Collector indicted for trafficking antiques
Self-titled adventurer scholar
Douglas Latchford, who has died aged 89, was a self- described “adventurer scholar” who became a respected expert and dealer in Khmer (Cambodian) and Indian antiquities.
But in November last year a New York district attorney announced his indictment on charges of smuggling and trafficking in stolen and looted Cambodian antiquities.
Latchford was born to British parents in Bombay on Oct. 15, 1931. In the early 1950s he moved to Bangkok for pharmaceutical company Smith and Nephew. He dabbled in property, and continued to own a large luxury block of apartments in Bangkok, where he lived in a penthouse.
His interest in Khmer art was sparked, he said, at a dinner party in Bangkok in 1955, when he was shown a stone torso. “Smitten,” he began collecting Khmer antiquities.
Latchford became a Thai citizen in the 1960s and assumed the name of Pakpong Kriangsak. He regularly loaned his personal Khmer pieces to museums around the world. He also donated pieces to the Cambodian National Museum.
In 2010 Latchford had said “most of the pieces I have come across have been dug up by farmers in fields.” In 2011, however, a 225- kg 10th- century sandstone statue of mythic warrior Duryodhana was withdrawn from auction at Sothebys after a Cambodian official claimed it had been looted from an archeological site.
In 2013 New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to return two statues from the same site after Cambodian officials presented evidence that they had been smuggled in the 1970s. The statues had arrived at the museum as a series of gifts between 1987 and 1992; Latchford was the donor or part-donor of three of the four.
Latchford always denied any involvement in smuggling. But Tess Davis, director of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washington- based NGO that works to stop the looting and trafficking of antiquities, said he was known by expats in Cambodia in the ’60s as “Dynamite Doug” for his preferred method of extracting buried treasures.
In the 1970s Latchford was briefly married to a Thai woman with whom he had a daughter.