In the fall of 2020, federal agents with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security hatched a plan.
They had just lost out on a big case when a disgraced antiquities dealer named Douglas Latchford died before he could stand trial. But the Englishman’s longtime collaborator, Emma C. Bunker, was still alive.
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The feds wanted to pay her a visit in the Mile High City, said J.P. Labbat, a former special agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations and lead investigator on the Latchford case.
Bunker had been on the periphery of the long-running investigation, with Latchford serving as the government’s main target. But over and over again, the Colorado scholar’s name popped up alongside the indicted art trafficker.
“The more you start reading Latchford’s emails, the mindset changes from, ‘she’s just a scholar, museum employee and educator’ to ‘she’s a scoundrel,’” said Labbat, who worked with Homeland Security’s Cultural Property, Art and Antiquities Program until his retirement last year.
The agents never had the chance to talk to her. Bunker died Feb. 21, 2021 — just six months after Latchford. Any potential federal case perished with her.
That revelation, which has not previously been reported, underscores Bunker’s tenuous final months of life as she told friends that she felt authorities were closing in. Labbat’s comments also, for the first time, shed light on the federal government’s plans to question one of Latchford’s closest accomplices.
“It almost feels (Bunker and Latchford) absconded in a way,” Labbat said.
Two of Bunker’s children did not respond to messages seeking comment Friday.
In 2019, a federal grand jury, in a case that sent shockwaves through the global art world, indicted Latchford on multiple counts of wire fraud, smuggling and conspiracy related to the trafficking of looted Cambodian relics. Prosecutors alleged Latchford made millions by directing the pillaging of thousand-year-old Khmer temples and selling the loot to prominent foreign collectors and museums — including the Denver Art Museum.
Latchford found an especially eager taker in the Mile High City — courtesy of close friend and confidant Bunker. The longtime Coloradan spent six decades with the museum, first as a trustee on the board of directors and then for years as a volunteer research consultant. In that role, she helped the museum assemble its 7,000-piece Asian art collection through her relationships with high-rolling dealers such as Latchford.
The pair then used the Denver Art Museum as a way station to boost the value and profile of looted works, The Denver Post found in a three-part investigation published in 2022.
Bunker was never charged with a crime, but she’s mentioned or referenced in at least five civil and criminal cases surrounding the sale of stolen antiquities.
Cambodian deputy Prime Minister Sok An, left, shakes hands with British Khmer art collector Douglas Latchford during a function at the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. Cambodia, on June 12, 2009. Latchford repatriated a number of Khmer antiquities during the event. (Photo by Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP via Getty Images)
“Emma just kept popping up”
After her death, those in the art world and across foreign governments wondered why Bunker had been spared from legal action. Many speculated that she had cut a deal with the U.S. government and had turned state’s evidence. Latchford himself suspected this at the end, even recording his conversations with Bunker out of paranoia.
LOOTED
Stolen relics, laundered art and a Colorado scholar’s role in the illicit antiquities trade
Labbat, though, said Bunker never had a deal with federal prosecutors. The agent never even tried to speak with her during the Latchford investigation, he said. That changed as investigators learned more about Latchford’s scheme.
“We weren’t looking at Emma,” he said. “Emma just kept popping up.”
As the evidence mounted, federal prosecutors and agents in 2020 decided it was “probably time to bring Emma a little closer into the crosshairs than on the periphery where she was,” Labbat said. “It seemed to us she had a lot to offer.”
Emails between Bunker and Latchford, some of which The Post reviewed and reported on in 2022, suggested Bunker knew certain pieces had dubious origins, Labbat said. Some of those relics ended up in the Denver Art Museum.
“You can presume she had a huge role to play in that happening — we just don’t know to what extent without talking to her or the museum,” the retired special agent said, adding that he never spoke with Denver museum officials after Bunker’s death.
A close friend of Bunker’s told The Post in 2022 that the scholar, after Latchford’s indictment, feared legal action might be coming.
“She wasn’t optimistic and hopeful,” the friend, Joyce Clark, told The Post then. “It was really just trying to protect herself.”
Bunker did meet with federal agents at least once, in June 2013, and sent unspecified documents to a federal investigator with the Homeland Security Investigations’ Commercial Fraud Group two years earlier, The Post previously reported. Those interactions came amid a U.S. government case against Sotheby’s auction house and Bunker’s role as an expert authenticator for a multimillion Cambodian statue.
The Bunker Gallery section of the Denver Art Museum’s Southeast Asian art galleries at the Martin Building is pictured on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022. Emma C. Bunker’s name was removed from the gallery in the wake of an investigation by The Denver Post. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Museum distances itself from Bunker
The Denver Art Museum, after The Post’s series ran, has been distancing itself from any associations with Bunker.
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In March 2023, the museum removed Bunker’s name from its Southeast Asian gallery, acknowledging for the first time that the longtime scholar had “participated with indicted art dealer Douglas Latchford to mislead the museum into acquiring looted and illegally trafficked works of art.” The museum also returned $185,000 that Bunker and her family had donated as part of a 2018 naming agreement.
For the past 16 months, the museum has been scouring Bunker’s donations, particularly the 50 antiquities she and her husband gifted their beloved institution.
Earlier this month, museum officials said they would be returning nearly a dozen relics from Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam that passed through Latchford or Bunker’s hands.
The Denver Art Museum still has two Latchford pieces in its collection, following the 2022 return of four looted Cambodian relics.
Both originate from Thailand — a ceramic vessel dating back more than 2,000 years and an 18th-century wooden cabinet that Latchford and Bunker jointly gifted the museum in 2006.
Museum officials contacted Thai and U.S. authorities in 2021 about these works and followed up last year to determine next steps, said Andy Sinclair, a museum spokesperson.
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