[This post is the transcript of a 60 Minutes (CBS News) segment originally broadcast on 17 December 2023 and rerun 28 June 2026. Apparently, I didn’t deem Anderson Cooper’s report worth republishing on Rick On Theater two-and-a-half years ago, but on watching it again last week, I decided it is. Given my interest in art in general, and in the preservation of art in particular, I can’t explain my first decision.]
“HOW CAMBODIAN
ARTIFACTS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES
by Anderson
Cooper
[Anderson Cooper’s 60 Minutes report, with video, is posted on the CBS
News website. I have split it into two parts for
republication on ROT. The second
installment will be posted on Saturday, 11 July.
[Other posts on ROT that deal with the conservation or preservation of art and antiquities include: “‘How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage‘“ by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour (28 May 2017); “Conserving Modern Art“ (11 December 2018); “‘Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war‘“ by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport of PBS News Hour (15 September 2022); “Greenwood Pond: Double Site“ (22 February 2024); “Two Restorations“ (4 November 2024); and “Replicating Classic Art Works“ (21 February 2026).]
Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities
The theft of Cambodia’s cultural treasures . . . thousands of sacred stone, bronze and gold artifacts from religious sites across the country . . . might just be the greatest art heist in history. It began nearly a century ago when Cambodia was colonized by France [the French protectorate lasted from 1863 until 1953, interrupted from 1941 to 1945 during the World War II occupation by Japan] . . . but in the 1970s, 80s and 90s amidst genocide, civil war, and political turmoil – the looting became a global business, much of it run by a British man named Douglas Latchford [1931-2020]. He kept some of it for himself, but much of what his gang of thieves stole, Latchford then sold to wealthy private collectors and some of the most important museums around the world. As we first reported in 2023, Cambodia’s government has spent the last 14 years trying to track it all down . . . and bring their history and heritage home.
Angkor Wat [Khmer for ‘City (or ‘Capital’) of Temples’], with its towering spires, is the glory of Cambodia. Nearly a thousand years old, it’s one of the biggest and most extraordinary religious temples in the world — sprawling across 400 acres. Originally built [1122-1150 CE] to honor the Hindu god Vishnu, it then became a Buddhist temple [ca. 1181 CE], and remains a place of worship today. You can wander here for weeks, lost in a labyrinth of ancient stone corridors and sacred chambers. But the scars of plunder run deep: looters have hacked off the heads of many statues . . . they’ve stolen bodies as well . . . empty pedestals mark where gods and deities once stood . . . on some, only the feet remain.
It’s worse in the rest of Cambodia’s 4,000 temples. Nearly all have been looted. This one is a hundred miles northeast of Angkor Wat . . . on a remote mountain . . . called Sandak [established late 9th century CE].
Brad Gordon: This was hit very heavily by the looting gangs.
Brad Gordon: They found gold, they found statues, they found many, many things.
That’s Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, who’s been working for the Cambodian government for 14 years, tracking down its stolen treasures . . . he brought us to Sandak with his team of investigators, archeologists and art scholars.
Anderson Cooper: This is so cool.
In the temple’s crumbling courtyard, little remains . . . mostly empty pedestals scattered among the Sralao trees.
Anderson Cooper: It’s remarkable to me just how much stuff is just scattered on the ground.
Brad Gordon: Yes.
Brad Gordon: It’s like a pedestal graveyard.
Anderson Cooper: We’ve all seen in museums these statues with no feet on them, and I don’t think people realize the feet were hacked off. Because in order to steal them, that’s the easiest way to– to get them off the pedestal.
Brad Gordon: And we know when the looters came to sites like this, the first thing they took was the heads. That was the easiest to grab. And then later on maybe they come back and get the torso. But they were not very careful, so they left behind pieces.
For Cambodians, these statues are not just works of art . . . they are sacred deities that hold the souls of their ancestors to whom they ask for guidance and pray . . .
Anderson Cooper: This is incredible. Th– these were all looted.
Phoeurng Sackona: Yes, all looted.
Anderson Cooper: All of these heads, like, cut off–
Phoeurng Sackona: And the head was cut off, yes.
Phoeurng Sackona [b. 1959], Cambodia’s minister of culture [2013-present], is in charge of the government’s efforts to track down their stolen gods. We met her in a closely guarded warehouse not far from Angkor Wat . . . ––where more than 6,000 pieces from temples across the country are stored for safekeeping . . . each one sculpted by an artisan from an ancient Khmer Empire . . . that lasted for more than five centuries [802-1431 CE] and spanned Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.
Anderson Cooper: So the statues have a soul? The statues are– are they living?
Phoeurng Sackona: For us, yes.
Phoeurng Sackona: And we believe that we can talk with them. They will hear. They will see. What do you want? What do you see? What do you do in your life, in your house, outside in the society, also? So that–
Anderson Cooper: They’re watching.
Phoeurng Sackona: They’re watching, everywhere . . .
Phoeurng Sackona’s entire family was killed in the genocide that began in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist group took over, forcing millions of Cambodians into labor camps. Some 2 million people, nearly a quarter of the population, were slaughtered or starved to death. The Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979 [to the invading army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam], but fighting and instability continued for decades, leaving Cambodia’s temples unprotected and vulnerable . . . easy targets for unscrupulous antiquities dealers like Douglas Latchford.
Anderson Cooper: Who was Douglas Latchford?
Brad Gordon: I would say that he was, in many ways, the mastermind behind the greatest art heist in history.
Anderson Cooper: The greatest art heist in history?
Brad Gordon: Yes, in terms of scope and multitude of crime sites and the enormous amount of statues that were taken out.
Latchford lived in Thailand . . . an enigmatic British businessman . . . he began collecting in the 1960s. He had, it seems, two great loves: Cambodian antiquities and . . . Thai bodybuilders . . . He sponsored Bangkok’s biggest bodybuilding competition, the Latchford Classic [from ca. 2004].
Anderson Cooper: How would you describe him?
Brad Gordon: He was extremely deceptive, I think in many ways, was ruthless. But he hid that behind this incredible façade of charm.
Latchford portrayed himself as a scholar and protector of Cambodia’s culture, a reputation he burnished by donating sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other prestigious institutions. He also published three books filled with the finest examples of Cambodian antiquities [Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art (Art Media Resources, 2004); Khmer Gold Gifts for the Gods (Art Media Resources, 2008); Khmer Bronzes: New Interpretations of the Past (Art Media Resources, 2011)] . . . many of them, it turns out, Latchford had stolen.
Brad Gordon: He was using the books as sales catalogs. You know, he was handing them out. He was using them to sell pieces. And– and he understood a certain psychology of collectors out there that if they see something in a beautiful book, they think it’s legitimate.
Those books have been an invaluable guide for Brad Gordon and his team, helping them compile a database of thousands of missing artifacts. Many of which they didn’t know existed until Latchford published photos of them.
Gordon’s team got their big break when they met this man in 2012. He was a former Khmer Rouge child soldier and leader of a gang of looters. His name was Toek Tik [ca. 1959-2021; pronounced day duck].
Brad Gordon: That first meeting, I– I didn’t really know who we had met. You know, I knew– I knew that he was important. I knew that many people were telling me he was the best. And I knew that he was feared.
Anderson Cooper: Why were people afraid of him?
Brad Gordon: You know, over the years, he had killed many people.
It turned out Toek Tik had worked for decades supplying Douglas Latchford with thousands of treasures . . . and he was amazed to see them again in Latchford’s books.
Brad Gordon: He kept opening the book and going back to the front cover and– and going through and tapping and saying, “I know this one. I know this one. I know this one.”
Anderson Cooper: And when he says he knew this one, means he– he helped loot the– those ones.
Brad Gordon: That’s what we learned later, yeah.
Toek Tik became a key confidential source for Gordon’s team. They gave him a code name, Lion, to protect his identity. And followed him to dozens of temples where he confessed what he’d found, and how he’d stolen it.
Brad Gordon: He would say to us, “I’m gonna transfer everything in my head to you. I’m gonna tell you everything. Every secret.”
Anderson Cooper: You felt like his memory was very good. It was accurate.
Brad Gordon: Oh it was unbelievable. He remembered the size of everything. Measured against his body. He would use his arm to show us how long a statue was.
Anderson Cooper: Why do you think he wanted to cooperate?
Brad Gordon: You know, he felt tremendously guilty about many things he had done in his life, about the killing, about the looting. And we offered him a road of redemption– a way to do something really good at the end of his life.
They recorded hundreds of hours of Lion’s testimony . . . he explained how gangs of looters would spend weeks at remote temples . . . using shovels, chisels, metal detectors . . . even dynamite . . . to find and dig out treasures. Dozens of men would hoist heavy stone statues onto oxcarts before transporting them across the border . . . into Thailand . . . and into the hands of Douglas Latchford. Lion never met Latchford, but he’d send him photographs of artifacts he could choose from.
Brad Gordon: We hear about them saying, “Oh we had to go to this temple and take a photo. And then sending it back.” You know, my sense is he was shopping. He had a list. The looters knew his priorities.
Like these . . . which came from a temple complex called Koh Ker [koh kay]. The statues from there had a distinctive style that Latchford loved.
It was, however, a dangerous business. Most looters only made enough to buy food for their families. And fighting between rival gangs was common.
Anderson Cooper: People were killed over these– these antiquities. Do you look at these as blood statues?
Brad Gordon: For sure. They’re blood antiquities. Whenever I see a statue I think about, you know, who died to– to get this out of the ground or get it out of a temple and to– to move it here? So, so much of this looting was done in the shadow of the war, shadow of the genocide.
It was this 500-pound sandstone warrior from Koh Ker that appeared in a Sotheby’s auction catalog in 2011 that put Douglas Latchford on the radar of U.S. law enforcement. Its feet were missing. And the price tag? An estimated $2-3 million.
J.P. Labbat: When it appeared in the market– there were a number of archaeologists, a number of people who immediately recognized the– the source of the statue as being a specific temple in Cambodia.
Anderson Cooper: It c– came from Koh Ker?
J.P. Labbat: That’s right.
Until he retired in 2023, J.P. Labbat was a special agent on the cultural property, art and antiquities unit with Homeland Security.
J.P. Labbat: A team from the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the Southern District of New York traveled to Cambodia– to inspect the site where the statue had been removed.
J.P. Labbat: And so the base– was still there with it with the feet still in the ground. And so– they were able to match that base and feet to the statue.
Anderson Cooper: And that was enough evidence to get the statue pulled off the market?
J.P. Labbat: That’s right.
After years of legal wrangling, Sotheby’s finally agreed to send this stolen warrior back to Cambodia . . .
A ceremony was held welcoming it home . . . and investigators were able to trace its original sale back to Douglas Latchford . . . who was asked about its repatriation in a German documentary in 2014 [Die Spur der Tempelräuber (‘The trail of the temple robbers’; known in English as The Stolen Warriors; nb: film databases like IMDb list the release date as 2015)].
Wolfgang Luck: Is it a good day for Cambodia, or is it a bad day for the art market if these things are coming back?
Douglas Latchford: It’s a good day for Cambodia, it’s a bad day for the art market.
Law enforcement in New York was closing in on Latchford, but he claimed prosecutors had him all wrong.
Douglas Latchford: 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 and I certainly don’t belong to any smuggling network.
Anderson Cooper: The attempted sale of this statue in 2011, was that a turning point in the unraveling of Douglas Latchford?
J.P. Labbat: I would say yes. That case put more of a– focus and a spotlight on him. And then efforts were– were then doubled to, like, really peel back the onion and look into Latchford’s activities.
The testimony of former looters found by Brad Gordon and his team was critical for the U.S. attorney’s case against Latchford.
Anderson Cooper: How rare is it to actually have access to the looters? To people who actually stole these things 10, 20, 30 years ago.
J.P. Labbat: I know of no other case where– where that’s happened. And– it– it’s quite remarkable to have looters actively assisting a team of investigators to recover artifacts that they had a firsthand in helping remove from the country.
Douglas Latchford was finally indicted by U.S. authorities in 2019 for smuggling, conspiracy, wire fraud and other charges, but he died before he could be put on trial. Brad Gordon eventually convinced Latchford’s family to return his personal collection of stolen treasures . . . Among the first pieces to come home in 2021 was this statue from Koh Ker. Lion, weakened by cancer, came to inspect it in Cambodia’s National Museum to verify it was the same one he’d dug out of the ground.
Brad Gordon: And then he turned to me and he said, “It’s the real statue.” You know, it was a remarkable thing to watch. And just his– his relationship, it– it was living to him.
Anderson Cooper: Do you think he was happy it was back?
Brad Gordon: Thrilled. So happy, he knew that he had done something good.
Lion died a few months later . . . but the secrets he revealed continue to bring statues back to Cambodia’s National Museum . . . masterpieces that left the country long before these school children were born.
Anderson Cooper: Does the return of these statues, of these Gods, help some to heal.
Phoeurng Sackona: Yes. To get back the soul of the nation.
Anderson Cooper: The soul of the nation.
Phoeurng Sackona: It’s not only for me– but all of my family who was died [sic] during the war, and for– for all Cambodian people.
There are still many more stolen Cambodian statues and artifacts in museums and private collections around the world.
When we return, Cambodia’s fight to get those looted relics back.
Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Associate producer, Eliza Costas. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Patrick Lee.
[I don’t want to do a history lesson here, but I think a little background and some identifications are useful. The Khmer Empire was established in 802 CE and by the 12th century, when most of the temples in the 60 Minutes report were built, was the largest empire in Southeast Asia. The empire prospered and grew until 1431, when wars with neighboring kingdoms led to the sack of Angkor, the imperial capital. The empire went into decline and existed under the influence of Siam and Annam (now known as Thailand and Vietnam), reduced to little more than a vassal state.
[King Norodom (1834-1904) signed a treaty of protection with France, making the Kingdom of Cambodia a French protectorate—read “colony”—from 1863 until it gained independence in 1953 under King Norodom Sihanouk (1922-2012). In 1970, Sihanouk was ousted in a military coup by Lon Nol (1913-85), a Cambodian politician and general who proclaimed the Khmer Republic.
[Khmer means ‘Cambodian’ in the native language, which is also called Khmer. Khmer Rouge, French for ‘Red Cambodian,’ is the name Sihanouk gave to the Communist Party of Kampuchea led by Pol Pot (1925-98); it became the term everyone, both inside the country and abroad, used for the CPK. Kampuchea is the anglicization of the indigenous Khmer name for Cambodia.
[On 17 April 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces took Phnom Penh, the capital of the country, and the next year established the radical Marxist-Leninist state of Democratic Kampuchea. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge set about removing from Kampuchea all foreign and bourgeois influences by rounding up all intellectuals, professionals, capitalists, and artists and sending them to camps in the countryside; Phnom Penh, a city of 370,000 inhabitants in 1975, was almost emptied of people.
[By 1978, only 32,000 people lived in the city; many of the Cambodians the Khmer Rouge transported died either from execution, harsh conditions and treatment, or disease. Between 21 and 24 percent of Cambodia’s population was lost, from 1.7 to 1.9 million people.
[After years of hostility between the two communist countries, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—the now-united North and South Vietnam—invaded Kampuchea in 1979 in response to border raids by the Khmer Rouge. The Vietnamese forces defeated the Khmer Rouge and established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea; Pol Pot fled and was eventually arrested by his own Khmer Rouge in 1997 and tried in Phnom Penh. He received a life sentence to be served under house arrest, but died, likely by suicide, in 1998.
[In 1993, the monarchy was restored and the country again became the Kingdom of Cambodia. King Sihanouk retook the throne until his abdication in 2004; his successor is his son, Norodom Sihamoni (b. 1953). The head of government in Cambodia is Prime Minister Hun Manet (b, 1977), in office since 2023.
[Anderson Cooper left 60 Minutes in May 2026, announcing his departure in People magazine in February 2026. He explained, “I have little kids now and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they still want to spend time with me." He remains anchor of the CNN broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360.°]
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