As Toek Tik recounts it, he was a teenage foot soldier for the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia within the late Nineteen Seventies when he first realized that looting historical statues may very well be a profitable commerce.
As soon as, whereas bartering stolen cattle for clothes alongside the border with Thailand, he recalled, a buying and selling accomplice gestured towards his ox cart, which held the heads of statues Toek Tik had collected close to his house.
To his shock, he was provided cash, onerous foreign money, for them. For the livestock, he mentioned, “they’d give solely shirts or a battery.”
So started the prolific looting profession of an unschooled man from a thatch-roofed hut who not too long ago started disclosing to authorities how he oversaw lots of of confederates as they swept via temple ruins, pillaging sculptures and different treasures.
Within the twenty years he was lively, ending within the late Nineties, Toek Tik, who goes by the nickname Lion, estimates he plundered greater than 1,000 artifacts, lots of them thought-about the best masterpieces of Khmer tradition, akin to big sandstone sculptures of deities and their attendants.
To this point, he has recognized greater than 100 as being within the collections of museums around the globe, together with the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York. Others he has noticed in revered non-public collections.
His testimony, and that of others who labored for him, has change into the centerpiece of a world effort by Cambodia to claw again its fabled heritage because it challenges the museums and collectors who’ve lengthy defended their acquisitions as absolutely documented and unquestionably lawful.
Already Cambodian officers have begun to press the Met to return 45 objects, partly due to the testimony of Toek Tik, who says he personally excavated most of them. The Met has mentioned it started “proactively” to analysis its assortment impartial of the Cambodian request.
Among the most illustrious artifacts that Toek Tik says he stole ended up within the arms of Douglas A.J. Latchford, a collector and seller who was indicted as an antiquities trafficker in 2019, simply months earlier than his loss of life.
For many years, Latchford was considered as a scholar of Khmer tradition, a person as soon as knighted by Cambodia for his presents to its museums. However Toek Tik’s account additional unmasked him, figuring out Latchford as somebody who directed a lot of the looting via an middleman and who browsed temple pictures taken by Toek Tik to resolve which objects ought to be stolen.
Lots of the items later bought on the artwork marketplace for lots of of 1000’s of {dollars}, whereas Toek Tik mentioned he by no means acquired quite a lot of hundred {dollars} for a single merchandise, a sum he routinely break up along with his crew.
Now in his 60s and recognized with stage IV pancreatic most cancers, Toek Tik mentioned he’s working to redeem himself by returning to the locations he pillaged to assist investigators dig for onerous proof of his crimes.
“I remorse what I did,” he mentioned on a video name via a translator. “I need the gods to come back house.”
Parts of Toek Tik’s account, given over a interval of three years to Cambodian investigators however solely now being publicly mentioned, stay uncorroborated, akin to his recollection of being concerned in mass killings below the Khmer Rouge. However officers have come to belief him, as has the U.S. Division of Justice, which relied on his model of occasions in court docket papers filed this 12 months that demanded the return of Cambodian artifacts from a New York collector and the Denver Museum of Artwork.
The authorities have been satisfied, partly, by Toek Tik’s capacity to pinpoint the precise location of toes, bases and different remnants of statuary he says he as soon as stole.
Simply this month, Toek Tik helped archaeologists choose via the ruins of a temple complicated named Prasat Thom, which sits throughout the grounds of a thousand-year-old Khmer Empire royal metropolis that was often known as Koh Ker and is now an archaeological web site.
After scraping via piles of filth and stones, researchers discovered what seem like items of the carved headdress from a feminine deity that Toek Tik recollects eradicating.
Cambodian officers say the items might match lacking parts from a statue on show at an American museum.
Eric Bourdonneau, an archaeologist and skilled on Khmer-era artifacts, mentioned the main points being provided now by Toek Tik are essential to reconstructing the historical past of that dynasty.
“As a result of, for many of the items,” he mentioned, “with out such eyewitness and firsthand (actually) accounts, it will be inconceivable to guess their provenance.”
Cambodian investigators recognized Toek Tik as a looting suspect a decade in the past primarily based on interviews with villagers. Evasive at first, he in the end got here to explain looting on a scale that appeared nearly unimaginable, the investigators mentioned.
“I used to be skeptical — I used to be very questioning at first,” mentioned Hab Contact, secretary of state on the Ministry of Tradition & Positive Arts, who has additionally spoken with a few of Toek Tik’s confederates.
“Now we consider him very a lot,” Contact continued, “as a result of his info has been an vital supply to us on Khmer historical past and his actions and his claims are consistent with the archaeological report.”
A skinny, unassuming man with wire-rim glasses and graying hair, Toek Tik instructed of his thievery, and his efforts to undo it, throughout 4 current interviews with The New York Instances by which he detailed his violent days as a looter and a conscripted Khmer Rouge soldier.
Throughout the interviews, carried out over video with the assistance of a translator and a lawyer for the ministry, Bradley J. Gordon, Toek Tik expressed regret for the killings he was concerned in. He mentioned he had participated below the specter of his personal loss of life and had in the end fled the Khmer Rouge to keep away from being concerned in additional bloodshed.
Cambodian officers have supplied assurances that Toek Tik is not going to be charged for his cultural heritage crimes given his cooperation within the looting investigation. Kids who dedicated crimes below the course of the Khmer Rouge haven’t been prosecuted.
Toek Tik mentioned he’s the eldest of 25 youngsters by a father who had many wives and that he grew up in a tiny village roughly 100 miles south of the Thai border.
As a boy, he mentioned, he watched his father, uncle and different elders sometimes take away statues and use them for barter. By 1972, as Cambodia fell into civil warfare, he was pressed into service by the Khmer Rouge, which might later destroy the nation’s financial system and kill its skilled lessons.
Initially used as a messenger between regional commanders, he mentioned that in 1977 he was pressured to homicide civilians. “I used to be only a child and I used to be following orders,” he mentioned.
Sickened and fearful, he mentioned he fled to Kulen Mountain, a holy web site to Cambodians. There he hid in caves and lived off rice and fish in an space teeming with monkeys, snakes and water buffalo.
“Do you need to know how one can face a tiger?” he requested. “You sit very nonetheless till he walks away.”
Whereas in hiding, he found historical bones below boulders and carvings on cave partitions. Following a path of graves, he got here throughout an unexplored temple that he later looted closely.
When Toek Tik emerged a 12 months later, he started to barter cattle till he got here to understand the worth of the relics he had discovered. He got down to promote them to Cambodian and Thai merchants, together with a Khmer Rouge official that the Cambodian analysis group refers to solely as Sleeping Large.
Cambodian officers have decided that Sleeping Large developed a relationship with Latchford, the Thailand-based collector and seller.
In 1990, Toek Tik instructed investigators, two Thai males with a map and orders from Sleeping Large requested for assist discovering a mountainous web site believed to include useful artifacts. Toek Tik and his crew in the end looted the positioning of bronzes, jars of buried gold and different objects. Among the objects later appeared in scholarly books co-authored by Latchford, startling Cambodian archaeologists who mentioned they’d no concept they existed.
The archaeologists say there’s proof the place is perhaps a beforehand unknown burial web site for Khmer royalty who reigned from the ninth to twelfth centuries.
Investigators say pictures not too long ago discovered on Latchford’s pc, which was turned over to Cambodian authorities by his daughter as half of a big return of artifacts, help Toek Tik’s account. One picture is of Toek Tik’s daughter’s home with a statue in entrance. Others present artifacts freshly unearthed.
By the Nineties, Toek Tik mentioned he had groups working all through the nation, responding to ideas from villagers who got here throughout relics and deploying metallic detectors and different instruments within the hunt.
Over time, he and his confederates developed code phrases to make use of as they communicated through walkie-talkie. “Going dancing” meant occurring a temple raid. Discovering “bricks” meant unearthing bronzes. “Crimson objects” referred to gold. He organized his individuals into three teams: the hunters-scouts, the gatherers-bearers, and the overseers, a bunch that he led.
However Toek Tik mentioned he stop looting within the late Nineties after being disturbed and saddened to seek out human bones below a statue he was excavating.
Cambodian officers have marveled at how Toek Tik mastered the logistics of temple looting, utilizing compass factors to divine the places of long-buried objects, bringing them to websites they didn’t know existed and talking with authority on the nuances of Khmer-era artwork.
As soon as an object was excavated and bought, Toek Tik mentioned, he didn’t spend loads of time monitoring it. So he was shocked, he mentioned, when researchers first confirmed him “Adoration and Glory (2003),” one in every of three lushly illustrated books by Latchford and a co-author, Emma Bunker.
The statue on the duvet, “Skanda and Shiva,” was one he recalled stealing from Prasat Krachap, a temple at Koh Ker.
He grew animated throughout one videotaped interview as he re-enacted how he had crawled into the temple’s hidden vestibule to take away it and one other statue, “Skanda on a Peacock,” which can be featured in Latchford’s e-book.
Throughout negotiations with the Latchford household final 12 months for the return of “Skanda and Shiva,” Cambodian officers organized an excavation on the web site and, with Toek Tik’s assist, found the arm and ear of Skanda, the kid depicted within the statue. These fragments have been later matched to the unique, which had been fitted with a stone alternative arm and ear.
Additionally they dug up a base thought to belong to “Skanda on a Peacock,” which had sat beside “Skanda and Shiva” in the identical antechamber.
Federal prosecutors in New York embraced the credibility of Toek Tik once they introduced in July that the household of the collector who had purchased “Skanda on a Peacock” had agreed to give up it for return to Cambodia. Figuring out Toek Tik in court docket papers solely by the pseudonym Looter-1, they defined why his eye-opening account of rampant theft has now been so broadly embraced as credible.
“The knowledge Looter-1 has supplied,” the criticism filed by prosecutors mentioned, “has been corroborated by, amongst different issues, archeological proof, pictures, and different people concerned in looting.”