The Jeffrey Epstein of Antiquities: Matthew Campbell on the Man Who Got Away With Stealing the Gods,

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Back in 2002, when this show was just called Keen On, and it was an audio show, I did an interview with the Bloomberg, one of the Bloomberg correspondents in Asia based in Singapore, Matthew Campbell, about a true story of a fake hijacking and a real murder. He was the co-author of the hit book, Dead in the Water, a book about an invented maritime hijacking in the treacherous Gulf of Aden. It could be the kind of story which I guess would run today, at least in terms of our obsession now with the Straits of Hormuz. Matthew Campbell is back with a follow-up book, I guess in a sense, although in a very different part of the world. It's called The Man Who Stole the Gods, The True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy, which is built around a man called Douglas AJ. Latchford, who got a very nice obituary in the New York Times back in August 2020 when he died. I don't suppose he would get the same kind of obituary if he died in 2026 Matthew, congratulations on the new book. It's out this week. Tell us about this Latchford character. He sounds like the British version of Jeffrey Epstein in some way.

**Matthew Campbell** (2:03)
Certain parallels, certain differences. So Douglas Latchford, who's the central character in the book, and the central, really the villain of the story, was a Brit. He had actually been born in the last days of the Raj, went to school in the UK, and then decided to make his fortune in Asia, went to Bangkok in the 50s, and had quite a successful business career, but also set himself up as the leading dealer of Southeast Asian artifacts, and particularly artifacts from Cambodia, on the planet, selling pieces for millions of dollars and becoming a very important conduit to places like the Metropolitan Museum, to very wealthy American collectors.
But there was a dark side of this story, which I'm sure we'll speak about.

**Andrew Keen** (2:58)
A very dark side. In fact, the book brings to mind in some ways, Patrick Radden Keefe's best-selling book about the Sacklers. Kind of different, but also equivalence in the sense, you mentioned the Metropolitan, I know it features the Metropolitan Museum in New York, features in your narrative. Is this the dark side of the museum world, the wealthy people associated with the museums, Matthew?
I'm not suggesting necessarily that Latchford is equivalent to the Sacklers. That's a very different kind of story. But it seems the more journalists like yourself or Patrick Radden Keefe, sniff around these museums and this industry of artifacts, the more troubling the stories emerge.

**Matthew Campbell** (3:48)
Well, I think you can go at this generally and specifically. And the general note would be objects in museums have to come from somewhere. They obviously do not overwhelmingly, the objects in the Met or the objects in the British Museum do not originate in New York and London. They have to come into those collections somehow.
The stories of how they came to be in those collections, and in the collections of private buyers, which can be very large as well, often involve laws being broken, they involve unethical behavior, and they involve extreme violence. And if we go specifically, the works that ended up in the Met from Cambodia and also in other museums did come out of that country through an extremely violent process, wrapped up in the events, of course, of the Cambodian Civil War and the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

**Andrew Keen** (4:47)
Yeah, I want to talk about specifically that history, but in a broad sense, I mean, I'm not suggesting that Latchford was typical of the kind of characters who came out of the British Empire. As you note, he was born in the last days of the Raj and spent his life in Southeast Asia as this very genial, at least appearing, very genial British aristocrat. But in some ways, is this story the next chapter in the European colonization of Southeast Asia?

**Matthew Campbell** (5:24)
Well, I think there's something to that.
This is different from classic colonization, of course. But in the 20th century, we had, for various reasons, a lot of them just to do with pop culture and what people were interested in, a sudden explosion of interest in Asia. And if you think of things like the Beatles going to meditate with the Maharishi or the rise of the Hare Krishna movement, which...

**Andrew Keen** (5:55)
Steve Jobs, of course, who just as the Beatles was in India, he himself went there too.