering went that easily. I think that she had at least one or two quite difficult children.
Ellen Wong (14:00):
She could be forthright, abrupt even.
Dawn Rooney (14:04):
Emmy and I were on the board at the same time of the Center for Khmer Studies, and she always was opinionated, but she’s smart and she had good ideas.
Ellen Wong (14:14):
At the same time, she was falling further under Douglas’ spell, a man with whom she would talk almost daily on the phone for hours, often about how pesky rules were hurting the antiquities trade.
Emma Bunker (14:28):
There’s so little sales now of sort of antiquities. I mean, everybody’s upset if something has a little piece of ivory in it. I mean, the whole collective world, the whole art world has gone sort of crazy.
Douglas Latchford (14:43):
Right.
Emma Bunker (14:44):
I mean, if something has ivory in it, not selling an antiquity of ivory isn’t going to save an elephant.
Ellen Wong (14:55):
Once when she was tipsy, Emma told an acquaintance that Douglas was the less love in her life.
Dawn Rooney (15:03):
She was under his wing. She was very fond of him, both personally and professionally.
Ellen Wong (15:10):
There’s no evidence Emma sold Khmer artwork, enriching herself off the back of her scholarship. She was already married into an extremely wealthy family, and there’s no sign in the 1990s that she knew Douglas was falsifying provenance documents. But without access to the artwork Douglas procured, her academic career would not have been as successful. And without her scholarship, he would’ve lacked legitimacy. We asked Helen Jessup, the Khmer art expert, whether Emma was corrupted by Douglas.
Helen Jessup (15:47):
I think she was, yes. And I think it was because she was immensely fond of him. I think she was very attracted to him as a person. I think it was a very, very, very strong friendship. I don’t see her as a deliberate international art criminal, not at all. But she certainly colluded. She wrote the pieces.
Ellen Wong (16:17):
In the new millennium, Douglas was thriving despite questions about stolen Cambodian art. Visitors to his London apartment were dazzled by the opulent display of Khmer statues. Many of them bedecked in priceless gold jewelry. Visitors noted the shutters were often down and classical music playing, creating an otherworldly atmosphere among the statues and potted ficus trees. Douglas like to dazzle people with his wealth, says Alex Goetz, the dealer and friend.
Alexander Goetz (16:49):
He was more flashy. Douglas had a Rolls Royce in London, was a chauffeur driving around and was a bodyguard.
Ellen Wong (16:58):
Back in Bangkok, he was sponsoring type body building associations. There were often buff young Thai men in attendance. He built one of Bangkok’s most modern apartment blocks, the 19 story Chidlom Place, taking over a massive apartment for himself. The rooms were stuffed with ancient relics, statues, rugs, bronzes, remembers Craig Wilson, a friend and neighbor.
Craig Wilson (17:23):
He had remodeled the apartment to turn it basically into a mini museum, and there was Khmer art everywhere. Lots of statues, some modern paintings to go along with it, and all of them displayed with spotlights. You know, it was a beautiful apartment and very suited to showing off the artwork.
Ellen Wong (17:49):
Douglas was as powerful as ever, and he suffered delusions of grandeur. He went as far as telling the New York Times that two Buddhist monks once told him, and I quote that, “In a previous life, I had been Khmer and that what I collect had once belonged to me.” It’s as if Douglas was psychologically deluded, justifying in his own mind, the looting, but he was far from done. It was just then that Douglas made the sale of a lifetime to one of America’s richest people. Miami Beach, Florida, 2003. James H. Clark in his late fifties had more money than God. Better known as Jim, he’d founded Netscape, the internet browser company, and now he was looking to furnish a penthouse overlooking the ocean. The man for the job was Douglas Latchford, now in his early seventies, who’d come recommended by an interior decorator. Douglas was ready to help Jim fill out his apartment in an Asian fashion, which was all the rage. Douglas painted a picture of how this place could look. Jim was enraptured, but he was concerned about provenances. Emma and Douglas conferred, and then Douglas sent Jim an email. We had an actor read the email.
Douglas Latchford (actor) (19:21):
Dear Mr. Clark, I heard that you might have some concern as to the future possibility of the pieces that you are considering being asked for repatriation. All the pieces have been published in the book, Adoration and Glory. All the pieces were very carefully researched to see if they had ever been listed or photographed when I purchased them and prior to their being published in the book, there is no evidence to indicate this. They are all clean.
Ellen Wong (19:57):
He was using Emma’s scholarship as cover. Over the next five years, Jim spent $35 million to buy one of the largest private collections of Khmer and Asian art in the US. Douglas used fake provenances and customs documents. He even pretended one statue of Ganesha was a twin of one that Cambodian authorities were seeking, when in fact, it was that very same statue. Jim had been duped. Douglas had perfected fake provenances back in the 1970s after the UNESCO rule changes.
(20:38):
Now, he went into overdrive. He used an old friend in Hong Kong, Ian Donaldson as a false collector. On document after document, Douglas pretended that Ian had owned statues from back in the 1960s. He used this method to sell a 12th century Khmer statue to the Denver Museum, where Emma was a volunteer researcher. He was solicitous with his clients, but he bullied others who got in his way.
Helen Jessup (21:09):
My friend said, “He’s driving me mad. He’s phoned six times today. Please call him back.”
Ellen Wong (21:14):
Helen Jessup, the Khmer scholar, had recommended against an Australian museum buying a Khmer piece from the gallery. She thought the documentation looked dodgy. Out of the blue, she got bombarded with calls from Douglas, whom she had never even met in person.
Helen Jessup (21:33):
He berated me and said, “I understand you recommended against the acquisition of some pieces.” So I knew that he had been involved, but his name was never officially attached to it. And I said, “I didn’t really recommend, again, I just said I wouldn’t buy them.” Anyway, it was very unpleasant.
Ellen Wong (21:53):
Douglas was powerful and easily batted away most questions, but he needed some good publicity. So, he got on a flight with Emma. Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2002.
Craig Wilson (22:11):
There was a band playing and it was very structured, Douglas presented the piece of art to an official from the museum who accepted it with thanks. And there was a reception afterwards. It was quite a formal event.
Ellen Wong (22:33):
Craig Wilson accompanied Douglas and Emma to the National Museum in Cambodia’s Capital to return a statue, a Khmer hunchback that had been sitting in his London home. The pair, especially Douglas, was given a hero’s welcome. The plunderer was making it look like he was a savior. Some Cambodians, like Meas Prasithipheap, another guide, were taken in by Douglas’s cynical ploy. Who else was returning Cambodia’s heritage?
Meas Prasithipheap (23:03):
Well, people surprised at that time. He was the only one to do that.
Ellen Wong (23:08):
After this, Douglas and Emma would return regularly with grandees of the New York art world like Shelby White, who today sits on the board of the Met. The duo promised funding for the National Museum. In return, Douglas was even awarded the equivalent of a Cambodian knighthood.
Meas Prasithipheap (23:25):
He was so nice and kind heart person. As you know, he very knowledge of arts and then he helped the Cambodian people.
Ellen Wong (23:37):
Pieter Meyers, the scientist, was on one of the trips. At the museum and around the capitol, Douglas was treated like a celebrity.
Pieter Meyers (23:45):
Oh, I certainly knew about the rumors. It was hard not to know about it. But what I experienced was that Douglas Latchford was highly regarded by the Cambodian museum people. I seen that he had donated a lot of money and also objects to the National Museum and that he was treated very positively by all these Cambodians.
Ellen Wong (24:17):
Well, there’s another explanation for the positive attitude toward Douglas. Coming out of years of civil war, Cambodia didn’t have a handle on the situation. For years, corrupt local officials had sold statues into Douglas’s network. But at the national level, many Cambodians didn’t yet understand the role he’d played. Around this time, Pheourng Sackona, then an official at the Country’s Institute of Technology, picked up Douglas and Emma’s book, Adoration and Glory, at the Phnom Penh Airport.
Phoeurng Sackona (24:51):
I didn’t know a lot about Douglas, honestly, except the book, his name, and Emma Bunker.
Ellen Wong (24:59):
She was alarmed by the photos inside.
Phoeurng Sackona (25:02):
When I see the book the first time, I give question in my mind, “How they get it? How this country can go from Cambodia to U.S. or to another country? How?”
Ellen Wong (25:14):
Sackona would soon be in a position in government to do something about Douglas and Emma. But for now, she was just angry.
Phoeurng Sackona (25:21):
Even now, every time when I see the photo, I’m feeling so sad also. I’m sorry. I’m a little emotional.
Ellen Wong (25:34):
Others started to ask questions too. Bertrand Porte, a French academic specializing in Khmer antiquities works at the Cambodia National Museum. He was shocked to see a Ganesha statue in Douglas and Emma’s book that he believed had been stolen from Cambodia. He took it up with the pair when they visited, but they claimed it was a different statue.
Bertrand Porte (25:59):
No, no, no. It’s another one, something of the same style, but different. It was impossible. And at this time, they were not… Especially Douglas, not very nice with me. I received a few email, invite me to shut my mouth.
Ellen Wong (26:21):
Douglas could be vicious when questioned, Alex Goetz remembered.
Alexander Goetz (26:26):
He’s an extremely kind and funny person, but if you do anything wrong, he lets a sledgehammer down. No mercy. I mean, he conducts very, very strict rules in his own life for himself and for others. So if you play by his rules, everything is fine. And if you don’t, then you better don’t play, because if you cross him, it’s not funny.
Ellen Wong (26:55):
Perhaps it was this side of Douglas that made Emma, normally so forthright, a little scared by him. Emma was a loyal collaborator with Douglas, and soon she would do more than simply write academic papers to smooth over his thefts. As for Douglas, his donations in Cambodia were nothing more than a smoke screen. He kept collecting. He wrote an email to Nancy Wiener, who by now was running her mother’s Fifth Avenue gallery. She was happy to keep selling his wares, even in this new climate.
Douglas Latchford (actor) (27:30):
Hold on to your hat, just been offered this 56 centimeter Angkor Borei Buddha, just excavated, which looks fantastic. It’s still across the border, but wow.
Ellen Wong (27:45):
Attached to the email was a photo of a standing Buddha still covered in dirt. In another email to Nancy, Douglas wrote about a bronze head dug up. The looters were looking for the body, but no luck.
Douglas Latchford (actor) (27:59):
All they have found last week were two landmines.
Ellen Wong (28:04):
It was as if Douglas thought he could never be caught. Around this time though, a couple of art sleuths had made a discovery, one that would begin to unravel Douglas’s long con.
(28:24):
Coming up next on Dynamite Doug.
Emma Bunker (actor) (28:28):
I think we could be in business for quite a while and sell anything you want at auction.
Simon Warrack (28:33):
I certainly didn’t imagine that it would have this domino effect.
Helen Jessup (28:37):
My jaw metaphorically dropped when I saw it. And I walked around and I thought, “Oh my God, where did this come from?”
Ellen Wong (28:51):
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. Mariangel Gonzalez and Nicholas Brennan are senior producers. Matthew Rubenstein is the producer.
(29:22):
Mixing 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 like this episode, please be sure to tell a friend, or rate and review it wherever you listen.
Speaker 11 (30:01):
Audiation.
