# Mark Lombardi Mark Lombardi (1951-2000) was an American neo-conceptual artist known for large hand-drawn graphite diagrams he called "Narrative Structures," which mapped hidden financial, political, and criminal networks entirely from public-source facts. His subject matter overlapped heavily with [[Danny Casolaro]]'s [[The Octopus]] -- intelligence-linked finance, the [[BCCI Scandal]], [[Iran-Contra Affair]]-adjacent dealings -- making him a thematic twin in the frame's lineage, though there is no evidence the two men knew each other. ## Work Around 1994 Lombardi shifted to link-analysis diagrams, building an archive of thousands of index cards from public reporting and rendering the relationships as circles, arrows, and dated annotations. His best-known works include *BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972-91*, held by the Whitney Museum, which maps the BCCI money-laundering network, and *George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca. 1979-90*, tracing the future president's oil-business financing. After the September 11 attacks, an FBI agent contacted the Whitney (October 2001) seeking a reproduction of the BCCI drawing. ## Death and legacy Lombardi was found hanged in his Brooklyn studio in March 2000; the death was ruled a suicide. As with Casolaro, some readers find the death suspicious, but there is no forensic basis for a murder claim. A posthumous retrospective, *Mark Lombardi: Global Networks* (2003), cemented his influence on data-visualization and network analysis; his life and method are the subject of Patricia Goldstone's book [[Interlock]]. ## See also - [[The Octopus]] - [[Danny Casolaro]] - [[Interlock]] - [[BCCI Scandal]]