The Looter Who Built Your Favorite Museum
Matthew Campbell's book *The Man Who Stole the Gods* (2026) examines the network of British dealer Douglas Latchford, who trafficked looted Cambodian antiquities on a massive scale before his death in 2020. The book details how Latchford, with the code name "Lion" from a Cambodian looter named Toek Tik, decapitated and dismembered Khmer statues, stripping them from their sanctuaries and funneling them into Western institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Campbell portrays Latchford as a charismatic product of a global appetite for beautiful things, embedded within elite institutional structures that enabled the movement of looted cultural objects into the legitimate art market, aided by relationships with collectors, dealers, curators, and academics.