Dynamite Doug

How one man carried out the greatest art heist in history – the looting of Cambodia’s entire cultural heritage – with the aid of Western academics, dealers and curators. This is the story the art world doesn’t want told.

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How Douglas Latchford, a nobody from colonial India, makes a name for himself dealing in Cambodian art. It’s the 1960s, and no one cares about Westerners stealing ancient statues from poor countries to sell in London and New York. But, as attitudes start to change, gossip mounts about Douglas.

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When the genocidal Khmer Rouge takes over Cambodia, killing 2 million people, Douglas senses an opportunity. Amid the bloodshed, murderous generals rob the nation blind – hacking statues out of jungle temples – and Douglas is a willing buyer. A senior curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and a Denver-based academic are eager participants in Douglas’ schemes.

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As Cambodia opens to the world, the looting enters a new phase as a hoard of Western collectors descend on the nation. Douglas becomes rich, with a chauffeured Rolls Royce in London, and he grows close to the Denver-based academic, Emma Bunker. He’s soon using Emma’s scholarship as cover for his looting. Amid questions from the UN, Douglas starts to return statues to Cambodia, and is awarded a knighthood.

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A British conservator comes across a pair of stone feet in a Cambodian jungle temple. His sleuthing leads him to deduce the feet belong to a statue in a U.S. museum and the trail leads to Douglas, the most serious scrutiny yet. Emma Bunker helps Douglas create fake documents to cover up his looting. But when a Cambodian statue goes on sale in Sotheby’s in New York, Douglas is tied up in a lawsuit and his name splashed in the newspapers for the first time.

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A former Khmer Rouge child soldier, Toek Tik, codenamed “The Lion,” helps the Cambodian government identify looted statues. Eventually Sotheby’s agrees to return its piece. Douglas keeps on looting but he’s on the radar of investigators at the Department of Homeland Security. When a New York dealer is arrested, Douglas and Emma are the focus of a criminal investigation.

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Emma faces up to what she’s done as Douglas is finally brought low, and Cambodia begins the gargantuan task of bringing its art back home. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Museum fights a rearguard action to cling on to its collection…a struggle that’s still raging.

This is the final episode of Dynamite Doug. If you’d like to binge the full series, ad-free, subscribe to our channel on the Apple Podcasts app at: apple.co/dynamitedoug

If you’ve been listening to Dynamite Doug, you know it focuses on the looting of Cambodia’s art, and how so many priceless statues wound up in Western museums or with rich collectors. In this bonus episode of Dynamite Doug, Project Brazen reporter Neha Wadekar travels to Kenya to see how it is responding to the loss of its own cultural heritage to traders and colonizers.

More than 32,000 Kenyan cultural artifacts, ranging from drinking gourds to tribal belts and ceremonial shields, live in museums around the world, and are largely inaccessible to Kenyan people. Kenyan artists and technologists are working to digitally catalog these items and bring them to life through 3D printing and virtual reality — but critics say it’s no replacement for repatriation.

www.thelootmuseum.com

This week on Dynamite Doug, we’re sharing a preview of Night of Show, the latest podcast from Project Brazen. To listen to the rest of this episode, search for Night of Show, wherever you get your podcasts.

In Night of Show, accomplished concert promoter Adam Wilkes joins music industry legends as they share behind-the-scenes stories about the pressures superstar artists faced when staging some of their biggest performances. Most Prince fans forget he was once in the wilderness after his 1980s heyday. He’d walked away from his record contract and had released a slew of albums that didn’t chart. Then, with John and Paul as promoters, he stages a major comeback.

Don’t want to wait for the next episode? You can listen to the full series, ad-free, by subscribing to Project Brazen’s channel on the Apple Podcasts app. Subscribe at: apple.co/night-of-show

nightofshow.com

In this bonus episode, we bring you an expert panel on Cambodian art restitution, live from New York. Back in February, Dynamite Doug marked its launch with a symposium tackling Cambodia’s stolen heritage and the Met’s problem with trafficked art head on. The panel included Sopheap Meas, a Cambodian archaeologist working on the return of art; famed Cambodian dancer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro; American lawyer Brad Gordon, appointed by Cambodia’s culture minister to work on art repatriation; Gary Vikan, former director of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; and Jason Felch, author of “Chasing Aphrodite, the Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum. The conversation was moderated by Tom Wright, co-founder of Project Brazen, with opening remarks from Ellen Wong, podcast host of Dynamite Doug.

To watch a live stream of the symposium in full, search for ‘Dynamite Doug’ on YouTube.

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