Ever wonder how an art heist works? Here’s a step-by-step accounting of the looting, smuggling and dealing happening in the illicit global antiquities trade.
Who was Douglas Latchford? Indicted art dealer accused of selling stolen Asian relics
The book “Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art,” a core reference for art experts by Emma C. Bunker and Douglas Latchford, is pictured in New York on March 9, 2017. “Publishing a photograph of a looted antiquity is a common laundering practice,” a federal agent wrote in a 2016 criminal complaint.
That’s when falsified provenances, or ownership history, come into play. Someone like Latchford needs to manufacture a history for the piece — and they need a well-regarded voice like Bunker’s to vouch for it. It became a running joke in the Manhattan DA’s office — another provenance from Ian Donaldson. In some cases, he was posted to Vietnam when he acquired a particular object. In others, he was in Hong Kong.And customs officers in the U.S. wouldn’t know how to spot the forgeries.Once a looted object has made it out of the source country, it needs to be cleaned of any evidence that it had been ripped from a temple or yanked off a pedestal.
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