The Octopus
A Paranoid's History of the United States #5
In this episode we look at the death of freelance journalist Danny Casolaro, who was found dead in a hotel bathtub in Martinsburg, West Virginia. This was ruled a suicide, but circumstances surrounding the case raised questions. Casolaro had been investigating what he called “The Octopus,” a sprawling conspiracy that connected intelligence agencies, organized crime, and international arms dealers. The episode also examines the role of Lyndon LaRouche's intelligence network in spreading misinformation (and sometimes, credible information).
GUESTS INCLUDE a number of journalists familiar with crimes and conspiracies, including Martin Kilian, Jack Calhoun, and Dan Moldea. We also speak with Casolaro’s cousin, the playwright Dominic Orlando.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Unsolved Mysteries episode on Danny Casolaro:
The Inslaw Affair (Australian TV news program):
SOCIAL MEDIA
HOSTED BY JOSEPH L. FLATLEY. For bonus content and to receive my newsletter, sign up below:
TRANSCRIPT
Lenny Flatley: I’m Joseph L. Flatley. And from Amphibian Media, this is A PARANOID’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Each week, I explore America’s obsession with conspiracy theories, bringing untold stories to light and challenging what we think we know about our nation’s history.
ARCHIVAL - UNSOLVED MYSTERIES
ROBERT STACK: “A week before he died, Casolaro told his brother he had been receiving frequent death threats.”
“DANNY” (re-enactment): “I’m getting calls in the middle of the night from guys I’ve never heard of. I don’t recognize their voices. I don’t know where they’re coming from. They’re just saying, you are going to die. I’ll tell you this, though. When I go to Martinsburg, if something happens to me or if I should get hurt, don’t believe it’s an accident.”
Lenny Flatley: On August 10, 1991, housekeeping staff at the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia made a grim discovery. In room 517, they found the body of freelance journalist Danny Casolaro. He was in the bathtub, his wrists slashed multiple times. The cuts were deep and methodical. A note nearby read: “To my loved ones, Please forgive me — most especially my son — and be understanding. God will let me in.”
Danny was 44 years old. Two days earlier, he had driven to Martinsburg from his home in Fairfax, Virginia, telling his family he was meeting a source who would help him crack open what he called “The Octopus” — a sprawling criminal conspiracy involving the intelligence community, international arms dealers, and organized crime. He had been working on the story for nearly a year, and according to those who knew him, he was close to breaking it wide open.
In the weeks leading up to his death, Danny told multiple people, including his brother: “If anything happens to me, don’t believe it was suicide.” And there were troubling details about his death. His body was illegally embalmed before the family was notified. The briefcase containing his investigative notes — which he took everywhere — was missing.
The investigation itself raised further questions. The hotel room was quickly cleaned, potentially destroying evidence, and the police issued a preliminary suicide ruling before learning Casolaro was a reporter investigating a major story. Anonymous phone calls reported his death to both a journalist and the FBI before it was publicly known, mentioning his work. These irregularities, combined with the reports of death threats he had received and his family's insistence that he was far from suicidal, have led many to question the official verdict.
PROMIS
ARCHIVAL: “The INSLAW Affair”
ANCHOR: “This story centers on incredible allegations of spying on a scale never before imagined. It involves America’s Central Intelligence Agency selling computer programs to foreign nations. These programs allegedly allowed the CIA to spy on the intelligence agencies that bought it.”
Lenny Flatley: Over the years, the story that Danny called “The Octopus” has become a catch-all — a grand unifying theory that links everything from Satanic mind control cults, secret underground alien bases, or even time travel in a vast, interconnected web of corruption.
But it began as something much simpler: a contract dispute between a small software company and the Department of Justice. The company, Inslaw, had developed a program called PROMIS that helped prosecutors manage cases and track defendants. But when the government stopped paying for the software while continuing to use it, Inslaw’s owners sued. They won in bankruptcy court, where a judge ruled that the DOJ had used “trickery, fraud, and deceit” to steal the software.
That should have been the end of it. But the DOJ appealed the ruling. In May 1991, the decision was reversed on a technicality: the bankruptcy court was not the proper venue for the case.
The fact that the court did not rule on the merits of the case itself did not sit right with Bill Hamilton, who asked Casolaro to investigate, to figure out what really was behind the federal government’s actions.
The story, you might say, began to grow tentacles.
Through a series of sources — many of questionable reliability — Danny started hearing wild claims about PROMIS. That it had been modified with a secret “back door” allowing intelligence agencies to spy on anyone using it. That it was being sold to foreign governments as part of a massive intelligence operation. That it could track anything from drug money to nuclear submarines.
But PROMIS wasn’t really the story anymore. As Danny investigated further, he became convinced he had stumbled onto something much bigger. The Octopus, as he conceived it, was a hidden power structure that connected seemingly disparate elements: the CIA, American Indian reservations, international arms deals, banking scandals, and political assassinations. It was a shadow government operating just beneath the surface of American democracy.
RABBIT HOLES
Lenny Flatley: Martin Kilian is a German journalist best known for his in-depth reporting on the intelligence community for DER SPIEGEL.
Is that something that happens in this field, especially working with, you know, defense or intelligence stories that you have these characters that are like —
Martin Kilian: Latching on? Oh yeah. [...] you always have this kind of element. So in October Surprise, I think I told you the first time we talked, I feel convinced today without being able to prove it, but I’m convinced that some of these characters were sent our way to totally muddy the waters. Not all, probably, you know, just one or two. The rest are some psychopath people who wanted to be the media who wanted to be important, who wanted to cash in on a certain notoriety, you can run the gamut, it was just you know, it was, and I think, Casolaro’s tragic tragedy was that he fell for some of these people in a big way.
Lenny Flatley: It must be a really bizarre world to work in.
Martin Kilian: What makes it particularly problematical — and I think if you would talk to Seymour Hersh he’d tell you the same thing, or Bob Perry who, you know, I think was the greatest of all investigative reporters. There’s always some people who know something. They really do. And, but it’s kind of like not enough to bring the bacon home, and you can never really tell for sure what their bona fides are and very often they do not want to tell you why they know something for a variety of reasons, so it becomes it becomes almost like, it becomes a labyrinth. And it’s very tedious to weed out these people, and you know you just spend a lot of time, some time going down rabbit holes.
Lenny Flatley: In August 1990, Danny Casolaro was at a crossroads. He had recently sold his share in a computer industry newsletter business — taking a bath in the process — and was looking for a big story that could take his career to the next level. What he couldn’t know was that this investigation would consume the final year of his life.
We’ll be right back.
PART 1
ARCHIVAL: “1984 Lyndon H LaRouche Commerical”
LaROUCHE: “Mondale is not simply a KGB agent of the ordinary sense, of course. Mondale is jointly owned by the left wing of the socialist International and the grain cartel interests. If both these owners tell Mondale to lick the floor before a nationwide TV audience, I sincerely believe he would do just that.”
ANNOUNCER: “Watch Lyndon LaRouche, independent Democrat for president, Tuesday, October 23rd.”
Lenny Flatley: To understand how the Inslaw story became entangled in a web of disinformation, we need to examine one of the most unusual political organizations in American history: the intelligence network built by Lyndon LaRouche.
LaRouche was a political cult leader who began on the far-left, but shifted to the far right — clearly a man of extremes. His organization had various names throughout its existence, including the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), the US Labor Party, and the National Democratic Policy Committee. Its message was characterized by anti-semitism, absurd conspiracy theories, and hatred of jazz. LaRouche ran for president multiple times, including one bid while he was in prison for mail fraud and tax evasion. He died in 2019, at the age of 96.
LaRouche was a paranoid man, and like all good paranoids collected information on his enemies. And everyone was his enemy. By the 1970s, his cult had turned into a full-scale intelligence-gathering operation. The centerpiece was EXECUTIVE INTELLIGENCE REVIEW, a weekly magazine that positioned itself as a source of privileged information for Washington insiders. But LaRouche’s operation went far beyond publishing — it was one of the main pushers of conspiracy theories that would later become central to Casolaro’s investigation of the Octopus.
In his book LYNDON LAROUCHE AND THE NEW AMERICAN FASCISM, journalist Dennis King detailed his visit to the EIR offices in the late seventies.
ARCHIVAL — “Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism”
“ In its early years it was more like a spoof of a government spy agency. The various ‘sectors’ and ‘files’ representing different regions of the world were crammed into a three-floor complex in a factory building on West Twenty-ninth Street in Manhattan. It was a rabbit warren of shabby offices, such as the ‘Southern Cone’ room, where LaRouche disciples pored over newspapers from Argentina and Chile. When I visited in 1977, dozens of young people in rummage-sale clothing sat hunched over WATS line phones amidst a surrealistic clatter of the telex machine and typewriters. There was a smog-like atmosphere from chain smoking. When an ashtray became full, the contents were simply dumped on the floor. No one had swept up in days. The bathrooms were also in a state of neglect, and the walls were devoid of any decoration. One sensed that the members were so intent on their political tasks that they didn’t even notice their surroundings.”
Lenny Flatley: A broken clock is right twice a day, and even the EIR had some successes: For instance, it was among the first to break aspects of the Iran-Contra scandal, providing documented evidence of arms deals and covert operations. Yet these same pages claimed Queen Elizabeth controlled the global drug trade and had orchestrated the Oklahoma City bombing.
The LaRouche organization’s reach extended far beyond Washington. Its representatives met with world leaders including Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the President of Mexico, and the Vietnamese Foreign Minister. They provided intelligence to European security services about leftist organizations. They cultivated contacts throughout the CIA, National Security Council, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other government bodies.
Jeffrey Steinberg was a key figure in the Lyndon LaRouche organization, serving as the Director of Counterintelligence. He cultivated contacts amongst journalists like King.
Dennis King: I started a series about the newspaper distribution business and how it was propped up. And I had some good stuff. The first person who called was Steinberg, who explained to me how there was really a larger conspiracy and everything. That was 1979.
Lenny Flatley: This is author Dennis King.
Dennis King: These were theories that were about as far out as you can go. And maybe people like Steinberg, you know, ultimately, saw those theories as just being a useful tool for talking to people and gathering information. I don’t know, I just can’t say for sure, sure. But I would say that he was constantly talking with both sides, going back and forth. That’s sort of like typical of what they would do. But they would do it with everybody. I mean, I talked to people who decided to play with him about this stuff, and make up intelligence. What he was getting was basically bullshit.
COACHELLA
Lenny Flatley: Through Steinberg, Bill Hamilton was introduced to Michael Riconosciuto, whose story seemed concocted to draw in the unsuspecting investigative journalist.
ARCHIVAL: “The INSLAW Affair”
RICONOSCIUTO: “I spent several thousand man hours of programming time with a programming team you know, developing that subset.”
ANNOUNCER: “This unlikely looking character is a computer genius. His name is Michael Riconosciuto and he says he was in charge of modifying the PROMIS program so that it could be accessed by American intelligence.”
Lenny Flatley: Riconosciuto claimed that in the early 1980s, he had been hired to modify PROMIS, adding a secret “back door” that would let intelligence agencies spy on anyone using the software. He said this work was done on the Cabazon Indian Reservation in California, where he was involved in a joint venture between the tribe and Wackenhut Security to develop weapons for the CIA.
ARCHIVAL: “COACHELLA”
“Good morning. So today is a very very special Vlog because we are currently in California in Palm Springs and we’re going to Coachella Festival, which is just — it blows my mind. There’s incredible acts, artists and [...] we’re going to be spending the next three or four days here in Palm Springs enjoying the festivals and going to loads and loads of parties that are associated and around Coachella.”
Lenny Flatley: Before the Coachella Valley was synonymous with music festivals, the city of Indio was best known as a stop on the Southern Pacific Railroad midway between Yuma, Arizona, and Los Angeles. It sits within Riverside County, a vast jurisdiction stretching from the Los Angeles suburbs to the Arizona border, encompassing both crowded urban areas and isolated desert communities.
Among these communities are several Native American reservations, including that of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, whose lands, like those of many tribes, offered few natural resources for generating income.
In the 1980s, the Cabazon tribe emerged as pioneers in leveraging tribal sovereignty for economic development, under the guidance of a management consultant named John Philip Nichols. The tribe’s gambling hall — as well as the lawsuits it attracted — would eventually lead to a Supreme Court decision that transformed tribal gaming across America.
But their ambitions extended beyond casinos.
Tech consultant Michael Riconosciuto had a complex history — he served time in 1973 for drug production, claiming the arrest was payback for exposing undercover agents in Haight-Ashbury. Medical professionals noted his difficulty separating truth from reality, while his supervisor John Nichols labeled him unstable. During lengthy phone conversations with Casolaro, he wove increasingly fantastical stories about the PROMIS software system, suggesting it could do everything from tracking submarines to monitoring alien ships through international banking networks. His talent for mixing verifiable facts with extraordinary claims made his narratives captivating, though questionable.
But sometimes, Riconosciuto told the truth. According to documents obtained by journalists, the reservation had indeed partnered with Wackenhut, a private security firm sometimes called the “shadow CIA.” The tribe was trying to get into the weapons manufacturing business, hoping to leverage their sovereign status for lucrative defense contracts. Their point man was Nichols, who had bragged about participating in CIA operations including assassination attempts on Castro in Cuba and Allende in Chile.
In April 1991, Riconosciuto was arrested on drug charges in Washington State. He claimed, of course, that he was framed. Danny actually spent ten days in Washington after the arrest, working as a defense investigator on Riconosciuto’s case. He wrote about it in an unpublished article, describing Riconosciuto as “immense in frame but agile and graceful in movement like some giant white rabbit or perhaps some hybrid fugitive creature related to a fox.”
JACK CALHOUN
Jack Calhoun: It’s a database, so it can keep track of anything, any transaction.
Lenny Flatley: I’m talking to Jack Calhoun. In the 1980s, he was the Washington correspondent for New York’s GUARDIAN newsweekly. He has a Ph.D. in history and specializes in post-World War II U.S. foreign policy.
Right now, he’s describing the “backdoors” or “trapdoors” that Riconosciuto allegedly installed in the — again, allegedly — stolen PROMIS software.
Jack Calhoun: One of the first things that we tracked was how the trapdoors were used to gather intelligence, on what your allies or your enemies may be doing based on the money movements from their different bank accounts. This was a way to monitor armed shipments often. If you’re dealing with a secret arms transaction, and you see the money move from one bank to another bank, and you’ve been following this, you can see the trail of the arms circle. It could be used in terms of drug operations. It could be used on another side to move money around to keep it from the prying eyes of say, U.S. government regulators, too.
Lenny Flatley: So it can be used to track money, but I guess the same technology could be used to create a path for the money that would be hard for regulators to pick up on, if you wanted to move money around and hide it.
Jack Calhoun: Yes.
ROBERT BOOTH NICHOLS
Lenny Flatley: But even as Danny drew deeper into Riconosciuto’s world, another figure entered the picture: Robert Booth Nichols — no relation to John Philip Nichols.
Born to a prominent Los Angeles surgeon, Robert Nichols had been living in Hawaii under an assumed name when he was arrested in 1968 for evading the draft. Over the years, the FBI has investigated his ties to both the Gambino crime family and the Yakuza, though he was never charged with anything.
Through their conversations, Nichols painted himself as a sophisticated player in a shadowy world of intelligence operations and high finance. Unlike Riconosciuto’s manic tales of super-weapons and drug conspiracies, Nichols had real connections to the business world, apparent ties to intelligence agencies, and he seemed to take Danny seriously as a journalist. At their first meeting at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., Nichols told Danny he was about to be appointed state security minister of the island of Dominica. And he discussed the Illuminati in cryptic terms: “I’m afraid of them because I know them,” he said at one point. “I lived in a hole. They gave me an exit.”
On July 31, 1991, Danny spoke with former DOJ prosecutor Richard Stavin, who revealed something explosive: Nichols had once offered to become an informant against organized crime. Whether he had actually worked as a snitch didn’t matter — just the suggestion of it could have been a death sentence in the circles Nichols moved in. This information made Danny both more intriguing to Nichols and potentially more dangerous.
Six days after learning this secret, Danny had another long phone call with Nichols, who tried to convince him to abandon his investigation. Two days after that conversation, Danny drove to Martinsburg, West Virginia, telling his family he was meeting a source who would help him crack the whole story open. It would be his last trip.
COMING UP: A group of journalists gathers to examine Danny's files, hoping to find evidence of the explosive story he was chasing. What they discover instead reveals how disinformation consumed the reporter’s life — and raises new questions about PROMIS. We'll be right back.
PART 2
ARCHIVAL - UNSOLVED MYSTERIES
ROBERT STACK: “Even Casolaro's funeral was clouded by mystery. As the ceremony was drawing to a close, a highly decorated military officer arrived in a limousine.”
ANN KLENK: “It was really unusual, because I noticed this tall, stoic looking black man in full military dress, standing there with this like plain clothes type of guy.”
ROBERT STACK: “Just before the casket was lowered into the ground, the military man carefully placed a medal on the casket lid.”
Lenny Flatley: Less than two weeks after Danny Casolaro’s death in that Martinsburg hotel room, a group of Washington journalists gathered at ABC’s NIGHTLINE offices to examine his investigative files. With the family’s permission, they hoped to find evidence of the explosive story Danny believed he was about to break. Instead, they found stacks of newspaper clippings, scattered notes, and phone numbers. Lots of phone numbers.
As Phil Linsalata reported in the COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, the files “could easily have been contained in a file labeled ‘Major American Scandals, 1950-1991.’” There were no taped interviews, no smoking guns, no evidence to support the grand conspiracy Danny had dubbed “The Octopus.” What they found instead was a roadmap of how disinformation had consumed a journalist’s life.
NORMAN BAILEY REVELATION
ARCHIVAL — “Bailey/Shorrock interview”
SHORROCK: “I've heard that there was a software program called PROMIS —”
BAILEY: “That's correct.”
SHORROCK: “That was developed by—”
BAILEY: “...developed by a company which developed it for the Department of Justice to follow case law.
SHORROCK: “And they had this long drawn out case where they said it was basically taken or stolen by the government.”
BAILEY: “The PROMIS software was — it's not any longer, but it was — the principal software element of the following of criminal money laundering by Treasury. I don't know about the CIA.”
Lenny Flatley: Please forgive us for the poor quality audio. That’s from an interview conducted by Tim Shorrock, the eminent national security reporter. In 2008, he began looking into a Homeland Security database called MainCore. During his investigation, he landed a major scoop: Norman Bailey, former Senior Director of International Affairs for Reagan’s National Security Council, admitted that the U.S. government had indeed used the PROMIS software.
The scoop appeared to validate Bill Hamilton’s claims and potentially vindicate Danny Casolaro’s investigation. In the interview, Bailey confirmed that PROMIS was the, quote, “principal software element” used by the Treasury Department to track financial flows related to criminal enterprises and Soviet bloc activities.
But there’s a crucial wrinkle to this revelation. Bailey had deep ties to the EXECUTIVE INTELLIGENCE REVIEW. He met with LaRouche agents multiple times and was an enthusiastic supporter of the intelligence-gathering operation. This raises a thorny question: Did Bailey know about PROMIS through his official government work, or through his association with the very same LaRouche network that had been pushing the PROMIS conspiracy theory — the group who introduced Michael Riconosciuto to Bill Hamilton in the first place?
This ambiguity perfectly encapsulates the challenge Casolaro faced in his investigation. The PROMIS scandal exists in a journalistic limbo where truth and disinformation are nearly impossible to disentangle.
DAN MOLDEA
Lenny Flatley: What’s remarkable about the story is that another journalist saw the dangers before Danny ever became involved.
In the summer of 1990, Bill Hamilton approached Dan Moldea, an investigative journalist known for his work on organized crime. Hamilton was looking for an independent, freelance journalist who understood the criminal underworld, and he offered Moldea the story first.
Dan Moldea: I sort of can’t take projects that don’t work out. I can’t, I don’t have much time or money here to experiment with things and see how it works out. I get pitched projects all the time. But I can’t necessarily afford them. I mean, Bill Hamilton offered me this story before he offered it to Danny Casolaro. I’m pretty sure I was the first person Bill offered it to. Because he was looking for somebody like me, he was looking for an independent. He was looking for somebody freelance, he was looking for somebody who understood the world of organized crime. And he believed that, you know, that a thorough investigation would corroborate his belief about what happened to his PROMIS software. Which was, you know, basically stolen, as I understand the story, and I haven’t seen much for me to challenge that. I like Bill, I think Bill’s a good guy. But I just didn’t have — I started looking into this, doing my preliminary work. And within a couple of days, I saw that this was a bottomless pit. There was just no way that I could enter this world. And, and come out of it in one piece in my estimation.
Lenny Flatley: Moldea’s own work had already mapped much of the territory Danny would later explore. His 1986 book DARK VICTORY had introduced the term “The Octopus” to describe the alliance between Ronald Reagan, the MCA corporation, and organized crime. Danny would later adopt this same term for his own investigation, though his “Octopus” grew to encompass a much broader conspiracy.
Dan Moldea: “I think I had one or two conversations with Danny. I interviewed him, I introduced him to a couple of people. Like Carl Shoffler, who was a former intelligence officer, for the MPD, that the DC police department, he was also the arresting officer of the Watergate burglars.
Hold on, let me look at the file here. Hold on. Let me see.
I have Casolaro dying on August 10, 1991. So Bill would come to me in August of 1990. Danny died [...] almost a year to the day later. And so, from everything I could tell, because I had been approached by a lot of people who wanted -- there was there was word that came out that when it first went, I was getting calls of concern. Because the word was out there was a freelance reporter who was investigating in the mob and had an Italian sounding name [...] who was found dead in a West Virginia hotel. And a lot of people thought that was me. And I was getting a lot of calls about that. And I said, No, no, no, no, that’s, that’s not me. Then I when I found out it was Danny Casolaro, like I said, I didn’t know him very well.
Lenny Flatley: It was apparent to those who knew Danny that the investigation had taken its toll.
Dan Moldea: I was at a party on August 14, four days later. And it was a party for a person in the Intelligence Division at the MPD. And Carl was there, my friend Carl Shoffler was there, and he told me he had spoken to Danny, I think like the day before or something like that. And that, and that he was lost. He was a lost man. He was like, he was very, very upset. He was very emotional. He was [...] telling me how Danny was, you know, basically admitting that he was over his head with what he was trying to do. […] And I mean, my goodness, he was in the bottomless pit.
JACK CALHOUN
Lenny Flatley: So let’s talk a little bit more about Michael Riconosciuto. Did you say he came to your house once?
Jack Calhoun: He’s trying to scare the shit out of me. [laughs] No, really. He drives up in a car, and the car has restricted plates, because I used a police source to check the plates and the place the plates were restricted, they were intelligence. He claimed he was representing an intelligence unit created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And I didn’t know whether that was true or not, but all I know is when he tells you a whole lot of stuff, and then he tells you that several days in advance, I mean, from now, a story will appear in the LONDON TIMES on such and such a subject that’s related to what we’re talking about. And it does, I mean, hell, doesn’t that get your attention?
I do know that he had some inside information. That’s that’s all I know. And I know that he’s disposable, I mean, like a lot of cutouts for an intelligence operation. You know, they’re not from the Better Business Bureau. They’re people with, you know, kind of shady backgrounds. So they’re easy when they’re caught, to be cut loose and to disavow any connection to it.
Lenny Flatley: Danny Casolaro had entered a dangerous world of half-truths, lies, and what spies call “cut-outs” — agents who secretly connect different people. This world proved fatal for him.
As one of his sources told fellow journalist John Connolly, Danny, quote “worked on it 16 hours a day, staying on the phone past midnight, sleeping only 2 or 3 hours a night, talking with quasi-spooks and bona fide spies, chasing leads, always enlarging his vision of the Octopus.”
The tragedy is that Danny actually was onto something important. There were real questions about government surveillance, about the privatization of intelligence operations, about the intersection of criminal enterprises and national security. But the professional disinformation apparatus that had evolved in Washington during the 1980s existed precisely to prevent journalists from effectively investigating these stories. By surrounding real scandals with increasingly bizarre conspiracies, they created an environment where the truth became nearly impossible to discern.
We’ll be right back.
CONCLUSION
ARCHIVAL — Danny Casolaro Died for You excerpt 2
“Casolaro” (actor): “Who the hell is this?”
“Riconosciuto” (actor): “Danny, are you alone?”
“Casolaro” (actor): “Depends. How do you know my name?”
“Riconosciuto” (actor): “Is someone there with you?”
“Casolaro” (actor): “Look, friend. Tell me who this is.”
“Riconosciuto” (actor): “It’s Michael Riconosciuto. Mike. [...] I know who stole the PROMIS software, Danny.”
“Casolaro” (actor): “Okay. Give me a second. I thought the Justice Department stole the software.”
“Riconosciuto” (actor): The Justice Department is just the tip of the iceberg, Danny … I have been threatened because I know too much…”
Lenny Flatley: That was dialogue from a play called DANNY CASOLARO DIED FOR YOU.
Perhaps Danny’s story can’t be adequately captured through traditional journalism. His cousin Dominic Orlando, a playwright and screenwriter, approached it through theater instead. His play is a political conspiracy thriller inspired by the true story of the Octopus investigation and Danny’s death.
Dominic Orlando: Well... what you do in a fictional narrative is that the characters have motivations and desires, and that’s what drives the plot. For something like this, you know what the plot is, but you don’t know what the characters want or what their motivations were.
Lenny Flatley: Orlando’s insight gets at something crucial about this story. Lack of transparency creates a breeding ground for speculation, deception, and conflicting narratives. While pursuing the Octopus, Danny lost sight of the individual motivations of people like Riconosciuto and Robert Booth Nichols. He was looking for a grand unified theory that could explain everything, when the reality may have been more mundane — but no less dangerous.
Dominic Orlando: I think what Danny realized...was basically, there are all these ex-spies, ex-FBI, uh, the criminals that they were dealing with. It just seemed like there was this kind of freelancing that was going on in that world, for profit.
I think a lot of people [...] especially the WASHINGTON POST, seemed to really go out of their way to try and make him look pathetic. [...] I think probably because he was a complete freelancer and not really attached to any kind of organization.
Lenny Flatley: This outsider status made Danny vulnerable. Without institutional support or editorial oversight, he had no one to help him evaluate the credibility of his sources. Those who venture into this kind of story risk getting lost in a maze of smoke and mirrors. And Danny’s sources, especially Riconosciuto and Nichols, seemed to understand exactly how to manipulate a freelance journalist looking for a career-making story.
ARCHIVAL — “Uproar over PRISM”
“Be careful what you type online, the government is watching [...] There is an uproar about how much data the government is collecting about citizens online. Recent reports from the Washington Post and the Guardian have brought to light how greatly our national surveillance is expanding and the broad power the US government has to snoop into online conversations and collect data from cell phone companies.”
Lenny Flatley: Ironically, many of Danny’s concerns about surveillance proved prescient. The capabilities he attributed to PROMIS in the 1980s — global tracking and data integration — are now standard features of modern surveillance systems, as revealed by Edward Snowden’s PRISM disclosures. However, by mixing legitimate concerns with sensational claims, the disinformation network of the 1980s effectively buried real government overreach beneath more outlandish conspiracy theories.
Danny’s story resonates today as we grapple with advanced surveillance technology and sophisticated disinformation. The systems he warned about, and the networks that obscured them, have only grown more formidable with time, lending continued significance to his discoveries. Yet his tragic end also serves as a warning about the dangers journalists face when pursuing complex investigations alone — how easy it is to get lost in a maze of conspiracy and disinformation, where real dangers hide behind layers of misdirection — and where those who control the flow of information understand exactly how to manipulate someone seeking the truth.
LENNY (v.o.) A PARANOID’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is written and read by me, Joseph L. Flatley.
Recorded and produced by Jesse Naus at Red Caiman Studios in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Music by Benjamin Nicholson.
PARANOID’S HISTORY is an Amphibian Media production.
For more info, check out the show notes. Or go to PARANOIDHISTORY.COM.