Joseph Daniel Casolaro (June 16, 1947 – August 10, 1991) was an American freelance writer who investigated the Inslaw case and a series of alleged connections that he called "the Octopus". He was found dead in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in August 1991. His death was ruled a suicide.Ridgeway, James and Vaughan, Doug. "The Last Days of Danny Casolaro", The Village Voice, October 15, 1991, p. 34 ff.
Casolaro believed that the Inslaw dispute was connected to several political and financial controversies, including the Iran–Contra affair, the 1980 October Surprise theory, and the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. He referred to the alleged network connecting these events as "the Octopus".Ridgeway, James and Vaughan, Doug. "The Last Days of Danny Casolaro", The Village Voice, October 15, 1991, write that: "In particular, Casolaro was interested in what he called the 'Octopus', a network of individuals and institutions that he believed had secretly masterminded a whole series of scandals, from the Iran-Contra affair and the S&L debacle to the BCCI collapse and the 1980 October Surprise deal." See also Lewis, Neil A. "Reporter Is Buried Amid Questions Over His Pursuit of Conspiracy Idea", The New York Times, August 17, 1991, who writes: "Friends of the journalist said he was looking into a connection between the Inslaw matter and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International". Elliot Richardson, a former United States Attorney General who now represents Inslaw in its suit against the Justice Department, said "it involved B.C.C.I., drugs and the persistent but unproven allegations that in 1980 some members of Ronald Reagan's Presidential campaign team worked to delay the release of American hostages in Iran to damage President Jimmy Carter's re-election chances."
Casolaro's family claimed that he was murdered. They state that before he left for Martinsburg he told his brother that he had been receiving harassing phone calls late at night, that some of them were threatening, and that if something were to happen to him while in Martinsburg it would not be an accident. They also cited his well-known squeamishness and fear of blood tests, and stated they found it incomprehensible that if he were going to kill himself, he would do so by cutting his wrists a dozen times.Lee, Gary. Area Writer Investigating Inslaw Case Found Dead , The Washington Post, August 13, 1991, p. A8. A number of law-enforcement officials also argued that his death deserved further scrutiny, and his notes were passed by his family to ABC News and Time magazine, both of which investigated the case, but no evidence of murder was ever found.Committee on the Judiciary. House Report 102-857:The Inslaw Affair, Investigative Report , September 10, 1992, accessed August 22, 2008. Also see House Report 102-857 , subsection "Findings", item 13, page 110.Lee, Gary. Writer's Papers Shed Little Light on His Death; Casolaro Sought to Prove `Octopus' Theory Encompassing Hostage Delay , Inslaw, BCCI, The Washington Post, August 19, 1991.
Early life and career Casolaro was born into a Catholic family and grew up in McLean, Virginia, the son of an obstetrician and the second of six children. One of his siblings fell ill and died shortly after birth. A younger sister, Lisa, died of a drug overdose in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in 1971. Casolaro attended Providence College until 1968. He married Terrill Pace, a former Miss Virginia. The couple had a son, Trey, and divorced after ten years, with Casolaro granted legal custody of his son.Rosenbaum, Ron. "The Strange Death of Danny Casolaro", Vanity Fair, December 1991.
Casolaro's interests included amateur boxing, writing poems and short stories, and raising purebred Arabian horses. He also dabbled in journalism, looking into issues such as the Soviet naval presence in Cuba, the Castro intelligence network, and Chinese communist smuggling of opium into the U.S. according to his own curriculum vitae (though it remains unclear how much he had published). At the time of his death, he had written and published one novel, The Ice King, with Whitmore Publishing Co.
Toward the end of the 1970s, he dropped his interest in journalism and acquired a series of computer-industry trade publications, which he began selling towards the end of the 1980s. In early 1990, he decided to take up journalism again and, soon after, took an interest in the Inslaw case, of which his IT contacts had made him aware.
Research Shortly before his death, Casolaro told people that he was nearly ready to reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy involving the Inslaw case, Iran-Contra, the alleged October Surprise conspiracy, and the closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) being related to the Central Intelligence Agency.Linsalata, Phil. , The Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 1991, accessed October 20, 2008. David Corn writes in The Nation that the papers Casolaro left behind reveal few clues, except that he was in over his head, but was tenacious.Corn, David. [https://archive.org/details/Danny-Casolaro "The Dark World of Danny Casolaro" (PDF)], The Nation. October 21, 1991, p. 511.
His papers included old clippings, handwritten notes that were hard to read, and the names of former CIA officers and arms dealers. Corn writes that the notes show Casolaro was influenced by the Christic Institute and that he had pursued material fed to him by a reporter who worked for Lyndon LaRouche. Richard Fricker writes in Wired that Casolaro had been led into a "Bermuda Triangle of spooks, guns, drugs and organized crime."Fricker, Richard L. The Inslaw Octopus, Wired, March/April 1993.
Inslaw case
Ron Rosenbaum writes that the Inslaw story alone is enough to drive a sane man to madness. "If they ever make a movie of the Inslaw suit," he writes, "it could be called Mr. and Mrs. Smith Go to Washington and Meet Franz Kafka." Inslaw's founder, William A. Hamilton, in a previous position with the U.S. Justice Department, had helped develop a program called PROMIS, short for Prosecutor's Management Information System. PROMIS was designed to organize the paperwork generated by law enforcement and the courts. After he left the Justice Department, Hamilton alleged that the government had stolen PROMIS and had distributed it illegally, robbing him of millions of dollars. The department denied this, insisting that they owned it because Hamilton had developed it while working for them. As a result of this dispute, Hamilton and the department had been in litigation since 1983. A federal bankruptcy judge ruled in 1988 that the department had indeed taken the software by "trickery, fraud, and deceit", a decision upheld by a federal district court in 1988, but overturned on appeal in 1991.
A theory was developed around the case, with allegations that "back doors" had been inserted into the software so that whoever bought a copy of it from the Justice Department could be spied upon. The major source on the theory, both for Hamilton and, later, for Casolaro, was Michael Riconosciuto, described by Rosenbaum as a "rogue scientist/weapons designer/platinum miner/alleged crystal-meth manufacturer". Riconosciuto had been introduced to a friend of Casolaro's by Jeff Steinberg, a longtime top aide in the LaRouche organization.
Riconosciuto told Bill Hamilton that he and Earl Brian, a director of Hadron, Inc., a government consulting firm, had paid $40 million to Iranian officials in 1980 to persuade them not to release the American hostages before the conclusion of the presidential election that saw Ronald Reagan elected president of the United States; this is the claim now known as the "October Surprise". In exchange for his helping the Reagan administration, Brian was allegedly allowed to profit from the illegal distribution of the PROMIS system, according to Riconosciuto.See: House Report 102-857 , subsection IV, B, 2, "Sworn statement of Michael Riconosciuto", page 50 Brian, who was a close friend of then-Attorney General Ed Meese and had worked for Reagan when he was governor of California, denied any involvement in either October Surprise or the Inslaw case.
In addition to this allegation, Riconosciuto claimed in a March 21, 1991, affidavit submitted to the court in the Inslaw case that he had modified Inslaw's software at the Justice Department's behest so that it could be sold to dozens of foreign governments with a secret "back door", allowing outsiders to access computer systems using PROMIS. Michael J. Riconosciuto, March 21, 1991 These modifications allegedly took place at the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, California. Because the reservation was sovereign territory where enforcement of U.S. law was sometimes problematic, Riconosciuto further claimed that he had worked on weapons programs there for the Wackenhut Corporation, such as a powerful "fuel air explosive". On March 29, 1991, eight days after submitting the affidavit, Riconosciuto was arrested for, and later convicted of, distributing methamphetamine and methadone, charges that he said were a set-up to keep him from telling his story.See: The Inslaw Affair (House Report 102-857) , Section VII, D, "Department interferes with Michael Riconosciutio's sworn statement to the committee-refuses request to interview DEA agents", page 100, House Judiciary CommitteeDefendant Says Government Drug Charges Are Part Of Vendetta , Associated Press, January 2, 1992.
In the summer of 1990, Casolaro arranged to meet Bill Hamilton, expressing an interest in pursuing the Inslaw story. Hamilton gave Casolaro a 12-page memo Riconosciuto had written detailing his allegations. Rosenbaum writes that, "The moment he got his hands on that maddening memo, with its maze of illusion and reality, was the moment Danny's life changed and he began his descent into the obsession that would lead to his death. He was slowly, then rapidly, sucked into a kind of covert-ops version of Dungeons & Dragons, with that memo as his guide and Michael Riconosciuto as his Dungeon Master."
Final days
On August 5, 1991, Casolaro phoned Bill McCoy, a retired Army CID officer to tell him that Time magazine had assigned him an article about the Octopus. He further claimed to be working with reporter Jack Anderson, and that publishers Little, Brown and Time Warner had offered to finance the effort. All of these claims were later shown to be false: Little and Brown, for example, had rejected his Octopus manuscript over a month earlier.
On the same day, Casolaro's friend Ben Mason agreed to talk to Casolaro about his finances. A few days later, Casolaro showed Mason a 22-point outline for his book and expressed frustration at having been tied up with a literary agent who was unable to sell it for the last eighteen months. He also allegedly complained about his sleep being disturbed for the previous three months by calls during the night.
The following day, a neighbor of Casolaro's and longtime housekeeper, Olga, helped Casolaro pack a black leather tote. She remembers his packing a thick sheaf of papers into a dark brown or black briefcase. Casolaro said he was leaving for several days to visit Martinsburg, West Virginia, to meet a source who promised to provide an important missing piece to his story. This was the last time Olga saw him. Olga told The Village Voice that she answered several threatening telephone calls at Casolaro's home that day. She said that one man called at about 9:00 a.m. and said, "I will cut his body and throw it to the sharks". Less than an hour later, a different man said: "Drop dead." There was a third call, but Olga remembered only that no one spoke and that she heard music as though a radio were playing. A fourth call was the same as the third, and a fifth call, this one silent, came later that night.
Last known sightings