The Loss of Innocence

Archival Audio (00:01):
You got to get out of here. Come on. What came down though? What came down? They crashed, the other trade center’s down, down. It’s down. Smoke everywhere. People jumping out the windows. Over there and jumping out the windows. I guess because… Believe that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (00:18):
The world is reeling from the deadliest terror attack in history.

Archival Audio (George W. Bush) (00:22):
Osama bin Laden is just one person. He is representative of networks of people.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (00:28):
The US government is on high alert. Committed to what would become a decade-long international manhunt. Every possible source, every possible effort.

Archival Audio (George W. Bush) (00:39):
I want justice.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (00:40):
In the aftermath of the destruction Americans and millions the world over remain in total shock and fear. But one New Yorker had known. A lone conceptual artist by the name of Mark Lombardi had connected the dots, a full seven years earlier.

Mark Lombardi (01:01):
I’ve never really shown this computer-generated BCCI image anywhere. Well, they better censor that.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (01:15):
It’s one month after 9/11. The mood in New York is tense, quiet, but paranoia seeps into every interaction. The events of September 11th are about to reshape American foreign policy forever.

Archival Audio (George W. Bush) (01:31):
None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (01:38):
In the days immediately following the attacks, American society starts to witness the sweeping changes to US National security operations that will lead to two devastating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At 945 Madison Avenue, the striking brutalist Upper East side location of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Maxwell Anderson, the museum’s then director, receives a phone call. It brings a message so significant he can still recall it in minute detail. More than 20 years later.

Maxwell Anderson (02:23):
I was sitting in an office on the fifth floor. It was a message passed to me that 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) (02:37):
That work was a drawing of celestial-like magnificence by Mark Lombardi. The drawing also visualized information, information explaining how George HW Bush used a particular bank to fund covert CIA programs bypassing Congress. Yet alarmingly, it also connected Osama bin Laden’s associates to the same bank. The bank’s name was BCCI. In fact, this work was Mark’s greatest achievement. Completed in 2000, a month before he died, and well over a year before September 11th.

Archival Audio (03:19):
Now, many of you may remember the BCCI Bank. Osama Bin Laden had a number of accounts at BCCI. A worldwide banking scandal, a tale of fraud, corruption, and international intrigue. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI operated more than 400 branches in 73 countries.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (03:42):
This drawing by Mark Lombardi, a prophecy a year before its time right there on the second floor of the Whitney Museum. But how did he do it? Driven by a righteous pursuit of the facts and a devilish insomnia. How did Mark unearth the connections that would fund the worst terror attack in history?
(04:14):

This is The Illuminator: Art, Conspiracy and Madness. The story of conceptual artists Mark Lombardi’s rise to fame, whose brilliant genius had devastating consequences. I’m Ako Mitchell, and this is Episode Two, The Loss of Innocence.

Singing (04:48):
A young man rode with his head held high under the Texas sun..

Archival Audio (05:00):
From Dallas, Texas. The flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1:00 PM Central Standard time, some 38 minutes ago.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (05:18):
12-year-old Mark Lombardi is at home in Syracuse, upstate New York when he is shaped by the 9/11 of his time. On a small black and white TV he watches with his family, as president John F Kennedy’s coffin makes its way to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The Lombardi’s, working class Italian Americans, watch along with hundreds of thousands. It’s the most important moment in television history.

Archival Audio (05:51):
President in shroud for three days is folded smartly for presentation to Mrs.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (05:57):
Soon this sorrow becomes seared into the collective memory of Americans. A seismic event that would decades later draw close parallels to the traumatic events of September 11th. It seems the pieces of the puzzle of Mark Lombardi’s life begin to fall into place that very day. Not only does Mark become fixated on politics from a young age. On the loss of innocence in American ideals, the burgeoning civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, but he gets a taste for what it would be like to be extraordinary. Watching the Kennedy family from his modest home and the thousands of eyes on them, he glimpses what it’s like to be part of something bigger than himself. To create a legacy.

Archival Audio (Martin Luther King Jr.) (06:49):
All the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying..

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (06:58):
In another life, perhaps his obsession with politics and American ideals would’ve led him not to conceptual art, but down a wholly different path.

Andy Feehan (07:09):
He was a gregarious guy. He loved people and he loved to talk and he would’ve been a wonderful political aid. And actually with his intensity, I could see him being in politics and he could have done that.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (07:28):
Mark’s secret weapon though was never debate or ideology, but facts, evidence, truth.

Mark Lombardi (07:36):
So that is really where I get a buzz. That is where my energy is renewed every day because I am able to deal with issues and information that I think have an impact on my life.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (07:52):
It’s this single-mindedness and unshackled creativity that propels Mark so strongly down this path.

Mark Lombardi (08:01):
And this is my way of coping with it, of dealing with it. More or less visualizing the connections that I think have some power and influence and in really even daily affairs through politics and finance.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (08:15):
It’s an artistic flare he has not yet managed to wield.

Mark Lombardi (08:20):
So I’m kind of getting off the track.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (08:22):
After a few false starts and some failures at local colleges, Mark takes his first resolute step forward and transfers to Syracuse University for art history.

Paul Schimmel (08:33):
I would’ve met Mark in September of ‘72 at Syracuse University for a museum studies class

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (08:42):
Curator and fellow student at Syracuse, Paul Schimmel.

Paul Schimmel (08:47):
I think Mark at that time was both interested in museums and art history, but first and foremost, I think he thought of himself as an artist.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (09:01):
The program is prestigious and highly sought after, notably for its link to the nearby Everson Museum of Art

Paul Schimmel (09:09):
Was such a dynamic place at that time. The Yoko Ono show and the Joan Mitchell show and the Nam June Paik show.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (09:17):
All the right names for someone like Mark, searching for the same recognition and influence. When Mark graduates in 1974, at a time when the conceptual art movement is taking hold, he leaves for Houston following droves of others, searching for meaning in the thriving Texan art community.

Don Redman (09:41):
We were all at that age where we were, how we were taking chances.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (09:46):
Don Redmon, a fellow artist working at the University of Houston, makes the same choice. And Don, like Mark, is a young renegade, rebelling against the dark side – in this case, a rapidly accelerating oil boom.

Don Redman (10:03):
We were demonstrating, and I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I ended up in Washington DC marching against the Gulf War,

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (10:11):
But the move to Houston is also driven by an important person. A man named Jim Harithas.

(10:18):
We’ll be back after this short break.

(10:26):
Jim Harithas was Mark’s mentor, but he also happens to be a powerful and preeminent figure in the art community. A leader, a patriarch and maverick museum director. There was a pull to Jim that his proteges know all too well. There was no question; if you’d gained Jim’s admiration, you’d already won. David Ross, who would later acquire Mark’s work as the director of the Whitney Museum, was also taught by Jim at Syracuse.

David Ross (11:02):
No one had ever met anyone like Jim. And of course, I mean I had met my mentor. I mean you’re lucky in life, if you meet your mentor ever, and I found my mentor, somebody who took me under his wing.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (11:13):
And Jim knew that Mark possessed something special, something out of this world.

David Ross (11:18):
Anyone who responded to Jim was immediately somebody like I could understand. Because if you met Jim, you really either totally turned off and you thought like, who’s this phony motherfucker? Or you were like, wow, this is the real deal. When you met Jim Harithas, you realized that you were meeting a truly authentic radical, a real, not a student radical, but a real radical.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (11:41):
Jim was at once a free spirit rejecting the mainstream art world and with a particular knack for discovering talent.

David Ross (11:49):
When Jim felt something, he felt it very strongly, and it’s probably one of the reasons that Mark liked him.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (11:57):
Jim died in 2023 at the age of 90. This relationship altered Mark’s life for the better.

David Ross (12:06):
Because Mark was political in his own way. He wasn’t a journalist even though he used the techniques of journalistic research into these so-called conspiracies. Jim had a strong influence on Mark the way he did on all of us. And I think Mark probably really interested Jim because of his seriousness and the seriousness of his aesthetic project, which was to reveal not necessarily to be a witness.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (12:31):
Mark invited people to question structures of power, exposing corruption and conspiracy and global politics and finance without ever revealing his own point of view.

Andy Mann (12:45):
Where does your research come from now?

Mark Lombardi (12:48):
It’s almost exclusively from paper sources. I find a book more comforting than the computer screen, the monitor, the book I can take anywhere with me.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (12:59):
Under Jim’s guidance and mentorship, Mark can almost taste greatness. He expects his purpose to unfold in front of him, like it has for his peers already experiencing early success. Jim hires him to work as an assistant curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. It’s an energizing time, a melting pot for minimalism, conceptual art and performance art. And Mark even opens two galleries of his own. Accounts vary for how Mark’s time at The Contemporary Arts Museum ends, but Hillary Maslon who dated Mark, heard one side of the story.

Hilary Maslon (13:42):
From what I understand, and I don’t think I knew this from Mark, Jim fired him because Mark I think was in a relationship with a woman and got physically violent with her, which is not how I experienced Mark at all. But he might’ve. Who knows what happened.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (14:00):
Either way, it’s a shock. Mark is experiencing acute difficulties. His galleries begin failing. He starts taking part-time jobs, simple stuff like moving precious art for galleries, something to pay the bills.

Terrell James (14:16):
I remember when Mark started having a little more, I don’t know, difficulty and distress.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (14:25):
Terrell James, a Houston abstract painter remembers a particularly hard moment.

Terrell James (14:32):
It was after the gallery, and then he opened another gallery on Bissonette Street where the museums are and other galleries were, and that didn’t make it, and that was difficult. I remember being at someone’s house gallery and seeing Mark in a UPS deliverer brown outfit. He had a day job briefly delivering for UPS, and I was very sad about that.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (15:03):
Mark hides his menial work from others. Ashamed, especially from people like Paul Schimmel, his peer at Syracuse University, who is coming up in the art world and succeeding where Mark seems to fall flat.

Paul Schimmel (15:19):
I got to do more shows and started working with artists and Mark, I think it was less clear to him what he wanted to do.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (15:29):
Something simmers inside Mark, a yearning to understand not just the world but himself. It shakes his core, disturbs his peace.

Paul Schimmel (15:41):
Well it’s going to sound terribly arrogant, but yes, I do think Mark was in some ways competitive with me. It was in a way maybe more competitive with me than it really being a competition

Mark Lombardi (15:57):
Trying to make connections…

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (16:01):
But go deeper and it’s clear it wasn’t just career envy. Paul had family wealth and the effortless confidence that comes from being told you’re destined for success. Mark was outclassed. But worse, his own identity evaded him. He didn’t just hide from others, he hid from himself. The biggest blow, however, was that Jim Harithas, his anchor to Houston and the energy behind his work seemed to prefer Paul.

Paul Schimmel (16:35):
I think he was probably first and foremost jealous of the attention and affection he saw that Jim had to me. I think he was also jealous that I, apparently from the get go, knew what I wanted to do and he was still unclear, and it’s the nature of his art in some ways…

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (16:55):
This had a particular sting, because more than mentor, Jim had become a surrogate father to Mark.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (17:04):
You could tell they knew each other for so long. It was kind of like a father-son kind of friend friendship. He was just really, really happy to see Mark and happy to hang out.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (17:16):
The gap in his life that Jim Harithas once filled, Mark now replaces with an intense and uncompromising drive as a reference librarian at the Houston Public Library, along with his friend Andy Feehan.

Andy Feehan (17:31):
People would come in, you looked up stuff by subject title or author in drawers full of cards.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (17:39):
Here he could bury his pain amongst the dusty shelves. Mark’s desire for political truth would be matched with the means to channel his discoveries in art. Finally, his political desires and his artistic vision would merge with such ferocity that he would never look back.

Andy Feehan (18:06):
It was almost an accident, but sometimes original things like that. They are accidents. They’re not intentional.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (18:16):
The information he handles at the library unlocks a part of Mark that he finds deeply satisfying. That speaks to the artist and the obsessive researcher within him. The physical handling of the paper, unrestricted, free, full of possibility. The potential to, for example, unearth the financial webs that connect an upscale resort in Southern California called LaCosta to both the mob and the former president, Richard Nixon. But at the library, Andy witnesses his friend’s transformation from gallerist and art historian to thinker, truth seeker and conceptual artist.

Mark Lombardi (19:00):
I prefer really working with paper. I can adjust in the light, I can go backward and forward with ease.

Andy Feehan (19:08):
Nobody did stuff like that. Nobody.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (19:12):
Mark was doing something seemingly simple, benign. Xeroxing newspaper articles. Hundreds of them. People coming into the library would often do it for themselves. But Mark,

Andy Feehan (19:24):
He was extremely fastidious about collecting data and information and he was right there with the newspapers.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (19:32):
Andy notices Mark is making two copies of everything. He is making his own card catalog system. All on paper, something he can hold.

Mark Lombardi (19:44):
I don’t really enjoy sitting at a desk, being at a monitor. The keyboard is kind of in my way. I would rather have the information central than a keyboard with my eyes over here. I can sit in the car, I can take these on the plane. I can lay around in bed.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (20:01):
At first, he has too much information.

Andy Feehan (20:04):
He had these shoe boxes full of these index cards that finally became completely unmanageable. I mean, he couldn’t connect one with the other. They weren’t chronological, and it was conceptually really, really awkward.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (20:21):
So he devises a system.

Mark Lombardi (20:24):
Something that’s paper in tactile that I can literally in my hands sort through, rearrange, shift around.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (20:33):
His method underlies his most successful art.

Mark Lombardi (20:38):
Until it begins to make sense to me and I can then use it to accomplish this work.

Andy Feehan (20:48):
And so he decided to draw diagrams like a sentence diagram, and all of a sudden you’ve expanded the definition of what art is with what you’ve done, and that’s what Mark did. His stuff was outside of anybody’s notion of art.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (21:20):
Mark has found an outlet for his thoughts and ideas, the connections that make up the political terrain in which he’s become so obsessed. Driven by an internal need to prove himself, what he’s worth. Mark works with a renewed frenetic energy, thoughts racing like five radio stations all playing at the same time.

Mark Lombardi (21:46):
I was getting into information from a number of sources, which I was beginning to get confused by. Couldn’t really keep the story straight. I was losing track of various connections.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (21:58):
The galleries, the paintings, the museum curating. It all faded into the background as his purpose became clear and the man we would come to know as Mark Lombardi emerged.

Susan Swenson (22:10):
I mean he always said everything that was in his drawings was public information. It was all found in books and articles and vetted information.

Mark Lombardi (22:20):
It’s all public information. I am just reprocessing it. I’m rearranging it in a visual format that’s meaningful to me.

Rafael Vargas-Suarez (22:29):
He had a lot of books, a lot of book sources.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (22:34):
It’s Mark’s renegade spirit that drives him. And it’s the all-consuming fixation on power and political corruption – on global conspiracies – that alienates him from others.

Billy Hassel (22:49):
I think there was this sort of intensity lurking just below the surface with him.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (22:55):
But it turns out even those who thought they knew Mark, didn’t know the true man.

Leonard Gumport (23:02):
The person asked me to explain a financial transaction.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (23:09):
Because he cut a secretive figure.

Leonard Gumport (23:12):
He did not introduce himself to me as an artist.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (23:16):
Mark wasn’t just obsessed for the sake of obsession. Mark the unsuccessful gallerist and artist was in fact a private investigator.

Don Redman (23:33):
I’m curious why he even went to New York. I’m assuming that he didn’t have anything left in him.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (23:46):
Coming up on the next episode of The Illuminator:

Mark Lombardi (23:49):
And this is my way of coping with it, of dealing with it, of more or less visualizing the connections that I think have some power, influence, and really even daily affairs through politics and finance and all this other stuff.

Archival Audio (24:09):
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?

(24:18):
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) (24:27):
Two of the biggest stories of the 80s and 90s. The Savings and Loans debacle when a thousand institutions collapsed in an implosion of reckless investments.

Archival Audio (24:38):
We will not rest until the cheats and the chiselers and the charlatans spend a large chunk of their lives behind the bars of a federal prison.

Ako Mitchell (Narrator) (24:49):
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.