Digital image Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Courtesy The Lombardi Family and Pierogi Gallery
Mark Lombardi, BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972-91 (Fourth Version), Graphite on Paper, 1996-2000, 52 x 138 inches. Digital image Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Courtesy The Lombardi Family and Pierogi Gallery.
- Ed Baker was not just an oil tycoon, but also an acquaintance of Mark Lombardi, who was friends with Baker’s wife, Karen Wallbridge. On the BCCI drawing, Ed’s name has two lines leading to it. The first connection is to “Saudi European Bank S.A”, a small bank in Paris he was involved with (the extent is unclear). In turn, Saudi European has links to Charles Keating — disgraced — who owned a 15% stake in the bank’s parent company, Saudi European Investment Corp (S.E.I.C.). Its board members included S.P. Hinduja, whose family were under fire for receiving kickbacks from Swedish arms giant Bofors, as well as former Secretary of the Navy Robert A. Anderson and Philippe Giscard d’Estaing, brother of France’s former President Valéry.
The other line reveals Baker’s still unexplained fate: “1985: Died in mysterious car fire”. It’s possible that Baker was a source for Lombardi’s work, illuminating connections in the sprawling financial web of BCCI. - Charles Keating was an American financier and conservative activist who ran a real-estate company called American Continental Corporation, as well as the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association in the 1980s. By buying “junk bonds” in the truckload to finance his bank’s operations, Keating’s highly risky investment strategy precipitated the Savings and Loans crisis of the late 1980s and early 90s, which cost the American taxpayers tens of billions.
In Lombardi's BCCI drawing, Keating is directly connected to Saudi European Bank S.A. — and by extension Ed Baker — through the American Continental Corporation, which he chaired. Its implosion in 1989 was at the core of the Keating Five scandal, when five U.S. senators were accused of corruption, having intervened to look out for Keating’s interests. This connection — which links Keating to 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, one of the five indicted senators — is not on Mark’s drawing. - Jackson T. Stephens was an oilman and investment banker, the CEO of a financial services company in Little Rock, Arkansas. But he’s also connected to two U.S. Presidents on Mark’s BCCI drawing: Jimmy Carter and the then-incumbent president Bill Clinton.
Stephens had actually made friends with Jimmy Carter at the Naval Academy years before, before becoming an outspoken backer of Ronald Reagan, and then later Little Rock-native Bill Clinton. But he was also closely linked to the secretive acquisition of assets by BCCI, including the National Bank of Georgia and FGB Bank, both of which helped to bring BCCI into American markets — laying the path for the scandal to come.
Stephens takes a more prominent role in another of Mark Lombardi’s works: George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, c. 1979 – 91, 4th version , 1998. - A Saudi Arabian billionaire and a former non-executive director of BCCI, Khalid bin Mahfouz was indicted by a NYC grand jury for fraud, having personally owned a 20% stake in BCCI. He denied all culpability, but settled the charge for the sum of $225 million.
Bin Mahfouz also came under fire in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, when it became apparent that he had donated over $270,000 to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, at the request of Osama’s half brother Salem bin Laden. Elsewhere it was inaccurately reported that Bin Mahfouz was actually Osama bin Laden’s half-brother, with a former Director of the CIA even testifying (based in false information) in court that this was true. - Saddam Hussein — who was still President of Iraq when Mark drew this BCCI drawing — is also implicated in the sprawling web of scandal. Along with the likes of Manuel Noriega, Ferdinand Marcos and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, Saddam Hussein had numerous BCCI accounts that he used to move and hide money without a trace. He skimmed money of Iraq’s national oil revenues for years, while Reagan’s CIA also used BCCI to run guns to Hussein in the late 1980s.
BCCI also helped Hussein move millions to the Banca Nazionale del Lavaro (BNL) in Atlanta, which made four billion dollars of secret loans to Iraq in the late 1980s, helping it to amass arms during the First Gulf War. - Wafic Said is Syrian-born banker, who made his fortune in Saudi Arabia’s 1970s construction boom. He later came into the public eye when he helped to the Al-Yamamah arms deal between Saudi Arabia and the U.K. in the 1980s. It became Britain’s largest ever export agreement, with British arms manufacturer BAE Systems earning an estimated £43 billion by 2005, with a further £40 million in projected earnings.
Curiously, Lombardi’s BCCI links Mr. Said not just to the First City Bancorporation of Houston, but also to a British man named Mark Thatcher, the son of the U.K.'s prime minister from 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher. She had lobbied hard for the Al-Yammah arms deal, and it is alleged that her son Mark Thatcher was unofficially employed by Said as a back channel to his mother. Both deny this, but it later transpired that a luxurious Belgravia townhouse purchased just after the arms deal went through by Said (via a Panamanian shell company) was put in the service of the young Thatcher.