Danny Casolaro

Joseph Daniel Casolaro (June 16, 1947 – August 10, 1991) was an American freelance writer who came to public attention in 1991 when he was found dead in a bathtub in room 517 of the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, his wrists slashed 10–12 times.

The medical examiner ruled the death a suicide.

His death became controversial because his notes suggested he was in Martinsburg to meet a source about a story he called "the Octopus".

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.

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.

Towards 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.

A younger sister, Lisa, died of a drug overdose in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in 1971.

This centered on a sprawling collaboration involving an international cabal, and primarily featuring a number of stories familiar to journalists who worked in and around Washington, D.C. in the 1980s—the Inslaw case about a software manufacturer whose owner accused the Justice Department of stealing its work product, the October Surprise theory that during the Iran hostage crisis Iran deliberately held back American hostages to help Ronald Reagan win the 1980 presidential election, the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and Iran–Contra.

Casolaro's family argued that he had been murdered; that before he left for Martinsburg, he had apparently told his brother that he had been frequently 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.

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.

A Netflix docuseries titled American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders is centered around the Casolaro case.

Casolaro was born into a Catholic family 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.

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.

Brian, a close friend of then-Attorney General Ed Meese, has denied any involvement in either October Surprise or the Inslaw case.

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.

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.

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 BCCI.

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.

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."

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.

In addition to this allegation, Riconosciuto also 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", which allowed outsiders to access computer systems using Promis.

These modifications allegedly took place at the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, California.