The Mother of All Bank Scandals

Ako Mitchell (00:04):
Beneath a vast cloudless sky in the serene New Mexico desert, a man emerges from a rustic clay home. A persistent heat beats down on the intense red landscape. It’s the year 2000 and Don Redman, Mark Lombardi’s old friend, is the artist-in-residence and custodian of a mud brick house. It’s the former home of artist Georgia O’Keeffe, which harmoniously blends in with the natural surroundings. Don’s life has moved on. He’s left Houston and become a father, starting a fresh in New Mexico. Which is why what happens next is even more surprising.

Don Redman (00:56):
I ran into Day Barlow and it was kind of shocking.

Ako Mitchell (01:00):
It’s been a few years since Don last saw Mark and his wife Day. She looks older, a little tired. Then she blurts it out.

Don Redman (01:10):
She said, Mark and I got a divorce and Mark’s moved to New York, and I was like, well what’s going on? Because Day and I were kind of friends. I know he totally loved Day. I’m curious to why he even went to New York.

Ako Mitchell (01:25):
Don doesn’t know what to say but Day keeps talking anyway. The couple that were always a little unusual have finally succumbed to the pressure of difference. Day’s corporate job supporting them, her disinterest in Mark’s work and his growing obsessions with the power brokers of the world – the bankers, the Bush dynasty, even the Bin Ladens.

Andy Feehan (01:52):
One day Mark came to me when he and his wife were splitting up and he handed me a bunch of little micro cassettes off an answering machine.

Ako Mitchell (02:02):
Mark even had a secret job, which Day likely had no idea about, but that he shared with his close friends like Andy Feehan.

Andy Feehan (02:13):
They were conversations that he had secretly recorded with his wife and some guy talking and I was just like, Mark, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t want this. This is none of my business. And he said, yeah, well, I’ve been doing private eye stuff and so this is part of what I do.

Ako Mitchell (02:33):
Mark has been snooping on Day and he’s found something

Michael Hollis (02:38):
The way I remember it, she was cheating on him with a Houston cop and that didn’t go over too well.

Ako Mitchell (02:48):
But their marriage, already straining under the stress of Mark’s obsessions and his lack of commercial success, has already collapsed.

Mark Lombardi (02:58):
A story perhaps it had oh, some dark passages to it.

Jim Holland (03:04):
He did know how to fix it, but he said, I want to, but I don’t know how. So I think at some point he just said, I’m going to choose one or the other, and I guess he chose art.

Mark Lombardi (03:13):
That is really where I get a buzz. That is where my energy is renewed every day.

Ako Mitchell (03:20):
For the first time in his life, aged 45, has Mark Lombardi committed to what makes him happy? Or has he finally been swallowed by his obsessions? Elegant drawings, visualizing the hidden architecture of power, money, and influence.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (03:40):
He let the work speak for itself. Nobody was making art like this and they still haven’t. Nobody’s made work like this.

Ako Mitchell (03:48):
And it’s his commitment that sets in motion the making of the man we know today. Mark doesn’t know it yet, but his years of toiling as a struggling researcher are about to come to an end.

Mark Lombardi (04:00):
And this is my way of coping, of dealing with it..

Ako Mitchell (04:05):
For better or worse.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (04:07):
I don’t want to say it was an overnight success, but things started happening really, really, really fast for him.

Ako Mitchell (04:20):
This is The Illuminator: Art, Conspiracy and Madness. The story of conceptual artist Mark Lombardi’s rise to fame, whose brilliant genius had devastating consequences. I’m Ako Mitchell and this is episode four, The Mother of All Bank Scandals.

(04:51):
New York City, the place where Mark Lombardi would succeed and achieve the recognition he craved most.

Irv Tepper (05:04):
Mark Lombardi had to survive and did what he had to do.

Ako Mitchell (05:08):
He’s living in a tiny loft apartment, no more than 500 square feet on the south side of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A loft advertised on the Village Voice classifieds. His friend Irv Tepper is horrified.

Irv Tepper (05:22):
The living situation was horrible, I thought. I couldn’t live in that place he was living in. It was like this smallish place. It was a warehouse. It was divided off. These windows that led to 24 hour car wash way that are blasting Puerto Rican music. That’s what I remember. I can’t imagine going home to that.

Ako Mitchell (05:44):
In the shadow of his failed marriage and ill-fated galleries, many of Mark’s friends advise him against moving to New York. Including Irv, who lives in Manhattan.

Irv Tepper (05:56):
So I knew what that kind of life was like, but I didn’t know how long he could sustain it.

Ako Mitchell (06:01):
But Mark ignores them. New York promises, greater recognition than ever.

Mark Lombardi (06:07):
I was never thoroughly satisfied with it.

Ako Mitchell (06:11):
He’s found his purpose.

Terrell James (06:14):
I think by the time Mark moved to New York, he was thinking of himself as an artist and had had this tremendous approval and interest in his work.

Mark Lombardi (06:28):
I mean, I enjoy doing them. It allows you to almost to walk into the narrative in a way that this doesn’t, and I find that very appealing, and I think that the stories are conducive to that. They’re very expansive.

Ako Mitchell (06:43):
Mark is deliberate with his plan. Even the building he lives in turns out to be owned by Judy Pfaff, the pioneer of installation art. One of his neighbors is the sculptor, Ursula von Rydingsvard.

Fred Tomaselli (06:58):
He already had it in his head that he wanted to do it, and I was like, are you sure? Because New York is complicated.

Ako Mitchell (07:08):
Mark’s friend, Fred Thomaselli, senses his excitement to join a vibrant art movement that is responding to the social, economic and political changes of the era.

Fred Tomaselli (07:21):
And he was like, yeah, no, I really want to get out of Houston. I didn’t really so much encourage him to move to New York as try to be helpful to him should he make that decision. And he did.

Ako Mitchell (07:33):
Mark’s intentionally surrounding himself with the flow of information and inspiration he needs to succeed. The risk pays off… and quickly… as his friends witness, among them the artist Billy Hassell.

Billy Hassell (07:48):
He was getting shows. He was getting recognized. There was interest in his work in New York and he was happier than I’d ever seen him.

Mark Lombardi (07:58):
I was searching for a vehicle that would have the graphic impact of a painting but could convey a story, narrative information.

Billy Hassell (08:10):
He was looking for something beyond what most artists I knew at the time were doing, and I think that when things finally started to click for him, I think that had to have been a very satisfying time in his life for a brief period.

Ako Mitchell (08:39):
Mark Lombardi is surrounded by people at the prestigious Drawing Center in Manhattan. It’s a museum and gallery dedicated to the one thing Mark excels at: drawings. Unique works on paper as a major art form. It is almost like it’s meant to be – had Mark not so painstakingly worked his way up to this point. Rafael Vargas-Suarez is spell bound by the attention on Mark.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (09:07):
And I just remember being at the opening. It was just amazing to hear what people had to say and they’re just so curious.

Ako Mitchell (09:15):
Mark’s best works are all there on display. The exhibit is called “Selections: Winter 1997”.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (09:24):
It would draw you in. You really had to study it, so that was fascinating to see.

Ako Mitchell (09:31):
Kathy Heard, who hosted Mark’s wedding reception, is among the large group of friends and family rallying around him.

Kathy Heard (09:39):
The Drawing Center was a really big deal in that era because it showcased things like Mark’s work, which were not paintings, weren’t oil or watercolors or whatever. They were truly drawings and diagrams.

Ako Mitchell (09:55):
Mark had worked for years, all in a small, lonely room, channeling a massive inventory of facts to turn them into what he called “narrative structures”. Each drawing told a story about an event that interested him – like the collapse of a big bank. Mark’s hunger for information drove him, but the promise of an audience, of attention – that was what made him come alive.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (10:21):
I was more interested in listening, eavesdropping in on people’s comments about the work. Everybody reading all those little names, and it was just fascinating to see how people who didn’t know Mark, perhaps, were reacting to the work.

Ako Mitchell (10:38):
Rafael met Mark for the first time in 1997 on a job moving and installing art in New York City. That night at The Drawing Center, he meets Mark’s parents, Shirley and Don.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (10:53):
I do remember him saying to me that his parents were really against the idea of him being an artist because nobody in his family was creative at all. When Mark attained a level of success, his parents did come to town and I think they were very proud of him, eventually.

Ako Mitchell (11:10):
And Mark is more himself than he’s ever been. Funny, charismatic and oozing confidence. People are drawn to Mark, to the thing he has always wanted to create, a personality, a legacy, – more so than even his drawings.

Irv Tepper (11:29):
He wasn’t really after the money. The fame was definitely more of the issue. From day one, you could tell he was hungry, really hungry, make it. He was already, I think in his forties and had tasted it. Now, he wanted it.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (11:52):
I’m sure that was a part of it as well. Starting over at almost age 50. It’s pretty tough and then you go do it in New York City. To try to make it as an artist, it’s like, all these things are just so stacked against you. I remember when Mark said, well, I can just draw now. I’m so happy I can just draw now.

Ako Mitchell (12:17):
And the audience for Mark’s conceptual art doesn’t diminish. He goes on to have successful solo exhibitions in New York, including one at the Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, run by Joe Amrhein and Susan Swenson.

Joe Amrhein (12:33):
He actually walked into the gallery and at the time the gallery had an open door policy where artists could come in and show their work. He didn’t show a lot at that time, but he talked about the work, which was very interesting, and then we made a schedule, a visit, to come in with more of his accomplished work and totally blew me away.

Ako Mitchell (12:55):
It’s a fortuitous meeting and Mark bolstered by his recent success, makes a great first impression.

Joe Amrhein (13:04):
He came across as a very, as a heartfelt personality that was honest and straightforward. When I talk to artists or look at artwork, it’s always interesting how the artist talks about the work. Mark. Of course, his work is all information based. It’s not about emotional aspects or spiritual aspects or things like that. It’s more mental and straightforward information.

Ako Mitchell (13:31):
Pretty soon after he meets Joe, the Pierogi Gallery put on a show of Mark’s work called “Silent Partners” named after the so-called silent characters that make up the bulk of Mark’s diagrams. The businessmen and institutions who shy away from the headlines and are rarely held accountable. Susan Swenson, who runs the Pierogi with Joe is astonished by the level of detail.

Speaker 14 (14:00):
I mean he always said everything that was in his drawings was public information. It was very difficult to put together when you have all the information scattered in all these different places and he really visualized it. For most of us normal people who read all these things and can’t keep all the pieces together, he made it visual.

Ako Mitchell (14:22):
We will be back after this short break.

(14:29):
Mark is finally getting a small dose of the recognition he craves and he can start to consider quitting the jobs he’s had to put up with to keep a roof over his head. He’s surrounded by the emerging creatives of the New York art scene. Most are half his age. Ambitious and rebellious. Then at the Armory Show, at the Gramercy Park Hotel, a who’s who of the New York art scene, he meets someone.

Hilary Maslon (15:00):
I was immediately drawn to him.

Ako Mitchell (15:03):
Hilary Maslon, a fellow artist. The connection is instantaneous.

Hilary Maslon (15:09):
He was lively and I was attracted to him and he had kind of a groundedness in his maleness. It was kind of Texas. I think there was definitely a spark.

Ako Mitchell (15:23):
It’s an intense bond. Mark instantly wants to tell her everything, chain smoking through his words.

Mark Lombardi (15:31):
In the case here again of our Kissinger associates, I want to show the relationship….

Hilary Maslon (15:35):
I mean, he could really talk about a lot of things. Art, history. He was really brilliant, but it could be a little bit too much. Just so much information. It was overwhelming.

Ako Mitchell (15:48):
Hilary is experiencing what many of Mark’s closest friends, like Rafael, know all too well. His tendency to fixate on a subject and never let it go.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (16:00):
He would sometimes ask me a really funny question, a very almost cryptic or coded question. He would say, Hey, are you a fan of the Slurk? And I thought it was like, that sounds like a band or some show, a movie or I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Ako Mitchell (16:17):
But what his new girlfriend and young artist followers don’t realize is Mark’s intense fixations don’t just inspire and challenge them to think differently –

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (16:29):
And he would tell me the names of some CIA operatives or some general from some military dictatorship from Cambodia or something and I was like, well, why are you asking me? He’s like, well, you need to know because it might affect you. So he was always asking me, do you know about this? Do you know about that? It was like this very multidimensional kind of reasoning behind it. I always felt like he would ask me these things, almost like saying to me, you got to be aware of how fucked up the world is.

Ako Mitchell (17:02):
The closer people get to Mark, the more they see that his obsessions do not just underlie a paranoid man searching for answers, but someone close to putting a finger on the biggest controversies in American history.

Hilary Maslon (17:18):
Some weird stuff happened

Ako Mitchell (17:20):
And it starts to scare them.

Hilary Maslon (17:23):
We were hanging out together at a loft on the 13th floor in Hell’s Kitchen. He had parked on the street. He had a little truck and somebody slammed into it when it was parked, and I think he thought that that was intentional.

Ako Mitchell (17:38):
At first, Hillary laughs it off, reassures him. It was an accident bound to happen in one of the busiest cities on earth. But then a few weeks later, Hilary is with Mark in his apartment when a dark shadow falls over the room outside. A black orb is suspended in the sky.

Hilary Maslon (18:00):
A blimp was hanging right outside of our window. So there was this little sense of being watched. I mean, he was definitely under surveillance.

Robert Hobbs (18:12):
Okay, so it was a female FBI agent. I don’t know her name. I only know that she contacted his gallery, Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn and also contacted the Whitney Museum, which owns the work they wanted to see, the BCCI piece.

Ako Mitchell (18:33):
Robert Hobbs, an art historian and curator knows exactly why the FBI wanted to see the BCCI piece, his crowning achievement.

Robert Hobbs (18:45):
Well, she was interested in the money, she wanted to know how Osama bin Laden was able to get the money and distribute the money.

Ako Mitchell (18:53):
The work’s precise title is a series of acronyms, BCCI-ICIC-FAB. It stands for Bank of Credit and Commerce International, International Credit and Investment Corporation, and First American Bankshares. It is the culmination of every other work Mark has ever done. The scale and complexity of which is unmatched. A beautiful unraveling of the dirtiest bank in the world. A financial institution where Osama bin Laden held multiple accounts and whose employees went on to work for Al-Qaeda.

Mark Lombardi (19:39):
The BCCI drawing, which is 52 by 140, has like 300 elements. I went through six pencils doing that one drawing,

Ako Mitchell (19:49):
And the FBI agent has located it on the second floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where Maxwell Anderson was director at the time. The FBI have found something so threatening held within this drawing that the government will go to great lengths to censor it.

Maxwell Anderson (20:13):
The idea that someone could simply ask for a work of art to be removed from a gallery to me would only be if it was a function of danger, immediate danger to the public.

Ako Mitchell (20:21):
The FBI want to take Mark’s drawing

Maxwell Anderson (20:25):
Presumably to inspect it, to examine it, to put it through their forensic examination and whatever else they might have been seeking, including presumably invisible ink or anything that their forensic team might have wanted to have access to it for.

Ako Mitchell (20:38):
But Maxwell and the team at the Whitney refused to release the drawing, which remains in storage there to this day.

Maxwell Anderson (20:46):
It suggested that he had touched a nerve obviously, and that at a time when, as today, the FBI is deeply connected to corridors of unseen power. I assumed that there was someone in the tradition of J Edgar Hoover, who was obsessed and worried about how creative person could create harm in the United States by simply expressing themselves.

Ako Mitchell (21:12):
In his pursuit of truth. Mark had uncovered a profound fact. Osama bin Laden had held a number of accounts with BCCI. Notably the name Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire banker and former BCCI director, appears on the drawing. Khalid held a 30% stake in the bank and following the 9/11 terror attacks, considerable suspicion fell on him and other Saudi financiers for their alleged bankrolling of Al-Qaeda. The bank collapsed in 1991, having more than earned its nickname: The Bank of Crooks and Criminals. Exposed for facilitating mass financial crime, it had never discriminated when it came to its clientele. All of the most notorious criminals had accounts open there, from Saddam Hussein to the Medellin Cartel, run by none other than Pablo Escobar. The FBI sees the web of uncomfortable connections unfold in Mark’s drawing, lines spooling out.

Mark Lombardi (22:38):
BCCI, which is an Arab-owned bank, that was essentially incorporated in Luxembourg, operated worldwide, and was the mother of all bank scandals. Something like $14 billion disappeared in the process.

Robert Hobbs (22:53):
To my knowledge, it is the first time that a government agency has ever used a work of art for verifiable information, so it represents a whole other stage in terms of the role art can play in terms of political events.

Ako Mitchell (23:11):
We asked the FBI to clarify the reason for their visit to the Whitney in 2001. They did not respond to requests for comment.

Don Redman (23:21):
Mark was a priest trying to find what high art was.

Mark Lombardi (23:26):
I wanted to tell a detailed story… Perhaps that had some dark passages to it.

Maxwell Anderson (23:32):
He was making connections that were insidious and powerful and suggested an unknown currency of power and authority that the public was unaware of. Behind the beauty of the mark on the page was an extraordinary vision of a dystopian vision of power. Often you have a political work which is very direct, blunt and wants your attention. For Lombardi, it was human scaled. It was a whisper.

Ako Mitchell (24:23):
It is a cold February evening and Mark Lombardi is just entering his New York apartment, having spent another night out with the up-and-coming artists of the city. Most are half his age and see him as a mentor, but he doesn’t see himself as one out there. He commands a room. Intensely intelligent, driven by an urge to prove what kind of world we really live in.

Mark Lombardi (24:49):
Connected people on the board at the initial development company

Ako Mitchell (24:53):
In his own home, the mask drops. Now that he’s tasted success with a few solo exhibitions, he craves more. The brilliant man everyone knows him to be disappears behind closed doors and what is left is the Mark that directs a single vicious accusation at himself. Who am I?

Mark Lombardi (25:17):
Can I take a break for a minute?

Ako Mitchell (25:19):
But Mark has a solution. He’s been working on it for years, working on something big. He takes a drag of his cigarette and something curious jolts him out of his daydream, a change in his apartment. The chaos he normally works around – altered. At first, he sees the rolls of papers, they look stained. The usually pristine white paper is now brown. Nervous, he moves towards them. He feels a drip on his nose. He looks up. He can’t catch his breath.

Mark Lombardi (25:58):
Drawing like the BCCI drawing that I did, I think I went through, it has like 300 elements.

Ako Mitchell (26:05):
Something impossible has happened. Something terrible.

Hilary Maslon (26:10):
There was a sprinkler accident and his drawings had gotten wet and he had this big show coming up.

Ako Mitchell (26:16):
The sprinkler system has soaked his work. His BCCI masterpiece is ruined.

(26:27):
Wet paper, blurred names. His work, his lifeline destroyed.

(26:41):
Coming up on the next episode of The Illuminator:

Andy Feehan (26:45):
Aren’t you worried about somebody shutting you up?

Billy Hassell (26:51):
There are people out there that are convinced that he pissed off the wrong people.

Irv Tepper (26:55):
I asked him one day, why don’t you take the subway? and he was afraid to ride the subway.

Ako Mitchell (27:03):
The Illuminator is a production of Brazen. It’s hosted by me Ako Mitchell. Farah Halime is the showrunner and script writer. Soobin Kim is the reporter and associate producer. Megan Dean and Charlie Barlow are story editors. Iain Chambers is senior producer, sound designer and composer. Clair Urbahn is the production manager. Mariangel Gonzalez is the senior producer and project manager. Ryan Ho is creative director and Julian Pradier is the cover art designer. Additional design by Andrija Klaric. Lucy Woods is head of research and Arnav Binaykia is fact checker. Bradley Hope and Tom Wright are executive producers. Mark Lombardi interview excerpts are sourced from the Andy Mann Video Archive, courtesy of Media Arts Organization, Aurora Picture Show. Subscribe to Brazen Plus to listen to ad-free episodes. For other amazing stories please follow us on Instagram at brazen.fm or X at brazenfm or go to our website, brazen.fm.