August 15, 2022 at 6:00 am EDT Placeholder when loading article actions The January 2021 issue of Architectural Digest featured a renovated $42 million San Francisco residence described as a Spanish Revival palace. Owned by a billionaire’s daughter and her husband, the home is “dramatic” and has been “deservedly described as the most beautiful home in America,” the luxury magazine said. Accompanying photos describe its opulence — mirrored pilasters, white onyx paneled walls, stunning views of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge. One particularly striking image showed a two-story central courtyard with several empty pedestals on one side. However, the pews weren’t really empty: The photo had been tampered with. Another version, discovered by journalists on the house’s architect’s website, shows ancient Khmer sculptures resting on the same pedestals. The Cambodian government says these stone relics, depicting the heads of gods and demons, match a set looted years ago from one of the nation’s sacred sites. It’s not known who altered the photo or why, but experts were interviewed for this story confirmed that the sculptures were edited from the magazine image. The owners of the San Francisco mansion are attorney and author Sloan Lindemann Barnett and her husband, Roger Barnett, an executive at a nutritional supplement company. The couple, who bought the property through a limited liability company, did not respond to emails and phone messages from reporters. Cambodia’s research on the family’s collection exceeds a set of statues. The stone objects in the San Francisco home appear to have come from a larger collection of Khmer relics held by Lindemann Barnett’s billionaire parents, Frayda and the late George Lindemann. The parents’ collection was featured in an earlier Architectural Digest spread in 2008, described as “one of Southeast Asia’s largest privately held art collections.” These photos show their home in Palm Beach, Florida, filled with Khmer antiquities, many of which the Cambodian government suspects were looted. Two of them appear to match items that are among the country’s 10 most important stolen heirlooms, the government says. “Some of these statues are of huge historical and cultural importance to Cambodia and should be repatriated as soon as possible,” said Phoeurng Sackona, the country’s culture minister, who is leading efforts to recover thousands of lost items. “It’s not just art,” said Sopheap Meas, an archaeologist working with the Cambodian team. “We believe that each of them holds the souls of our ancestors.” Antiquities unit agents at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have contacted the Lindemann family in recent years about the Khmer collection, and there is no indication the family plans to return the statues, according to two people close to the efforts who spoke on condition of anonymity because the work is ongoing. The Lindemann family has not been charged with any wrongdoing related to the artifacts. Frieda Lindemann did not respond to reporters’ messages. The discovery of the altered photo is part of a larger investigation by the Washington Post, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and Finance Uncovered, a journalism nonprofit, into the fate of thousands of relics linked to looters and art dealers. As The Post and ICIJ previously reported, many of these treasures are in the collections of notable Western art museums. The new report sheds light on the role of private collectors who acquire ancient objects of uncertain provenance and the opaque world of the antiquities trade. Once they leave their country of origin, stolen items can be difficult to repatriate. With limited means to force their return, authorities in victimized countries rely heavily on the assistance of law enforcement in the United States and other nations where the items end up. But such investigations are expensive, often seen as a low priority for overburdened agencies, and rarely result in convictions, in part because owners may say they bought the looted works without their knowledge. “This is a systemic problem” in the art market, said Domenic DiGiovanni, a former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer who specializes in antiquities. There is little incentive for dealers and private collectors to stop buying looted art, he said, and “having to pay something back, that’s just the cost of doing business.” Asked about the edited image, Erin Kaplan, a spokeswoman for Architectural Digest, a Condé Nast publication, said via email that the magazine published a photo that does not show the remains because of “unresolved publication rights related to selected artwork.” Kaplan declined to say who altered the photo or to clarify her comment about the publishing rights issue.

Ancient temples, rich collectors Cambodia’s ancient temple complexes are recognized as outstanding feats of engineering and art. Three have been listed as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO and another seven have been provisionally added to the list. For Cambodia, antiquities have economic as well as cultural value. In the year before the pandemic, tourism accounted for 18.7 percent of the country’s GDP growth, according to World Bank statistics, much of which was fueled by visits to historic temples. However, almost all major temple sites have been looted, with a particularly devastating wave beginning in the 1970s, during the country’s civil war and genocide, when they were ransacked by organized networks linked to military groups. While no one knows how many items were stolen during this turmoil, archaeologists believe thousands passed through traders and ended up in museums and the private collections of some of the world’s wealthiest people. To bring the Khmer treasures, Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts assembled a team of about 40 researchers, archaeologists, lawyers and art scholars. The effort is being led by Phoeurng and Bradley J. Gordon, the department’s US attorney. So far, the Cambodian team says, it has located more than 2,000 allegedly looted Khmer relics in museums and private collectors around the world. The next step is to convince the owners of the antiquities to return pieces they have acquired. Authorities say that can prove difficult, especially when a collector has bought them for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Collectors should be required to prove they legally own their items, Cambodian authorities say, because the government has never issued export permits for Khmer sculptures – although in a few rare cases, Cambodian kings have. give as gifts. To support their claims, Cambodian researchers gathered information from former looters, archaeological digs and, crucially, computer files left behind by Douglas Latchford, a British antiquities collector. Prosecutors say Latchford was a key intermediary between the looting temples and the wealthy collectors in the western nations. The researchers shared some of his files with the reference group. For decades, Latchford portrayed himself as a scholar, benefactor and devotee of Khmer artworks, but he was indicted in 2019 for what US prosecutors say was his leading role in the looting of Cambodian sites. Last year, The Post and ICIJ located dozens of items linked to Latchford in museums, galleries and private collectors. The Pandora Papers investigation also revealed offshore trusts used by Latchford to hold money and art. Latchford died in 2020, effectively closing the case against him, but ongoing investigations into antiquities he allegedly trafficked have opened a glimpse into the secretive world of private collectors. Billionaire Jim Clark, the co-founder of Netscape, an early web browser, offered rare insight into Latchford’s dealings in an interview with ICIJ and The Post this year. Clark said he was on vacation in Southeast Asia about two decades ago when he was struck by Khmer artwork. He paid Latchford about $35 million for dozens of pieces, he said. Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture would later say that Clark’s collection was so important that it could fill an entire wing in the country’s national museum. “I was newly rich,” Clark said in the interview. “I was a little naive. In those days, I just thought, “Wow, this is great stuff — I’m going to buy it for my apartment.” “ Latchford’s dignified manner made him easy to trust, Clark said. “I always thought he was a well-known expert because he had published these books and had documents from the Cambodian government honoring him,” he said. Clark displayed the pieces in a Miami Beach penthouse he owned for a few years before moving them to a storage unit in Palm Beach, where they remained for more than a decade. “I kept wanting to get parts of it out,” Clark said of the collection. But “the decorator we were going to use for whatever place we had, he wasn’t thrilled with it.” Last year, US authorities working with the Cambodian recovery team approached Clark about relics from his collection believed to have been stolen. He voluntarily surrendered dozens of pieces he had acquired through Latchford. Retrieving pieces of Khmer is rarely that easy, however, even when…