For the most part, books about art crimes don’t involve a lot of bloodshed. Such stories seem better suited to an “Ocean’s Eleven” spin: eccentric, chaotic, even a little whimsical. But in The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy, reporter Matthew Campbell tells a very different sort of tale.

The Cambodian Civil War was a brutal and bloody conflict that left untold numbers of civilians dead or suffering under dictator Pol Pot’s regime. To add insult to injury, while citizens were dying of starvation or being shot in the killing fields, wealthy foreigners were instigating a roaring trade in looted antiquities stolen from some of Cambodia’s most revered sites:

“The conflict had sparked an explosion in looting, particularly the largest, most impressive works [from ancient Khmer temples] — near life-size statues whose theft might have attracted too much attention in peacetime…Some were moved by temple robbers who took advantage of the chaos, [while others] were almost certainly being stolen by the warring forces fighting for control.”

Campbell likens these thefts and the pieces’ subsequent sales to wealthy foreigners to the Lincoln Memorial “adorn[ing] the courtyard of a museum in Jakarta…Even worse, clandestine excavations, carried out by gangs of thieves using picks, shovels, and sometimes dynamite, routinely destroyed irreplaceable works.”

If the looters were at least capitalizing on a lucrative market in order to survive under a punishing dictatorship where even foraging for food was illegal, the same cannot be said about the Westerners who brokered further sales of the antiquities. Douglas Latchford, a British expatriate living in Thailand, quickly became an industry heavyweight, having access to teams of middlemen who would remove statuary and other masonry from sacred Khmer sites (including Angkor Wat and its environs) and ship it all to him.

Although Latchford generally didn’t feel the need to justify his decades-long plundering of Cambodia’s cultural and religious heritage, even his own arguments tended to feel garbled and maudlin. At one point, he claimed Buddhist priests told him that “in a previous life I had been Khmer, and that what I collect had once belonged to me.” (Using that same logic, readers might wonder whether they were millionaires in a previous life and, if so, are entitled to similar remuneration in this one.)

Of course, Latchford knew he was in tricky legal territory; the objects he was profiting from had been taken from Cambodia illegally by many measures. He often employed fraudulent testimonials and downright lies to convince his buyers, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that an item’s provenance was sound. For their part, those purchasing the obviously important artifacts tended not to ask too many questions, if any at all.

While the United Nations provided a framework under which plundered items could be repatriated, enforcement fell to the individual countries involved: Both the country in possession of the goods and the one they’d been swiped from needed to be willing to right the wrong. Further, in the United States, writes Campbell:

“the government would need to show where and when the statue was looted, and to demonstrate that Cambodian law had made such an act illegal at the time.”

Given that many of these artifacts were pilfered during the civil war, such a demonstration would prove difficult. Nevertheless, a cadre of improbable allies — a former looter turned state’s witness; a Denver widow who falsified provenances while signing her emails “Giggles and more giggles”; and an archaeologist who used superimposed images to pinpoint stolen items’ original homes — was increasingly willing to take on the challenge.  

This cast of unlikely characters helps this tale of “war, obsession, and a global art conspiracy” more than live up to its subtitle. Fans of true crime, history, and stranger-than-fiction, real-life folks will enjoy every page.

Mariko Hewer is a freelance editor and writer, as well as a nursery-school teacher. She is passionate about good books, good food, and good company.