A Whole Other Life

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (00:02):
Mark Lombardi is the happiest he’s been for a while. This is his party, a gathering of his closest family and friends.

Mark Lombardi (00:10):
Well, I’m real pleased you could come by.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (00:13):
He’s lit his fifth cigarette of the hour, enjoying the attention of his inner circle. He’s feeling confident. For Mark, life can get intense, a claustrophobic and private battle that he hides. But right now, he’s good. He’s in his element even. He’s chatting to a friend, something about a project he’s working on, excited as usual, talking nonstop when someone catches his eye.

Mark Lombardi (00:44):
In, uh, I’m sorry, not Chicago, but, um

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (00:44):
He stops mid-sentence. Smiles. His glasses slip down the bridge of his nose. Across the room is a striking woman – delicate like a doll, a pretty face framed by blonde curls. Mark’s eyes are locked on her. When the woman smiles back, she lifts her drink to her lips. She doesn’t look away. It’s flirtatious.

Mark Lombardi (01:08):
Sorry about that.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (01:11):
Her name is Day Barlow. A quiet Southern woman. In fact, it’s hard to miss her, hard to look away.

(01:20):
And she is Mark’s new wife. This is Mark and Day’s wedding reception. Mark, the intrepid researcher has finally met his match. A southern bell who also happens to be an ambitious advertising executive, embodying the inner resilience and steadiness Lombardi relies on to stay balanced. A union of two remarkable people, a meeting of minds of esoteric intellect and whip-smart shrewdness. A feeling of optimism imbues Mark. There’s a question of “what if”. But it doesn’t scare him. It fills him with excitement. His destiny is right there for the taking, at his fingertips. To Mark, Day is a catalyst to his unstoppable success.

Kathy Heard (02:24):
Mark was so fascinating that it was always entertaining being with him. I rarely saw one without the other and that kind of thing. Mark was always upbeat, enthusiastic, trying to figure out what he was going to do next. It was heady times

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (02:42):
The energy that day reflects the ambition and confidence of a new era for Mark. The drinks flow. The wedding guests – artists, curators, writers – start to let loose.

Kathy Heard (02:55):
The only bad thing was that Day had too much champagne.

Igor Alexander (03:01):
My feeling at the time was this is a bad omen.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (03:13):
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 Three, A Whole Other Life.

(03:50):
It is a bright Saturday, March 22nd, 1980 and Mark and Day are getting married in a private ceremony that only their family attends. Their choice of venue is unconventional. The iconic Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational church in Houston. It’s distinct, not so much a church, but a major work of modern art. Completed in 1971, its architect, the chapel’s namesake Mark Rothko, never lived to see its sparse beauty in full, having died by suicide a year earlier. On the chapel’s walls are 14 massive paintings, floor-to-ceiling Rothkos. They’re all black, varying shades of black. The paintings are thrown into even sharper severity against Day’s vivid white wedding dress. Afterwards, the newlyweds make their way over to the wedding reception and a bicycle drawn rickshaw to celebrate with their friends. It takes place of the office of their architect friend Kathy Heard.

Kathy Heard (05:10):
We did it on the shoestring budget and it was a glorious place to have events like their wedding reception because it was a big open space.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (05:19):
Mark feels limitless. Day looks a picture.

Kathy Heard (05:24):
She was absolutely gorgeous and probably wore a size two. Very thin and attractive, curly blonde hair. Very, very attractive.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (05:35):
Everyone drinks far too much. Day in particular, something to calm her nerves. When she sits down at the piano to play a duet with the couple’s journalist friend, Igor Alexander, he realizes something isn’t quite right.

Igor Alexander (05:52):
Then she turned to me and her expression changed and she put her hand over her mouth and then threw up. My feeling at the time was this is a bad omen. If the bride throws up at the wedding, this marriage may not last.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (06:13):
Their friends laugh it off.

Igor Alexander (06:16):
Luckily it didn’t land on me.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (06:18):
The party goes on into the early hours.

Kathy Heard (06:23):
They ended up missing their connection for the train to go on their honeymoon in Mexico.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (06:31):
They’ve overslept. Day’s upset, but Mark comes up with a plan thanks to his friend Michael Hollis, an artist and colleague at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. They’d both done the same grunt work together to keep things going – mopping floors, hanging paintings.

Michael Hollis (06:53):
I called him to congratulate him and say, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t at your wedding reception or whatever, but Kristen and I are on a ski trip.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (07:07):
Michael invites Mark and Day to join them in Aspen, a substitute honeymoon, and the guys get to hang out.

Michael Hollis (07:15):
I didn’t think that Mark was going to take me up on it, but he called back and said, we’ll be there tomorrow.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (07:24):
For some newlyweds, the idyllic setting and the charm of a serendipitous last-minute honeymoon would be enough and it is, at least for Mark.

Michael Hollis (07:34):
But Mark was like a pig of shit. He was happy. Everybody else was kind of miffed.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (07:42):
Two couples squashed in one small room with just a screen separating them. Mark and Day have to sleep on a pullout sofa.

Michael Hollis (07:53):
It was just kind of awkward. They argued. I heard ’em argue about it. She was just really unhappy. She had planned on a vacation at the beach and that was the total opposite. She was pissed the whole time.

Mark Lombardi (08:16):
A visual format that is meaningful to me. I was never thoroughly satisfied with it. I was searching for…

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (08:23):
Mark has had a string of jobs by now and in the fast fading shadow of his wedding, his mood starts to falter. The setbacks, notably his abrupt exit from the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and later the failure of his two galleries hurt his finances and his ego.

Mark Lombardi (08:44):
I was searching for…

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (08:48):
Envy of other people’s success reveals a more unsettling insecurity within him. What is he for and why?

Billy Hassell (09:08):
I kind of got the feeling he had either gotten a little deeper into what he was doing and kind of alienated himself from a lot of his friends.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (09:21):
New job, new friend, artist Billy Hassell. He gets to know Mark at Meredith Long and Company, an upscale art gallery in downtown Houston where he is just started working. But with a taste for fringe politics and the underdog Mark’s stubborn rebelliousness clashes wildly with the family business, whose intimate gallery rooms evoke old money.

Billy Hassell (09:50):
I think there was probably more going on there between him and Meredith, some sort of tug of war or some tension going on.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (09:58):
The more Meredith Long and Co push Mark to fit their formal stuffy mold, the harder Mark pushes back. Quickly he runs into trouble.

Billy Hassell (10:09):
One time he was asked to clean up the frame shop. He took everything that he could get his hands on and put it in the dumpster behind the building and there were frames from the 19th century in the dumpster and I was fishing them out of the dumpster to take them home because I thought they were legitimate trash. He might’ve been a little bit more of a troublemaker than I realized at the time.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (10:41):
It’s Mark’s renegade spirit that drives him. His inability to let go of even the smallest things propels an all consuming fixation with power and corruption: banks, politics, people.

Billy Hassell (10:58):
I think there was this sort of intensity lurking just below the surface with him.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (11:03):
Mark doesn’t reveal exactly what he’s doing, but his behavior – increasingly secretive, agitated – suggests the signs of someone troubled, preoccupied by something. Someone losing a grip on themselves. One night Billy’s heading back with Mark after a late night drinking. Mark’s driving. He always insists on driving.

Billy Hassell (11:27):
I thought we were going home and he dropped me off and asked me if I had any money left in my wallet because he was going back out. He wasn’t ready. The night wasn’t over for him and he was out of money, so he took whatever I had in my wallet and I guess I’m sure he paid me back, but I think he had a bit of a wild streak that he kept sort of restrained.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (11:50):
Mark’s intensity spills over not just into his work but his personal life too. His marriage strains under the weight of his secret obsession with fame and success. Day, like some of Mark’s friends, struggles to understand him

Billy Hassell (12:08):
She just had a real kind of southern gentleness about her, but Mark could be incredibly aggressive.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (12:17):
The couple, who do not have children, spend much of their time pursuing their own interests. Right from the beginning, the relationship seemed unusual.

Billy Hassell (12:28):
They were very cordial and they kind of seemed to almost have parallel lives. I think the only way I can describe it is their house, for example, didn’t look really lived in. There were rooms that were furnished but really minimally and there just, I don’t know, there was just a kind of a coldness.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (12:48):
When Mark’s friends meet him, he seems volatile. His mood’s erratic.

Billy Hassell (12:54):
He and I used to go play tennis occasionally and on the tennis court he was incredibly aggressive. I mean, it was like this other side of him came out and it was almost scary. He was a vicious opponent and then after the game was over, he’d be back to his jovial self.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (13:16):
At some of his lowest moments. It’s as if his friends cannot reach him, can’t relate to what he’s feeling.

Deven Golden (13:24):
His life was not easy for him. I think internally, he never showed that.

Billy Hassell (13:30):
I was finding it more and more difficult to communicate with Mark. Like, he was kind of obsessing about these things that he was involved in researching.

Mark Lombardi (13:41):
And this is my way of coping with it, of dealing with it, of visualizing the connections that I think have some power or influence in really even daily affairs through politics and finance and all this other stuff.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (13:57):
But there’s a use for its frenetic energy. A once-in-a-lifetime artistic exploration, digging into connection so deeply hidden that as far as we can tell, only federal agents were searching in the same place. We’ll be back after this short break.

Archival Audio (14:22):
More ripoffs, the savings and loan scandal could cost half a trillion dollars, but in Washington, the big question still is who gets the blame?

Archival Audio (14:30):
The Iran Contra scandal transfixed Washington for most of 1987 and renewed a struggle as old as the republic between the President and Congress.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (14:39):
Two of the biggest stories of the eighties and nineties, the savings and loans debacle when a thousand institutions collapsed in an implosion of reckless investments. And the Iran-Contra affair, a secret US arms deal where White House officials traded missiles with Iran to free Americans held hostage in Lebanon.

Archival Audio (15:03):
We will not rest until the cheats and the chiselers and the charlatans have spent a large chunk of their lives behind the bars of a federal prison.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (15:14):
It’s these stories that become the catalyst for all Mark’s drawings.

Mark Lombardi (15:21):
Savings and Loans lost something on the order of $2 billion because of the mismanagement, theft and outright larceny that went on there.

Deven Golden (15:33):
He found his style accidentally. A friend of his who he spoke to often on the phone was describing the machinations and the networks behind the SNL scandal and Mark, he found this interesting and so he started to make these little diagrams like almost on napkins, trying to understand who the players were and what their relationships were to each other.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (16:03):
Deven Golden, artist, and unofficial dealer of Mark’s work later in life, witnesses his friend’s transformation from a skittish misguided genius into a disciple in pursuit of the facts.

Deven Golden (16:19):
There’s something about the clarity of his work where everybody knows that there’s weird shit going on, but when he did a drawing, you would see, oh, so George HW Bush’s Palmer National Bank was the bank that was the money launderers for Iran Contra. You just suddenly started to understand the world in a way that I think most people found thrilling.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (16:46):
An investigator so dedicated that he’s kept awake for days on end, smoking, talking to himself and scribbling on some 14,000 pink and green index cards. But Mark illuminates relationships, bringing attention to the pervasive influence of dirty money and power on world politics. But he never explains or concludes a thing. Instead, his drawings ask the audience to dig deeper to evidence the connections themselves.

Mark Lombardi (17:23):
This seemed to be a appropriate and an effective way for me to convey the information.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (17:30):
A lot of Mark’s work during this period, however, never makes it to an audience and Mark would never reveal it.

Billy Hassell (17:38):
He played his hands close to his chest as they say. He didn’t share a lot.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (17:43):
Not even to his wife. Living dual lives, Day was running out of patience from Mark’s fractured working habits, his inability to hold down a steady job. Jim Holland, who Mark worked with at Meredith Long, sized up the fault line in the marriage straight away.

Jim Holland (18:04):
I don’t think she liked it. She didn’t approve. She thought he was wasting his time in a rinky dink gallery somewhere, not making any money and wasn’t on the career path that maybe, I don’t know what they talked about, but I mean he was always in art as far as I knew, so at least for five or six years, I mean she had to know that’s what he wanted.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (18:23):
Resentment begins to grow. Communication starts to break down. The more Mark withdraws into himself, the more the relationship suffers. His friends like Deven try to help.

Deven Golden (18:38):
I think he was very depressed and had issues that I used to blame it on Texas because he wasn’t seeing a shrink. Like, only someone from Texas would have problems like that and not go see a shrink. It’s New York. Everybody has three shrinks. Why wouldn’t you go see a shrink if you’re depressed? But he didn’t. He never saw one.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (19:03):
Mark was hiding a momentous struggle with what some of his close friends and family now realized may have been bipolar disorder. But there was something else to this, something beyond an internal battle. Mark was in a new arena, one closer to politics than art.

Billy Hassell (19:24):
I feel like he had a whole other life that I’m not sure anyone really knew about. There was a lot about Mark that was a mystery.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (19:42):
Mark swears his drawings were based on links using publicly available information – books, newspaper articles, journal entries. But, it turns out, he was using more than just written information. He was speaking to people using covert sources to make connections that hark back to both the Iran Contra affair and eventually BCCI. One of these people was Sissy Farenthold, a highly influential Texan politician for whom Mark was allegedly a private investigator. An attorney and progressive activist, Sissy discovered and Mark a special skill – the ability to investigate using publicly available information, not ever realizing he was an artist.

Bill White (20:34):
Sissy was a kind of a gadfly in that she sponsored events all the time.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (20:40):
But Sissy played an important role for Mark. She connected him to the former Mayor of Houston. A real estate developer named Bill White, whose connection was even more vital: it led Mark straight to the Bush family.

Bill White (20:57):
Mark was making a series of drawings that basically outlined relationships and she felt that some of the work that he was doing was germane to the people that were attacking me.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (21:11):
Bill is referring to James R. Bath, a close associate of the Bush family who he was in business with in Houston. Though the two did well together, the partnership fell apart quickly when Bath suddenly asked to borrow money.

Bill White (21:27):
So he came down to our company, called me into the conference room and said, Bill, we have a problem.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (21:32):
James reveals he has been having an affair and used funds from their joint bank account to pay for the woman’s house, a pool and the setup of a childcare company.

Bill White (21:43):
And I said, how much are we talking about? $550,000. And I said, how in God’s name did you spend over half a million dollars on the girlfriend?

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (21:52):
It leads to a wormhole of financial problems and the men enter into a bitter feud resulting in multiple lawsuits against each other.

Bill White (22:03):
I needed lawyers to represent me on a contingency fee basis because I had four criminal charges and 28 civil lawsuits filed against myself and my companies.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (22:12):
Bill wants to get the dirt on his former partner. He claims Bath was involved in shady financial dealings, namely as a front man for the CIA, a go-between for Saudi investors in the U.S., including a connection to Salem bin Laden, the half-brother of Osama bin Laden – names that would later end up on Mark’s greatest work on BCCI bank.

Bill White (22:39):
The Saudis were funneling money. They were basically providing matching funds for the CIA to support the Mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviets

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (22:52):
For years these claims were never definitively proven. Until in 2018, the U.S. State Department declassified a document showing that Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi spy chief, had offered to match the CIA spending dollar for dollar.

Bill White (23:11):
Yeah, those relationships were on Mark’s drawings. One of his charts. I just commented on what he had done and said, well, yeah, I think you left had some players here who were connected, who I knew, and he would go off and research it and maybe make modifications to his chart and Quebec and we discussed it further.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (23:31):
Mark may be moonlighting as a private investigator, but it’s as much for his own benefit as it is Bill’s. One day Mark calls a lawyer in Los Angeles to obtain information on a key middleman of the Iran Contra affair.

Leonard Gumport (23:51):
People periodically asked me if I had spoken with a person named Mark Lombardi. I think I’ve only had one conversation with him,

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (24:02):
Lawyer Leonard Gumpert, whose specialty is financial fraud and government corruption.

Leonard Gumport (24:08):
He did not introduce himself to me as an artist.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (24:12):
Gumport can hear shuffling on the other end of the line. The man has very specific questions.

Leonard Gumport (24:18):
The person asked me to explain a financial transaction and I did tell him what any number of bankruptcy lawyers would have told him to help him understand the transaction clearly.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (24:38):
Gumport instructs him to grab a pen and paper. A few seconds later, the man says he’s ready.

Leonard Gumport (24:46):
Draw some boxes and each box would be a person or a bank account and to draw arrows from connecting one box to the other, and that would illustrate the flow of funds among the people and or the bank accounts.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (25:08):
Instantly, Gumport can hear pencil scratching over the line.

Leonard Gumport (25:13):
As bankruptcy practitioners know, a question that’s frequently asked is, what happened to the money? Where did the money go?

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (25:25):
That conversation leads to the technique which becomes the foundation of Mark Lombardi’s oeuvre.

Mark Lombardi (25:32):
I feel like I’m so to speak, borrowing or pillaging part of the corporate vocabulary. Diagrams and charts are very common in business law, whatnot. People use them to visualize deals, information. They’re very expansive. Can I take a break for a minute?

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (25:57):
Coming up on the next episode of The Illuminator:

Maxwell Anderson (26:01):
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. 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 a creative person could create harm in the United States by simply expressing themselves.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (26:37):
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.