Angels and Devils

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (00:00):
This episode contains references to suicide.

(00:02):
In a cramped dark loft in Williamsburg, New York. A sour smell seeps through the narrow halls. On each wall is an array of pencil drawings, framed in black and hung precisely. Delicate graphic sketches spun with the precision of a spiderweb, strung out silk-thin lines connecting a network of circles. But no personal photographs, no color. The apartment is bare other than the rolls of parchment paper leaning against corners, ripped-out sketchbook pages and piles upon piles of books. There’s a chill in the air, an other-worldly heaviness weighing over the space because in the living room, a single shaft of light tells us everything we need to know… the tragedy before us. There’s someone here. A man. At first, only his hand is visible. A worker’s hand. Nails bitten down, dirt lining each one. The hand of a creator. He wears a navy blue suit. Well tended to. Recently dry cleaned. And in his front breast pocket a bottle of Tylenol. Open.

Hilary Maslon (01:42):
Mark. Um, you know, I’m trying to get ahold of you and your mother’s trying to get ahold of you…

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (01:48):
The man is dressed for an important occasion. So important that in fact, it’s his own death. One day before his birthday.

Hilary Maslon (01:58):
And if you don’t call me back, I’m gonna call the police.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (02:01):
It’s too late. And the police officer on duty, Officer Michael Hendricks, is first on the scene following a distress call from Hilary Ann Maslon, the man’s girlfriend.

Officer Hendricks (02:12):
She was just concerned that she hadn’t heard from him. So when I got there, the music was playing, the radio was on, so I thought he was home. Once I looked through and saw him hanging

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (02:24):
The weight of his body creaks from a sprinkler pipe. Scattered on the floor beneath him are several hundred more Tylenol pills. But strangers still is what dangles beside him.

Officer Hendricks (02:36):
He hung a bottle. I, I think it was champagne. I don’t remember. It was a large bottle. But it was also hanging next to him, hanging like, like you would hang yourself. You, he hung a bottle.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (02:47):
48-year-old Mark Lombardi, father, lover and artist. A man at the cusp of international success for his intricate line drawings that walked a tightrope between art and information. A man who shone an unwelcome light on the power brokers of the world. A man who was at once conceptual artist and investigative reporter, one of a kind,

archival audio (03:15):
Mark drew pictures about money and politics. Provocative pictures, even incriminating pictures. Connections that were unbelievably telling

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (03:25):
Brilliant in his own unique way.

archival audio (03:28):
Something was very wrong with this case. He handed me a bunch of micro cassettes tapes. Of fraud and corruption and international intrigue. These conspiracy theorists are morons. How did they know who did this? Like they did Lee Harvey Oswald, where the money from 9/11 came from, etc cetera, et cetera. He’s sort of below the main radar of contemporary art. Mark Lombardi, Lombardi. Lombardi. Lombardi, Lombardi,

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (03:56):
Tragic in his own unique way.

Mark Lombardi (03:59):
I wanted to tell a detailed story, um, a story perhaps that had oh, some dark passages to it.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (04:07):
This is the journey of his life, and how he rose from humble beginnings – a researcher and archivist – to the artist who left behind a legacy, a story yet untold. Trailblazing a path for whistleblowers to challenge individuals in control of politics and finance.

Hilary Maslon (04:28):
They asked me how old he was, and then they said, um, go home. You know, we’ll call you later. And I remember at that point that I knew he was dead. I remember ’cause I went out to a side street and I cried. I just knew he was dead.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (04:49):
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 Episode One, Angels and Devils.

Andy Mann (05:23):
Okay, Mark, since I’m rolling the tape now, uh, we have begun shooting your videotape.

Mark Lombardi (05:29):
Mm-Hmm, .

Andy Mann (05:30):
So talk to me. Tell me about your process,

Mark Lombardi (05:33):
about the process?

Andy Mann (05:33):
Your work. Point out interesting things to me here in your, in your apartment.

Mark Lombardi (05:39):
Humble abode

Andy Mann (05:40):
It’s a little more humble than that.

Mark Lombardi (05:41):
Ha-ha!

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (05:42):
Andy Mann, Mark’s good friend, a pioneer of video art is over at Mark’s apartment filming him. Mark doesn’t seem to notice. He’s on the floor, hunched over a parchment surrounded by stacks of books and scribbled notes.

Andy Mann (05:57):
Okay, what’s up? What, what do you have to show?

Mark Lombardi (06:00):
What do I have to show?

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (06:02):
They first meet in Houston in the late eighties where Mark lived for decades as a struggling artist.

Andy Mann (06:07):
What do you have to show me?

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (06:08):
Andy’s among a troupe of fellow creatives who always believed in Mark before he even believed in himself.

Andy Mann (06:14):
Trace with your finger maybe a few of these connections so we can,

Mark Lombardi (06:19):
Okay. Um, for instance, you had, uh, Moe Dalitz

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (06:24):
In the sweltering heat of a New York summer. The air conditioning unit hums tirelessly in the corner of Mark’s small apartment.

Mark Lombardi (06:33):
He goes back to the thirties. He was a partner of Lansky and, uh, bootlegging, I believe it’s Cleveland.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (06:40):
He stubs out a cigarette and smiles up through the lens of his friend’s camera. This grainy footage is among the only remaining that captures the chaotic genius of Mark Lombardi at work. A genius that everyone else in the world would learn of only after his death.

Mark Lombardi (06:58):
This is basically what I’m, listen, what I’m trying to enjoy. For, um, four years. For four years,

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (07:05):
Mark handsome in his own way. A toothy grin, glasses permanently perched on his nose, a wild look in his eyes.

Mark Lombardi (07:14):
I was getting into information, um, from a number of sources, which I was beginning to get confused by. Couldn’t really keep the the story straight.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (07:23):
Slim, tan and aloof. He’s popular with the ladies, but his real charm lies with his intellect. How he merged art with revealing the identities of the people who run the world. Those he called the silent partners that shy away from the headlines that are often not held accountable. Until now,

Mark Lombardi (07:46):
I was losing track of various connections that I thought were vital to the story. And simply out of sheer necessity, began doing sketches of corporate organizations, hierarchies and various political structures to keep the information all at hand. Um, I used the drawings to refresh my memories, so to speak. A prompt.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (08:10):
Mark’s brilliance is in his vision and ability to see the world around him as a tapestry of connections… connections the rest of us can’t see

Mark Lombardi (08:22):
A database.

Irv Tepper (08:27):
He knew how to research. He knew how to dig into things.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (08:31):
Irv Tepper is another artist friend of Mark’s drawn to the magic of Mark’s mind

Irv Tepper (08:37):
From day one you could tell he was hungry. He didn’t have to talk about it. You could tell the guy was hungry, really hungry to make it. He was already, I think in his forties. He hadn’t tasted it. And now he wanted it. That’s why he worked. He was gonna make it and he was onto something.

ko Mitchell (narrator) (08:54):
Mark started with paint. No one talks about those pictures. Even Mark. He distances himself from his early work. Almost embarrassed by it.

Mark Lombardi (09:03):
I had to paint and wanted to paint, but I was never thoroughly satisfied with it.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (09:08):
Those rarely-seen abstract paintings are often black and white, composed of fragmented deconstructed letterforms. But in search of political and financial truth, he hunts for another way, a window for us all to view the corrupt world around us.

Mark Lombardi (09:26):
I was searching for a vehicle that would have the graphic impact of a painting, but could convey a story, narrative information. Um, I call these narrative structures.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (09:40):
What he came up with was a remarkable cross between conceptual art and hard hitting investigative journalism. In some ways, only newspaper reporters and investigators truly understood his work, and perhaps that was his greatest downfall.

Irv Tepper (09:59):
He did all the drawings on the floor and he’d sharpen these pencils and he had a bunch of T-squares and triangles and French curves and all those kind of things.

Mark Lombardi (10:14):
And what I will do is I will use, this is called a, a ship’s curve. And I will use these to create a flow to the drawing that first of all, interests me.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (10:27):
Using a ship’s curve – a stencil, architects and designers use to mimic the smooth, continuous, and flowing line like that of the hull of a ship – Mark draws meticulous, fine lines curving outward from a network of circles. His art is, in essence, an elaborate mind map. But Mark’s creations are so far removed from a conventional graph, they pulsate with life. Looking at one of Mark’s ‘narrative structures’, it’s as if a mosaic of the world unfolds before you. A name in a circle catches your eye. A line stretches out from that name, linking it with another, and then another, illuminating incongruous connections in an eye pleasing labyrinthine mass.

Mark Lombardi (11:19):
My eye wants to follow something other than all these right angles. So the image looks organic, kind of for a reason. I found that the rectal linear drawings were more difficult to read, were less pleasing on the eye than a diagram that consisted of a series, a web of radiating lines.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (11:42):
Rectilinear meaning a diagram using straight lines, never appealed to Mark.

Mark Lombardi (11:50):
All those right angles were slowing down the flow of the information. They’re slowing down my interest.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (11:57):
It is this technique applied to all manner of people and institutions that leads him to triumph. Mark doesn’t know it yet, but his years of toiling as a struggling researcher are about to come to an end.

(12:15):
We’ll be back after this short break.

(12:24):
Soon Mark will stumble across the information he needs to create his masterpiece. A drawing spanning over 11 feet on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI or what Mark comes to call it, the bank of crooks and criminals. His drawing would connect names as seemingly disparate as George W. Bush and Sheikh Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s brother. But to Mark everything had to make sense. Accessible for the common man.

Mark Lombardi (12:58):
I want the information on this level to be legible. And I don’t want to have to interpret it myself because there are a lot of little passages that are kind of obscure.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (13:08):
But it is this ability, his greatest skill that will also lead him to his greatest danger as his close friends would come to realize

Deven Golden (13:18):
All the information in his artwork was public. But seeing it in the drawings is what freaked people out, because you suddenly could understand these complex networks. Because it was, it was a drawing and it brought it all together and it made it crystal clear what was going on.

Hilary Maslon (13:40):
He was pretty obsessed with what he was doing. He wanted to tell the truth. I think that he wanted to cut through the lies and expose things.

Irv Tepper (13:55):
The guy was like relentless.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (13:57):
Irv watched as his friend worked. Mark was always tense. His back aching. His hand in an endless cramp, forgetting Irv was even in the room.

Irv Tepper (14:11):
I mean, he was in a hurry. He was in a hurry and he wanted to get his work out there. After he started getting more and more attention, he got more and more nervous, I think. In my opinion.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (14:24):
Andy Feehan, another artist from Mark’s Houston days, has gone over the death of his friend time and time again, but comes back to the same conclusion.

Andy Feehan (14:34):
Whatever devils were driving him, his angels were driving Mark too. Whatever that manic energy was that made him work like a demon. If they had treated him psychiatrically with drugs, something maybe that would’ve destroyed his motives. Some very brilliant people have been like that, you know, and it, it’s a tragedy, but it’s part of the package.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (15:03):
But for all of Mark’s feverish intensity, for all his apparent madness and brilliance combined, the man was onto something. The truth.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (15:24):
He had these index cards. And he would put his sources. He’d say, you know, this is not conspiracy theory. Everything is based on fact-checked, published information. I’m not making any of this up. I remember he would always tell me, he’s like, this is all reality.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (15:41):
Rafael Vargas-Suarez is an up-and-coming artist when he meets Mark for the first time in 1997 in New York City,

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (15:49):
Listening to Mark talk about the history of the Italian mob, the Colombian cartels, the CIA and even art history. I mean, ’cause that’s actually what he studied. It was just really fascinating.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (16:04):
The two struck up an unlikely friendship. Rafael is half Mark’s age, and among a small group of other 20-somethings who orbit the artist compelled by the way he thinks.

Mark Lombardi (16:16):
First of all, what I do is survey the major published texts… I will actually Xerox the index and then begin to pick through looking for corporate names of individuals in whom I have some kind of an interest or are already in my database.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (16:35):
He would go into deep detail about what his work was about, the players and characters, or as he called them, silent partners.

Mark Lombardi (16:43):
And I will make a card for each one and then go back to the original book and follow the index and transcribe the information that I think is relevant onto the cards, which form a database.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (16:59):
He didn’t need much. He needed paper, pencil, and he needed a lot of time to research.

Mark Lombardi (17:06):
And then I’ll set about sketching. Doing just really, um, doodles almost that are meant to get this story going. I’ll start out with just smaller, uh, elements of it. Here I use a timeline. This is, it is a pretty easy way for me to lay it out. And what it allows me to do is to plug information in. For instance, this is gonna eventually stand for the Defense Ministry. It’s the Agricultural Ministry. This is called the, uh, Ministry of, uh, Industrialization and Military Industrialization. And…

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (17:56):
Rafael ends up spending hours with Mark, listening to him analyze the political landscape in which we live. And he quickly realized Mark wasn’t just an artist.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (18:09):
His art was therapeutic to how messed up he, he saw certain aspects of the world and of, of the entire political, financial organized systems.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (18:20):
Mark was a visionary. Progressive, and insistent on telling the truth.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (18:25):
Make art about things that matter. That’s a conversation we always used to have. Mark and I stick to reality, deal with real things. So that’s what he did. It did piss him off that taxpayers had to bail out all these banks and that people would get away with untold crimes in terms of violence and coups and assassinations and this kind of crime that goes unpunished. He was angry about those things. And what did he do about it? He made art about it. He let the work speak for itself.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (18:59):
But Mark is hitting almost 50 and seeing young artists like Raphael makes him more desperate. Hungry for success. But the closer he gets to it, as he makes strange connections about the world, the more his life deteriorates. His girlfriend, Hilary, notices Mark’s increasingly erratic behavior.

Hilary Maslon (19:21):
He was super wired and his eyes just looked dismal. At one point a blimp was hanging outside of our window. So there was like this little sense of being, you know, watched maybe. I mean, he was definitely under surveillance. Mark was writing about things that people didn’t want revealed.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (19:50):
It’s just before his birthday. And Mark drops off the face of the earth. No communication. No one can reach him. Not long after Officer Hendricks finds Mark’s body, questions linger over the artist’s death.

Hilary Maslon (20:05):
A detective took me to his desk and he started asking me questions. I think there was some speculation that I might’ve been involved in his murder, in his death

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (20:15):
For two days police interrogate his loved ones, refusing to call it a suicide, considering the strange circumstances in which he died. Until an even stranger development. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Maxwell Anderson, the museum’s director gets a call. It’s the FBI, they want to know more about Mark Lombardi’s work.

Maxwell Anderson (20:44):
I said something to the effect of, we’ll take that under advisement. And that was it. And can I have your number? I wasn’t gonna respond in real time to that. This would’ve been incautious.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (20:53):
But the FBI agent is not interested in the artist’s life. They’re interested in just one particular piece.

Lawrence Rinder (21:03):
I worked, uh, to acquire the piece for the museum, the very large piece, the BCCI,

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (21:11):
A curator of the Whitney Museum, Lawrence Rinder, knows the piece is powerful. But he has no idea just how potent the connections made by Mark are, how they link all the characters of a huge story.

Lawrence Rinder (21:27):
I felt that Mark’s work and this piece in particular the BCCI was, you know, it’s an overused term, but I’ll use it in this case, you know, a masterpiece. It had a kind of a grand scale for one thing. It had a very powerful, globally significant subject.

archival audio (21:45):
This mighty nation won’t rest until we protect ourselves, our citizens and freedom loving people around the world. // The FBI has put America’s national threat warning system on its highest alert. // I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us. Soon.// American and British forces have begun attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan tonight in a wave of military // missile explosions, light up the nighttime skies anti aircraft tracers streak over the captial city, Kabul.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (22:21):
A year and a half after Mark’s death, Osama bin Laden is held responsible for the worst terror attacks in the history of America. And Mark Lombardi had laid out the connections showing how Osama bin Laden, through his brother Salem, moved money around the world – critical clues in how he financed the attacks.

Lawrence Rinder (22:47):
This was not long after the September 11th attack that they came and possibly within just like a month of it. The atmosphere in New York at that time was very, very strange and troubling, for lack of a better word, paranoid.

Mark Lombardi (23:11):
It’s all public information. It’s all public information. I am just reprocessing it. I am rearranging it in a, a visual format that’s meaningful to me.

Andy Mann (23:21):
You think anybody’s gonna come along and shoot you, uh, in the back of the skull tonight?

Mark Lombardi (23:25):
Uh, no. I mean, uh, you know, uh, actually, I’ll tell you, I have been, I asked that question before

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (23:33):
Coming up on the next episode of The Illuminator.

Maxwell Anderson (23:36):
I was sitting in an office in the fifth floor. It was a, a message passed to me that, uh, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had come into the museum and was requesting an opportunity to examine a work offsite.

Ako Mitchell (narrator) (23:50):
That work was a drawing of celestial like magnificence by Mark Lombardi.

(24:01):
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. And 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 Man 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.