NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Douglas A.J. Latchford, a pre-eminent collector of Cambodian antiquities who earned praise for his scholarly works on Khmer Empire art, only to be indicted last year by American prosecutors for illicitly trafficking in the selfsame objects, died Aug. 2 at his home in Bangkok. He was 88.

The cause was organ failure brought on by complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to his death certificate.

A bon vivant and bodybuilding buff, Latchford was known for a half-century as a cultured accumulator of museum-quality Khmer sculptures and jewels. In 2008, the Cambodian government granted him the Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Monisaraphon, the equivalent of a knighthood, for donating money and exhibits to its state museums. It invited him to become a citizen.

“Cambodia has always recognized Mr. Latchford’s unique contribution to scholarship and understanding of Khmer culture,” Chhay Visoth, the director of Cambodia’s National Museum, said in an email.

But Latchford had ardent detractors, among them archaeologists and antiquities trackers. Some accused him of acquiring treasures he knew to have been stolen from remote, thousand-year-old Khmer temples, and of operating on the dubious margins of the Southeast Asian antiquities trade.

In November, federal prosecutors in New York accused him of trafficking in looted Cambodian relics and falsifying documents, and said that he had “built a career out of the smuggling and illicit sale of priceless Cambodian antiquities, often straight from archaeological sites.” A longtime legal adviser to Latchford said Latchford had been comatose at the time and unable to rebut the charges.

In the end, he was indicted not for looting but for wire fraud, smuggling and filing false customs documents. The same Cambodian officials who had feted him for his donations of Khmer rarities quietly aided the prosecutors. (The case will most likely be closed as a result of his death.)

In interviews with The New York Times between 2012-17, Latchford, a British and Thai citizen who lived primarily in Bangkok, denied involvement with looted antiquities.

He said he bought his objects — often ancient Buddhas and Hindu deities like Shiva and Vishnu — largely from dealers in Thailand, and did so in an era when export licenses, provenance papers and other documentation were essentially overlooked.

American prosecutors claimed Latchford took advantage of the upheaval, civil war and genocide that racked Cambodia from the mid-1960s until the mid-’90s. “Archaeological sites from the ancient Khmer Empire suffered widespread looting,” they said in their complaint. “This was widely publicized and well-known to participants in the art market.”

Cambodia enacted laws in 1996 barring the excavation, removal and unauthorized exporting of Khmer artifacts, and the United States placed an embargo on the import of Cambodian antiquities in 1999.

Latchford had a ready retort. He said the Westerners who acquired such artifacts and sold or donated them to foreign museums were saviors who lavished care on relics that might have crumbled in the jungle or been destroyed.

“If Western collectors had not preserved this art,” he said in 2012, “what would be our understanding of Khmer culture today?”




Douglas Arthur Joseph Latchford was born Oct. 15, 1931, in Mumbai, India, to Ellen and Henry Latchford, who was a banker. India was occupied by Britain at the time under what was known as the Raj. Latchford was a British citizen at birth and educated at Brighton College, an English boarding school, before returning to India just before its independence, in 1947.

He began his career in the pharmaceutical trade, first in Mumbai, then in Singapore and finally in Bangkok in 1956. The romance of Thailand, with its opulent temples, glamorous nightlife and unsullied forests, prompted him to settle there.

Latchford started a drug distribution company in 1963 and prospered after negotiating deals with European manufacturers. He invested profitably in land development, briefly married a Thai woman and took a Thai name, Pakpong Kriangsak. He became a Thai citizen in 1968.

In 1956, Baron François Duhau de Berenx, a Belgian aristocrat and antiquities dealer, introduced him to Khmer art, and Latchford was captivated. He started visiting antiques shops in the Chinese section of the city and scouring a large open-air market where Khmer objects were freely available at low prices.

He befriended other keen collectors, including Jim Thompson, an American silk merchant and intelligence agent who disappeared in Malaysia in 1967, and tobacco heiress Doris Duke. He took note that the French colonial rulers of Indochina had for decades openly acquired artifacts directly from Khmer temples.

Eager to enhance his collection, he traded in Khmer art with international and local sellers. Along the way he teamed up with Emma C. Bunker, a research consultant at the Denver Art Museum. Together they wrote three seminal volumes — “Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art” (2003), “Khmer Gold: Gifts for the Gods” (2008) and “Khmer Bronzes: New Interpretations of the Past” (2011). They remain core reference works for experts.

Critics called the books “groundbreaking” and “filled with new interpretations.” Hab Touch, a Cambodian cultural official, said the Latchford books “introduced a number of remarkable Khmer sculptures which have been hidden from the world for years.”

But it was hard not to notice that the books were filled as well with hundreds of sumptuous photos of Khmer relics, many far superior to those on display in Cambodia’s museums. Latchford said many of the items were his own or held by anonymous foreign collectors.

Asked by The Times where such exquisite works had originated, Latchford replied, “the ground.” He then added: “When I buy a piece, on principle, I thoroughly research it. I certainly don’t want to buy a piece that has been stolen or anything.”

In a 2010 interview with The Bangkok Post, he said: “Most of the pieces I have come across in the past years have been excavated, or dug up. You know, there is a farmer in the field who digs something up, and he probably thinks, ‘If I take it to Bangkok or Singapore or a middleman, I can get $100 instead of getting $10.’”

By 2012, Latchford said, he had amassed more than 100 major Khmer artifacts, which were kept in his London and Bangkok residences; many others, he said, had been sold or donated to museums and collectors. His London apartment was crowded with sinuous bronze dancing figures and gold-adorned stone deities dating to the 7th century.

When he wasn’t trading in Khmer relics, Latchford was a devotee of bodybuilding, a popular sport in Thailand, and spent freely promoting competitions, mentoring athletes and funding training facilities. From 2016 until his death, he was honorary president of the Thai Bodybuilding Association. He also supported a Cambodian orphanage, Sunrise Cambodia.

A Buddhist funeral with an open pyre was held Aug. 8 at a monastery in northern Thailand. He was not known to have left any immediate survivors.

A self-described believer in reincarnation, Latchford said that two Buddhist priests once told him that he had been Khmer in a previous life, and that “what I collect had once belonged to me.”

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