Book Review: Mark Lombardi Global Networks
The late Mark Lombardi drew flow charts he called "Narrative Structures" of scandals and criminal networks. I was expecting this book to be a reference, but I got more of a coffee table book instead. The first half of the book explores his work from an art perspective, which is fine, even though I got it more for the political content. My main problem is that the charts are hard to read, defeating the purpose of the art, which is to shine the light on government corruption. Lombardi’s works are large and complex, covering entire walls, and by the time you shrink them down to fit in a book, the words are sometimes unreadable, even with a magnifying glass. Thankfully, most of the works have a featured portion enlarged in a separate detail picture, accompanied by an informative text overview.
The subjects covered include Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit, the mafia, the Vatican 1959-82, World Finance Corporation, Iran-Contra, BCCI, and Jackson Stephens’ connections to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. It seems like most of the charts have at least one U.S. president in them. The work featured on the cover, completed two years before 9/11, shows links from George W. Bush to James R. Bath to Salim bin Laden to Osama bin Laden.
In spite of its shortcomings, I still recommend the book, available on Amazon.com.
posted by Tom Cleland @ 3/02/2005 08:45:00 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
You know what I like better than the books are all the online interviews with authors these days. It's kind of nice to see authors have to defend their arguements (whatever they may be.)
I'll be on the lookout for some interviews with this writer. :)
Sadly, that won’t be possible. In March 2000, Lombardi was found dead in his studio. The police report cited suicide by hanging. The door to his studio was locked from the inside.
That would definitely make current interviews difficult.
Still, I think I will look at the WGBH archive. They have lots of footage and interviews of dead people online. :)
The evidence behind the links in his charts was not always clear, but he usually based them on mainstream news reports. Over the course of his career, he compiled thousands of notecards on the people and groups he was investigating.
This former friend of mine in San Francisco has a friend named Dave Emory, who does this show and collects all these articles (mainly from the Wallstreet Journal) and is convinced everyone is in bed with everyone else. I'm not saying its the same. It's just what you wrote reminded me of this guy.
Here's the URL for his archive: http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/DX
What Emory ignores is that we all know somebody connected with someone else. For example, I know the deputy prime minister of Bulgaria. Does that mean that if you know me and I know him and he does something bad, then you are somehow involved in it all? That's the sort of leaps that are made by people like Emory.
Idon't believe in guilt by association any more than I believe in virtue by association. I have a lovely Republican friend who is working in Germany for the military, and his work is somehow connected with terrorism. I find it reassuring that someone like my friend is involved, but at the same time, if he was responsible for something I do not agree with, it would still be his decision.
I think associations can sometimes be good research tools for discovering connections that really exist. I just don't think that they necessarily mean something, and I think the researcher should be careful about jumping to conclusions just because people know one another.
That being said, I’d like to learn more about this Jackson Stephens character. Here are some quotes from the book:
“During Bush’s first year at Harken, members of the company’s board asked Little Rock investment banker Jackson Stephens, whose family owns the country’s tenth-largest brokerage firm, to arrange a $25 million stock purchase by Union Bank of Switzerland, a deal that took place the following year.” (p. 100)
“When Worthen Bank, during the first year of Riady/Stephens ownership, lost $32 million in Arkansas State pension funds through an investment scheme – a failure that might well have cost Governor Clinton his political career – Stephens wrote a personal check covering the entire loss.” (p. 107)
(Related post: 01/25/2005, Clinton and H.W. Bush.)
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