terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center...an FBI agent contacted the Whitney Museum of American Art....to obtain a reproduction of Mark Lombardi's large drawing BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972-1991 (4th Version) or, if that were not possible, to see the actual work at the museum. At about the same time, Lombardi's gallery, Pierogi, also received a telephone inquiry from a 'lead investigator into the September 11th attacks.' Federal investigators wanted to obtain information pertaining to wealthy Saudi Arabian terrorist Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network by tracing his many financial connections...[to] BCCI," Robert Hobbs writes in his introduction to Global Networks. Hobbes continues: "If government investigators had merely decided to include select members of the art world in their investigation in the 9/11 attacks, that fact alone would have been newsworthy. But when an F.B.I. agent consulted a work of art for clues pertaining to terrorist financing, she unwittingly made history." In Lombardi's historical diagrams, each node or connection was drawn from news stories from reputable media organizations, and his drawings document the purported financial and political frauds by power brokers. According to Hobbs, who faced the overwhelming task of fact-checking Lombardi: "Certain things that are listed in the drawing are in red. These represent court judgments, actual dollar amounts. That is verifiable information. And I think that Lombardi himself realized that not everything could be verified. So I think what you have instead is names. We know about connections of names. Exactly what is that connection is hard to characterize. So that is a line with an arrow in one direction, or an arrow in two directions. So it's really the abstract component of the work of art. It's what can be represented, and – really – what cannot be represented." For instance, his 1999 drawing "George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979–90" shows alleged connections between James Bath, the Bush and bin Laden families, and business deals in Texas and around the world. Following Lombardi's suicide in 2000, the book Mark Lombardi: Global Networks was written in conjunction with a traveling exhibit. The editors chose to incorporate into the cover artwork (see image at right) a detail from "George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979–90", showing George W. Bush (on the back cover of the book) and Osama bin Laden (in the upper left of the front cover) separated by one