Mary Carter Resorts Study is a preliminary sketch of a diagram for mapping connections between organized crime, politicians, and intelligence agencies through the Mary Carter front company and casinos in the Bahamas. Mary Carter Paint Company, which operated a national chain of paint stores, was to function as a covert CIA money-laundering operation. The company was set up in the early 1950s by then CIA director Allen W. Dulles and New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, a political functionary in the so-called Rockefeller Republicans. In 1958–59, Dewey and a number of associates used CIA funds to buy the Crosby-Miller Corporation (headed by Dewey friend James Crosby). After the merging of the companies, the name was changed to Resorts International in 1968, and it ran casinos in the Caribbean. Jim Crosby was an alleged CIA frontman who later founded a private security company called Intertel, whose clients included dictators in Iran and Nicaragua. When Crosby died, his family sold the Resorts International to Donald J. Trump, in 1987. In his own memoir, The Art of the Deal, Trump proudly described how he bought his first casino interests when he purchased 93 percent of the Resorts International gambling concern.

Mary Carter Resorts Study investigates evidence of social, political, and economic transactions. Depicting evidence in the form of networks evokes the interconnection of information as a primary material of investigation. The linking, tagging, archiving, and cross-referencing of fragmented information is used as a creative practice to decode highly complex social and financial relationships. The resulting detailed and delicate geometrical drawings provide a nuanced understanding and immediate visualization of the complexity of global power structures.

Read Edges of Evidence: Mark Lombardi’s Drawings by Susette Min.