Museum officials, in a statement posted to its website last week, said it proactively contacted federal authorities in January with a list of pieces linked to Doris and Nancy Wiener, a mother-daughter tandem who for decades operated a prominent gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The sculptures — gifted to the museum between 1980 and 2008 — include three bronze Cambodian pieces from the 12th and 13th centuries, a 14th-century bronze seated Buddha from what is now Myanmar, and a 600-year-old bronze, silver and turquoise depiction of Padmasambhava, the legendary Indian Buddhist mystic, from Tibet.

RELATED: Looted: Stolen relics, laundered art and a Colorado scholar’s role in the illicit antiquities trade

The museum deaccessioned — or formally removed — the artifacts in July from its collection and returned them to U.S. officials for their eventual repatriation.

The returns come as the Denver Art Museum faces a reckoning over its past collection habits — and the shady dealers who helped fill its glass cases.

Authorities have said Doris Wiener, who died in 2011, took “shopping trips” to South Asia to select stolen antiquities that would later be smuggled into New York. She was a generous benefactor to some of the country’s most prestigious art museums, including the Norton Simon Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 2016, during New York’s famed Asia Week, authorities raided the Wiener gallery, seizing prized relics they said were stolen from Southeast Asian temples. Nancy Wiener was later arrested and charged with buying and selling millions of dollars worth of looted relics from the Middle East and Asia.

She pleaded guilty in 2021 to charges of conspiracy and possession of stolen property. In remarks before a New York court, Wiener admitted to buying plundered antiquities and fabricating provenance documents, which trace a piece’s ownership history.

“For decades I conducted business in a market where buying and selling antiquities with vague or even no provenance was the norm,” the gallery owner said, according to court transcripts. “Obfuscation and silence were accepted responses to questions concerning the source from which an object had been obtained. In short, it was a conspiracy of the willing.”

Nancy Wiener, who did not respond to inquiries Tuesday, worked closely with another disgraced collector, Douglas Latchford. The Bangkok-based businessman sold numerous stolen pieces to the New York gallery owner, authorities said. He was indicted in 2020 on charges related to trafficking stolen antiquities but died before he could stand trial.

The New York case also illuminated the role of a Colorado scholar in Latchford’s decades-long scheme. Emma C. Bunker, a longtime Denver Art Museum trustee and research consultant, provided Wiener with one of the false provenances cited in the gallery owner’s guilty plea.

Bunker, who died in 2021, served as Latchford’s confidant and respected scholarly voice as he marketed his wares for big money on the international art market. Her connections allowed Latchford to use the Denver Art Museum as a laundromat for looted relics, The Post found in a three-part investigation published last year.

The July returns are not the first time the Denver Art Museum has given back artworks from the Wieners.

Museum officials in 2016 handed back a 10th-century sandstone sculpture — the “Torso of Rama” — to Cambodia after the Southeast Asian nation pressed for its return. The museum acquired the piece in 1986 from the Wiener Gallery. The Cambodians have since said the object originally came from Latchford.

Wiener has been cooperating with law enforcement as they scour the country for other stolen objects.

In October, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office repatriated five antiquities to India that Wiener had trafficked. The following month, the DA’s office returned to Cambodia a seventh-century sandstone statue of a standing Vishnu that had been broken off and looted at the direction of Doris Wiener.

The Denver Art Museum has been steadily returning artifacts to their countries of origin in recent years amid a rapidly changing landscape in the art world.

The museum last summer relinquished four looted Cambodian statues associated with Bunker and Latchford after the U.S. government moved to seize them. In October, the museum handed back 22 pieces connected to another disgraced former New York gallery owner, Subhash Kapoor.

Meanwhile, federal investigators continue to probe the Denver museum’s Southeast Asian art collection, many of which Bunker donated to the museum. Government officials from Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam this spring pressed the museum for the return of their cultural heritage.

Denver Art Museum leaders previously said they would return a host of items that Bunker had donated as part of a now-scrapped agreement that had put her family’s name on the museum’s Southeast Asian wing.

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

Government officials from three Southeast Asian nations say the Denver Art Museum continues to house antiquities stolen from their countries’ ancient temples and heritage sites.

Representatives from Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam sent letters to the museum, via U.S. investigators, in May and June, saying the prized relics had no legal export permits to lawfully leave their countries. The museum, they said, did not respond.

“There is a taint on these cultural properties at the Denver Art Museum,” Phoeurng Sackona, Cambodia’s minister of culture and fine arts, wrote in a June letter obtained by The Denver Post.

The countries are seeking the return of eight pieces in all — including six donated to the museum by Emma C. Bunker, a former Denver Art Museum trustee and research consultant. In December, The Post published a three-part investigation into Bunker’s critical role in a decades-long antiquities trafficking operation that implicated some of the world’s top museums and private collectors.

Bunker’s close relationship with one disgraced dealer, the late Douglas Latchford, spurred the Denver Art Museum to acquire a host of looted Southeast Asian relics — some of which the museum has returned in recent years.

After The Post’s series, museum officials removed Bunker’s name from a gallery wall and returned $185,000 that she and her family had donated as part of a 2018 naming agreement. The museum also shuttered an Asian art acquisition fund dedicated in Bunker’s honor after her death in 2021.

Denver’s museum, though, still holds more than 200 pieces from Bunker’s collection — and host countries are clamoring for their return. The antiquities include a 2,000-year-old green Vietnamese dagger from the ancient Dong Son culture, a bronze 12th-century Buddha from Thailand and multiple 12th-century Khmer bronzes, among others.

Bunker in 2016 donated these six pieces to the museum, along with three others, as part of the naming agreement that would cement her legacy on the museum’s Southeast Asian gallery wing for half a century.

She never faced criminal charges, but Bunker is named or referenced in five civil and criminal cases related to illicit antiquities.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been investigating the origins of the Southeast Asian pieces since last year.

The museum in March formally deaccessioned — or removed from its collection — five of the donated pieces, Kristy Bassuener, a Denver Art Museum spokesperson, said in an email. The museum is working with the U.S. government to ensure their return, she said.

“The museum has cooperated with the U.S. government, including producing all requested materials, and will continue to do so as it responds to the government’s inquiries in its ongoing work to ensure the integrity of its collections,” Bassuener said.

“A cause of serious concern”

Thailand has been targeting a cache of stolen bronze statues — known as the “Prakhon Chai” horde — which were unearthed in the 1960s from a secret vault near the Cambodian border. Villagers told The Post last year that they sold these rare finds to Latchford for huge sums. Bunker then marketed these valuable relics in articles to bolster their value.

Two of the so-called “Prakhon Chai” statues sit in the Denver Art Museum, while dozens of others remain in the collections of prominent American galleries from New York to San Fransisco. The U.S. government is investigating those as well.

“These donations to the Denver Art Museum are a cause of serious concern as Thailand has not issued any permits or permissions to Ms. Bunker for the exportation of Thai cultural heritage,” Phnombootra Chandrajoti, director general of Thailand’s Fine Arts Department, wrote in an April letter. “Ms. Bunker was well known among academics for her association with individuals responsible for significant looting throughout Southeast Asia.”

For five of the six donations, Bunker was unable to provide the museum any provenance — or ownership — information, according to museum donation documents, which were obtained by The Post. Bunker said she purchased the sixth piece in 2012 from Jonathan Tucker, a London art dealer and known Latchford associate. Tucker told the museum he acquired the item — a 19th-century gilded bronze Buddha — from a private English collection. He provided no contact information or name.

The dagger, appraised at $8,000, “is one of the finest pieces of its kind,” according to the museum documents. Minted between 300 BCE and 200 CE, the 9-inch-tall dagger sports a standing human figure on its handle, a typical feature of Dong Son bronze weaponry. Bunker originally loaned the piece in 2005 to the Denver museum before making it part of her gift.

“It will be a nice addition to our small Vietnam collection,” museum officials wrote.

Small, portable objects like this one, officials noted, are considered “very low risk for repatriation claims.”

The museum also indicated that the dagger, along with two other donated pieces, previously had been published in Bunker and Latchford’s books. The dagger appeared in their 2004 work “Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art,” attributed to a “private collection.”

Publishing looted pieces in books or articles is a common laundering practice, investigators say. Bunker and Latchford’s three books gave stolen pieces an air of legitimacy, experts say, and increased their value. Latchford, with Bunker’s help, used loans and gifts to the Denver Art Museum in order to market his pieces for sale to wealthy collectors, The Post previously reported.

Experts in the illicit antiquities trade say objects with no provenance — such as Bunker’s donations — also represent enormous red flags, especially when they come from war-torn countries. Cambodia, in particular, suffered from widespread looting during the genocidal Khmer Rouge reign in the 1970s and subsequent civil war.

The region’s history “should have heightened the museum’s scrutiny of its provenance,” said Angela Chiu, an independent art expert who studies the Asian antiquities trade. Instead, officials “assembled a hash of excuses to justify the acceptance.”

Thailand’s cultural patrimony laws date back to 1926, meaning any piece without an export permit cannot legally leave the country. Cambodia never issued permits allowing cultural heritage to be shipped abroad.

“If it’s not there, you don’t have complete provenance,” said David Keller, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, the federal agency leading the Thailand probe. It’s been difficult, he said, getting museums to acknowledge that pieces that may have been part of their collection for a long time could have problems with ownership.

“What is rightfully ours”

Museums for decades burnished their collections without much care for provenance. That began to change after a 1970 UNESCO convention designed to combat the illegal trade in cultural items.

The Denver Art Museum, though, acquired Bunker’s objects well after museums had adopted more stringent acquisition policies. And the donations came just three years after Bunker’s name surfaced in a New York civil case surrounding the auction of a multimillion-dollar stolen Cambodian statue.

“They’re obviously not following proper ethical standards,” said Bradley J. Gordon, an American attorney leading Cambodia’s efforts to reclaim its plundered history. “You really have to question what was the mindset of the management and board of trustees at that time.”

The Denver Art Museum did not respond to questions about why the museum acquired antiquities with no provenance, only saying acquisition and loan practices have “evolved and improved over the last several decades.”

Cambodia has been especially vocal as it seeks the return of its cultural heritage from collections around the world. Officials have been pressing New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for dozens of looted objects in its care and scouring the globe for other national treasures. This month, Australia’s national gallery returned three thousand-year-old statues to the Southeast Asian nation.

“The stolen Cambodian objects at the Denver Art Museum are not the result of an isolated incident,” Sackona, the Cambodian official, wrote in the letter. “Many other artifacts were taken from Cambodia without permission over a number of decades.

“But first we must be given back what is rightfully ours.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

Now the U.S. government says his money is tainted — and they want it back.

Federal prosecutors, in a landmark civil action on Thursday, announced Latchford’s daughter agreed to return $12 million in proceeds her father garnered from selling plundered artifacts.

The deal, spearheaded by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and Homeland Security Investigations, represents the largest-ever forfeiture of money from the sale of stolen antiquities, the agencies said in a news release.

RELATED: Looted: Stolen relics, laundered art and a Colorado scholar’s role in the illicit antiquities trade

“For years, Douglas Latchford made millions from selling looted antiquities in the U.S. art market, stashing his ill-gotten gains offshore,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “This historic forfeiture action and settlement shows that we will be relentless in following the money wherever it leads to fight the illicit trade in cultural patrimony.”

Latchford’s daughter, Julia Copleston, will also relinquish a seventh-century bronze Vietnamese statue depicting the four-armed goddess Durga. Prosecutors allege the statue was stolen from the Southeast Asian nation in 2008 or 2009; Latchford then purchased it using “tainted funds,” authorities said.

The Bangkok-based businessman’s alleged exploits were suspected for years, but only began to unravel during a series of civil and criminal cases brought by American prosecutors in the early 2010s. Those investigations culminated in a much-publicized indictment by a federal grand jury in 2019, accusing Latchford of perpetrating a decades-long smuggling scheme to sell looted works.

But Latchford didn’t do it alone. For years, he had the help of a late Colorado art scholar, Emma C. Bunker, who vouched for and promoted his stolen relics, The Denver Post found in a three-part investigation last year. A longtime museum trustee and consultant, Bunker helped Latchford use the Denver Art Museum as a laundromat for looted Southeast Asian antiquities, The Post reported.

After the series published, the Denver Art Museum distanced itself from Bunker, removing her name from a gallery wall and announcing the return of nearly $200,000 in donations from the family. The museum, which returned four Latchford pieces to Cambodia last year, has removed all Bunker donations from its Southeast Asian wing as the Department of Justice probes their histories.

The criminal case against Latchford died when he did in 2020. But prosecutors have continued to go after his assets — including artworks and money stored in offshore bank accounts located in friendly tax havens.

Copleston inherited scores of priceless Khmer antiquities after her father’s death, and has worked with authorities in the United States and Cambodia to return them to their ancestral homeland.

She did not oppose the forfeiture, and the agreement did not constitute an admission of liability or guilt on her part, according to the stipulation and order of settlement.

An adviser to Copleston told Bloomberg that she was aware even before her father died that authorities would seek assets from his estate.

“The Cambodian campaign for the restitution of their heritage is the right resolution to a difficult history,” Copleston told the news agency in a statement. “It is appropriate that my father’s records have been used by the Cambodian Minister for Culture and Fine Arts, and her team, to shed light on the activities of the very many collectors, dealers and institutions which have been involved with the trade.”

The Durga

Bunker’s name does not appear in the 46-page forfeiture complaint. But prosecutors, much as they’ve done in previous cases involving Latchford’s dealings, hint at her role in the alleged scheme.

In January 2009, Latchford emailed an unnamed art dealer a photograph of the Durga lying on its back. The 6-foot-tall bronze statue was covered in dirt and minerals — clear signs of recent excavation and that the piece likely was looted, authorities said.

“Confidential: for your eyes only – not to be shown to anybody,” Latchford told the art dealer. He and a “scholar he worked with” believed the piece came from the late seventh century, prosecutors outlined in the complaint.

Bunker, in prior criminal and civil cases, was referred to as “the scholar.”

Latchford paid $750,000 for the relic, authorities said.

In 2011, the Bangkok-based art collector published the Durga in a book — “Khmer Bronzes: New Interpretations of the Past.” His co-author of that book, along with two others: Emma C. Bunker.

The book’s entry for the Durga claimed it to be “one of the earliest known Southeast Asian bronze images cast by (the) lost wax (casting technique) with an iron armature supporting the core.”

“Years, decades even, to unravel”

Publishing looted antiquities in books is a common laundering practice, cultural heritage experts and investigators in the illicit art trade say. The act of featuring items in glossy pages gives them a veneer of legitimacy, experts say, and boosts their value in private sales.

Bunker and Latchford’s names are on three books, though the Colorado scholar acknowledged in private emails that she actually wrote them. Latchford supplied many of the pieces that appeared in those books — many of which had never been seen before.

Cambodian officials have said these books represent the lost culture of their country, which was ravaged by looting during decades of genocide and civil war.

Prosecutions for cultural property were historically few and far between. But these actions have stepped up recently, as authorities in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and Homeland Security Investigations turn complex, years-long investigations, uncovering sprawling trafficking networks from Southeast Asia to the Middle East and southern Europe.

“I hope this case encourages other departments to go after this kind of malfeasance,” said Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

And the impacts of Latchford’s dealings continue to be felt as Cambodian officials traverse the world in search of their lost history.

“It took him decades to build up his collection of illicit antiquities,” Thompson said. “It could take years, decades even, to unravel it.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

In January 2018, Emma C. Bunker and the Denver Art Museum reached an agreement — one that would etch the longtime donor and board member’s name on the institution’s walls for half a century to come.

The esteemed scholar, who helped the Denver museum build its Asian art collection over six decades, would donate $125,000 to the museum’s Vision 2021 Capital Campaign, a project to renovate the north building and expand the museum campus. Two of her children would chip in another $60,000 combined.

In return, the Denver Art Museum agreed to put the Bunker name in three-dimensional lettering on a gallery wall, displayed in a prominent location until 2071.

But five years to the day after Bunker put pen to paper on a deal that would cement her legacy in the Mile High City for decades to come, the museum notified the Colorado attorney general that it planned to remove her name from the wall in the Martin Building and give back all the money.

The museum’s attorney, in a Jan. 25 letter obtained this week by The Denver Post, wrote that the institution could no longer abide by the naming agreement due to mounting evidence that its respected donor — who died in 2021 — aided a criminal enterprise.

The letter was sent nearly two months after the publication of a yearlong investigation by The Post that found Bunker helped her close friend and collaborator, Douglas Latchford, sell and loan looted Cambodian relics across the globe.

“In light of Bunker’s long involvement with Latchford, connection to pieces with false provenance, documents indicating that she intentionally provided false provenance, and related issues, the museum has determined that it is no longer willing to abide by the (naming agreement),” the museum’s lawyer, Heidi S. Glance, wrote in the letter.

RELATED: Looted: Stolen relics, laundered art and a Colorado scholar’s role in the illicit antiquities trade

Now, the Bunker name has come down, Denver Art Museum officials confirmed Thursday. The six-figure donation was returned to her estate and children.

“This action, approved by the museum’s Board of Trustees, follows evidence that former museum trustee and volunteer, Emma Bunker, participated with indicted art dealer Douglas Latchford to mislead the museum into acquiring looted and illegally trafficked works of art,” the museum said in a statement released Thursday.

Along with the naming agreement, Bunker also donated nine artworks to her beloved museum, pieces she promised had “not been imported or exported into or from any country contrary to its laws.” At least six of those works are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. The museum wants to give back the rest, either to their countries of origin or to the Bunker family.

All told, the removal of Bunker’s name and monetary return represents the most significant action taken by the Denver Art Museum since The Post’s investigation outlined the scholar’s integral role in an international art looting scandal.

“We hope this marks a turning point for the Denver Art Museum,” Bradley J. Gordon, a lawyer spearheading Cambodia’s global quest to reclaim its heritage, said Wednesday. “It starts to recognize the terrible harm Emma Bunker and Douglas Latchford did to an entire nation.”

Three of Bunker’s children did not respond to requests for comment or declined to speak to a reporter Wednesday.

A scholar’s role examined

The Post’s series found Bunker was hardly a passive player in Latchford’s scheme to sell stolen Cambodian relics for huge profits.

The Bangkok-based collector and dealer over the years accumulated one of the world’s largest private collections of Khmer antiquities — many of which, authorities say, were plundered during Cambodia’s bloody civil war by bands of Khmer Rouge soldiers. Latchford, meanwhile, sold these thousand-year-old artifacts to wealthy foreign collectors and prominent museums such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And he couldn’t have done it without his trusted confidant in Denver, The Post’s reporting found.

Emails taken from Latchford’s computer — and shared with The Post — show Bunker overtly discussing how to forge signatures on documents needed to transport looted works. She co-authored three books on Khmer art that experts say were necessary for Latchford to legitimize and move his plundered pieces around the globe, and she repeatedly vouched for falsified provenances — antiquities’ ownership history.

Bunker’s association with the Denver Art Museum also allowed Latchford to use the Mile High City museum as a way station for these priceless Southeast Asian relics — serving to sanitize them for sale to future buyers, The Post found. Latchford sold, loaned and gifted 14 pieces to the museum, deals that Bunker shepherded along. Only the Met had more Latchford pieces in its collection than Denver.

The Colorado scholar, who died at age 90, is named or referenced in five civil and criminal cases related to trafficking stolen art, though she never was charged with a crime. A federal grand jury in New York indicted Latchford in 2019, accusing him of pilfering Cambodia’s cultural heritage. He died in 2020 before he could stand trial.

The Denver Art Museum, through last year, defended its association with Bunker and her decades of financial and scholarly contributions, despite growing evidence that she collaborated in Latchford’s illicit dealings.

Chasing Aphrodite, a blog covering the movement of stolen antiquities, detailed Bunker’s questionable involvement with several pieces at Denver’s museum in 2012. The New York Times identified Bunker in 2017 as a “co-conspirator” in a scheme to doctor provenances — or ownership histories — to allow stolen Cambodia antiquities to be sold on the open market.

Public court documents referencing Bunker’s role in Latchford’s operation were available a decade ago, repeatedly mentioning a “Colorado scholar.”

Only now is the museum reckoning with Bunker’s past.

The museum’s attorney, in the January letter, cited “documentary evidence and sworn testimony of which the museum has recently become aware suggests that Bunker facilitated Latchford’s illegal activities by providing false provenances for, and introducing him to the museum for the acquisition, assumption on loan, and display of, various artworks involved in the DOJ Investigation.”

“The museum has learned that before Bunker died in 2021, her role in Latchford’s criminal activities was part of the DOJ investigation, which continues to focus on the provenance of several Asian antiquities she donated to the museum,” Glance wrote.

The museum also intends to rid itself of the pieces that Bunker agreed to donate in 2017, including six Cambodian bronzes. Six of the nine items the scholar gave the museum are under federal investigation, while five objects not associated with the gift agreement were also shared with federal investigators. The museum said it will either return the artworks to their country of origin or to the Bunker family, pending the DOJ probe.

The Attorney General’s Office was notified since it is charged with overseeing the state’s nonprofits and charitable organizations.

After The Post’s series, the museum has been slowly distancing itself from Bunker’s association.

Officials in December removed from the museum’s website an Asian art acquisition fund named in Bunker’s honor, pledging to use some of that money for provenance research.

The museum also said it would be making it a “top priority” to probe items in the collection associated with Bunker. The Denver Art Museum received 221 pieces from the Bunker family over the years, with 34 still on display as of December.

Around 40 of these objects are considered antiquities and “remain a continuing focus of the museum’s provenance research,” a museum spokesperson, Andy Sinclair, wrote in an email Thursday.

“A pretty big deal”

Removing a donor’s name from a wall or building is uncommon, though there are a few recent examples.

Art museums in the U.S. and Europe in the last few years have scrubbed mentions of the Sackler family, the OxyContin makers accused of launching the opioid crisis.

But giving back nearly $200,000 rarely happens in the museum world. Gary Vikan, the former director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, said he didn’t do that once in 20 years at the helm.

“It’s hard to imagine a circumstance when that would happen,” he said. “That’s a pretty big deal.”

Gordon, meanwhile, said Cambodia is still waiting for the Denver Art Museum and Bunker’s family to share records and photographs of Khmer antiquities as his team continues its hunt.

“This information could significantly speed up the massive task we have in front of us to track down Cambodia’s stolen national treasures, scattered across the globe,” he said.

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

Museum officials, in a statement posted to the institution’s website last week, also said they will use money from an acquisition fund launched after Bunker’s death last year to supplement ongoing work examining the ownership history of objects in the museum’s Asian art collection.

That fund raised $25,000 from family and friends and was initially created to help the museum purchase pieces for its galleries. After publication of The Post’s series, the museum removed the fund’s donation page from its website.

“The wide-ranging impact of the Bunker family is reflected in their name being present in many ways in our collections,” Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum, said in the statement. “This is not a history that can or should be easily erased. It needs to be thoroughly researched and clearly and publicly explained.”

The museum said it is “deeply troubled” by documents included in The Post’s stories about Bunker and her work with Douglas Latchford — many of which had been publicly available. The museum’s board of trustees will now determine the “best path forward in dealing with the Bunker Gallery in its Asian collection.”

“In the decades since the Latchford/Bunker antiquities arrived at the Denver Art Museum, acquisition and loan practices across the museum field, including those at the DAM, have evolved and improved,” museum officials said in their statement.

Representatives of the Denver Art Museum did not respond to an interview request from The Post on Monday.

The museum’s first public statement on the Bunker controversy came two days after The Post’s editorial board called for the institution’s top brass to address the newspaper’s “Looted” series and to remove Bunker’s name from museum exhibits.

The Post found that Bunker spent years assisting Latchford, one of the world’s foremost antiquities collectors and dealers, as he peddled stolen antiquities around the world. A federal grand jury in 2019 indicted Latchford on a host of charges related to smuggling stolen art into the United States. He died in 2020 before he could stand trial.

The scholar, who spent six decades affiliated with the Denver Art Museum, helped Latchford falsify provenance documents — or ownership history — for relics known to be pillaged from Cambodia’s ancient temples, The Post found.

She’s named or referenced in five civil and criminal cases related to illicit antiquities dealings — though she never was charged or sued herself.

And it was her connections in Denver that allowed Latchford to use the Mile High City’s esteemed institution as a way station for looted goods. The Bangkok dealer sold, loaned or gifted more than a dozen pieces to the Denver Art Museum and used Bunker’s scholarship to market those pieces in future sales.

The museum this year gave back four Cambodian relics connected to Latchford and Bunker after federal authorities moved to seize them.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is currently investigating three pieces from Thailand that remain in the museum’s collection — including one that had been donated by Bunker.

As the headline suggests, Tabachnik uncovered a network of plunder that, over decades, robbed Southeast Asians of a significant part of their art, heritage, and culture.

And at the center of the work was a Denver woman known as “The Scholar,” who is accused of having worked hand-in-hand with an art dealer to hide the means of ill-gotten statutes presenting auction houses, private buyers and museums with the needed sheen of legitimacy.

We have heard rumors that the Denver Art Museum is among the worst institutions in America in terms of their willingness to accept plundered and looted art. But The Post’s investigation was the first time hard evidence of such bad behavior has been laid out so cleanly and so irrefutably.

We are dismayed that Christoph Heinrich, the director of the Denver Art Museum, has not publicly responded to the scandal. We worry the institution is hoping the storm will blow over without having to address the fact that not only is the museum housing artwork that was likely smuggled into the U.S. by art dealer Douglas Latchford and then legitimized by The Scholar Emma C. Bunker, but the Denver Art Museum’s complicity also helped give these two people legitimacy in the eyes of other buyers.

“The Denver Art Museum became one of Latchford’s primary landing spots as he sought to burnish his reputation,” The Post’s investigation found. “The institution housed more looted pieces of his than any other collection aside from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ‘Pandora Papers’ investigation found last year.

“All told, the Denver museum spent more than a half-million dollars on Latchford pieces, and he loaned, gifted or sold the museum more than a dozen ancient artifacts — deals made possible and shepherded along by Bunker, court records and previously unreported emails show.”

This is not a scandal that Heinrich can ignore.

He should immediately commit to removing Bunker’s name from exhibits and pledge to review the acquisition process of art tied to Latchford and Bunker. The Denver Art Museum received much praise in recent years for returning four looted statues to Cambodia.

But the action rings hollow now that we know Cambodian officials have requested Denver Art Museum records for any pieces that came from Latchford and Bunker and that the museum has not responded to the request after 18 months.

Only after the investigation was complete has the museum taken steps to distance itself from Bunker, whose name appears on The Bunker Gallery section of the Denver Art Museum’s Southeast Asian gallery.

Because both Latchford and Bunker died before the investigations and potential prosecution of their criminal actions could be completed, the onus now rests on the museums to complete their own survey of art.

Museum officials responded via e-mail to questions from The Denver Post and indicated that they have not cooperated with officials in Cambodia directly on other objects outside of the four already returned because the museum has provided “all records to the DOJ regarding the returned pieces.”

But that is not the information that is needed – there are other pieces in question.

The Post reported that “Latchford loaned, gifted or sold 14 pieces to Denver’s museum between 1999 and 2011, according to museum records. They included the four relics returned to Cambodia in August and two objects from Thailand — a neolithic vessel and cabinet — that remain in the museum’s collection.”

There is much more to write about the Looted investigation than we can cover here.

If all of this seems insignificant amid larger travesties in a world with billions of people, consider the great difficulty and barriers preventing Cambodians from visiting the United States to see these exquisite relics from their own culture and history.

We were struck hard by a quote from Hab Touch, the deputy director of Cambodia’s National Museum, that was included in a 495-page book written by Latchford and Bunker documenting many of the art that had passed through their hands.

“The first time I saw the photographs of Khmer sculptures collected by Emma and Douglas for this book, I realized that while I work with Khmer art every day, I had only been familiar with a small proportion of what exists,” wrote Touch.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

The art museum last year launched the “Emma Cadwalader Bunker Asian Art Acquisition Fund” to honor the Colorado woman who spent decades helping the museum boost its collections.

But The Post’s investigation, published online Thursday, found that Bunker used her scholarship and writings to help an accused art smuggler, Douglas Latchford, sell and loan artwork that had been looted from Cambodia’s ancient temples. Over the past decade, Bunker — who died last year — was referred to or mentioned in five civil and criminal cases surrounding the sale of illicit antiquities — though she was never charged or sued herself.

Members of the public could still donate to the fund this week. But by Friday morning, the link to the Bunker fund’s donation page instead showed visitors a “Page Not Found” message.

“The fund was established at the request of friends of Emma Bunker who wanted to honor her at the time of her passing,” the museum said in an email Friday afternoon in response to a query from The Post. “The fund is no longer active.”

Andy Sinclair, a museum spokesperson, said in a follow-up email Friday night, about four hours after the publication of this story, that the museum closed the fund Sept. 30 and the fund’s promotional page had been removed from the website three months earlier, on June 30. A “back-end page” that included a payment function for the fund “was recently removed to reflect that the fund is no longer active,” she said.

Denver Art Museum officials declined multiple interview requests during the reporting of The Post’s series. Museum officials answered written questions from the newspaper last month, including specific queries about the fund named in Bunker’s honor — but made no mention that the fund had been shut down.

But it is far from clear that the @DenverArtMuseum is learning lessons and reforming its practices: unbelievably, it is now seeking donations to its "Emma Bunker Asian Art Acquisition Fund" pic.twitter.com/iY9AIyxOcU

— Angela S Chiu (@ChiuAngelaS) October 17, 2021

Bunker and her husband donated more than 200 pieces to the museum’s collection, many of which are still on display across its myriad galleries.

The museum last month told The Post that the acquisition fund raised $25,000 to purchase new pieces, and officials last year named the Southeast Asian art wing the “Bunker Gallery” to celebrate her decades of contributions.

Latchford, through Bunker’s connections, used the Denver Art Museum as a way station for looted art, The Post found. He sold, loaned or gifted 14 pieces to the museum between 1999 and 2011, using these placements to market his goods to wealthy collectors. Experts in the illicit antiquities trade say this practice helps legitimize stolen art.

The Denver Art Museum gave up four Cambodia pieces connected to Latchford last year after the U.S. Department of Justice moved to seize them.

Now federal investigators are probing the origins of three Thai pieces in the museum’s collection. Those include two statues from the so-called “Prakhon Chai hoard” that, according to local villagers, had been pillaged and sold by Latchford some 50 years ago.

A third piece — gifted to the museum by Bunker — is also under investigation.

Updated 11:30 a.m. Dec. 3, 2022 This story has been updated to include an additional statement from the Denver Art Museum.

Visitors entering the Southeast Asian wing are welcomed to the Bunker Gallery, her name displayed in large white lettering, lit up on the forest green wall.

The scholar’s gifts are featured in nearly every Asian art exhibit, which showcase exquisite wonders from across the continent: Palanquin hooks from Cambodia, mythical birds from Indonesia, bronze bracelets from Iran, tiles with lotus heads from Turkey.

After Bunker’s death last year at 90, the museum dedicated an Asian art acquisition fund in her honor, celebrating six decades of contributions to a collection the museum touts as “one of the finest of its kind in North America.”

A longtime museum consultant and leading scholar, Bunker helped assemble the Denver institution’s 7,000-piece Asian art collection through her relationships with some of the world’s biggest antiquities collectors.

But those close ties also turned the Denver Art Museum into a way station for looted art.

Bunker’s relationship to one disgraced dealer in particular, Douglas Latchford, led the museum to acquire pieces that had been pillaged from Cambodia’s sacred temples. And now artifacts from Thailand in the museum’s collection are under scrutiny.

Connections with museums were a crucial piece of Latchford’s long-running illicit antiquities scheme, investigators and experts in the art trade say: The Thailand-based collector and dealer spent decades loaning and gifting prized artifacts to prominent museums like Denver’s, which he used to legitimate his collection. With items behind glass cases, Latchford could tell prospective buyers that his goods were clean — and worth big money.

“Latchford used Denver as a laundromat to tell people that there must be no problem with the pieces because they’ve been in museums,” said Bradley J. Gordon, an attorney leading Cambodia’s efforts to reclaim its plundered history.

The second installment of The Denver Post’s three-part series on Bunker and the global illicit antiquities trade focuses on the integral role of museums in validating plundered art — and the curators, scholars and dealers that make it possible.

The Post’s year-long investigation calls into question how much the Denver Art Museum should have known about the consultant helping fill its glass cases, and why officials there continue to celebrate Bunker’s contributions in the face of criminal suspicion.

And the series details the largely unknown story of how Latchford, through Bunker’s scholarship, directed a hidden trove of stolen Thai treasures from the hands of poor rice farmers to galleries in Denver and around the globe.

The Denver Art Museum became one of Latchford’s primary landing spots as he sought to burnish his reputation. The institution housed more looted pieces of his than any other collection aside from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the “Pandora Papers” investigation found last year.

All told, the Denver museum spent more than a half-million dollars on Latchford pieces, and he loaned, gifted or sold the museum more than a dozen ancient artifacts — deals made possible and shepherded along by Bunker, court records and previously unreported emails show.

Bunker helped Latchford falsify provenances — or ownership history — for pieces known to be stolen, the records show. She gave presentations about his collection, wrote scholarly articles and books highlighting his works and talked to wealthy collectors as her friend negotiated six- and seven-figure sales.

“She was extremely important to helping his looting flourish,” said Angela Chiu, an independent scholar who has studied the Asian antiquities trade extensively.

Now the Cambodians want to see the Denver Art Museum’s records for any pieces that passed through Latchford or Bunker’s hands — but officials say the museum has refused.

Three of Bunker’s surviving children did not respond to The Post or declined to comment for this series. Harriet Bunker, one of Emma’s daughters, said the allegations against her mother didn’t fit the profile of the woman she knew and loved.

“I really have a hard time believing that my mom was an art smuggler,” she said.

Representatives of the Denver Art Museum declined multiple interview requests for this series. Instead, they responded to emailed questions, defending the museum’s association with Bunker and blaming Latchford for providing falsified documents.

“Naming the Bunker Gallery was in recognition of the family’s lifetime of support of the museum,” Denver Art Museum officials said.

“I want the gods to come home”

Latchford, a British citizen who spent much of his life in Thailand, was a prolific collector and dealer, amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of Cambodian antiquities.

He was beloved in Cambodia for decades, helping the National Museum pay for badly needed upgrades and donating several pieces to its collection. The government even bestowed upon Latchford the equivalent of a knighthood in 2008 and invited him to become a citizen.

But in multiple court cases, beginning in 2012, the sheen on Latchford’s dealings started to wear away. Authorities alleged that the Bangkok dealer — with Bunker’s assistance — falsified provenances in order to sell objects the Cambodians said were looted from the nation’s ancient temples.

In 2019, a federal grand jury indicted Latchford on five counts, including wire fraud and smuggling, accusing him of bringing illicit antiquities into the United States. He died in 2020 before he could stand trial.

Latchford over and over again sold, loaned and gifted pieces to the Denver Art Museum — and that was no accident.

“Cultivating her longtime friendship with Douglas A.J. Latchford, (Bunker) encouraged him to donate and lend several major examples of Southeast Asian art to the museum,” Mary Lanius and Ronald Otsuka, former Denver museum curators, wrote in a 2007 article.

But years after their acquisition, the Cambodians said these items were all stolen — and enlisted the U.S. government’s help to get them back.

Federal prosecutors, in a forfeiture complaint filed last year, outlined how Bunker helped her friend get four relics — including a prehistoric bell, and ancient sandstone statues and lintels — on display at her hometown museum. (She’s not named in the complaint, but a review of past cases confirms Bunker is the “Scholar” mentioned.)

“Over the years, the Scholar assisted Latchford on many occasions by verifying or vouching for the proffered provenance of Khmer antiquities that Latchford was trying to sell,” prosecutors wrote.

In the case of the four Denver items, Bunker “facilitated the sale and donation… including by vouching for their provenance,” the court document read.

The government had moved to seize the antiquities that had been in the Denver museum for two decades. Prosecutors’ evidence largely came from testimony given to the Cambodian team by a former looter named Toek Tik, who recalled stealing the four items from temple sites.

Tik, who died in December, joined the Khmer Rouge at the age of 10, working with his father throughout the 1980s and ‘90s to loot Khmer objects from its thousand-year-old temples.

But he spent his final two years atoning for his past work, collaborating with Gordon and the Cambodian team to track down relics in foreign museums and private collections.

“I regret what I did,” Tik told The New York Times last year. “I want the gods to come home.”

In May 2000, Latchford agreed to loan a 12th-to-13th-century Prajnaparamita statue and a 7th-to-8th-century sandstone Surya sculpture to the Denver Art Museum, prosecutors said.

But he gave the museum contradictory provenance information, authorities alleged. At various times, Latchford told the museum that he acquired the Prajnaparamita from a man prosecutors called the “false collector” — Ian Donaldson — in 1999, while also providing the museum documents purporting to show that both pieces were shipped from Latchford’s Bangkok apartment to London in 1994.

He donated the Prajnaparamita in Bunker’s honor, the former museum curators wrote in the 2007 article.

“A representation of the Goddess of Transcendent Wisdom was a fitting tribute to Bunker,” the authors note, “who has great knowledge of Cambodian bronze and stone sculpture.”

Latchford assured a museum curator that the sandstone statue arrived in the United States in June 1999, months before the federal government declared an emergency embargo on the importation of stone Khmer antiquities, designed to crack down on the widespread sale of looted relics from Cambodia.

But authorities say Latchford shipped the pieces in May 2000, after the embargo was in place.

Four months later, the Denver Art Museum purchased the Prajnaparamita for $358,000. On the bill of sale, Latchford said he had bought the statue from Donaldson in 1989, prosecutors alleged, the third acquisition date he gave the museum during their correspondence.

A museum curator emailed Bunker 11 days after the sale, according to the complaint, noting the 1970 UNESCO Convention restrictions on removing objects during war. The curator asked the scholar for more details on the Prajnaparamita and where it was “dug up.”

Bunker replied that Donaldson “is very ill in a hospital,” the government alleged, and that if the museum needed anything signed, Latchford would have to try to get it. She added that Donaldson “has no idea where it came from” and that he “was never a soldier in Vietnam, so this did not come out during the war” (Latchford and another disgraced dealer, Nancy Wiener, used Donaldson repeatedly to vouch for the provenance of looted goods, investigators alleged, even after the Hong Kong-based businessman had long been dead. Donaldson, in his will, called Latchford a friend, and even left him a condo in Bangkok, along with an expensive Patek Philippe watch and a crystal apple.)

Denver Art Museum officials, when asked by The Post why the museum purchased an artifact with three conflicting provenances, said Latchford had provided them with forged documentation.

In 2005, Latchford donated an Iron Age bronze bell and a 7th-to-8th-century sandstone lintel to the museum as gifts, providing “limited provenance information to the museum for either piece,” prosecutors said.

He previously had tried to sell two similar bells to private American collectors, authorities alleged, sending photos of the artifacts encrusted with dirt and minerals, “a sign of recent excavation.”

A decade later, a researcher from the Denver Art Museum sent Latchford an email. She was looking into the provenance of the six items he donated or sold to the museum between 2000 and 2006 — “beautiful artifacts” that “enhanced the depth and breadth of the collection,” the researcher said — and which remained on display in the fifth-floor galleries.

But someone purporting to be Latchford’s secretary replied hours later that she was unable to pass along the message because Latchford was undergoing medical care “and his doctor stipulated that (he) not be disturbed,” according to the email. Latchford’s daughter, after his death, shared troves of his emails with the Cambodians, some of which were reviewed by The Post for this series. “As soon as he is well and sufficiently strong, I will bring your letter to his attention.”

Museum officials told The Post that a grant allowed for provenance research in its Asian art collection, but that this research wasn’t specific to Latchford’s pieces.

In a statement last year, museum officials said they contacted Cambodian authorities immediately after Latchford’s 2019 indictment to bring the four pieces “to their attention, and gather additional information.”

The Cambodians, however, say the Denver institution has been less forthright than its public statements indicate.

“They weren’t honest brokers,” said Gordon, the attorney leading the government’s repatriation team.

Museum officials never disclosed their 2015 emails with Latchford while in talks with the Cambodians, Gordon said, and didn’t acknowledge that they had had any questions previously about the pieces.

“It was really incredible that I had multiple conversations with them and they didn’t tell me,” Gordon said. “They know a lot more than we do.”

The museum said it “disagrees with Mr. Gordon,” citing its outreach in 2019.

While the Cambodians were grateful to get back the four pieces from Denver in August, they’re still waiting for the museum to give up documents relating to those deals and others.

In a June 2021 email, Gordon asked the museum’s lawyer to provide provenance records for all Khmer objects that passed through the hands of Latchford, Bunker or any other dealers.

“We hope that with this information and your resolving issues with the U.S. government, we can move forward with a positive relationship between Cambodia and (the) Denver Art Museum,” Gordon wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The Post.

Eighteen months later, the museum still hasn’t responded or sent any records, he said.

“We’re putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” Gordon said, likening each looted temple to a crime scene. “For them to be hiding information doesn’t seem ethical.”

Museum officials said Gordon suggested the museum “work directly with the (Department of Justice) regarding the process for returning works to Cambodia.”

“The museum has done so, including providing all records to the DOJ regarding the returned pieces,” the statement said.

“An unlikely place for Cambodian sculptures”

The Denver Art Museum, through Bunker’s affiliation, became a way station for Latchford’s prized objects, and he used loans and gifts to the museum to legitimize his collection and market his artifacts for sale to other wealthy buyers.

Latchford loaned, gifted or sold 14 pieces to Denver’s museum between 1999 and 2011, according to museum records. They included the four relics returned to Cambodia in August and two objects from Thailand — a neolithic vessel and cabinet — that remain in the museum’s collection.

He also loaned four items to the museum that later were purchased by James Clark, the billionaire co-founder of Netscape.

In 2004, Clark was in the midst of buying $35 million in Khmer antiquities from Latchford. But in emails, the wealthy internet pioneer expressed concerns that Cambodia might, at some point, push for their repatriation.

So Latchford sought to assuage Clark, telling him in a letter that he had previously donated major pieces to prominent museums, including the Denver Art Museum. He cited one specific piece — a large Vishnu statue — that he had loaned to Denver in 2002 as proof of his legitimate acumen.

“All of the pieces you are considering have been published and/or on loan to museums for several years, and if there was any question of asking for them back, it would have happened long before now,” Latchford wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The Post.

Clark bought that 10th-century sandstone Vishnu statue, along with two Avalokitesvara pieces and a thousand-year-old Yaksha that were in Denver’s art museum. The Vishnu and the Yaksha were published in Bunker and Latchford’s 2004 book “Adoration and Glory” and attributed as “anonymous loans to the Denver Art Museum.”

These same pieces showed up in a January forfeiture filing as federal prosecutors sought Clark’s looted collection that came from Latchford.

Bunker was part of the dealer’s sales pitch, emails show.

Clark’s decorator, in one 2004 email to Latchford, said she had “talked at length” with Bunker about repatriation. Three years later, as Clark sought to purchase more of Latchford’s treasures, Latchford suggested the businessman use Bunker to provide a valuation for the items.

Bunker in 2004 even prepared a presentation for Latchford on the sculptures he was offering for sale, federal prosecutors alleged in the forfeiture filing.

She wasn’t the direct saleswoman, Gordon said. “But she was definitely an enabler.”

“If Emma wasn’t in Denver, would Denver really end up with Khmer pieces?” the attorney said. “It’s an unlikely place for Cambodian sculptures to end up.”

In January, Clark gave up the entire lot after federal investigators told him the relics had been stolen. (The businessman couldn’t be reached for comment.)

Over four years, Latchford lied to Clark and withheld information about the origins of the pieces he was selling, the federal complaint alleged. The Bangkok dealer supplied him with false provenance documents. Many of the items, authorities said, were then illegally imported into the United States based on false statements Latchford and others supplied to border control agents.

Prosecutors used one of Latchford’s loans to the Denver Art Museum — the eight-armed Avalokitesvara statue — as an example of how Latchford marketed items to Clark.

The dealer told Clark, as he previously had told Denver’s museum, that he had purchased the artifact from an individual who authorities called the “false collector,” aka Donaldson.

A Denver Art Museum spokesperson told The Post in January that the sculpture was on loan to the museum from February 2001 through December 2003.

“The museum was not a party to the acquisition or sale of this piece, and has no details about those transactions,” said Kristy Bassuener, a museum spokesperson.

But emails show Latchford tried to enlist a Denver museum curator to help transfer at least one artifact to Clark.

In April 2006, an employee of Clark’s emailed an Asian art curator at the museum to ask about coordinating the shipping and installation of a piece to Clark’s New York City residence. Latchford is copied on the email.

Dealers normally handle logistics themselves for delivering artwork, said Chiu, the independent art scholar. A curator, even if the piece was on loan to a museum, should only be expected to provide museum access to the dealer’s agents. Going above and beyond that, arranging the logistics themselves, would be “unusual and outside the normal duties of a curator,” she said.

“This raises grave concerns about ethics,” Chiu said. “Does the Denver Art Museum actually allow its curators to be involved in private art sales between individuals?”

There was no indication in Latchford’s emails seen by The Post that the curator responded. But the museum, in an email responding to questions from The Post, said staff assisted in coordinating the de-installation of the three loaned works sold to Clark that year, as well as the museum side of the shipment to the new owner.

“Such activities are common practice for museum staff for loaned pieces that are sold,” the statement said.

Museums, as nonprofit entities, are not supposed to participate in commercial transactions. Many, in fact, have policies forbidding the exhibition of works that are known — or expected — to be for sale.

The fact that Latchford did this multiple times with the Denver Art Museum raises serious questions about whether officials there violated a fiduciary duty to the museum or the public, said Amanda Nelson, an attorney who specializes in art and museum law.

“It becomes a question of how long can they plausibly deny this was Latchord’s pattern to use them to market his pieces?” she said.

Andy Sinclair, a museum spokesperson, said in an email that the museum was not aware the relics loaned by Latchford were for sale until the dealer requested they be shipped to Clark.

The museum’s loans policy, she said, is standard for the field.

Crucial to a museum’s survival

Museums often have different standards for items they purchase versus ones that are donated by wealthy collectors, experts in the illicit antiquities trade say.

With donors, museums can be reluctant to push them too hard or ask too many questions, said prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos, who runs the Antiquities Trade Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York City. The vast majority of seizures by his office come from donations, he said.

Trust is key. If a no-name person comes to a big museum or gallery with a prized relic, they’ll be subjected to far more scrutiny than a person of Latchford’s status.

This is the other thing that the Bangkok dealer perfected, Bogdanos said: “He simply wasn’t scrutinized.”

It only takes a few years of a plundered piece being exhibited in museums before buyers are satisfied that it’s legitimate, a federal investigator said in a 2016 interview.

Latchford wasn’t the only antiquities dealer to use the Denver Art Museum — and other institutions — in this fashion.

Subhash Kapoor, who once ran a prominent New York City gallery called “Art of the Past,” gifted or sold 31 pieces from India to the Denver Art Museum over three decades. This summer, the museum gave up 22 of those artifacts after New York investigators said they were stolen, part of Kapoor’s alleged long-running scheme to sell plundered art. Kapoor was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison by an Indian court, and still faces similar charges in the United States.

“Kapoor would also loan stolen antiquities to major museums and institutions,” prosecutors alleged in a 185-page criminal complaint in 2019, “creating yet another false veneer of legitimacy by its mere presence in otherwise reputable museums and institutions.”

For American museums, loans and donations aren’t just nice to have. They’re crucial to a museum’s survival.

More than 90% of the art collections held in public trust by America’s art museums were donated by private individuals, according to the Association of Art Museum Directors. Part of that is owed to the generous tax breaks afforded to donors under the American tax code.

“You’re going to be friendly toward a terrific collector with objects you covet for the museum,” said Jacqueline Simcox, a London art dealer.

“It’s the end of an era”

Those in the industry acknowledge times have changed in the global art world — and museums are scrambling to change with it.

The important question for museums or collectors used to be whether the item at hand was real or fake, never mind the provenance.

“People who matured in the ‘60s, they believed in the art market,” said Hiram Woodward, a friend of Bunker’s and former curator at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. “They believed in the general good created by private collecting. They believed that objects from origin countries should be exhibited in American art museums.”

Dealers in the mid-20th century, let alone before then, did not always keep or share detailed records, museum officials have said in response to recent questions about allegedly stolen artifacts in its collections.

“The norms of collecting have changed significantly in recent decades,” the Met said in September after investigators seized more than two dozen looted artifacts from its collection.

In 1973, a curator with the Cleveland Museum of Art estimated that 95% of ancient art materials in the United States had been smuggled in.

“Unless you’re naïve or not very bright,” John D. Cooney, the curator, told The New York Times, “you’d have to know that much ancient art here is stolen.”

Cooney, in his transactions, said he was only concerned about whether an object had legal entry into the country.

“Even if I know it’s hot,” he told The Times, “I can’t be concerned about that. If the museums in this country began to send back all the smuggled material to their countries of origin, the museum walls would be bare.”

But this line of thinking is also what Western collectors and museums want to project, said Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She compared it to cigarettes decades ago, when people said they didn’t know how harmful smoking could be.

“You have to be incredibly stupid to have a Cambodian antiquity and not know where these things were coming from,” she said. “It wasn’t just ignorance — people were assembling justifications for why it was OK to be buying these things.”

Bunker, Latchford and others would defend their practices in interviews and articles, saying if not for Western collectors, many of these artifacts would be destroyed in civil war or other conflicts.

Museums have an obligation to closely research the provenance of pieces in their collections to make sure they’re not displaying stolen goods, advocates say.

“Museums are often the front line of this,” Tatum King, the special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in San Francisco, said during a 2021 repatriation ceremony. “And we need their help.”

It’s an awkward position for museums. Most curators and other staff have long since changed over from when controversial pieces were acquired. And the incentives have always pushed museums to increase their collections, not decrease them.

Institutions that long have held high public approval ratings are now increasingly under the microscope.

“It’s the end of an era for being the unquestioned good guys,” Thompson said.

Honoring a complicated legacy

Despite serious allegations across civil and criminal court cases, the Denver Art Museum continues to celebrate Bunker.

After her death, the museum invited friends and family to unveil the Bunker Gallery on the fifth floor of the Martin Building in downtown Denver. This happened, the museum said, after the Bunker family made an unspecified donation to the building’s capital campaign.

Its exhibits still display 34 works gifted by Bunker or jointly with her husband. Another 187 pieces from the couple remain in the museum’s collection.

The Asian art acquisition fund launched in the scholar’s honor has raised $25,000. But museum officials confirmed Friday, following the publication of The Post’s investigation, that the Bunker fund “is no longer active.”

“She loved the Denver Art Museum,” said Tianlong Jiao, a former museum curator. “She was a very generous donor… she was a very generous lady. She left a great legacy for Denver. I think people should appreciate her contribution to the community rather than focus on the negative, unfortunate connection with Latchford.”

Several art crime experts and historians said they were astounded the museum would choose to name a gallery in Bunker’s honor, and is raising money in her name to purchase more antiquities from a part of the globe that she’s accused of helping pillage.

“How can the museum deny it has a provenance problem when the name of a looter is up on the wall?” Thompson asked. “The gallery name shows the museum was once proud of its relationship with someone who could help it fill its galleries — as long as it didn’t ask too many questions.”

Chiu, the independent art expert, said she found the acquisition fund “shameful.” Gordon, the attorney representing Cambodia, called it “disturbing.”

“She was so close to Douglas and so involved with his commercial ventures that it just seems extremely inappropriate to set up an acquisition fund in her memory,” Gordon said.

Asked about whether it was appropriate to name the gallery after Bunker, given the serious allegations, Denver Art Museum officials cited her decades of service as a volunteer and board member. They also referenced her family’s donations to the museum’s collections.

As for Bunker’s contributions that still grace the museum’s glass cases?

“Repatriate unless they have legal export permits,” Thompson said.

And there are a lot of necessary players — the local looters who know the lay of the land, the middlemen smuggling objects over borders, the high-end dealers with connections to wealthy collectors and prominent museums.

Another key player: the respected scholar.

“Everyone’s got an Emma Bunker,” said Matthew Bogdanos, a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York City. The former Marine runs the office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, spearheading some of the country’s largest art theft investigations.

“They all have one thing in common,” he said. “They’re all for sale.”

Bunker, a Coloradan who died last year, was a prolific scholar, publishing extensively on Chinese and Southeast Asian art. She spent decades as a volunteer, board member and consultant with the Denver Art Museum, which named its Southeast Asian art gallery in her honor.

But in the decade before her death, the scholar’s sterling reputation took a hit.

She was named or referenced in five civil and criminal cases surrounding the sale of illicit antiquities, though never directly charged or sued herself. Bunker was particularly close with Douglas Latchford, a Bangkok-based dealer and collector, who died in 2020 after a federal grand jury indicted him on a host of charges related to smuggling illicit antiquities.

Court records and personal emails show Bunker used her lofty position and museum credentials to help her good friend fabricate ownership histories for looted artifacts and market his stolen antiquities to wealthy collectors and museums such as Denver’s.

The scholar usually keeps their hands cleaner, experts say. They’re not normally digging for treasures — or selling them — themselves. But their writing is nonetheless crucial.

Bunker and Latchford are credited with co-writing three books (Bunker acknowledged in emails that she actually wrote them), and she authored a host of other articles on Southeast Asian art. In almost every case, she spotlighted Latchford’s pieces.

And that’s no accident, experts say.

“Publishing a photograph of a looted antiquity is a common laundering practice,” a federal agent wrote in a 2016 criminal complaint.

Getting an item published in a book gives it an air of legitimacy, experts say, facilitating its sale.

“This respectable person is making it respectable by trafficking in looted antiquities so it must be OK for me to purchase it, display it, etc.,” said Erin Thompson, an art crime professor with New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

A statue’s actual theft is normally not the dangerous segment of the heist, investigators say. It’s during shipping when things can get dicey.

That’s when falsified provenances, or ownership history, come into play. Someone like Latchford needs to manufacture a history for the piece — and they need a well-regarded voice like Bunker’s to vouch for it.

“Misrepresenting the true provenance of an antiquity is essential for selling stolen items in the market,” a federal agent wrote in a 2016 criminal complaint, “because false provenance prevents the items from being easily traced and enables ownership records to be falsified to predate the patrimony laws of the antiquity’s country of origin.”

Latchford and other illicit antiquities dealers would also pin provenances on a dead collector. Latchford and Nancy Wiener, a New York gallery owner who pleaded guilty last year to trafficking stolen artifacts, used the same individual repeatedly: Ian Donaldson, a Hong Kong-based collector who died in 2001.

It became a running joke in the Manhattan DA’s office — another provenance from Ian Donaldson. In some cases, he was posted to Vietnam when he acquired a particular object. In others, he was in Hong Kong.

These shady dealers would photocopy provenances to use in multiple sales, investigators say.

And customs officers in the U.S. wouldn’t know how to spot the forgeries.

A “socially destructive illicit trade”

Once a looted object has made it out of the source country, it needs to be cleaned of any evidence that it had been ripped from a temple or yanked off a pedestal. Enter the art restorer, someone who removes dirt, debris or rust.

“I avoided asking questions, because I was suspicious that the answers would reveal that the objects were stolen,” one restorer told a New York court after pleading guilty to assisting in a large looted-antiquities ring, according to an account published in The Atlantic.

After an object is cleaned up, dealers sell pieces back and forth to one another. Latchford and Wiener did this often, prosecutors alleged, a tactic designed to create sham provenances and artificially boost market prices.

Sellers don’t often offer a guarantee of the legality of an object at the sale and buyers don’t require it in most cases, experts say. It’s accepted in the art market for anonymous donors to sell pieces from unnamed private collections, making it difficult to determine a true ownership history.

On top of all that, many pieces on the art market date back centuries, sometimes millennia, adding to the difficult task of tracking origins across changing borders and varying patrimony laws.

“With a drug case, you identify where and when it (happened), but with this kind of case, you have to really dig into the century and what was going on there,” said Greg Wertsch, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations focusing on global trade. “Who was involved at that time? Who was in charge? It gets very, very complicated.”

Looted art, until recent years, hasn’t been treated as a serious crime. But that’s changing as federal and state prosecutions take aim at dealers, collectors and museums alike. Countries like Cambodia are aggressively seeking the return of their plundered heritage.

“This is a culturally destructive, socially destructive illicit trade” that deserves law enforcement resources, said Samuel Hardy, ​​head of illicit trade research with the Heritage Management Organization.

The Manhattan DA’s Office, in particular, has been aggressive in seizing artifacts believed to be looted. Bogdanos’ team has obtained nine search warrants since 2017 to seize ancient works from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest museum in the country, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Six of those have come this year, encompassing more than 30 antiquities from Greece, India, Egypt and Libya, among other nations.

In December, one of New York’s most prolific collectors, the billionaire Michael Steinhardt, surrendered 180 stolen objects worth $70 million after authorities determined the works to have been looted and smuggled from nearly a dozen countries. Steinhardt also agreed to a rare lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities.

The Denver Art Museum in July gave up 22 looted pieces from India connected to a former New York City gallery owner, Subhash Kapoor, who recently was sentenced to 10 years in prison by an Indian court for running a decades-long illicit antiquities smuggling operation. He’s expected to be extradited at some point to the U.S., where he faces similar charges.

“The pace is picking up,” Bogdanos told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in August regarding his office’s art seizures. “Expect it to pick up more.”

As a result, collectors and dealers are now thinking twice about making purchases that once might have been easy decisions 10 or 15 years ago, industry watchers say.

“Recent actions by the government have decimated the industry,” said Duncan Levin, a former federal prosecutor who now consults with antiquity dealers and gallery owners. “As a dealer of antiquities now, if you don’t have iron-clad provenance, you have to really be careful your piece is not going to get seized by the government.”

One effective tactic that prosecutors have used is threatening dealers and collectors, Levin said, forcing them to give up the item in question or risk being charged with a crime.

“I don’t think criminal prosecution should be used as a threat to get a piece returned,” he said. “Often it’s too heavy-handed.”

Bogdanos, in another interview last year, said people who deal in antiquities “are capable of the same base criminality as common hoodlums in the streets of lower Manhattan. For me, honestly, they’re just the same.”

Updated 10:55 a.m. Dec. 1, 2022 This story has been updated to clarify that Michael Steinhardt agreed to a lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities.

After the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, David Shu realized he needed to get out of China.

He long had dreamed of studying in the United States, a country that represented everything his didn’t, he said: liberty. The land of the free.

But the teen had trouble finding sponsorship to attend an American university.

Emma C. Bunker “changed my life,” he said, by helping him come to the United States. Decades later, Shu has a good job and a family, living the American dream.

“I owe everything to Emma,” he said.

When Bunker died last year at 90, Denver’s art community grieved the loss of a beloved colleague and friend, an esteemed scholar who wrote dozens of articles and books about Chinese, Eurasian and Southeast Asian art.

She spent decades as a board member, volunteer and consultant for the Denver Art Museum, helping boost its 7,000-piece Asian art collection through donations and connections to some of the world’s most prolific collectors and dealers.

But she also died under the shadow of criminal prosecution. Bunker is referenced or named in five civil and criminal cases involving the sale of looted antiquities, though she never was charged or sued. And it was her close relationship with Douglas Latchford, a disgraced Bangkok dealer who faced criminal charges, that has art crime experts and the Cambodian and Thai governments concerned about the myriad pieces she helped the Denver Art Museum acquire.

Bunker was born June 19, 1930, in Haverford, Penn.

She earned a master’s degree from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, studying with the esteemed Alexander Soper and William Watson, two titans in the field of Asian art.

In 1956, she married John Bunker, a sugar executive and son of a U.S. ambassador. The couple moved to Denver six years later.

In a male-dominated industry, Bunker — whose friends called her Emmy — stood out for her scholarship, becoming a leading authority on personal adornment in China and the art of the horse-riding tribes of the Eurasian Steppes.

“My mom knew history inside and out,” said Harriet Bunker, one of Emma’s five children.

Her work once comprised half an exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and she published and lectured extensively on the subject.

In the 1980s, she helped launch the Connoisseurs’ Council at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco to support the purchase of relics. Bunker courted wealthy Bay Area collectors, convincing them to donate their prized relics to the museum.

In Denver, she and her husband befriended some of the world’s top art dealers and collectors, helping the Denver Art Museum acquire big-time pieces for its Asian art collection. One prominent collector, Christian Humann, agreed in 1971 to loan much of his Pan Asian Collection to the museum based on his friendship with Bunker, according to a 2007 article published by two of the museum’s Asian art curators.

The Bunkers donated 221 pieces to the Denver Art Museum over the years, filling glass cases in the European, American, Latin American and Asian art galleries.

Beginning in 1963, the Bunkers also donated money to the museum, and Emma’s name is listed as a “major benefactor” on a giant board near the institution’s downtown entrance.

She spent parts of three decades as a visiting professor at Colorado College as well, teaching courses on Asian art and introduction to art history. John Bunker also was on campus, lecturing on business ethics.

“Emma was highly regarded as an exceptionally knowledgeable scholar,” said Jacqueline Simcox, a London art dealer.

Bunker had an innate ability to grasp subtle details about particular objects, contemporaries said, writing authoritatively about how they fit within the context of the time period.

“Emmy was excellent at perceiving fakes and forgeries and understanding their nature and distinguishing them from authentic objects,” said Hiram Woodward, a friend and former curator at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

She was a force of personality, friends and colleagues said, and held firmly to her beliefs.

“She would make it very clear if she did not like an idea,” said Tianlong Jiao, a former Asian art curator at the Denver Art Museum, who considered Bunker a mentor and friend. “Emmy wasn’t shy.”

Chatty and warm, Bunker developed a broad group of friends.

“She was a kind of all-embracing, outgoing, extremely hospitable, very enthusiastic, charming person,” said Angus Forsyth, a friend of Bunker’s.

If Bunker liked you, she’d do anything for you, said Joyce Clark, a longtime friend. “But if she didn’t, watch out,” Clark said.

Bunker’s fields of expertise and research also bled into her personal life.

Shu’s father met Bunker in the 1980s during conferences and scholar exchanges in China. Despite the language barrier, the two became good friends.

After Tiananmen Square, she helped Shu and another Chinese student make it to America.

“It was difficult to get them out,” Bunker told The Denver Post in 2005 after her husband’s death. “We wiggled a few things around to get it done.”

With the Bunkers’ support, Shu attended Colorado College. He spent summers with the family in Wyoming, helping out on the ranch as John Bunker worked with him on his English.

“She was really a loving, passionate person who’s dedicated to her family and to her work,” Shu said. “She played a really good role model for me.”

The Bunkers lived in Wyoming but kept an apartment in Denver, which they adorned with art from around the globe, friends and colleagues said. The walls were filled with modern collages, Chinese and Tibetan works and American Indian relics.

On the ranch, Bunker rode horses and wrestled cattle.

“She was rough and rugged,” Clark said.

On her frequent trips to China and Southeast Asia, Bunker would bring along some of her children or 19 grandchildren.

Harriet Bunker said she was in awe of her mother’s deep knowledge of the region’s artwork.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe that’s my mom,’” she said.

Over the course of her life, Bunker published more than 50 works.

“Her whole entire life was, ‘I have to write one more article, one more paper,’” Harriet Bunker said. “She died writing one more article.”