Black Bird

Andy Feehan (00:07):
I asked Mark once, I said, aren’t you worried about somebody shutting you up? And he laughed at me. He just said, no, I’m not at all. This is all public knowledge. I’m not saying anything that people don’t already know.

Mark Lombardi (00:24):
I’m not introducing new information that could get anyone indicted or in trouble.

Hilary Maslon (00:35):
Did he do that because he thought something was going to happen? Nobody really knows.

Mark Lombardi (00:42):
There’s nothing on any of the charts that I cannot substantiate with a major published source.

Billy Hassell (00:53):
He was working with pretty dangerous subject matter, I think, exposing people and exposing where they were investing their money. And I remember telling him, aren’t you afraid for your life with the information and the names of people that are in your art? And he handed me his business card and it was Mark Lombardi Death-Defying Works of Art. And I thought, well, he’s obviously aware of the risk factor involved, but it’s obviously not stopping him.

Ako Mitchell (01:31):
The final few months of Mark Lombardi’s life. Among the best days and the worst. He’s on the precipice of international renown for a technique he developed – mapping the world’s hidden dirty money trails in clear, constellation-like drawings. His previously private fixation is now very public. And at 47, he’s finally experiencing the attention he craves. Recognition for his unique art, and the fame that comes with it. But best of all, the prestigious Whitney Museum is interested in acquiring his work. At last, he can quit a string of menial day jobs and become a full-time artist. And now he has a big show coming up at the Museum of Modern Art – MoMA PS1. It promises to catapult his work into the mainstream.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (02:36):
Everybody’s interested in his art. Everybody at that point knew who he was.

Ako Mitchell (02:41):
But in Mark’s world, not everything is straightforward.

Mark Lombardi (02:45):
I have been asked that question before.

Ako Mitchell (02:48):
His behavior is becoming increasingly erratic. He fears he is being watched, that his work is attracting the attention of the wrong people.

Irv Tepper (02:59):
He was afraid

Andy Feehan (03:01):
He just lost his mind.

Hilary Maslon (03:03):
He was a little unhinged.

Mark Lombardi (03:06):
It’s all public information. I am just reprocessing it. I am rearranging it in a visual format that’s meaningful to me.

Ako Mitchell (03:15):
He’s afraid he’s being surveilled by the people whose names appear in his art.

Mark Lombardi (03:21):
He was a weapons salesman. $5 billion to Saddam Hussein guaranteed by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Hilary Maslon (03:32):
He thought if he was targeted, yeah,

Ako Mitchell (03:34):
He is afraid that they’re coming for him.

Hilary Maslon (03:37):
That maybe somebody had targeted him, that that was intentional and that he was doing something that was revealing a lot of people.

Ako Mitchell (03:45):
But Deven Golden doesn’t think his friend Mark was just some overly paranoid theorist.

Deven Golden (03:52):
For a lot of people, it’s very difficult to understand how society works and how the world works. He liked exposing it for sure. He wasn’t like one of those conspiracy theorists wearing a tin aluminum foil.

Ako Mitchell (04:12):
Mark falls back on his old coping mechanisms, either going out all night, seeking out parties, smoking weed, or he is locked up in his tiny apartment talking to himself on the floor, surrounded by index cards, searching for the next subject, the next interrogation.

Mark Lombardi (04:31):
This is my way of coping with it, of dealing with it.

Ako Mitchell (04:36):
But Mark’s professional success doesn’t wait for his peace of mind.

Robert Hobbs (04:42):
Any one of these things would’ve been horrific

Ako Mitchell (04:46):
And neither do the secrets that spill from his personal life.

Irv Tepper (04:51):
And that’s how it came up once that he had a son.

Ako Mitchell (05:02):
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 five. Black Bird. Mark Lombardi is in shock, rooted to the spot in the entrance to his apartment, watching the aftermath of a massive malfunction of his building’s sprinkler system. It’s now fixed, but the damage is done. A steady drip of water falls on his life’s work, including the largest piece on the BCCI scandal. It is the drawing that MoMA PS1 was most interested in showing. He has no choice. He has to start all over again. The show is days away when he needs to stop work for the night, he can’t. His mind continues to turn.

Hilary Maslon (06:21):
He was up all night. He was super wired and his eyes just looked like, dismal. He had been taking, he said sleeping pills.

Ako Mitchell (06:33):
He’s shut himself off from the world, working frantically, coffee in hand, salvaging what he can.

Robert Hobbs (06:40):
He stayed up for four nights working continuously.

Ako Mitchell (06:46):
Curator Robert Hobbs recounts Mark’s routine, how he worked so long without a break.

Robert Hobbs (06:53):
He turned up the static as loud as possible, creating a white noise, and he was able to zero in and make this drawing.

Ako Mitchell (07:03):
Something about the sound is soothing. It blocks out everything else in his mind.

Mark Lombardi (07:08):
So that is really where I get a buzz…

Ako Mitchell (07:14):
He cuts the drawing into pieces, salvaging the unaffected sections and redrawing the precise curves and lines of the original. Remapping the connections he’d worked so hard to link. After combing through more than eight boxes of mark’s accumulated research, Robert came to realize that this is Mark’s working process.

Robert Hobbs (07:39):
Now I read a ton of material. Mark could remember all of these statistics, these intense periods of working four nights this time, other times two or three nights at one go suggests that there were times of an extraordinary amount of energy and focus, and certainly to make these works would require a great deal of concentration.

Mark Lombardi (08:04):
I haven’t even filled in a lot of these little blanks. What I’m doing here is I’m developing a marquette for a more finished drawing.

Ako Mitchell (08:27):
He shuts himself off, works nonstop, barely eats. There’s no sense of night and day. The exhibition called “Greater New York” goes ahead at the MoMA PS1, housed in a historic 19th-century public school building in the heart of Long Island City, Queens. Nearly 150 artists feature. Mark should be among them.

Joe Amhrein (09:01):
He was stressed out about it.

Ako Mitchell (09:04):
Joe Amhrein of the Pierogi Gallery is at the exhibition looking for Mark’s work. Art crawls over every inch of the old schoolhouse from the fourth story roof to the basement and sweeping courtyard.

Joe Amhrein (09:20):
Somehow he pulled it off.

Ako Mitchell (09:22):
There in all its glory is Mark’s drawing on BCCI. A cosmic constellation of information where the cold facts of a flow chart meet the mysteries of the human psyche. How do these bankers and businessmen connect, and why do they work so hard to conceal these links?

Irv Tepper (09:46):
That’s what I say about Mark. Yeah, very ambitious. At that point in his life, he wanted it bad. No question about it.

Ako Mitchell (10:00):
We’ll be back after this short break.

(10:12):
Mark has done it. His work on BCCI bank is on view for everyone to see. Its full title BCCI-ICIC-FAB Fourth Version. Stark and minimalist – black lines on white paper – it stands out.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (10:37):
At the PS1 opening, Mark was the star.

Ako Mitchell (10:39):
Adrenaline courses through him. Nights spent awake, recede to nothing. It’s as if it never happened. No sprinkler disaster. Irv Tepper and Rafael Vargas-Suarez are among a large crowd of friends gathered to celebrate him.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (10:59):
He was on cloud nine. He had a big smile on his face. He was selling a lot and he was just really, really, really enjoying those moments. He deserved that recognition. He deserved that happiness that the work that he created for himself brought to him.

Irv Tepper (11:18):
The guy was relentless. He stood by his drawing, shook everybody’s hand and introduced himself to everybody that walked by.

Mark Lombardi (11:27):
I’m certainly thrilled that other people want to look at it as well, but I do.

Irv Tepper (11:31):
It was great to see Mark do that. He paid a big price.

Ako Mitchell (11:48):
In Mark’s life, there’s one defining factor that is consistent. His extreme highs are quickly followed by deep lows. It’s weeks after the PS1 exhibition opening.

Hilary Maslon (12:06):
It was just kind of crazy. We got in, kind of, an argument. It wasn’t like a big bad argument, but we just went our separate ways.

Ako Mitchell (12:14):
Hillary and Mark, first drawn to each other by their creative ambitions, now find those very same ambitions, have driven a wedge between them.

Hilary Maslon (12:26):
This was a time that I was seeing him that Mark was becoming really, people were really acknowledging him for his art. He was really becoming quite well known. It was exciting. I personally felt a little bit overshadowed by him, but that’s just what happens. Maybe I didn’t feel like he appreciated my art enough. It was more conventional.

Ako Mitchell (12:49):
For Hillary, it’s another chapter of life that’s over. It was never going to work. The deeper he got into his work, the more she felt him slipping away.

Hilary Maslon (13:00):
Just so much information. It was overwhelming. He was smoking a lot and I was trying to quit smoking. Those are things that cause a strain.

Ako Mitchell (13:10):
But there was something else, something that ultimately bruised Mark’s ego far more than their creative differences.

Hilary Maslon (13:18):
I started seeing somebody else. It was kind of the reason that we split up. I met somebody that was from Mississippi, a musician, and I wanted to go to Mississippi and start an arts residency down there.

Ako Mitchell (13:32):
The lull of the post exhibition days is already messed with his head, but Mark, deeply sensitive and already in a state of heightened stress doesn’t take Hillary’s decision well. The couple arrange to meet at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus in New York. His eyes are bloodshot. He keeps checking over his shoulder.

Hilary Maslon (13:57):
We went out to see the elephants. Barnum and Bailey Circus was in town and they were walking the elephants across 42nd street.

Ako Mitchell (14:07):
Hillary can’t seem to reach Mark. He seems far away distracted. She chalks it down to their recent split and the stress of the flood, having to redraw his artwork. But then Mark suddenly bolts.

Hilary Maslon (14:24):
He started running with them down the street.

Ako Mitchell (14:27):
She watches in astonishment as Mark runs to the elephants in the parade.

Hilary Maslon (14:32):
He was a little unhinged.

Ako Mitchell (14:38):
For so long, Mark has laughed off his friend’s worries about the dangers of his work, but the paranoia that has followed him for several years now starts to reveal itself in startling new ways.

Andy Feehan (14:52):
Aren’t you worried about somebody shutting you up?

Billy Hassell (14:58):
There are people out there that are convinced that he pissed off the wrong people.

Ako Mitchell (15:03):
But Mark is afraid, as his friend Irv can attest.

Irv Tepper (15:09):
He’d come over and he would drive his truck. I asked him one day, why don’t you just take the subway? and he was afraid to ride the subway.

Ako Mitchell (15:18):
Mark’s truck becomes some kind of refuge for him. He’d take it everywhere, refusing to use public transport. That is until it’s destroyed, totaled by a hit and run.

Irv Tepper (15:33):
Once that happened, things started changing. You know, the way he’d act.

Ako Mitchell (15:38):
He’s convinced it was intentional.

Irv Tepper (15:42):
Yeah, more, a little bit more paranoid, a little bit more nervous.

Ako Mitchell (15:46):
Mark becomes afraid for his life. It could be the delusions of a troubled mind, but a suspicious death a decade earlier suggests it’s happened before.

Karen Wallbridge (16:00):
Ed Baker was my husband

Ako Mitchell (16:01):
In 1985, Ed Baker, a wealthy oil businessman once married to Mark’s longtime friend, Karen Wallbridge is presumed dead. His Jaguar is burnt in a horrific fire, but Ed Baker’s link to Mark is even more mysterious. It turns out Baker did business with a subsidiary of BCCI bank in the 80s and could have been a source for Mark Lombardi’s work.

Karen Wallbridge (16:32):
I didn’t know he knew Mark

Ako Mitchell (16:34):
So far Mark’s insisted he only uses public records for investigations, mostly books and newspaper articles. But the death of Karen’s husband, Ed, which remains unsolved to this day, points to a very different method of investigation. One that brought Mark face to face with the name circled on his own art. Before Ed disappeared, he’d given Karen an ultimatum.

Karen Wallbridge (17:04):
He told me he wanted a divorce and I didn’t know why. And he said, because I want to protect you. I thought he was just being really paranoid.

Ako Mitchell (17:19):
Ed gives Karen $150,000 and ends the marriage. He insists he has to run because someone is after him. He has to disappear. She thinks it’s all an excuse to run away with another woman. But what Karen discovers is that Ed is borrowed a million dollars from the mob to pay off debts he owed.

Karen Wallbridge (17:42):
Maybe Mark was trying to protect me or something.

Fred Tomaselli (17:49):
I’ve come to believe that, I don’t really know what Mark was like when I didn’t see him. Obviously, there had to be other Marks.

Ako Mitchell (17:59):
Lombardi is an enigma just as complex as one of his art pieces. And in the diagram of his life, there comes one more unexpected connection.

Irv Tepper (18:11):
I think part of it had to do with paying money for child support.

Ako Mitchell (18:15):
A long lost child.

Andy Feehan (18:18):
It was kind of a one-night stand at a Christmas party. The woman never told him about the child and then he told Day, his wife, about it, and I don’t know whether Day took that very well or not.

Ako Mitchell (18:34):
Mark’s friend, Andy Feehan, is among a handful who find out about his secret love child. A young son, but not many other details. One time, Mark lets it slip in a casual conversation, talking about bank accounts with Irv Tepper.

Irv Tepper (18:55):
He didn’t have a bank account, not that I know of, and that’s how it came up once, that he had a son. I think his son at that time, maybe 12 years old, he may have said that. I sort of vaguely remember him saying something like, that – the kid is into airplanes or something like that – and I said, what kid?

Ako Mitchell (19:12):
Maybe it is because of the art he makes, but Mark doesn’t like banks and he won’t trust them with his money. So everything is paid through checks, including his son’s child support.

Irv Tepper (19:27):
The mother would get the checks, she would cash it, and that’s how I knew he had a child.

Billy Hassell (19:32):
I do think it was stressful.

Ako Mitchell (19:35):
Billy Hassell, Mark’s friend, is witness to Mark’s attempts to keep it together.

Billy Hassell (19:41):
It was one of those things where a child that was kind of grown-up, resurfaced in his life.

Ako Mitchell (19:47):
The chaos of his bachelor lifestyle. Protected by a kind of selfishness that allowed him to work with such energy for so long, without interruption. But with an increasing fear for his life, and now the prospect of a child, a profound responsibility – it strikes a different fear within him.

Deven Golden (20:08):
His life was not easy for him, I think, internally. He never showed that, but a lot came out about how difficult his life was and how much he had trouble dealing with the world. Whether it was a child, I don’t know, and maybe he had trouble with the banks, it’s all unclear. But he definitely was unto himself.

Ako Mitchell (20:33):
There was a brilliance to Mark that seems predestined, formed from an early age. That’s clear to everyone. But his struggles with his mind are another animal. Hidden even from friends and colleagues in his inner circle.

Billy Hassell (20:50):
Someone told me that he had bipolar disorder. I mean, I’ve known several people since then that have bipolar disorder and in my experience, if they’re medicated, they can function pretty well and if they’re not medicated, they can go off the rails.

Ako Mitchell (21:06):
His manic energy helped him at times. Propelled his work binges. His mad unexpendable energy and appetite for investigation. But the reverse, the deep lows, those were kept hidden.

Fred Tomaselli (21:22):
If Mark ever crashed, I never saw that. I only saw the manic side of Mark. If there was a depressive side, I never saw it. Maybe Mark chose to be out in the world when he was feeling more social and maybe when he was feeling more social is when he was having a manic episode out.

Andy Feehan (21:44):
Sometimes I think about him and I just kick myself. I just wish somebody had been observant enough to just grab him and say, Mark, you’re burning your candle at both ends, and what the hell is wrong with you?

Ako Mitchell (22:01):
In March of 2000, a few weeks after his big debut at MoMA PS1, Mark moves his entire life’s work to the Peirogi Gallery in Brooklyn – everything. Joe Amrhein goes to his studio to personally collect it.

Joe Amhrein (22:19):
Some of it was framed. A lot of it was in tubes and in portfolio. I mean, I felt he wasn’t himself when I was there, and that’s all in hindsight. I mean, when I left, I just felt that he had a bad day or something like that, but I can’t psychoanalyze the situation.

Ako Mitchell (22:41):
Soon after, Mark is dead.

Don Lombardi (22:47):
I feel it’s a suicide. Yes.

Interviewer (22:51):
Why do you say that?

Don Lombardi (22:52):
It’s just a feeling I have.

Ako Mitchell (22:56):
Mark’s parents, Shirley and Don Lombardi, in a documentary about their son’s life.

Don Lombardi (23:04):
What do you want to say?

Shirley Lombardi (23:05):
I have never thought I was.

Ako Mitchell (23:08):
Before she died in 2012, Mark’s mother Shirley couldn’t come to terms with her son’s death. Why was the FBI involved? How could he have been so jubilant about commercial success and then so abruptly cut his life short? Mark’s friend from New York, Ombretta Agro, can see how a man so interlinked with the mysteries of the world, could himself become one.

Ombretta Agro (23:36):
I think at one point you start maybe looking for patterns and signs and say, oh, maybe that was something, maybe there was a message, or that someone was really pissed off, wanted to send that, Hey, you should probably stop doing this kind of research, and yet again, it might be nothing. Right?

Ako Mitchell (23:56):
In one of Hilary Maslon’s final calls with Mark, he’s upset with her. He still can’t quite grasp that she’s moved on romantically.

Hilary Maslon (24:06):
I called him up just to say, hi, how are you doing? And this was very strange. I remember it struck me as really, really uncanny. He told me that a big black bird had come and either it fluttered or landed in front of him. I don’t know if it was a raven or a crow. I can’t imagine what came and fluttered in front of him. I remember that it set chills up and down my spine. To me, that was a forebearer of his death.

Ako Mitchell (24:43):
Coming up on the final episode of The Illuminator:

Bill White (24:47):
As we pushed 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? And he said, we know what you said is true, the problem is that somebody’s going to end up killed.

Ako Mitchell (25:01):
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. 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. Additional excerpts from the documentary “Mark Lombardi – Crossing the Line” by Michelle Lindenberger and Michael Amish. 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.