Federal officials announced Thursday that the daughter of an accused antiquities dealer had agreed to forfeit $12 million from his estate as part of a settlement of a civil suit accusing her father of profiting from the sale of stolen Cambodian artifacts.
The daughter of Douglas AJ Latchford, a scholar and dealer of ancient Khmer artifacts who died in 2020, also agreed to hand over a seventh-century bronze statue from Vietnam that federal authorities say Latchford bought with illegally obtained money.
Latchford’s daughter, identified in court documents as Julia Copleston, inherited more than 125 statues and gold relics that authorities say were looted from Cambodia, as well as an undetermined amount of money from her father.
In 2021, she reached an agreement with the Cambodian government to return those items. Negotiations over Latchford’s financial accounts have been ongoing since then.
“The late Douglas Latchford was a prolific dealer in stolen antiquities,” Ivan J. Arvelo, a special agent in charge of US Homeland Security Investigations, said in a statement announcing the settlement. “His complicity in numerous illegal transactions over several decades earned him millions of dollars in payments from buyers and dealers across the United States, $12 million of which will be rightfully forfeited by his estate as part of this agreement.”
Latchford was indicted in 2019 by federal prosecutors in New York who charged him with trafficking looted Cambodian relics and forging documents, saying he had “built a career smuggling and illegally selling priceless Cambodian antiquities, often directly from archaeological sites . But the charges were dropped after Latchford’s death the following year at age 88.
In recent years, Toek Tik, a reformed looter who said he had led a gang that looted Khmer-era temples for two decades, came forward to identify areas in Cambodia where he helped loot several antiques. Some of the most illustrious artifacts Took Tik is said to have stolen were eventually marketed by Latchford, he said. According to Toek Tik’s account, Latchford directed much of the looting through an intermediary and even flipped through temple photos taken by Toek Tik to decide which items to steal.
The Cambodian government has had some success in recent years recovering looted antiquities and has pursued multiple museums in the United States and elsewhere.
Talks are currently underway between Cambodia and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Cambodian officials say they believe dozens of looted items are being held, some of which were given or sold to the museum by Latchford.
In their announcement, officials at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which was handling the civil case, said Latchford provided false provenance information as part of his sales or made false statements about shipping and import records when antiquities were brought into the United States. States. The officials said Latchford had bank accounts in Britain, New York and the island of Jersey, and that he had transferred at least $12 million in tainted proceeds to his Jersey bank accounts.
The officials said the US Justice Department will later decide on the distribution of the funds once they are received.
The confiscated seventh-century bronze statue represents the four-armed goddess Durga, and federal officials said it was stolen from a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Vietnam. Latchford’s role in the theft was confirmed, officials said, by emails recovered from his computer.