[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text disabled_on=”off|on|on” admin_label=”Text Mobile” _builder_version=”4.16″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”Times New Roman||||||||” text_text_color=”#FFFFFF” text_font_size=”18px” header_font=”Times New Roman|600|||||||” header_text_color=”#FFFFFF” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n
Patricia Goldstone<\/h1>\n
author, playwright, journalist<\/em><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ fullwidth=”on” _builder_version=”4.8.1″ _module_preset=”default” custom_padding=”0px||0px||false|false” global_module=”320″ saved_tabs=”all” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_fullwidth_menu menu_id=”3″ menu_style=”centered” fullwidth_menu=”off” active_link_color=”#df9f1f” dropdown_menu_line_color=”#df9f1f” dropdown_menu_text_color=”#df9f1f” menu_icon_color=”#df9f1f” disabled_on=”off|off|off” _builder_version=”4.16″ _module_preset=”default” menu_text_color=”#ffffff” menu_font_size=”18px” background_color=”#265986″ background_layout=”dark” height=”80px” custom_margin_tablet=”” custom_margin_phone=”||||false|false” custom_margin_last_edited=”on|phone” custom_padding=”||||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}” active_link_color__hover_enabled=”on|hover” active_link_color__hover=”#ffffff”][\/et_pb_fullwidth_menu][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ specialty=”on” _builder_version=”4.16″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”3_4″ specialty_columns=”3″ _builder_version=”4.16″ custom_padding=”|||” global_colors_info=”{}” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_row_inner _builder_version=”4.16″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column_inner saved_specialty_column_type=”3_4″ _builder_version=”4.16″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_text admin_label=”Page header” _builder_version=”4.16″ _module_preset=”default” header_font=”Georgia||on||||||” header_text_color=”#265986″ header_font_size=”36px” border_radii=”on|2px|2px|2px|2px” border_color_all=”#0C71C3″ border_width_bottom=”1px” border_color_bottom=”rgba(0,0,0,0.3)” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.16″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n A working-class outsider who busted his way into the privileged art world, Lombardi used Conceptualism\u2019s emphasis on ideas over aesthetics and execution to hide his own early lack of drawing and painterly technique, but also as a great actor might use a series of masks to hide his true intention. Marcel Duchamp, the father of Dada who used ordinary objects such as the famous urinal to create heavily ironic anti-art works based in anti-bourgeois, anti-war politics, was the artist he admired most.<\/p>\n Shrewdly manipulating the pretensions of art-speak, Lombardi created his art from quite another form of ordinary object \u2013 an arcane litigation tool known as an interlock search, a prosaic accounting device which art specialists, understandably, failed to recognize but which is immediately familiar to attorneys who often refer to it as a \u201cflow of funds\u201d chart. Art historians and critics also failed to realize that his drawings, at least initially, were executed under the patronage of a powerful politician who used his interlocks to investigate her opposition behind the scenes.<\/p>\n Popular among trust-busting attorneys in the 1970s \u2013 the last time busting monopolies was itself popular \u2013 an interlock search is a form of flow-chart cross-referencing the boards of companies suspected to have overly cozy links. The artist, at first struggling to find his own, unique voice, expanded the definition of \u201ccorporation\u201d to encompass the shadowy entities between offshore banking and global money-laundering. The interlocks between the oil cartel and the seven biggest American banks in the 1980s were his favorite area of research.<\/p>\n His relentless pursuit led him deep into the tangled relationships between banking, intelligence and crime. This was his shot at the fame he craved, and he took it. Just as success seemed assured, he was discovered hanged in his studio. INTERLOCK examines the gaps in the investigation that ruled his case a suicide.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_video src=”https:\/\/patriciagoldstone.com\/author-playwright-journalist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/20250122_Interlock_2min48Sec_600x480.mp4″ image_src=”https:\/\/patriciagoldstone.com\/author-playwright-journalist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/20250122_2min48sec_poster_600x480.png” _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}” disabled_on=”on|on|on” disabled=”on”][\/et_pb_video][et_pb_video src=”https:\/\/patriciagoldstone.com\/author-playwright-journalist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/20250122_Interlock_5min5Sec_600x480.mp4″ image_src=”https:\/\/patriciagoldstone.com\/author-playwright-journalist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/20250122_2min48sec_poster_600x480.png” _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” title_text=”20250122_Interlock_5min5Sec_600x480″ sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_video][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.16″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n Cocky, funny, and mischievous, Lombardi would be the first to appreciate the joke that, in his next incarnation the three-letter agencies of the United States he made a career of studying would be tasked with studying him. In the immediate aftermath of 9\/11, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the DoD (Department of Defense) and the ONR (Office of Naval Research) were obliged to take crash courses in social-network analysis in order to figure out linkages between terrorist groups. The \u201crhizomatic\u201d drawings of Mark Lombardi were a prime focus of their attention.<\/p>\n Learning from Lombardi<\/a><\/p>\n Lombardi Drawings of Graphs \u2013 Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications<\/a><\/p>\n Mark Lombardi\u2019s Narrative Structures and Other Mappings of Power Relations<\/a><\/p>\n Mark Lombardi by Devon Golden, Bomb Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n BCCI 1999 drawing<\/a><\/p>\n A rhizome is a subterranean plant system. It is also a highly influential concept developed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari, an \u201cimage of thought\u201d in theory and research that resists conventional, treelike up-and down organizational structure that charts causality along chronological lines between an origin and a conclusion. A rhizomatic thought structure presents history and culture as a wide array of attractions and influences with no specific genesis, for a \u201crhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo,\u201d a concept which applies particularly to the \u201ceverything is connected\u201d-ness of information science. Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s post-modern theories are in fact linked by scholars to the design of hypertext and indeed to the deep structure of the Internet itself.<\/p>\n www.lombardinetworks.net\/networks\/services<\/a><\/p>\n Lombardi\u2019s peculiar genius as an abstract artist was to incorporate these far-ranging philosophical elements into his work, and to integrate them with the prosaic accounting principle of the interlock. Consciously or unconsciously he answered one of the greatest challenges of the most advanced artificial intelligence simply by using the fundamentally human thought process of trying to draw the story out of the mass of data he had collected.<\/p>\n Today, 15 years after his death, the artist\u2019s work has spun off a data-visualization industry that encompasses not only the national security complex but IBM, MIT, the PayPal Mafia of Silicon Valley and an ONR-funded computer program named, in his honor, the Lombardi Spirograph \u2014 an amazing achievement for an artist who publicly declared he had little use for the Internet. Says Roger Hurwitz, a research scientist who works with Tim Berners-Lee at MIT\u2019s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory \u201cEveryone who does social network analysis has looked at him.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the years since Lombardi\u2019s death, data visualization and\/or pattern recognition have become the hot new frontiers of the artificial intelligence business. Ironically, the NSA is particularly challenged by the volume of the personal information it has collected by invading millions of private lives. Its attempts at graph analysis have tended towards what some computer scientists call \u201cspaghetti\u201d, i.e., the links conveying information are so dense that they run into each other and become unreadable. To computer scientists, the curved edges Lombardi painstakingly drew from node to node as a human means of narrative are a radical innovation in information analysis. Hurwitz says, \u201cIt\u2019s really kind of amazing because it\u2019s not figurative art but\u2026 it represents the social network in links that are nonetheless real \u2014 some social or economic exchange.\u201d<\/p>\n Lombardi in fact sketched a well-known problem in the discipline of economics, where little or no consensus exists on how to measure the size of what is commonly known as the \u201cshadow\u201d or \u201cunderground\u201d economy. In the second half of INTERLOCK I discuss in detail how his \u201cone continual drawing in my head\u201d visualizes the pooling of various clandestine funds into an exponentially expanding pot of black money that, because it remained secret for \u201creasons of national security,\u201d remained out of the reach of any regulation \u2013 the definition of a shadow banking system. Lombardi\u2019s famous BCCI series shows this malignant growth metastasized worldwide when covert funding was driven underground by the Congressional investigations of the 1970s and created the first subprime crises. Three weeks before his death, he completed a final version showing the entrance of the Russian mafiyeh, replete with oil, aluminum, and other plundered riches of the former Soviet Union, into the US banking system.<\/p>\n The ballooning distortions Lombardi drew suggest the impact of floods of hot money on the global economy. In a June 2008 speech, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner placed significant blame for the freezing of credit markets on a run on the entities in the shadow banking system by their counterparties \u2013 who remained, literally, in the shadows. In the second half of INTERLOCK, I explain how the interlocks in Mark Lombardi\u2019s drawings can be used to trace the financial scandals of the present day.<\/p>\n What do we know about non-bank interconnectedness? \u2013 Bank Underground<\/a><\/p>\nInterlock<\/em><\/h1>\n
![\"Interlock\"](\"https:\/\/patriciagoldstone.com\/author-playwright-journalist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/INTERLOCK-cover-sidebar.jpg\")
Without exception all those who \u201cknew\u201d Mark Lombardi say they never knew him well \u2013 certainly not well enough to know what he was really after in stringing together a stunning continual visual record of the cozy relations between intelligence agencies and organized crime in funding half a century\u2019s worth of black operations and illicit wars. INTERLOCK<\/em> unpicks that mystery with the tools of biography rather than art criticism to come up with some highly unexpected and fascinating answers.<\/p>\n![\"Mark](\"https:\/\/patriciagoldstone.com\/author-playwright-journalist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/mark-lombardi.jpg\")
The one thing Lombardi clearly did want, from a very early age, was fame. His mature work, in over 25 monumental drawings executed between 1994 and March 2000, reveal sensationally how \u201chot\u201d money derived from criminal activities has inextricably bonded to more legitimate funds chasing high returns on investment in the unregulated or \u201cshadow\u201d reaches of the world economy, where loopholes in foreign exchange restrictions have been freely exploited by the Mafia and various intelligence agencies since the end of World War Two, and where capital flow, now infused with petrodollars and exponentially enhanced by derivatives, has swelled to volumes that can either rescue struggling treasuries or swamp financial markets with floods of fugitive liquidity. In one of his essential series, \u201cThe Pope and His Bankers,\u201d Lombardi traced how the Mafia patented the use of modern derivatives as money-laundering instruments. I explain in INTERLOCK how he linked his drawings together to suggest the building, over time, of a single network which like a predatory organism has consumed the ecology that nourished it.<\/p>\n