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.
The book matters because it exposes how art market bureaucracy serves as an effective laundering mechanism for looted cultural heritage, challenging the sanitizing language that describes these objects as beautiful Asian art rather than sacred deities violently stolen from their communities. Campbell's empathetic treatment of the physical violence of looting and his refusal to romanticize institutions that claim to protect these objects distinguishes this work from other reporting on Latchford. By treating statues as evidence of absence—with severed sandstone feet still anchored in Cambodian soil—the book underscores the irreversible loss caused by such thefts and the complicity of museums, dealers, and scholars in accepting problematic provenance.