60 Minutes - 06/28/2026: Betting on War, The Looting of Cambodia

Episode Date: June 28, 2026

 In April, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier was indicted for using classified intelligence to make bets online. It comes as online prediction markets have exploded in popularity. The war in Iran and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro have revealed suspiciously-timed bets on when an attack might happen, even the fate of world leaders. Correspondent Jon Wertheim reports on the phenomenon of betting on war and the creation of a whole new category of insider trading. Andy Bast and Jessica Kegu are the producers.   A year-long investigation by 60 MINUTES examines what might be the greatest art heist in history: the theft of thousands of sacred stone, bronze and gold artifacts from religious sites across Cambodia. Correspondent Anderson Cooper reports on Douglas Latchford, the British dealer who masterminded the looting amidst genocide, civil war and political turmoil and sold to the world’s wealthiest collectors and most prestigious museums. The Cambodian government has spent more than a decade tracking it all down and wants their history and heritage brought home. This is a double-length segment. Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts are the producers.

As long as there have been wars, there have been war profiteers, but never quite like this. Tonight, new evidence that bettors, including a U.S. soldier, may have profited by using inside information to wager on when and how military operations will unfold. A soldier using classified intelligence to trade. Unprecedented. There is nothing to compare that to. This is a new kind of insider trading. For a year, 60 Minutes investigated the theft of Cambodia's cultural heritage. Thousands of sacred stone, bronze, and gold artifacts from religious sites across the country, leaving empty pedestals where gods and deities once stood. We found some of them on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

How did these looted treasures get here, and will they ever be returned? We are on the verge of returning a number of them. All of them? I bet I can't say. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm John Worthyne. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Leslie Stahl.

Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. The war with Iran and the U.S. military operation to capture Venezuelan president, Nicholas Maduro, have carried the usual hallmarks of conflict. Soldiers, strategy, casualties, cost. But they've also been accompanied by a new feature, betting on war. This year alone, more than a billion dollars, has been staked online on military decisions and outcomes. As if they were wagering on football games or Oscar winners,

betters all over the globe have taken positions, some suspiciously timed and with information seemingly too specific for a civilian outsider, on when and how an attack might happen, even the fate of world leaders. As we reported in May, it's created a whole new category of insider trading. As long as there have been wars, there have been war profiteers, but never quite like this. Cloaked in night shrouded in secrecy, U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro on January 3rd. He was taken to the U.S. to face drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges. As it turned out, the president of Venezuela wasn't the only figure in the operation who would find himself confronting federal charges.

U.S. Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was involved in the planning and the planning of the operation. execution of the Venezuela mission, was charged in April with using classified intelligence to place bets based on when the surprise raid would unfold. If the allegations are true, this is one of the worst betrayals of trust in this area that I can remember and possibly ever. Americans should feel confident that the most important little agency they've probably never heard of is on the job. Now a private lawyer in Washington, Rob Schwartz, until...

last year worked for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency policing fraud and insider trading. A soldier using classified intelligence to trade. Unprecedented. Classified intelligence that he knew about because he helped plan and to execute the mission. There is nothing to compare that to. The Justice Department alleges Van Dyke made a series of wagers totaling roughly $34,000,

including a half dozen the day before the first. raid. He ended up netting more than $400,000. According to the indictment, Van Dyck immediately withdrew his profit, then tried to delete his betting account on Polymarket, the world's biggest online prediction market. The 38-year-old Army Master Sergeant has pleaded not guilty. Polymarket says it cooperated with law enforcement. If you are a corporate executive and you're privy to non-public business information, you go trade on that. That's insider. trading. Everybody knows that. But the same thing exists in prediction markets where this soldier is alleged to have traded. You're saying different contexts from what we usually think,

two guys at the golf course are winking and whispering and tipping each other off, but this is still meeting the definition of insider trading? Exactly right. This is a new kind of insider trading. Spiking in popularity, prediction markets, including polymarket, offer wagers on the likelihood of future events. Will the Dodgers win the World Series? Will Jesus return in 2006? For that matter, in a 60-minute interview, would President Trump say the word trillion more than 10 times? Turned out that one didn't pay off. But lately, another kind of wager has found popularity. What will happen in military conflicts? Dates of attack. Will an airspace close? Will enrich uranium change hands? You can bet on it. You can also bet on

on this. Insiders, people holding non-public information will be laying down their money, too. In the U.S., it's prohibited to make military bets on platforms like Pollymarket, though it's easy to find digital workarounds, as Gannon and Ken Van Dyke allegedly did. Here's what's more astounding than the existence of military bets, how often they pay off. It's alarming to see a culture around betting on war. Michelle Kendler Kretsch and her team at the Anti-Corruption. data collective, examine polymarket bets on military outcomes. She looked specifically at long-shot wagers, bets with less than 35% odds.

Despite being underdogs, they won more than they lost, a telltale sign she says of, quote, systemic insider trading. Give me the apples to apples comparison. This military bets versus, say, sports wagering. So military bets are 52% success rate. Sports, 7%. Wildly disproportionate to what conventional probability should be telling us. Absolutely.

In Ocean Away, another team of digital detectives say they, too, have identified crooked betters wagering on war. This might be the most insane pattern we have found on polymarket so far. Based in Paris, Nicholas Weiman's small data analytics firm bubble maps creates visualizations of bets on polymarker. to spot bubbles or clusters of suspect traders. One paradox of polymarket, everything about the trades is totally transparent and public, except the traders themselves remain anonymous.

This big cluster in the middle, no one talked about it. The firm's head of investigations goes by his online handle, Deebbs. He asked us to obscure his identity over fears of retaliation for his detective work. They shared for the first time what they believe is a more egregious insider trading case than Gannon Ken Van Dykes. We spotted nine polymarket accounts, all connected who made collectively $2.4 million, bending almost exclusively on U.S. military operations. Van Dyck made $400,000, here $2.4 million. And now here's the crazy part.

98 person win rate. Wait, wait, wait, wait. 98. 98%. This is like winning the lottery multiple times. You know? The linked accounts made dozens of winning bets on the specific dates of pivotal moments in the war with Iran, even when the odds were low.

The first U.S. strikes, the removal of Iran's supreme leader, the announcement of a ceasefire. How do we know this isn't just someone who has really good instincts? Luck alone cannot explain those numbers. If you know this, why don't federal prosecutors? Well, hopefully with your interview, they're going to know this. We can talk to one source in the Defense Department. with relation to Sergeant Van Dyck, and he said, listen, there are dozens more of these. Van Dyke was just a small fish.

Oh, sure. There's so many people involved in the planning and the execution of a military operation. A former U.S. military officer, Dieb, speaks from firsthand experience when he says military bets are ripe for corruption. You have obviously the government officials, but you also have the military planners, right? You have the military intelligence analysts. and even spouses, they hear things, and that means that there consequently are a lot of potential insiders. And it's not just the bogus, high-tech online prediction markets, where trades based on war

have raised intense suspicions. It's happening on the old-school and heavily regulated commodities markets, too. I'm highly suspicious at this point, and I'm not the only one. Any trader right now is highly suspicious. A former commodities trader, David Cavell, is now a New York lawyer, representing victims of fraud on the same markets he once traded. In 2021, he secured the largest whistleblower award for commodities market manipulation in U.S. history.

Well, this is a classic graph than any commodities trader will understand. Covel walked us through the morning of March 23rd. Fighting had been raging for three-plus weeks, and it was a slow trading day in oil futures. If you see the chart, you'll see that no one is trading during that time period. Why would you trade at that time? It doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have a real reason. Then, according to data, the financial firm LSEG provided us, suddenly at 6.50 a.m., more than $800 million was staked on the chance of oil prices dropping.

Fifteen minutes later, President Trump posted on true social that the White House in Iran had, quote, very good and productive conversations about ending hostilities. The news sent the price of oil plummeting more than 10%. What kind of profit is that resulting in? We're talking tens of millions could be $80 million. You see this graph and you think insider trading. That's a natural conclusion to draw. I can't know it without knowing what happened,

but it's a natural conclusion to draw. Covel is not alone in finding this highly dubious. 60 Minutes has learned federal investigators are probing these oil market trades as well. What are the odds the government knows the identity of whoever executed that? If they go to the exchanges, they can know them. This could have been someone inside the U.S., this could have been someone from a foreign country. This could have been an enemy. Identifying who it was would be the secret to figuring out whether it was insider trading or not.

It's not just markets that risk manipulation by war bets. It's truth as well. Emmanuel Fabian, military correspondent for the times of Israel, thought little of a piece he wrote in March about an Iranian missile strike in an empty forest near Jerusalem. But soon after he published the account, Fabian received a barrage of messages asking him to change his story. He ignored most, but they turned darker. One of them was, you're going to make us lose $900,000,

and we'll invest even more than that to finish you, is what he wrote. He also wrote details about my siblings as well. He said, I know how often you visit your family. What's your fear factor at this point? I was quite worried. He investigated and found war bets on polymarket hinging on whether an Iranian missile would enter Israel, specifically on March 10th.

And Fabian's small news story voided the side of the bets predicting no missile, angering the losers. There was at $14 million that were being waged there. $14 million? Yeah, but by the time it closed, it actually went up to $22 million, if I'm not mistaken. Also, the person who wrote them,

they wrote that, you know, if you abide by my instructions and change it, then, you know, you can end with money in your pocket and this will all be over. Despite this pressure campaign against you, that escalated to death. threats, you did not go in and change your copy. Do you worry that other people might not have your principled stance? I do worry. We know when there's a lot of money involved, in this case,

$22 million, I think that can cause people to, you know, to lie. Fabian reported the threats to the police, and to Polly Market, which said that threatening a journalist was unacceptable and banned the accounts involved. Polymarket has said they work proactively on any suspicious activity constantly behind the scenes. Overseeing all this, playing sheriff in this New Wild West? In the U.S., it's that niche government agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, set up in the 70s to regulate food prices. Historically, led by a commission of five, today it's run by one person, Michael Seelig, a 36-year-old whom President Trump nominated nominated chairman last fall.

We will hold whoever is engaging in fraudulent, manipulative, or insider trading activity accountable to the American people. But enforcement actions have dropped by more than two-thirds since 2024. Staffing has dropped sharply too. Sealy declined our interview request, though the CFTC told us it is hiring more staff and using AI to go after bad actors. And government officials are aware of the new potential for corruption. In March, the White House issued a memo to staffers, noting it is a criminal offense for anyone to use non-public information on prediction markets.

Where do you draw the line? I guess reasonable people can debate where the line is. Source after source told us they fear today's insider trading scandal is tomorrow's national security scandal. If market watchers can spot irregular trades, surely enemies can too. And they'll make their war plans accordingly. Just to put it plainly, this could be putting people's lives at risk. Other adversaries may be using this information in order to plan their own strategy. If you're taking a futures position, a year from now, Sergeant Van Dyck is the only person charged with insider trading? No, I think it's just going to multiply from here.

In fact, it has multiplied. Since our story aired in May, federal prosecutors brought another campaign. this time against a software engineer at Google who allegedly used confidential information from inside the company to make bets on polymarket. According to prosecutors, he took home more than a million dollars in profit. His lawyers say he plans to plead not guilty. What if everything you learn in history class was only half the story? I'm Dr. Hrini Bot, host of hidden history. Every Monday, I go where history gets mysterious. Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science.

science still can't fully explain. On Hidden History, I treat these moments like open case files, not miss, not superstition, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look. Listen to and follow Hidden History, available now wherever you get your podcasts. The theft of Cambodia's cultural treasures, thousands of sacred stone, bronze, and gold artifacts from religious sites across the country might just be the greatest art heist in history. It began nearly a century ago when Cambodia was colonized by France, but in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s amidst genocide, civil war, and political turmoil, the looting became a global business, much of it run by a British man named Douglas Latchford.

He kept some of it for himself, but much of what his gang of thieves stole, Latchford then sold to wealthy private collectors and some of the most important museums around the world. As we first reported in 2023, Cambodia's government has spent the last 14 years trying to track it all down and bring their history and heritage home. Enkhorwat, with its towering spires, is the glory of Cambodia. Nearly a thousand years old, it's one of the biggest and most extraordinary religious temples in the world, sprawling across 400 acres. Originally built to honor the Hindu god Vishnu, it then became a Buddhist temple, and remains. remains a place of worship today. You can wander here for weeks, lost in a labyrinth of ancient stone corridors and sacred chambers.

But the scars of plunder run deep. Looters have hacked off the heads of many statues. They've stolen bodies as well. Empty pedestals mark where gods and deities once stood. On some, only the feet remain. It's worse in the rest of Cambodia's 4,000 temples. all had been looted. This one is 100 miles northeast of Ancor Wat on a remote mountain called Sandak. This was hit very heavily by the looting gangs. They found gold, they found statues,

they found many, many things. That's Brad Gordon, an American lawyer who's been working with the Cambodian government for 14 years, tracking down its stolen treasures. He brought us to Sandok with his team of investigators, archaeologists, and art scholars. This is so cool. In the temple's crumbling courtyard, little remains, mostly empty pedestals scattered among the Sralow trees. It's remarkably to me just how much stuff is just scattered on the ground. Yes. It's like a pedestal graveyard.

We've all seen in museums these statues with no feet on them, and I don't think people realize the feet were hacked off, because in order to steal them, that's the easiest way to get them off the pedestals. We know when the looters came to sites like this, The first thing they took was the heads. That was the easiest to grab. And then later on, maybe they come back and get the torso, but they were not very careful,

so they left behind pieces. For Cambodians, these statues are not just works of art, they are sacred deities that hold the souls of their ancestors to whom they ask for guidance and prey. This is incredible. These were all looted. Yes, all looted. All of these heads cut off.

This head was cut off, yes. Fohrong Sakana, Cambodia's most Minister of Culture is in charge of the government's efforts to track down their stolen gods. We met her in a closely guarded warehouse not far from Ankara Wat, where more than 6,000 pieces from temples across the country are stored for safekeeping. Each one sculpted by an artisan from an ancient Khmer Empire that lasted for more than five centuries and spanned Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. So the statues have a soul?

The statues are, are they living? Of course, yes. And we believe that we can talk with them. They will hear. They will see. What do you want? What do you see? What do you do in your life, in your house, outside, in the society also?

They're watching. They're watching. Everywhere. Fohrong Sakina's entire family was killed in the genocide that began in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist group, took over, forcing millions of kill. Cambodians into labor camps. Some two million people, nearly a quarter of the population, were slaughtered or starved to death. The Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979, but fighting and instability continued for decades,

leaving Cambodia's temples unprotected and vulnerable, easy targets for unscrupulous antiquities dealers like Douglas Latchford. Who was Douglas Latchford? I would say that he was in many ways the mastermind behind the greatest art heist. in history. The greatest art heist in history. Yes. In terms of scope and multitude of crime sites and the enormous amount of statues that were taken

out. Latchford lived in Thailand, an enigmatic British businessman he began collecting in the 1960s. He had, it seems, two great loves, Cambodian antiquities and Thai bodybuilders, the sponsor Bangkok's biggest bodybuilding competition, the Latchford Classic. How would you describe him? He was extremely deceptive, I think in many ways, was ruthless, but he hid that behind this incredible facade of charm. Latchford portrayed himself as a scholar and protector of Cambodia's culture,

a reputation he burnished by donating sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other prestigious institutions. He also published three books filled with the finest examples of Cambodian antiquities. Many of them, it turns out, Latchford had stolen. He was using the books as sales catalogs. He was handing them out.

He was using them to sell pieces. And he understood a certain psychology of collectors out there that if they see something in a beautiful book, they think it's legitimate. Those books have been an invaluable guide for Brad Gordon and his team, helping them compile a database of thousands of missing artifacts. many of which they didn't know existed until Latchford published photos of them.

Gordon's team got their big break when they met this man in 2012. He was a former Khmer Rouge child soldier and leader of a gang of looters. His name was Day Duck. That first meeting, I didn't really know who we had met. You know, I knew that he was important. I knew that many people were telling me he was the best, and I knew that he was feared. Why were people afraid of him?

You know, over the years he had killed me. many people. It turned out Day Duck had worked for decades supplying Douglas Latchford with thousands of treasures, and he was amazed to see them again in Latchford's books. He kept opening the book and going back to the front cover

and going through and tapping and saying, I know this one, I know this one, I know this one. And when he says he knew this one, mean he helped loot those ones? That's what we learn later, yeah. Day Duck became a key conference

for Gordon's team. They gave him a code name, Lion, to protect his identity, and followed him to dozens of temples, where he confessed what he'd found and how he'd stolen it. He would say to us, I'm going to transfer everything in my head to you. I'm going to tell you everything, every secret. You felt like his memory was very good.

It was accurate. It was unbelievable. He remembered the size of everything, measured against his body. He would use his arm to show us how long a statue of how long a statue was. Why do you think he wanted to cooperate? You know, he felt tremendously guilty about many things he had done in his life,

about the killing, about the looting. And we offered him a road of redemption, a way to do something really good at the end of his life. They recorded hundreds of hours of Lyons' testimony. He explained how gangs of looters would spend weeks at remote temples, using shovels, chisels, metal detectors, even dynamite to find and dig out treasures. Dozens a man would hoist heavy stone statues onto ox carts before transporting them across the border into Thailand and into the hands of Douglas Latchford.

Lion never met Latchford, but he'd sent him photographs of artifacts he could choose from. We hear about them saying, oh, we had to go to this temple and take a photo, and then sending it back. You know, my sense is he was shopping. He had to have a list that looters knew his priorities. Like these, which came from a temple complex called coque. The statues from there had a distinctive style that Latchford loved. It was, however, a dangerous business. Most looters only made enough to buy food for their families, and fighting between rival gangs

was common. People were killed over these antiquities. Do you look at these as blood statues? For sure. They're blood antiquities. Whenever I see a statue, I think about, you know, who died to get this out of the ground or get it out of a temple and to move it here. So so much as looting was done in the shadow of the war, shadow of the genocide.

It was this 500-pound sandstone warrior from Kokeh that appeared in a Sotheby's auction catalog in 2011 that put Douglas Latchford on the radar of U.S. law enforcement. Its feet were missing, and the price tag, an estimated $2 to $3 million. When it appeared in the market, there were a number of archaeologists, a number of people who immediately recognized the source of the statue as being a specific temple in Cambodia. It came from Kokea. That's right. Until he retired in 2023, J.P. Labat was a special agent on the cultural property art and antiquities unit with Homeland Security. A team from the U.S. Attorney's Office at the Southern District of New York traveled to Cambodia.

to inspect the site where the statue had been removed. And so the base was still there with the feet, still in the ground. And so they were able to match that base and feet to the statue. And that was enough evidence to get the statue pulled off the market. That's right. After years of legal wrangling, Sotheby's finally agreed to send this stolen warrior back to Cambodia. A ceremony was held welcoming at home, and investigators were able to trace its original sale back to Douglas Latchford.

He was asked about its repatriation in a German documentary in 2014. Is it a good day for Cambodia or is it a bad day for the art market if these things are coming back? It's a good day for Cambodia. It's a bad day for the art market. Law enforcement in New York was closing in on Latchford, but he claimed prosecutors had them all wrong. Their imagination has gone wild. They've seen too many Indiana Jones films. As far as I know, there is no such thing as a smuggling network, and I certainly don't belong to any smuggling network.

The attempted sale of this statue in 2011, was that a turning point in the unraveling of Douglas Latchford? I would say yes. That case put more of a focus and a spotlight on him, and then efforts were then done. double to really peel back the onion and look into Latchford's activities. The testimony of former looters found by Brad Gordon and his team was critical for the U.S. attorney's case against Latchford.

How rare is it to actually have access to the looters, to people who actually stole these things 10, 20, 30 years ago? I know of no other case where that's happened. And it's quite remarkable to have looters actively essentially. assisting a team of investigators to recover artifacts that they had a first hand in helping remove from the country. Douglas Latchford was finally indicted by U.S. authorities in 2019 for smuggling, conspiracy, wire fraud, and other charges. But he died before he could be put on trial. Brad Gordon eventually convinced Latchford's family to return his personal collection of stolen treasures.

Among the first pieces to come home in 2021 was this statue from Koke. Lion, weakened by cancer, came to inspect it in Cambodia's National Museum to verify it was the same one he'd dug out of the ground. And then he turned to me and he said, it's the real statue. You know, it was a remarkable thing to watch. And just his relationship, it was, living to him. Do you think he was happy it was back?

Throat. So happy. He knew that he had done something good. Lion died a few months later, but the secrets he revealed continued to bring statues back to Cambodia's National Museum, masterpieces that left the country long before these school children were born. Does the return of these statues, these gods, help some to heal? Yes, to get back the soul of the nation.

the soul of the nation. It's not only for me, but all of my family who was died during the war and fall for all Cambodian people. There are still many more stolen Cambodian statues and artifacts in museums and private collections around the world. When we return, Cambodia's fight to get those looted relics back. It's taken a team of Cambodian investigators led by Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, more than 10 years to document the theft of thousands of ancient statues and relics by a British collector

named Douglas Lachford. As we reported in 2023, they've managed to get some of what he stole back, but many of Cambodia's greatest treasures are still out there, hidden away in the mansions of millionaires and billionaires and hiding in plain sight, on display in some of the most prestigious museums around the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has one of the most important. important collections of Cambodian antiquities in the world. But many of the finest pieces on display here in the Southeast Asian art wing are stolen. Like this one and this one.

This as well. All passed through the hands of Douglas Latchford. Latchford sold this one to the Met in the early 1990s. This one he donated. Do you think people visiting the Met know that these were looted? I think most people walk through the Met. They have no idea those are blood antiquities. They have no idea what the history is behind those pieces.

They don't know the temples they came from. They don't know the people who were killed to get them here. The dirt has been brushed off. There's a little note that says where it came from. Should people believe what's on that little note? No, absolutely not. In 2023, we went with Brad Gordon to see where in Cambodia the Met and other museum's collections really did come from.

This is incredible. This seven-story pyramid is more than a thousand. years old and rises out of the jungle in Kokeh in northeast Cambodia. It's one of dozens of temples in what was once the capital of an ancient Khmer empire. Luters have been all over this site for decades. Correct. Douglas Latchford loved the statuary. In love with the beauty, in love with the artistic.

The statues from here have a distinctive style that he particularly loved. Correct. And perhaps the most famous statues in that distinctive style that Latchford stole from Kokey were nine stone warriors once arranged together in a battle scene. When we were there, seven had been returned to the National Museum in Phnom Penh, including this 500-pound sandstone sculpture. It's the one Sotheby's tried to sell in 2011. They're back on their original pedestals,

their ankles reunited with their feet hacked off by looters. This was at Sotheby's, this is at Christie's. Not on Simon's. Noron Simon Museum. Hab Tush is the Secretary of State in Cambodia's Ministry of Culture. He's working with Brad Gordon to bring back the two coquet statues whose empty pedestals sit in the museum. So do you know what are supposed to be on the... We know.

You know what are supposed to be here and you know what's supposed to be here. We know... One of those missing sculptures was discovered in the glossy pages of architectural digest in 2008. This mythical army commander and a stunning number of... and a stunning number of other stolen works were all together in the Palm Beach mansion of the late billionaire George Lindemann and his wife Freida. The ancient treasures of Cambodia were sitting in the living room of an incredibly wealthy family in America in Florida on display while people were having cocktails.

The one thing that I'm always struck by is how many people witnessed it and had been silent and continued to be silent today. The Lindeman spent an estimated $20 million. building the collection with the help of Douglas Latchford. Freda Lindemann didn't respond to our request for an interview. But in Koke, we showed her home to two former looters. What do you think of this house? It's a beautiful house, he said.

It looks like it belongs to a king. The former looters pointed out another statue in the Lindemann's living room. They said they helped steal. This reclining figure of the Hindu god Vishnu. They said it was dug out of the ground from this exact spot in late 19, You're 100% sure this was taken from here by you and others in 1995. They also identified a number of other statues they say they stole that appear in books published by Douglas Latchford. They say they found this copper statue using a metal detector.

This is Bally-Sat-Far-Dees? Yes. They dug it out of the ground here in 1990. J.P. Labat, former Special Agent, with Homeland Security, found photos of the statue covered in dirt on Douglas Latchford's computer. Latchford sold it to the Met in 1992. When we visited, it was still on display. You were able to get access to some of Latchford's emails.

Yes. And in there, there are detailed stories about the manner in which he obtained pieces, the fact that he was having them reassembled and repaired, that dirt and crustaceans were being cleaned off of them. They were freshly dug out of the ground. These were fresh pieces that he was describing his emails that needed a level of restoration before he could even attempt to sell them.

Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019 but died before he could be put on trial. Federal prosecutors in New York, however, continue tracing his looted artifacts. They believe at least 18 of them have landed up at the Met. I am very involved in our work on provenance. Andrea Bayer is deputy director for collections and administration at the Met.

The Met has said that they will return objects based upon rigorous evidentiary review. What rigorous evidentiary review was done before acquiring these pieces? Not enough. It seems like the Met had a don't ask, don't tell policy. They wanted to build up their collection, and nobody was really asking questions where it came from. For people, many people in the art world, there was a sense of protecting great objects that stood a chance of being destroyed.

We no longer feel about it that way. Under pressure 13 years ago, the Met did return two statues called kneeling attendants, which had been donated to them by Douglas Latchford. In 2013, when you returned the kneeling attendance, did you investigate the other items that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum? I don't know the answer to that question. I can only pick up the story several years later when Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019,

when we immediately and proactively went to the U.S. Attorney's Office and offered our full cooperation. Well, I can pick up the story actually in 2013 because a spokesman for the MED said that no special effort was going to be made to check the provenances of any other Douglas Latchford donated work. Why wouldn't the MET want to look into everything else that Douglas Latchford had brought to? this museum. I can't speculate about why that didn't happen. But no one investigated all the other items that Douglas Latchford gave? Not to my knowledge. The Met is not the only major museum with looted Cambodian artifacts, but its collection

is one of the largest in the world. In 2023, the museum announced it would create a research team to examine the provenance or acquisition history of all its collections. It's taken 10 years since Douglas Lashford was shown. to have given stolen property to the Met, for the Met to set up this provenance team, why is it taken 10 years? It was a slow process. I'll grant you that.

It was a slow process. But I think that the fact that we are fully engaged now, fully cooperative now, is our only answer to this, really. It's a moment of reckoning, and we're ready to do what it takes now, to write whatever the wrong is. Four years ago when Douglas Latchford was indicted by prosecutors, did you set up a team to check the provenance of every Lashford work? We started, absolutely.

We started to dig in right then and there. It's not easy. I mean, the fact that we don't have much information has to do with the fact that it's very hard to find the information. There's enough information for federal prosecutors to charge Douglas Latchford with stealing and looting and trafficking and smuggled items. How much more evidence do you need?

You haven't returned any of those, any Douglas Latchford related items since he's been indicted in those four years ago. But we are on the verge of returning a number of them. All of them? That I can't say. Four months after that interview, just two days before we went to air in 2023,

prosecutors announced the MET would return 13 antiquities that came through Douglas Latchford. But the MET hasn't returned this statue, which was specifically cited in the indictment of Latchford, or this one which Latchford sold to the Met in 1992. Cambodia's culture minister called the Mets announcement a first step and says she looks forward to the return of many more of our treasures.

Shouldn't museums have thought twice about buying things that were coming out of Cambodia during the genocide and civil war and decades of stride? And this question that you raise is really the crux of what were rather, with. You have acquired pieces from a known smuggler who used a team of looters that the government has interviewed and taken statements from. They have emails which refute the information in your own provenance at the museum. You have items in the museum which were named in the indictment of Latchford that are still there. And so these pieces should go back. There's no question. It's the right thing to do.

In 2023, the Lindemann family, whose collection was showcased in architectural digest, struck a deal with federal authorities, voluntarily agreeing to return 33 stolen treasures. In a statement to the New York Times, the Lindemann said, having purchased these items from dealers that we assumed were reputable, we were saddened to learn how they made their way to the market in the United States. Why did the Lindemans agree to return their collection to Cambodia? The pieces majority. I think they finally came around to the fact that Lashford was dirty.

Their collection was all looted pieces. It was obvious, and so they decided to surrender them. We got a peek at what was the Lindemann Collection shortly after the deal was done. It was sitting in a warehouse in upstate New York, a nation's living gods and ancestors waiting for a ride home. This is like a whole wing of the museum. A wing of a museum that only the Lindemannan, and their friends had access to.

If the Lindemans hadn't published these in Architectural Digest back in 2008, I think there's a good chance we maybe never would have found it. We always say the gods want to come home. We feel like the gods have spoken today. They didn't want to come home. As one of the biggest crates was being opened, waiting eagerly was Moy Kung Tang and Tida Long,

two members of Brad Gordon's investigative team. This would be their first look at the mythical army commander taken from Koke. They were likely the first Cambodians to set eyes on it since Douglas Latchford stole it more than 50 years ago. He's here! There's a look in his eyes and on his face. It's much bigger than I expected it to be.

Its presence is extraordinary. I did not expect to feel this way. Even the commander seemed to be smiling. Then it was time to see the rarest piece in the Lindemann's collection. The Cambodian team knelt in reverence as the Hindu god Vishnu was uncrated. Despite all the fuss, he appeared unperturbed,

reclining in a cosmic slumber. When this statue arrived in Cambodia, it was welcomed as one of the most important ever returned. Earlier this month, the Met returned two more artifacts to Cambodia following a seizure by the Manhattan DA's antiquities trafficking unit. The Cambodian government is is still demanding the repatriation of 30 others in the Mets possession.

The hunt for Cambodia's stolen crown jewels. I just felt like, wow, unbelievable that it's sitting here in a parking lot. At 60 Minutes Overtime.com. A lot of them didn't know what existed. Hey there, it's Jill Schlesinger. I'm launching a new show. It's called Money Moves, and your money is going to move. We're going to help you make better financial decisions.

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