Matthew Campbell is an editor at Bloomberg Businessweek who spent a decade reporting out of Europe before relocating to Singapore, filing from more than twenty-five countries on crime, corruption, terrorism, economics, public health and the environment along the way. He co-broke the investigation into how Goldman Sachs made hundreds of millions of dollars on bond deals with Muammar Gaddafi's Libya while the country lost over a billion, dug into South Africa's Gupta "state capture" scandal, investigated the still-unsolved murder of Canadian pharmaceutical billionaire Barry Sherman, and exposed massive undisclosed methane emissions leaking out of Central Asia's oil and gas fields. He's a seven-time Loeb finalist with honors from the National Press Club, SOPA and SABEW. His new book, The Man Who Stole the Gods, follows the decades-long, industrial-scale looting of ancient Khmer treasures out of Cambodia, and the British art dealer at the centre of it all, Douglas Latchford, who spent fifty years selling stolen antiquities to the world's biggest museums and private collectors on forged provenance nobody bothered to check. We follow the story from Latchford's arrival in 1950s Bangkok, through the horror of the Khmer Rouge and the thirty-year civil war that followed, into the private homes of American billionaires, the boardroom of the Met and even the Jeffrey Epstein files. Link To 'The Man Who Stole the Gods'Link To 'Curious Worldview Substack'Leave a review on Apple or Spotify (nothing does more to help grow the show) It's an enormous pleasure to have spoken with Matt, we discussed... How the story landed on his radar — a stray 2019 headline about a British art dealer indicted for fraud, the detail that he was also the principal financial sponsor of bodybuilding in Southeast Asia, and the COVID delay before he was confident, from his first day reporting in Phnom Penh, that there was a book in itMeeting Brad Gordon, the American lawyer hired by the US Department of Justice who ended up working for the Cambodian government instead — and why Matt built the book around the people chasing the statues rather than the man who stole themWhether the book might push other nations to take looting more seriously, from the century-long fight over the Elgin Marbles to looting still happening today in Iraq, Syria, Sudan and UkraineThe closest historical analogue to Cambodia's scale of loss — Nazi-looted art — and why the Khmer Rouge were "sui generis," even among history's worst regimesLife under Pol Pot: "to keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss" — and a regime so absolute it abolished money itself, something not even Stalin or Mao attemptedWhy the Khmer Rouge's brand of communism was so viciously effective and yet, within four years, collapsed like "a house of cards" — at a cost of two million livesDouglas Latchford's arrival in 1950s Bangkok, the CIA-adjacent expat demimonde built around Cold War espionage, and his mentor Jim Thompson — the "Thai Silk King" who vanished without a trace on a walk in Malaysia in 1967The Khmer Empire itself: Angkor at its 12th–13th century peak housing something like 750,000 people against London's 30,000–40,000 — and how little historical record survives because looters don't take notesToek Tik — "Lion" — the Khmer Rouge child soldier turned reluctant executioner turned escapee turned the most prolific looter in Cambodia, and how Brad Gordon spent over a decade coaxing his memories into evidence that kept matching the groundHow Latchford faked provenance — a forged letter from "Ian Donaldson," a man who conveniently died in 2001 but kept "signing" documents into the 2010s — and why almost nobody who saw the paperwork actually believed itWhy Americans developed a taste for Southeast Asian art in the 1960s (the Beatles and the Maharishi, the Hare Krishna movement founded on the Lower East Side) and how that fed straight into 1980s Wall Street fortunesThomas Hoving, the Met director who invented the blockbuster exhibition and corporate sponsorship as we know them — and the Met's refusal to sit for an interview or meaningfully engage with the bookTracing the loot today — an anonymous Architectural Digest spread, and how Jeffrey Epstein's email archive surfaced financier Leon Black's roughly $30 million in Cambodian purchasesArt as a money-laundering vehicle: Latchford's Jersey trusts, the push to finally bring art dealers under the Bank Secrecy Act, and Oliver Bullough's estimate that up to 70% of the secondhand watch trade may be laundering in disguiseWhether large-scale looting still happens — Cambodia's temples are effectively "cleaned out," but Sudan's National Museum lost more than 60% of its collection when the RSF took Khartoum in 2023Closing questions: which empty ancient civilisation he'd walk through if he could (Cambodia, then Mexico) — and the role serendipity has played in every story he's ever chasedCurious Worldview (catalogue connections to this ep) The blurbs made flesh — Matt name-checks both journalists who blurbed his book in conversation: Oliver Bullough, on his new book Everybody Loves Our Dollars and the eye-watering share of the secondhand watch and handbag trade that's really laundering, and Zeke Faux, whose Number Go Up mapped the same "value is whatever somebody says it is" logic onto crypto.The most important crime in the world — Matt's line that no significant criminal enterprise works without laundering its proceeds sits right alongside Nathan Lynch on why Australia became a laundering haven almost by accident.The exploited periphery — the scam compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar that come up near the end are Matt Friedman's exact territory, and Toek Tik — paid a pittance to dig up gods worth millions abroad — is a museum-world version of the same economy.The lone crusader — Brad Gordon spending over a decade, likely the rest of his life, chasing looted statues with no real system built to do it, echoes Bill Browder turning Sergei Magnitsky's death into a one-man campaign.Timestamps... 00:00 — Intro 02:04 — How the story found him 04:42 — Could this book push other nations to take looting seriously? 07:21 — Nazi-looted art as the closest analogue; why the Khmer Rouge were unique 08:45 — "To keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss" 13:29 — Latchford's Bangkok arrival and Jim Thompson's 1967 disappearance 17:45 — The Khmer Empire at its peak 24:58 — Toek Tik's story 29:47 — Faking provenance: the dead man's letter 34:20 — Why Americans fell for Southeast Asian art in the 60s 35:49 — Thomas Hoving's Met, and its refusal to engage 41:37 — Tracing the loot: the magazine spread and the Epstein archive 43:13 — Art as money laundering 47:18 — Does the looting continue? 49:45 — Closing questions
