Nexus - 0306 - New Times Magazine-pages

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Casolaro uncovered a secret network whose sphere of influence extends over everything from computer software piracy to alien hardware conspiracy. His research cost him his life. Part 1 he Octopus was writer Danny Casolaro's name for a handful of spooks and power-brokers in the intelligence community who had manipulated public events as wide-ranging as the 1980 “October Surprise" pay-off—which may have cost Jimmy Carter the presidency—and the BCCI banking scandal of the early 1990s. Like tentacles of his metaphoric sea creature, the slashes found in each wrist of Casolaro's dead body in a Martinsburg, West Virginia hotel in August 1991 pulled him down into oblivion. Casolaro's murder or suicide ended his investigation into the power cabal whose involvement in a list of notorious contemporary political crimes he had hoped to document in his book. Perhaps Casolaro had erred in changing the book's title from Behold, A Pale Horse, taken from the biblical admonition, "Behold a pale horse; its rider's name was Death..." (Rev. 6) Under the new title, The Octopus, Danny Casolaro had focussed the manuscript on many connected crimes. It included information on Contra War chemical and biowarfare weapons developed on the tribal lands of the Cabazon Indians of Indio, California— weapons possibly used in the 23rd October 1983 blast at a compound in Beirut that left over 300 American and French military personnel dead. His research also looked at bizarre murders among the Cabazon Indians involving administrators of the tribal land; the privatisation of CIA dirty tricks through the notorious Wackenhut security firm— policemen for both the Cabazons and the mysterious Area 51, home of secret spy planes and rumoured UFOs; Vietnam MIAs; corruption at Hughes Aircraft; the human genome project; even the Illuminati secret societies of the 18th century—the list was quite long. To his friends, Danny Casolaro was, above all else, the ultimate nice guy. He came from a well-to-do background in McLean, Virginia, a hub of the intelligence community that preoccupied his adult attention. His father had been a successful obstetrician. Although his Italian Catholic family experienced its share of tragedies (a congenital heart defect took one of Danny's five siblings, an infant; an older sister died of a drug overdose in Haight-Ashbury), Danny grew up with the good things in life. By all reports he was a congenial, open-minded and trusting soul with few serious worries. At age 20 he left Provident College to search for treasures of the Incas in Ecuador. When he returned, he settled into a marriage that lasted 13 years and produced one son, Trey (J. Daniel Casolaro III). He lived in a US$400,000 home on three acres in Fairfax City, Virginia, where he kept horses. He played the piano, His literary tastes ran along the lines of Jack Kerouac and the Beats. He was an Elvis Costello fan. Danny Casolaro had achieved only a modest success in his chosen profession of writ- ing, however. The magazines and tabloids he wrote for were as varied as his research: Washington Crime News Service; Home and Auto; Providence Journal; Washington Star, the National Enquirer; the Globe. His published books, seemingly towering triumphs for a novice writer, had not provided him much in the way of financial rewards. His novel, The Ice King, a Hemingway-esque novel of mountain-climbing, had been published by a vanity press. He also published a short-story collection, Makes Me Think of Tall Green Grass, and worked on two films, Rain For A Dusty Summer and To Fly Without Wings, the latter narrated by Orson Welles. According to one source, "Danny wasn't an inves- tigative reporter. He was a poet." Maybe so, but of all the things the informant (whom Danny Casolaro went to meet the night before his death) could have shared with him, it seems least likely that it was poetry. The first piece of Casolaro’s life to pass into conspiracy lore was that this informant may have supplied him with the last bit of evidence he needed to prove the existence of his Octopus cabal. ‘by Kenn Thomas © 1996 | Editor/Publisher Steamshovel Press PO Box 23715 St Louis, Missouri 63121, USA : Web site address: http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma NEXUS ¢ 25 OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 1996