Death Defying Acts

Ako Mitchell (00:00):
Warning, this episode contains references to suicide. It’s the evening of March 22nd.

Hilary Maslon (00:12):
There was an opening at the Whitney Museum

Ako Mitchell (00:16):
And Hilary Maslon is rushing down a busy road on the upper east side of Manhattan.

Hilary Maslon (00:21):
And I wasn’t planning on going, but I thought I would go and see if I could find somebody that had seen Mark

Ako Mitchell (00:29):
Mark’s not returning her calls and the last conversation didn’t go well.

Hilary Maslon (00:35):
We had a phone call in which he talked about how upset he was that we were splitting up and then we made some plans and then I didn’t hear from him. I started to get worried.

Ako Mitchell (00:48):
She’s been trying to reach Mark for days.

Hilary Maslon (00:51):
I called him and I said, Mark, I’m trying to get ahold of you and your mother’s trying to get ahold of you, and if you don’t call me back, I’m going to call the police. That’s what I said to him.

Ako Mitchell (01:03):
She hurries to the entrance of the museum where people are queuing for an opening reception. She’s hoping Mark’s there, or at least someone who knows where he is. She spots someone from the art scene, someone who might’ve heard from him and zeroes in on them rushing to get her words out.

Hilary Maslon (01:23):
I said, have you seen Mark Lombardi? And they said, no, but I’m sure he is okay.

Ako Mitchell (01:30):
The pit in her stomach grows.

Hilary Maslon (01:35):
And I said, no, he’s not okay. I know he’s not okay.

Ako Mitchell (01:40):
Hilary is desperate to get into the museum and find more people who might’ve seen Mark. And when the doors finally open, Hilary bursts in still hopeful she might run into Mark herself until her phone rings. It’s Mark’s mother, Shirley.

Hilary Maslon (01:59):
She said, has anybody seen him? And I said, no. And she said, then go call the police. So I went outside and there was some police standing at the curb. I said, I’m worried about this man, that we hadn’t heard from him. He was taking sleeping pills. They asked me how old he was.

Ako Mitchell (02:21):
The police try to get more information from Hilary, but something doesn’t feel right.

Hilary Maslon (02:28):
And then they said, we’ll call you later.

Ako Mitchell (02:32):
She just has a gut feeling. For a moment, Hilary stares as the police walk away from her. She can’t move. People brush by her on the sidewalk as if she’s not there.

Hilary Maslon (02:46):
At that point, I knew he was dead. I remember because I went out to a side street and I cried. I just knew he was dead.

Ako Mitchell (03:03):
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 am Ako Mitchell, and this is the final episode of The Illuminator – Death Defying Acts. Racked with dread, Hilary calls the police later that night, the police officer who responds to her distress call is Officer Michael Hendricks.

Officer Hendricks (03:56):
His girlfriend he had just broke up with, called out of concern for his wellbeing and that’s what brought us to the house.

Ako Mitchell (04:06):
He’s in the hallway, just outside Mark’s apartment. He can hear something.

Officer Hendricks (04:11):
When I got there, the music was playing, so I thought he was OK.

Ako Mitchell (04:17):
He calls out, identifies himself as an officer.

Officer Hendricks (04:21):
But obviously the door was locked and nobody answered the door. I could have broke the door in two, but I didn’t want to have to secure the door.

Ako Mitchell (04:28):
So he starts looking for another way in.

Officer Hendricks (04:31):
The doors, you see, have windows on top of them where you could push them in.

Ako Mitchell (04:35):
After some effort, Officer Hendricks manages to climb through the window above the door.

Officer Hendricks (04:41):
Once I looked through and saw him hanging.

Ako Mitchell (04:45):
Mark Lombardi’s death was 24 years ago, but Hendricks still remembers the unsettling scene in front of him.

Officer Hendricks (04:54):
He hung a bottle. I think it was champagne – it was a large bottle, but it was also hanging next to him.

Ako Mitchell (05:01):
Mark is already dead. When Officer Hendricks arrives, he is not allowed to touch the body. He can only check the apartment for evidence. He looks for a note but can’t find one, and as he stands there waiting for forensics to arrive, officer Hendrix catches a glimpse of an artist struggling to hold himself together.

Officer Hendricks (05:25):
It’s a typical artist apartment. It wasn’t filthy, but it wasn’t like you could say everything was in the right place.

Ako Mitchell (05:33):
Mark’s pencils, papers and stacks of research are everywhere. Very few belongings. Evidence of a chaotic life, but a devoted one. One that produced art so unique that there is no replicating.

Hilary Maslon (05:50):
It was devastating.

Ako Mitchell (05:56):
The news of Mark’s death soon spreads among his friends. A few days later, Hilary finds herself back at the Whitney meeting with friends Rafael Vargas-Suarez and Lindsey Noble. They go to see Mark’s drawing – the masterpiece that is BCCI.

Hilary Maslon (06:15):
I went with Lindsey and Rafael and we went and we brought a bunch of flowers and put it at the base of his drawing.

Ako Mitchell (06:24):
Mark had just begun to taste the fruits of his labor. It seemed like he’d had it snatched away from him right when he was on the cusp of something more. The whole thing made zero sense. When Rafael gets the call from Hilary, he’s completely lost for words.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (06:47):
The morning that Hilary called me, I think I didn’t even leave my house for the next day. I was just in shock. I couldn’t process it. Still such a strange thing to think about that he was just having this meteoric rise and then it just stopped like it never happened.

Ako Mitchell (07:20):
Back at the apartment, Mark’s parents are the first to arrive – five hours after a call from the police. In the days and weeks that follow others close to Mark stop by.

Andy Feehan (07:34):
Mark’s, at that time, ex-wife went up to look at his place after he died and they went in his closet.

Ako Mitchell (07:43):
According to Andy Feehan, Day Barlow finds six unworn suits, but not just any suits.

Andy Feehan (07:50):
And he had six identical suits by Giorgio Armani, six identical suits.

Ako Mitchell (07:58):
Day finds them in the closet, brand new. Signs of manic behavior that his family and friends now believe could have been a symptom of bipolar disorder.

Andy Feehan (08:10):
You don’t do that unless you’re just so wound up that you go, okay, well, I’m going to sell a million dollars worth of work in a week, and so I’m going to go buy some suits. And Mark, he had good tastes. So he went to Armani in New York and bought a half a dozen suits. And why not?

Ako Mitchell (08:28):
It’s a far cry from the man who only wore a brown suede jacket and the same jeans to important events. But those close to Mark remember another anxiety eating away at him, one that stalks the creatives of the world, the fear of what next. Despite all the success of his greatest work, the BCCI drawing, Mark was still plagued by an endless desire to make more, to be more.

Irv Tepper (08:59):
He never was comfortable, let me put it that way.

Ako Mitchell (09:03):
Irv Tepper watched Mark’s transformation from the confident artist at the Whitney Museum showing, shaking everyone’s hand and celebrating his work to the paranoid, insecure, obsessive, confining himself to his apartment.

Irv Tepper (09:18):
I don’t know what he was looking for, what he thought selling his work would do for him, but all of a sudden he felt the pressure of coming up with the next idea.

Andy Feehan (09:30):
For a minute, he thought he was out of ideas, which is absolutely shocking.

Ako Mitchell (09:39):
Detectives question Mark’s family for two days. Its routine procedure after a death and quickly the case is closed. Police declare his death a suicide, but this doesn’t stop theories of foul play… That Mark may have found himself more deeply involved in his investigations than he had previously admitted. An answer may lie with one of Mark’s sources. Houston real estate developer Bill White. Bill had revealed to Mark claims about his former business partner, James R Bath. Namely, that James was a front man for the CIA, and a go-between for Saudi investors in the US. James would later end up on one of Mark’s drawings called George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stevens, Fifth Version. Thirteen lines connect to him, more than any other name. Among those linked to him are George W. Bush and Sheikh Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s half-brother.

Bill White (10:52):
I reported all this to the FBI and they convened a meeting with me.

Ako Mitchell (10:57):
Bill tells the FBI everything he knows about James and his alleged links to the Saudis.

Bill White (11:06):
I was interviewed and deposed under oath for over an hour.

Ako Mitchell (11:10):
But as Bill leaves the meeting, he gets into the elevator with FBI special agent Mike McCoy.

Bill White (11:18):
As we push the button for the ground floor, Mike started shaking his head back and forth and I said, Mike, what’s wrong? Don’t you believe what I said? He said, I know what you said is true. The problem is that somebody’s going to end up killed.

Ako Mitchell (11:34):
Bill doesn’t know what to say. He thought the FBI were going to help him. But then as the elevator reaches the ground floor, the agent shakes his head again.

Bill White (11:48):
I said, what is it now, Mike? He said, well, the real tragedy of this is that the guy who pulls the trigger is going to believe in his heart of hearts that he’s doing his patriotic duty.

Ako Mitchell (12:01):
It takes a moment for Bill to understand what the agent is saying.

Bill White (12:06):
So in other words, they’ll tell an assassin that either Bath or I are both spies or turncoats, and that we deserve to be eliminated.

Ako Mitchell (12:16):
When Bill White hears about Mark’s death, instead of shock, there’s a flutter of dread that he could have been targeted.

Bill White (12:25):
I thought it was bizarre. A lot of people that helped me have been lost along the way and then the crooks all got rewarded.

Ako Mitchell (12:35):
Mark, though was always well aware of the risk.

Mark Lombardi (12:42):
Okay, so the people who have written the stories that I’ve derived my information from are still walking around. Now, in a few minor instances, there have been journalists assassinated. It has happened.

Ako Mitchell (12:57):
One journalist Mark might be referring to here is Danny Casolaro. He was reportedly investigating a mega conspiracy involving BCCI. He was found dead in August, 1991. Authorities ruled the death was a suicide, but his family and others persisted in calls for a full-scale inquiry.

(13:26):
We will be back after this short break.

(13:33):
There is a group of people like Mark’s friend, Lindsey Noble, who believed the artist’s paranoia was warranted, that he was being watched and that he would soon be targeted because the information he gathered challenged the dominance of powerful political elites like the Bush dynasty, the Vatican, the Mafia, and the CIA.

Lindsey Noble (13:59):
I have my theories, you know, I think he got murdered. So I mean because I don’t think he killed himself.

Ako Mitchell (14:06):
One question on the lips of this group of people is why did Mark offload his work to the Pierogi Gallery in that last minute handover when he was starting to sell it so successfully? Susan Swenson of the Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn saw it very simply.

Susan Swenson (14:25):
Well, he said because there was a lot more interest in his work and he felt like he couldn’t focus because he was spending too much time fielding calls and stuff. So I think he just wanted to offload some of that.

Ako Mitchell (14:37):
But others, like his ex-girlfriend Hilary, aren’t so sure.

Hilary Maslon (14:43):
Nobody really knows whether he killed himself or was murdered. He came and brought his work to Pierogi Gallery and did he do that because he thought something was going to happen or because he was going to kill himself? It’s really mysterious.

Ako Mitchell (15:02):
Everyone agrees that it doesn’t make sense. Mark may have hidden his anxieties, but why would he end his life when he was just on the cusp of international success? Curator Robert Hobbs has only one conclusion.

Robert Hobbs (15:19):
We really don’t know about Mark Lombardi’s end. We still don’t know whether it was self-inflicted or it was something else. All I can say is that it was truly a tragedy for him, but also a tragedy because so many different scandals have happened later that would benefit from a Mark Lombardi look or handling it.

Deven Golden (15:52):
What would Mark be doing if he was alive? Now, I mean, one can only imagine

Ako Mitchell (15:57):
Devin Golden supported Mark’s early work as his unofficial art dealer. He knows that if Mark was alive today, he would be a triumph of art and investigation, especially in the wake of 9/11. And what would that drawing look like?

Deven Golden (16:16):
Oh my God, there’s just so much. The world’s so much worse than it was. I can imagine Mark doing a drawing about the Saudis and Trump and Jared Kushner. Oh my God, that’s a whole drawing right there. He would’ve had a field day.

Ako Mitchell (16:36):
In the weeks after Mark died. Susan at the Pierogi worked to establish his legacy and get his work displayed in public for everyone to see.

Susan Swenson (16:47):
We felt that that’s what he would’ve wanted. So that it would be exhibited and preserved and could be lent out for traveling shows and things.

Ako Mitchell (16:54):
These days, a simple hand-drawn sketch by Mark Lombardi can go for as much as $6,000, while the larger formal drawings go for tens of thousands. But the death effect, when the value of art increases dramatically due to the sudden death of an artist, is not wholly reflective of the real value of Mark’s work.

Susan Swenson (17:19):
One of the things that’s really interesting about Mark’s work is how relevant it still is. I mean, people look at his work and they don’t realize it was made 25 years ago. I mean, it seems like it was made today, and I think it was very prescient.

Ako Mitchell (17:33):
The larger legacy he left behind informs the work of data analytics companies, whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

Andy Feehan (17:43):
There’s a website that has expanded on what Mark was doing, and that would’ve been the next thing for Mark. He would’ve had to have created a digital database,

Mark Lombardi (17:56):
I will actually Xerox the index, and then begin to pick through looking for corporate names of individuals.

Andy Feehan (18:03):
So that you could either track it visually or simply connect data, one thing at a time and have stuff come up.

Mark Lombardi (18:10):
I guess you could perhaps also call it a simple register.

Andy Feehan (18:15):
Because it was unmanageable by the time he was making those drawings. I mean, they were 20 feet long. That’s too much. How could you even retain all that stuff? You can’t.

Ako Mitchell (18:30):
But Mark had a very specific way of working.

Mark Lombardi (18:33):
The cards I prefer over a database again, because I don’t really enjoy sitting at a desk, being at a monitor.

Ako Mitchell (18:41):
And whether there was a madness in the method, it resulted in some of the most groundbreaking art the world has seen. Despite the gravity of the subjects he probed and the seriousness with which he approached his art. Mark was known universally as a fun guy with a wicked sense of humor.

Mark Lombardi (19:05):
I’m certainly thrilled that other people want to look at it as well.

Ako Mitchell (19:09):
Mark wanted to subvert the idea that the work he was doing was a conspiracy by revealing the facts as he came across them.

Robert Hobbs (19:17):
He had a sense of humor and a lot of people haven’t realized that. So he’d pass out business cards about his death defying acts of revelations of espionage and other things of this sort and hand it out to people.

Ako Mitchell (19:32):
And everyone in his life got one, especially when they would voice fear that he was getting too close to dangerous subject matter.

Mel Chin (19:42):
There was a camaraderie.

Ako Mitchell (19:44):
Mel Chin, an artist who knew Mark from his Houston days, deeply respected his work and his point of view.

Mel Chin (19:54):
He took his time when voicing his opinion. He seemed to care about art and was showing work that was not conventional.

Ako Mitchell (20:03):
Mel was so inspired by his friend’s work. He created a graphic novella and film called 9/11 9/11 about the 2001 terrorist attacks and the 1973 coup d’état in Chile. There’s an homage to Mark in it.

Film Clip (20:21):
She showed me everything. This map of a bank scandal is Art. Mark Lombardi – Lom – bar – dee.

Mel Chin (20:33):
I purposely put that in there. I wanted more people to know about Mark. To me, that was an important gesture. I was honored to know him and be a peer alongside him.

Ako Mitchell (20:49):
Mark’s memorial takes place several months after his death. It’s in Syracuse, New York where he was raised. It’s mostly a family event, but a select few friends are invited, including Joe Amrhein and Susan Swenson, who have already held a memorial for the art community back in Brooklyn. Kathy Heard, the architect who hosted Mark’s wedding is also invited along with his ex-wife, Day Barlow.

Kathy Heard (21:18):
Day was asked to speak, and since I was somebody who knew his family, Day and I decided to go together.

Ako Mitchell (21:26):
Mark’s mother Shirley has baked a rich Italian cream wedding cake, that is cut and passed around. A morbid reminder of the last time Kathy had met the family.

Kathy Heard (21:38):
It was not an emotional kind of thing because we had all accepted at that point that he was gone.

Ako Mitchell (21:45):
Mark never considered himself a conspiracy theorist. He was adamant he didn’t use any information that wasn’t already public. Yet sometimes, his art would make connections that no one had previously found. Mark beyond the grave keeps us guessing.

Mel Chin (22:06):
It was truly an inspired direction, and it’s almost like a person who finally makes something that you say, I don’t even know what this says, but the desire to want to know what it says is driving me profoundly.

Ako Mitchell (22:23):
Mark’s method continues to propel advances in data technology, journalistic and investigative techniques. But beyond the artist, the man, Mark Lombardi, the father, husband, son, he leaves behind a different impression.

Hilary Maslon (22:42):
Mark was really a sweet man. He was a really good guy. He had a really lovely heart and he had a lot of passion, and I’m just really sad that he’s gone.

Ako Mitchell (22:55):
Mark’s art lingers today like a whisper, revealing tangled webs of power and secrets that haunt the mind long after the canvas fades.

Mark Lombardi (23:08):
I’m real pleased you could come by and take a look at this work.

Ako Mitchell (23:24):
If you’d like to see Lombardi’s expansive BCCI drawing in full visit brazen.fm/illuminator/bcci. If you liked The Illuminator, you can buy merchandise from the series at shop.brazen.fm. This was the final episode of The Illuminator: Art, Conspiracy and Madness. It’s a brazen production 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.