In December 2022, Bradley Gordon ’95 stood in the National Museum of Cambodia looking at a statue of the Hindu deity Skanda astride a peacock. The 10th-century sculpture, carved during the Khmer Empire, was missing a chunk of its etched pedestal. Gordon watched as a sandstone fragment was placed into the gap — a perfect match.
“It was incredible,” Gordon recalled. “Cambodians think it’s one of the most beautiful sculptures in their history.”
The statue would not have been on display were it not for Gordon’s efforts. Through interviews with a former Khmer Rouge soldier and prolific looter, he’d discovered that the artifact had been stolen from a temple in northern Cambodia in 1997. It had later been sold for $1.5 million and wound up in the hands of a wealthy family in New York, Gordon learned. After he involved the U.S. Department of Justice, the owners agreed to relinquish the piece, and it returned home in March 2023.
For more than a decade, Gordon, a lawyer and consultant who lives in Phnom Penh, has made it his mission to bring back priceless historical artifacts pilfered from religious sites in Cambodia. Thousands were taken between the 1960s and 1990s — when the country endured civil war, mass killings, and political instability — ending up in private collections and major museums. By tracking down former looters, tracing the whereabouts of stolen antiquities, and negotiating with owners, Gordon has helped repatriate more than 300 objects that he estimates were collectively valued at $1 billion.
“I’m very interested in the idea of correcting a historical wrong that was so intense,” he said.
Gordon first traveled to Asia as an exchange student while an undergraduate at Brown University. After volunteering at a refugee camp in Singapore, he took a gap year to teach English and organize art workshops for refugees in Thailand. It was there that he met survivors of the Cambodian genocide.
“I was moved by it all, and it made me realize I needed to do something good with my life,” Gordon said.
He decided to become a lawyer in hopes of helping refugees trying to flee hardship. At Harvard Law School, he studied international and comparative law, joined the staff of the Harvard International Law Journal, and, as vice president of the Harvard International Law Society, led student delegations to Southeast Asia.
But after graduating, Gordon followed many of his peers to large firms in Manhattan, where he focused on U.S. securities law. He planned to work in the field for two years but ended up staying for a decade, eventually relocating to London and then Asia.
By 2007, Gordon was burned out. He quit his firm job and moved to Bangkok with his wife to open a contemporary art gallery. He wasn’t an artist but had been a collector for years, having worked in a gallery in New York City’s SoHo district during college and collected contemporary art from Asia since 2003.
A few months later, Gordon relocated to Phnom Penh to launch a private equity fund with a friend. When that endeavor and another investment venture failed to materialize, partly due to the Great Recession, he opened his own legal and business consulting firm, now known as Edenbridge Asia. Gordon began advising multinational corporations, law firms, nonprofits, and others on everything from acquisitions to real estate deals to film projects. (He and his wife briefly owned a contemporary art gallery in Phnom Penh, but they shuttered it due to a dearth of local collectors.)
One day, Gordon was visiting a famous temple when he overheard archaeologists lamenting that many sculptures had been stolen. He was intrigued. Then in 2012, he read an article by Tess Davis, now executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, about looting in Cambodia. Gordon wrote to Davis offering to help — by then he’d amassed a wealth of experience conducting investigations in Cambodia. She put him in touch with the Department of Justice.
The agency was attempting to seize the Duryodhana, a 10th-century statue of a Hindu warrior that Sotheby’s had put up for auction the previous year. Federal prosecutors argued that the sculpture, valued at more than $2 million, had been sold by British art dealer Douglas Latchford, who they claimed knew it had been looted from a Cambodian temple.
The DOJ hired Gordon to trace the stolen statue’s route. With a translator, he traveled to the countryside and found a man named Toek Tik, a former Khmer Rouge child soldier. When Gordon showed him a catalog of Cambodian artifacts that Latchford had published, he recognized many of the pieces. Gordon’s suspicions were piqued, but Toek Tik seemed too young to have participated in the Duryodhana theft.
Gordon has helped to return more than 300 artifacts to Cambodia.
In 2013, Sotheby’s, facing a forfeiture action from federal prosecutors, agreed to relinquish the statue. Gordon’s formal assignment had ended, but he felt his work was unfinished. He continued to visit Toek Tik for nearly a decade until his death in 2022, eventually learning that he’d spent 20 years as an artifacts looter, stealing more than a thousand pieces.
Toek Tik supplied hours of testimony and took Gordon to sites he’d looted — including one that contained the pedestal fragment from the statue of Skanda on a peacock. He also revealed that he’d been about 10 years old when he’d ridden on an ox cart wheeling the Duryodhana and other statues out of a temple in 1972. Toek Tik identified Latchford as his main buyer (via a broker named Sleeping Giant).
In 2018, the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts retained Gordon as its official lawyer to help repatriate antiquities. After three years of secret negotiations and Latchford’s death in 2020, the dealer’s family agreed to return hundreds of Khmer artifacts from his collection to Cambodia.
“It’s amazing when you work on something so hard and it gets a result like that, and you can see the impact it has on the people here,” Gordon said. “It’s hard not to be moved.”
Gordon was equally thrilled that the family agreed to release something else: tens of thousands of Latchford’s emails and other records that held clues to the locations of other stolen objects. Now, Gordon and nine others from his firm, collaborating with more than 30 archaeologists and other experts, are compiling the evidence the government needs to bring these pieces home. They’ve created a database of 2,300 likely stolen items now in museums and are tracking more than a thousand in private collections.
Gordon and his team are continuing to travel the country to record testimony from former looters, map the whereabouts of stolen pieces, and negotiate with individual collectors and institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He and his firm have worked pro bono since 2013. Financially, that’s been a challenge, he said.
Yet, Gordon doesn’t plan to give it up anytime soon. “It’s hard to say it’s not an obsession,” he said. “It’s difficult to just stop and walk away.”