THE MAN WHO STOLE THE GODS

The ugly truth behind ancient artifacts.

In the 1980s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City began acquiring stunning sculptures from the Khmer Empire, most famous for building the 12th-century temple complex at Angkor Wat in northern Cambodia. A decade earlier, Cambodia fought a bloody civil war with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge guerrillas, who had murdered roughly two million people. In his disturbing account, Campbell, a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, writes of Douglas Latchford, a young British expatriate art dealer who, taking advantage of the chaos from his high-rise in Bangkok, paid temple looters to bring him a steady stream of artifacts to put on the global market. Among them was a two-ton statue of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god, that wound up in the collection of a Netscape co-founder. Latchford, who had “a passing resemblance to the actor Roger Moore,” used his connection with the Met’s “eager” buyers to burnish his reputation as the world’s foremost expert in Cambodian art and legitimize his illicit trade, creating what the author describes as a network of “comfortable professionals in Bangkok, Paris, London, and New York who’d taken advantage of a poor country in crisis—and, in some cases, made a great deal of money through pillaging its history.” In a fast-paced narrative, Campbell expertly handles a complex story of art theft, violent history, implicated cultural institutions, and law enforcers in Cambodia and the U.S. struggling to repatriate looted treasures. After reading the book, you may never again look at ancient artworks in quite the same way.

Thought-provoking true crime on a grand scale.