American Conspiracy Pt. 4: The Octopus Murders
Netflix is at it. Again
Jack Calhoun, a journalist and author who worked on PROMIS and other parapolitical stories in the 1990s, had his fair share of calls with Michael Riconosciuto. This is how he summed up that experience: “He's not easy to trust.” Calhoun then added, “You can only try and verify what he says, and the shadowy stuff usually can't be verified.” (Op. Cit. Flatley at Failed State Update)
In a scene reconstruction, the film shows Danny Casolaro searching for a tape that Riconosciuto said he left somewhere in the woods in Washington. On that tape were supposed to be threats made to Riconsociuto by the Justice Department. Like many things Riconosciuto talked about, Danny never found it. (Reno Report, p. 149) Perhaps this is what made Casolaro lose faith, at quite a late date, in Riconosciuto. But, as mentioned in Part 3, listening to both that character and Robert Booth Nichols was not really a good tandem. Yet, his phone records reveal that Casolaro talked to Nichols 15 times in July, the month before he died. Some of those talks lasted 2 hours or more. (The Nation, October 28, 1991, “The Dark World of Danny Casolaro”)
Riconosciuto entered the INSLAW matter through a phone call to Bill Hamilton on May 18, 1990. And this is where Hamilton heard of the secret negotiations about the October Surprise and Earl Brian and a 40 million dollar payoff to the Iranians etc. Oh, and a 1983 tape Riconosciuto had recorded with CIA Director Bill Casey. Like Nichols, he was rather longwinded. This call lasted about 2 ½ hours. (ibid). Hamilton was now on his way to a huge, sprawling conspiracy about PROMIS. Which he later transferred to Casolaro. And near the end, INSLAW would suggest that Casolaro had been murdered because of this work. (Reno Report, p. 16)
I
The film does not do a good job in describing the last days of Danny Casolaro. Or describing what he had or had not dug up. It describes ever so briefly a network made up of people like George H. W. Bush, Ray Cline, Howard Hunt, and Dick Helms which Casolaro said made up what he called The Octopus. And he would draw arrows on a scratch sheet connecting them to certain scandals like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which had just been shut down in July of 1991. Casolaro had a way of writing about non-fiction that tended to be dramatic flourishes:
It is a pale moon that illuminates the characters in this story, With chords of fear and longing, it is a dark world that everyone thinks they know but few have seen. (op cit. The Nation.).
Ann Klenk, a witness in the film, used to work for Jack Anderson. And she recovered many pages of Casolaro’s notes. Much of these were based on phone calls with Bill Hamilton.(Bua Report, p. 133) Casolaro spent a lot of time with not just Hamilton but Riconosciuto, Robert Booth Nichols and a Kentucky salvage dealer named Charles Hayes, reputedly a former Air Force Colonel and retired CIA operative. (Ibid, p. 134)
As some commentators have noted, Casolaro’s work resembles that of Daniel Sheehan and the Christic Institute in its lack of reliable sourcing. And, in fact, there was some overlap in the people both men featured as suspects. Sheehan termed his group The Secret Team as opposed to The Octopus. That case was thrown out of court in Florida due to its lack of verifiable substance. As a consequence, Christic was stripped of its non-profit status and had to pay almost a million dollars in attorney fees and almost $80,00 in court costs.
After working for more than a year on INSLAW and The Octopus, Casolaro was having some serious financial difficulties and was also not able to market his book proposal successfully. This led to some emotional problems. In my opinion, the Treitz/Hansen film does not relate these matters in candid or comprehensive form. Or the fact that INSLAW in one of their later submissions went literally over the top on the Casolaro case. They accused the DOJ’s Office of Special Investigations, a Nazi hunting agency, with being a front for covert operations, including the killing of Casolaro. This was in a February 14, 1994 submission in order to rebut Bua’s report. (INSLAW addendum 6) So by that time, by incorporating the death of Casolaro, somehow, some way, INSLAW had gone even beyond the unproven accusations of Riconosciuto.
II
Let us fill in some information about Casolaro’s last days that the film more or less ignores. According to the Reno Report, Casolaro left for Martinsburg, West Virginia on August 8, 1991. He checked into the Sheraton Inn. There were three locations at which he spent most of the next 48 hours: the Stone Crab Inn, Pizza Hut and the Heatherfield Lounge, which is inside the hotel. (Reno Report, pp. 139-40). To inform the reader a bit about Hayes, he said that both Earl Brian and Peter Videnieks-- the DOJ contracting officer for PROMIS--went to Martinsburg to play in a high stakes poker match costing $10,000 for a seat. The local police could find no such evidence of such a game anywhere at the time of Casolaro’s death. And Videnieks was provably in New York state at the time. (Ibid, p. 160)
On August 8th he spent time at the Heatherfield talking to the occupant of Room 519 from Minnesota. This went on until about 11:30 PM when the bar closed. On the next day he was at the Stone Crab Inn for about three hours in the afternoon. He went to a convenience store for coffee. And then he went back to the hotel. The Reno Report mentions a meeting with a man named William Turner, a source for his book proposal, that Danny had in the parking lot. The Reno Report did not find him credible, and for different reasons neither does this author. We will deal with him and his affidavit later in this essay.
Casolaro’s body was found the next day at about 1 PM. The pathologist estimated his time of death at between 7 and 8 am. (Reno Report, p. 145) As mentioned earlier, the county coroner Sandra Brining examined the body which had 8 cuts on the left wrist and four on the right, and her and the police also could find no signs of struggle in the room or forced entry. There was also no sign that anyone had gone through Danny’s belongings. (ibid, pp. 114-116)
The actual autopsy was done by Dr. Frost, the West Virginia deputy medical examiner. He stated that one of the deep cuts would not have damaged the wrist tendon enough to prevent the motor ability of the left hand to grab the right wrist.(Ibid, p. 124) Dr. James Starrs of George Washington University was one of the foremost forensics experts in the country at determining cause of death. He reviewed the Frost autopsy. He said, “If this is a homicide, it would be the most singularly remarkable murder of record in fiction or nonfiction.” (Ibid, p. 127)
A suicide note was next to the razor blade package on the coffee table. It was written on the 4th page of a legal pad. It read as follows:
To my loved ones, Please forgive me—most specially my son—
and be understanding, God will let me in. (ibid, p. 116)
While he was in the throes of dying, he tore a bag off his head and tried to stand up but fell back down, breaking a drinking glass which fell to the floor. (ibid, p. 131) Through a forensic examination it was determined through handwriting and ink examination that Casolaro wrote the note with the pen near the pad on the table. (ibid)
The police did not find any briefcase in the room, and in fact, only one hotel employee ever said she saw him with one. (ibid, p. 128)
III
The film greatly discounts the problems Casolaro was having with the marketing of his book proposal. The title of the work was Behold a Pale Horse: A True Crime Narrative. Danny found an agent, who was signed to a one year deal. But this agent obviously did not think he would be able to sell the project himself. He started looking for another agent. Creative Artists Agency (CAA), sent out Melanie Ray to meet with Danny and his original agent over lunch. Ray did not offer a deal or advance. But she did refer them to Elizabeth Mackey, another literary agent. She had the same reaction: No deal and no advance. Several days later, Mackey called the original agent and tells him to have his client stop phoning her. She then told Danny the same thing. She then sent him a letter but, he would still call her. She sent him another letter. (Ibid, p. 149)
Danny and his original agent now tried an approach to Little, Brown, a significant publishing house. They turned him down. A few weeks later Casolaro sent them a new proposal which met with the same reaction. The Little, Brown employee who reviewed the proposal told the police inquiry that Casolaro’s material was amateurish. It was a rehash of newspaper and magazine articles; Ray and Mackey had a similar reaction. (ibid, p. 151)
These problems were magnified by Casolaro’s dire economic straits. He was spending about 4500 dollars per month on his inquiry. Just his phone bill for July was over 900 dollars. He had already deferred a balloon payment of nearly 180,000 dollars on his house. That was now due in September. (Ibid, p. 149) To translate those amounts into today’s currency, that would be over 10,000 dollars he was burning through per month, a phone bill of over two grand, and a house note of over $400, 000. At the autopsy he was found to have anti-depressants in his system. (Ibid, p. 126)
Before Casolaro left for Martinsburg, while he was preparing, he told his maid that he would not see his son again. He then took her to his basement office and showed her where he kept his will. (Ibid, p. 136) Beyond that, two months prior, there was evidence of a previous attempt to take his own life. (ibid, p. 154) And it seems apparent from Danny’s attempt to conceal it that one of the witnesses in the film, Ann Klenk, likely knew about it.
After admitting Riconsociuto was a spinner, the film suggests that due to a very late discovered document, someone who looks like military man Joseph Cuellar was at the hotel that night and perhaps entered Danny’s room. Danny knew Cuellar and talked to him about his book proposal. A problem for the film: Cuellar was in Washington that day, at work on “outprocessing” Desert Storm. And he had several witnesses to back up that alibi.( Ibid, p. 162)
But INSLAW advocates were and are indefatigable. They proffered the William Turner affidavit about meeting Danny in the parking lot while he was at the Sheraton. I have this handprinted affidavit, and for different reasons, I do not find it credible. Because if Danny had the materials that Turner describes in it, he would not have been turned down by a book publisher and two high level agents. And anyone who knows anything about the book publishing business would know that. We are now getting into the mythological Leo Damore/Mary Meyer territory.
In sum, American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders usesthe sources it wants to use—like Hamilton, Riconosciuto, and Bason-- to advance what is, in large part, a predetermined story line. But it ignores the inquiries that will not advance it, and in fact will impeach it--like the Senate Staff investigation, the Special Counsel report and the Reno Report. This is the opposite of what Oliver Stone, Rob Wilson and myself did in JFK Revisited, and JFK: Destiny Betrayed. In those two films, particularly the latter, we concentrated on knocking the stuffings out of the two major official inquiries: The Warren Report and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And we did it with their own declassified evidence, to the point that the ballistics and autopsy evidence had no legs to stand upon.
That is not what happened here. Treitz and Hansen simply dismissed the voluminous material that would counter their main tenets. As I have shown they cannot prove that the Cabazon murders or the Morasca murder is related to the Octopus. And as I demonstrated above, they cannot prove that Casolaro did not commit suicide. In fact, the evidence indicates he did. Therefore, the title of the film is a misnomer of the first magnitude: apparently to justify the spotty and flawed narrative that follows. In no other review of the film that I have seen did anyone point out these very serious faults with the film. Which shows us how bad American film criticism is today.
After watching this documentary and reviewing the Netflix version of Joyce Carol Oates’ roman a clef Blonde, I really wonder if there is any fact check operation at that huge company. If there is, those persons are obviously undertrained, underpaid and overworked. Anyone who could not spot these lacunae in the Treitz/Hansen documentary knows nothing about doing scholarly research. In my opinion this film amounts to, at best, shoddy journalism, at worst, preened sensationalism.