The Cambodian government has formally requested records from the family of the late Emma C. Bunker, a former Denver Art Museum consultant who helped museums around the world acquire looted Southeast Asian antiquities.
Bradley Gordon, an American attorney who serves as a legal adviser to the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, sent an email to Bunker’s son, Lambert, on Nov. 21 requesting Bunker’s “extensive notebooks concerning Cambodia” and other archival materials in the family’s possession.
Gordon also asked for photographs of Cambodian statues, noting that Bunker arranged the photography for many of the images used in the publications she co-wrote with disgraced collector and dealer Douglas Latchford.
“We are very eager to consult these materials as we continue our search for several important statues originating from the country,” Gordon wrote in the email, which he provided to The Denver Post.
The Bunker family, he said in an interview, has not responded.
Gordon called the documents a “missing roadmap,” saying their contents could mark “a significant turning point in our investigation.”
“These notebooks could be a crucial piece of our investigative work as we continue to unravel what we consider one of the largest art crimes in history,” he said.
Looted: Stolen relics, laundered art and a Colorado scholar’s role in the illicit antiquities trade
The Cambodian government, for years, has been on a global hunt to reclaim its looted heritage. Many of the country’s ancient temples were plundered during a genocide in the 1970s and subsequent civil war. Looters took advantage of the upheaval to sneak out priceless statues, which ended up in the collections of prominent museums around the world, including the Denver Art Museum.
Authorities pegged the main trafficker as Latchford, a British dealer who amassed one of the world’s largest private collections of Khmer artifacts. A federal grand jury in New York indicted him in 2019 on charges related to trafficking illicit antiquities, but he died before he could stand trial.
Latchford found an especially eager taker in the Denver Art Museum due to his longtime friendship with Bunker, The Post found in a three-part investigation in 2022. The pair wrote three books together about Khmer art — works that are now used not for their scholarship but as treasure maps for investigators and governments scouring for stolen works.
Bunker helped Latchford use the Denver museum as a way station for looted art, The Post found. She leveraged her cachet as a respected scholar to vouch for his collection and helped Latchford forge provenance — or ownership — documents to facilitate his high-priced sales. Bunker, who died in 2021, was never charged in connection with the scheme, though federal investigators were zeroing in on her involvement before her death, The Post reported last year.
The Denver Art Museum, following The Post’s reporting, has distanced itself from Bunker. In 2023, museum leadership removed Bunker’s name from its Southeast Asian gallery wall and returned a six-figure donation to her family.
The museum also turned over multiple pieces Bunker donated to its collection to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security last year to be returned to Southeast Asian countries.
One of Emma Bunker’s daughters, also named Emma, said in an interview that she’s not sure where her mother’s notebooks are or if they’re even still in the family’s possession. She said she last saw them 20 years ago and is not in touch with her siblings.
But, Bunker added, her family should help the Cambodians if they can.
“What good does it do us to keep the notebooks?” she said. “It would be nice to get things where they belong.”
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