Chasing the Ancient Stolen Statues of Cambodia

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Oanh Ha** (0:10)
In the spring of 2011, an ancient statue from Cambodia was sent to be auctioned at Sotheby's in New York. The five-foot-tall artifact with its powerful chest and large round eyes is known as the Duryodhana.

**Matthew Campbell** (0:23)
The Duryodhana is a thousand-year-old sandstone sculpture of a warrior from a Cambodian temple called Kokere.

**Oanh Ha** (0:33)
Matthew Campbell is a senior reporter and editor for Bloomberg Businessweek. Though the figure was sculpted out of stone, it managed to capture movement as if the warrior was ready to leap in a duel.

**Matthew Campbell** (0:46)
The object is significant artistically because it is one of the most amazing stone sculptures that's ever come out of Cambodia, and specifically of this remarkable ancient civilization called Khmer Empire, which produced among other things Angkor Wat.

**Oanh Ha** (1:03)
Sotheby's was aiming to sell the sculpture for as much as $3 million.
To collectors, it was a masterpiece. But to US prosecutors who've been tracking its sale, it was something else, evidence.

**Matthew Campbell** (1:18)
What was really significant about it from a legal perspective was, no one had seen this object in a long time. It had last been published in 1975
There was no record of where it was before that.

**Oanh Ha** (1:33)
For decades, the Duryodhana had seemingly vanished, before resurfacing on the other side of the world. Records showed that it was first sold in 1975 in London.
Documents tracking its chain of custody beyond that were scanned. But federal investigators who were looking into the statue had one clue they couldn't ignore.

**Matthew Campbell** (1:56)
When this piece arrived in New York City in 2010, for sale by Sotheby's, it had no feet. Its feet had been broken off at the ankles, and through kind of a coincidence, feet which matched it had been discovered at a temple site in Cambodia.

**Oanh Ha** (2:17)
Investigators believed that the Duryodhana had been stolen, ripped from an ancient site in Cambodia, and working its way through the most exclusive tiers of the fine art world. On the day the statue was about to go under the hammer, Sotheby's unexpectedly pulled it from sale after federal agents warned the auction house the item could be stolen property.
Meanwhile, authorities dug deeper into their case, trying to prove it.

**Matthew Campbell** (2:42)
So the Department of Justice went into this case with a pretty good idea of where this thing had come from, but not who had stolen it or when.

**Oanh Ha** (2:52)
Finding answers to those questions would send investigators on a far-reaching hunt that lasted for more than a decade.
That search has consequences for some of the world's wealthiest museums and collectors.
With implications for a country whose art had been used to prop up a multimillion-dollar industry.

**Matthew Campbell** (3:11)
When federal prosecutors began working on this, they were of the view that they were looking at a long-term criminal conspiracy, which stretched from the killing fields of Cambodia all the way to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

**Oanh Ha** (3:29)
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Oanh Ha. Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies, and the markets, tycoons and businesses that drive this ever-shifting region. Today on the show, how Cambodia's stolen gods got scattered around the world, and the unlikely investigation that's helping to bring them home.
For roughly 500 years, beginning in the ninth century, Cambodia sat at the heart of the Khmer Empire, one of the most powerful civilizations of the pre-modern world. Its rulers built monumental temples like Angkor Wat, and filled them with grand sculptures in stone and bronze.
But by the end of Cambodia's civil war in 1998, many of those treasures were gone, looted during three decades of conflict and upheaval. And the country itself was in shambles. Roughly two million Cambodians, a quarter of the population, died in the few years that the Khmer Rouge was in power in the late 1970s. They were then ousted by Vietnamese forces, but fighting between insurgent groups continued for another 20 years.

**Matthew Campbell** (4:47)
The Cambodian Civil War went on very violently, very viciously, all the way to 1998
And wars run on bullets, they run on fuel, but they really run on money. You can't fight a war without money.

**Oanh Ha** (5:02)
Matthew Campbell is the author of The Man Who Stole the Gods, a true story of war, obsession and a global art conspiracy.

**Matthew Campbell** (5:10)
And in Cambodia, one of the ways to fund yourself is to steal and sell ancient artworks. So all sides in the Civil War were engaged in this.