The daughter of the notorious accused antiquities smuggler Douglas Latchford will hand over a 7th-century Vietnamese statue and $12 million of her father’s money in a settlement finalized yesterday, June 22 in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The agreement marks the largest forfeiture of looted antiquities profits to date.
Latchford spent nearly a half-century systematically placing stolen Southeast Asian objects into the hands of art collectors and Western museums. In 2019, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Latchford for his criminal operations in Cambodia. He died a year later in 2020 at the age of 88. He lived primarily in Thailand, where he died, and the United Kingdom.
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Although Latchford operated illegally for decades, yesterday’s enormous settlement only reflects his American sales between 2003 and 2020. In those 17 years, Latchford made over $12 million selling looted objects from Southeast Asia, most of which were from Cambodia. He stashed that money in bank accounts in New York, the United Kingdom, and Jersey, a self-governing island in the English Channel under the British Crown.
In 2021, Latchford’s daughter Julia Copleton agreed to return 125 of her late father’s objects to Cambodia. Those artifacts were valued at more than $50 million. Now, Copleton has 90 days to hand over the 7th-century Vietnamese statue to the United States Department of Homeland Security outpost in the UK: In the late 2000s, Latchford used some of the profits from his illicit trades to buy the bronze sculpture, which depicts the Hindu goddess Durga.
According to the civil complaint, Latchford visited Vietnam in 2008 and then told a bank worker to wire $1.5 million to an unnamed person with a Vietnamese email address. In early 2009, Latchford sent a photo of the recently unearthed Durga statue to an American dealer (also unnamed) with the conspicuously suspicious subject line, “CONFIDENTIAL FOR YOUR EYES ONLY – NOT TO BE SHOWN TO ANYBODY.” A restorer who frequently worked with Latchford said the bronze statue was corroded and displayed iron deposits, suggesting it was recently excavated. Latchford published a photo of the statue in a 2011 book and wrote that the sculpture was “previously unpublished.”
In 2011, Latchford attempted to sell the Durga statue to an American collector. He said the sculpture was from Cambodia, not Vietnam, and that the artifact had a provenance dating back to the 1960s. The collector did not buy the looted work and the sculpture remained in Latchford’s personal holdings.
Copleton has denied any wrongdoing and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York stated that the financial settlement does not signify her guilt. The office also said that yesterday’s settlement does not mean the investigation into Latchford is finished.
Latchford did not fly under the radar as he spent decades plundering objects. In 2009, he even received an official honor from the Cambodian government after he returned six gold artifacts. In 2012, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed a civil complaint against Latchford for his involvement in the 1975 theft of the 10th-century Cambodian “Duryodhana” statue, which was literally knocked off at its feet. Latchford denied the charges. In 2014, that statue was repatriated. A year earlier, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had returned two Latchford-linked Khmer sculptures to Cambodia.
While admitting his criminal activities, narrations of Latchford’s life published as recently as 2020 and 2021 favorably name him a “Khmer antiquities expert” and “scholar,” even when Latchford’s links to antiquities smuggling had been public for nearly a decade and he had been officially charged.
The 2019 indictment, however, seemed to finally open the floodgates into deeper investigations of Latchford’s looted objects in the collections of museums, including those of The Met, the British Museum, and the Denver Museum of Art. The latter also dropped the name of donor and Latchford collaborator Emma Bunker earlier this year. The United States has returned some of these stolen antiquities to Cambodia.
Source: Hyperallergic.com