The Looter Who Built Your Favorite Museum

Hyperallergic reviews Matthew Campbell’s 2026 book The Man Who Stole the Gods, which traces how British dealer Douglas Latchford allegedly trafficked looted Cambodian (Khmer) antiquities on a large scale before his death in 2020. The book describes how statues were violently removed—often decapitated or dismembered—and then laundered into the Western art market through networks involving dealers, collectors, scholars, and major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Campbell details how Latchford’s publications with American scholar Emma Bunker helped legitimize objects with fabricated provenance, until researchers connected works sold by Latchford to pedestals still in situ in Cambodia. The account emphasizes the institutional and market conditions from the 1960s through the 1980s that enabled the trade and the cultural loss caused by the looting.

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