How a statue looted from a Cambodian temple revealed a vast smuggling network dealing in stolen cultural artefacts

via South China Morning Post, 18 June 2023: An excellent investigative piece on the Cambodian antiquities smuggling network, and how Sotheby’s tried to strong arm Tess Davis of The Antiquities Coalition to retract her research on the trade.

This was just the first of Sotheby’s’ numerous attempts to pressure Davis into retracting her research, which she revealed to me in a series of emails from Levine, who had previously been employed as a US attorney in the Southern District of New York prosecuting art fraud.

As they continued to lash out over the subsequent months, Davis contacted a colleague, Marc Masurovsky, an expert in Nazi-looted art.

In a video interview with Masurovsky in April, he told me he recalls offering his support at the time saying, “No offence, Tess, but no one who buys these antiquities is reading your research paper. This doesn’t make sense from a business point of view.
“If they [Sotheby’s] are going to invest in these amounts of legal resources to make you retract your paper, they must be trying to hide something.”

And he was right. Sotheby’s was attempting to deflect attention from the Duryodhana, but Davis and her publishers refused to retract the paper, and eventually Sotheby’s backed off.

Source: How a statue looted from a Cambodian temple revealed a vast smuggling network dealing in stolen cultural artefacts | South China Morning Post