The Octopus Conspiracy: Fictional Tale or Factional Trail?

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By Kenn Thomas

The Casolaro Case

Danny Casolaro might not have been the central figure in the real story behind the media flash accompanying his death in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia on August 10,1991. Casolaro was not an investigative reporter. He was more a novelist (The Ice King) and a poet, a “sensitive” type who had some experience writing for tabloids and news services. He had more credentials as the publisher of a computer industry PR organ (Computer Age) than as an investigator. Moreover, his sad fate may have been more the result of a factional rift in the intelligence community than of any impending fictionalized account of the Octopus story he would have written.

Police found Casolaro’s body atop a razor blade in the tub with deep gashes in the wrists. His previous admonition to his brother to not believe any “accidents” that might happen to him belied a terse and ungrammatical “suicide” note. The body was mysteriously embalmed without the family’s permission before the autopsy, eliminating any chance of discovering poisons. The all-too-familiar pattern, of course, brings to mind the dictum that if They control the coroner, They control the city. Two veritable MIBs even attended Casolaro’s funeral, one in a light-colored overcoat and another dressed as a soldier.

Most of Casolaro’s notes and his manuscript have disappeared, too, naturally. The only information available to an interested reader comes from friends, family and reporters who pieced it all together ex post facto, most notably James Ridgeway and Doug Vaughan of Village Voice. Apparently the tentacles of Casolaro’s Octopus reached out from a small body of Illuminati, a half-dozen or so conspiratorial cognoscenti. They have researched our to the October Surprise, BCCI, the Savings and Loan scandals and Iran-Contra. Ridgeway and Vaughan keep the door open to the possibility that Casolaro did indeed commit suicide and they assure Voice readers that the Illuminati definitely do not exist.

Octopus Surprise

The central figure in the Casolaro story might be Michael Riconosciuto, the techno-wizard who first let on about Justice Department head Ed Meese giving his buddy Earl Brian a software program called Promis in exchange for Brian transporting forty million dollars to Iran as part of the October Surprise deal. Brian apparently made a fortune bootlegging and selling Promis internationally to police agencies. Promis tracks legal cases through various prosecutors’ offices. This October Surprise connection brought the story to the attention of the media. October Surprise, of course, is the catch phrase for the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign’s alleged payoff to the Khomeini regime to delay the release of American hostages in Iran and thereby steal the election from Jimmy Carter. The Promis software, produced by a Washington firm called Inslaw, co-owned by St. Louisans Bill and Nancy Hamilton, was sold for six million dollars to the Justice Department for the department’s exclusive use. The Hamiltons have engaged the services of Watergate attorney Eliot Richardson to continue that legal battle.

Riconosciuto now sits in a jail in Tacoma, Washington for manufacturing and selling drugs. Police busted him in April 1991 after providing testimony that he modified Promis so the Mounties could use it in Canada. Riconosciuto claims to have been in on the October Surprise funds transfer with Earl Brian while both worked for Wackenhut, a security group that had William Casey as counsel. Ridgeway and Vaughan trace Riconosciuto’s misadventures with the law back to police surveillance in 1968 that led to a 1973 bust for manufacturing psychedelics. Since childhood, Riconosciuto had been adept at electronics to the extent that as a teenager he worked as a research assistant in a laser lab and with a Nobel laureate.

Riconosciuto adds to his list of accomplishments the development and manufacture of weapons technology, including see-in-the-dark goggles designed for the Contras, chemical and biological weapons, and a way to convert an ordinary explosive into an atomic bomb and air into fuel. Much of this was done, according to Riconosciuto, as joint development projects with Wackenhut, a private security firm called Coral Gables and the Cabazon tribe of Native Americans in Riverside County, California, from whose sovereign reservation this technology was created for export. That sovereignty allowed the Cabazons to open megabuck gambling facilities. Casolaro planned a visit to Ae reservation at the time of his death.

Quick and the Dead

Reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle Jonathan Littman and Michael Taylor have written at length about Riconosciuto’s link to a series of strange murders among the Cabazons. Someone named Paul Morasca, who had been in on Riconosciuto、high-tech deals with the Cabazons, was found brutally hog-tied and strangled. Riconosciuto admitted finding the body a day before the police and reporting it only to the Cabazons’ non-native administrator, John Phillip Nichols. Shortly thereafter an elderly school teacher named Mary Quick was murdered in what Riconosciuto later claimed was a robbery connected to his machinations with the Cabazons: Quick’s body was missing a super secret ATM card that she was to pass on to him.

According to Lippman and Taylor, the Morasca and Quick deaths were parts of a string of murders involving the Cabazons, including that of tribal council vice chairman Alfred Alvarez, who made public statements decrying the mismanagement of Cabazon funds. Pressure from higher-ups in the police bureaucracy caused one investigator working on the murders to leave California altogether. Like Casolaro, investigators have discovered “so many spokes leading out…by the time you finish going out on one lead, another crops up and drives you to distraction.” Are these the throes of the Octopus?

The Saucer Spin

Riconosciuto’s inability to produce tapes and pho-tographs he says supports many of his claims under-mines his most recent revelations. According to an article in Technical Consultant, Riconosciuto reports that the only information Casolaro had resulted from a fac¬tional split in the intelligence community. One faction, COM-12, has leaked the information to embarrass the other, called Aquarius with a sub-group leadership known as MJ12. MJ12, of course, appears on the still debated memoranda ostensibly documenting the retrieval of aliens from a 1947 flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico. According to UFO Magazine, Wackenhut does the security work for the rumored “Area 51” flying saucer hangars.

William L. Moore and Jimmy Ward carry on the discussion about the veracity of the MJ12 documents in a newsletter entitled Focus, available for $6 from the Fair Witness Project, Inc., 4219 W. Olive Avenue, Suite 247, Burbank, CA 91505. The MJ12 Documents: An Analytical Report by Moore and Jaime Shandera, which provides the up-to-the-minute minutiae of the debate, can be ordered from the same source for $25. Without reproducing its detail, the re¬port supports the authenticity of a series of documents connected to MJ12 and the Roswell crash, expressing doubt about only one Harry Truman signature on one document. (It’s an improbable original because of its similarity to a signature on a non-related document. The report does not even entertain the possibility of a signature machine being used for secret UFO memos.) Thus far, Focus has not addressed Riconosciuto’s claims. Stanton Friedman has done some interesting research suggesting that UFO debunker Donald Menzel back-channeled MJ12 information to John Kennedy. Jacques Vallee, who fails to credit Friedman for this information in his recent UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union (Ballantine, $18.00), nevertheless specu¬lates that Menzel had a role in discrediting an important scientific study of UFOs in the Soviet Union. At one point, a rift developed between Friedman associates Moore and Shandera after Friedman became in¬volved with a Roswell book project that all three now seem to view as a disinformation scheme. Moore has admitted his own involvement in similar schemes.

Hunt Continues

The Kennedy connection is interesting in that Voice reporters Ridgeway and Vaughan note that Casolaro’s Gambino crime family contacts put him in touch with E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar and author of fictionalized spy novels. These contacts were developed from sources close to jailed presiden-tial candidate Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche, of course, has a long history as a politico and intelligence gadfly. His crank status belies his power among fol-lowers and his real connections to officialdom, la his other current book, Revelations (Ballantine, $20) Vallee suggests a link between LaRouche’s European followers and the UMMO cult of UFO hoaxers in Spain, Argentina and lately of Russia.

E. Howard Hunt lost a defamation suit he filed against a group called Liberty Lobby when it publish-ed claims of his involvement in the Kennedy assassination. In a new edition of Coup D’Etat In America (Quick American Archives, $12.95) by Alan Weberman and Michael Canfield, the authors describe Hunt’s inability to sue them over similar claims. The first edition of Coup D’Etat originally produced the photograph overlays of Hunt’s picture superimposed on that of one of the “railroad tramps” arrested after JFK’s murder. Mark Lane describes the Liberty Lobby case, with depositions from the key players and supporting testimony from witness Marita Lorenz, in his book, Plausible Denial (Thunder’s Mouth Press).

Ridgeway and Vaughan describe the relationship between Casolaro and Hunt as “cordial, even effu-ive.” They also tell of an incident in Casolaro’s life when friends found him in his home with a bloodied towel wrapped around his head. Casolaro blamed it on a weight-lifting accident. After his death, Casolaro’s autopsy revealed a mild case of multiple sclerosis that friends and family believe Casolaro knew nothing about. In support of the suicide argument, however, the Voice writers note that he did discuss “slow viruses, including MS” with a nursing professor friend. Kerry Thornley, a Marine acquaintance of Lee Harvey Oswald who fictionalized Oswald’s life in much the same way Casolaro planned to fictionalize the life of the Octopus, told a Steamshovel Press interviewer of a brain implant he felt he received after conversations with E. Howard Hunt.

Another similarity between the cases of Danny Casolaro and Lee Harvey Oswald concerns surveillance technology. Inslaw designed Promis, of course, precisely to track and control people. Thornley knew Oswald around the time of the latter’s experiences at the Atsugi Air Force base in Japan, where Oswald worked in a radar tower that tracked the U2 surveillance plane missions over China and the Soviet Union. Gary Powers blamed his famous shoot-down on information supplied to the Soviets by Oswald. Before getting his job at the book depository, Oswald worked at a graphics business that contracted to work on U2 photo data. A spy camera that officials tried to pass off as a light meter was found among Oswald’s belongings. The space connection is there, too: Oswald’s closest co-workers at another job later got work at NASA when he went to Dallas. The last interesting comparison between Casolaro and Oswald may be how, in lieu of all the facts, the best speculation a game of invisible forces.

More To Come?

Was Casolaro used by feuding intelligence factions, was he brainwashed outright or merely victimized by a talented acid head who kept up on the UFO scene? Riconosciuto needed only to have watched a 1989 TV documentary entitled Cover-Up for the MJ12 material he now includes in his weird tales. Casolaro is no longer able to divulge further information about the Octopus. Nightline apparently does have some of Casolaro’s files. A bibliography follows for those interested in the details of the Octopus conspiracy that have emerged before and since Casolaro’s death. The article by Ridgeway and Vaughan contains the most information; UFO Magazine is a good place to look for new developments. Developments—and corroboration一”are most likely to come from Michael Riconosciuto, still awaiting trial in the Tacoma prison for manufacturing methamphetamine in a process he claims to use in refining platinum.

Please note that Edward Brian and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police deny any connection to events surrounding Danny Casolaro’s death. Thanks to Kevin Belford for bibliographic research assistance.

Bibliography:

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“Barr Asks Judge To Probe Inslaw Case,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, November 14,1991.
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Barrett, Paul, “Thoraburgh, Brooks Clash Over Charge Of Wrongdoing at Justice Department,” Wall Street Journal, December 10,1990.
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Other Sources:

Lane, Mark, Plausible Denial，Thunder’s Mouth, 1992.
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