Looting vulnerable populations and laundering their assets through institutional prestige has a long, documented history.
Look at how Prussia strip-mined the Ottoman territory and built their Pergamon museum around the loot. Look at how the Nazis then systematized that art theft across occupied Europe. The hunt for all the stolen works continues eight decades later.
Don’t look too hard in the estates around the Wannsee.
Powerful actors extract cultural wealth from people in crisis, then use institutional credibility to convert stolen goods into legitimate collections.
Enter Epstein.
Leon Black paid a convicted sex trafficker over $150 million for “financial advice” on looting. That trafficker’s files contain an inventory of Black’s $27.7 million collection of Southeast Asian antiquities, which happen to be objects extracted from Cambodian sites during conflicts that killed roughly two million people.
The supply chain for these objects runs through mass violence, displacement, and exploitation of vulnerable populations.
It brings to light Douglas Latchford’s network, which depended on local labor operating under coercion or desperation in conflict zones to loot these sites. Trafficking in looted cultural property produced by conditions indistinguishable from trafficking in persons. Latchford published one of Black’s pieces in a book, corresponded about selling bronzes to Black, and when an Australian museum canceled a purchase over insufficient provenance, redirected the same piece toward Black. He was indicted for fraud and conspiracy in trafficking Cambodian artifacts. His family returned the collection to Cambodia. The Metropolitan Museum returned 14 sculptures. The US government returned 30 objects.
Black still has his, somehow.
Epstein’s files contain the inventory of these looted acquisitions. I mean Epstein had operational visibility into Black’s holdings. The same Epstein whose own operation depended on exploiting vulnerable people. The financial plumbing connects both trafficking streams together. The wealth extracted through cultural looting in conflict zones, is managed by an operation funded through sexual exploitation.
Black’s spokesperson offers the standard laundering fallacy: looting was done “through a well-regarded and highly reputable art dealer.”
Yeah, we get it. Trump and Epstein were well-regarded. Latchford was reputable too right up until his indictment. An Australian museum canceling a purchase for insufficient provenance, followed by Latchford redirecting that piece to Black, shows conscious avoidance that normally triggers trafficking statutes.
The “reputation” defense works the same in every laundering operation from 1880s Berlin to 1940s Paris to 2013 New York. Buy through a middleman to claim distance from the act. Hire a hit man to say you didn’t do the hit.
Black “cooperated” with a DOJ inquiry five years ago. And then? Somehow he remains a MoMA trustee, a known Epstein associate who now shows up flaunting the files.
…art insiders were wide-eyed to see Black, as well as fellow Epstein pal Glenn Dubin, stride into a private party, apparently hosted by the [MoMA] institution itself…. Black…stepped down as chairman of the museum in 2021 after protest from artists and workers over his connections to Epstein. On Tuesday, a rep for Black told us, “Mr. Black was proud to be at the dinner….” Both Black and Dubin have galleries in MoMA named after them.
The Nazis looted art and trafficked underage girls, building their white man’s empire atop mass suffering. The Epstein network does the same. Black represents how an institutional playbook for elites converts mass atrocity into cultural capital even today.