American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, Pt. 3

Netflix is at it. Again

            

As the film points out there are two men named Nichols in the story.  They are John Philip Nichols and Robert Booth Nichols.  Let us go by sequential order and deal with John Philip Nichols first.

                                             I

It was in 1978 that Nichols was appointed to be the financial advisor for the Cabazon tribe, at that time numbering about 26 members.  Prior to this, according to his son, he had been a far-flung  labor organizer.  He had been to so many venues in the USA, South America and even Europe, that he apparently had ties to either the State Department or the CIA.  He passed on in 2001.

Nichols opened up a smoke shop on tribal lands.  His job was to expand the economic fortunes of the tribe. He had also opened up a poker playing casino. (AP Story of 1/21/10 by Amy Taxin and Gillian Flaccus). In mid-summer of 1981 the bodies of Fred Alvarez, his girlfriend Patty Castro, and their friend Ralph Boger were found shot to death on Bob Hope Drive in Rancho Mirage. The police said they had been dead for about two days.

Detective John Powers of the Riverside County Sheriff’s office was the lead investigator, and he is featured in director Zachary Treitz’s Netflix film. Alvarez told the local newspaper more than once that Nichols was cheating the tribal members. Powers concluded that Alvarez discovered that Nichols was skimming money from the casino.  The detective stated that, “What Fred was doing was trying to rid the Nichols family out of Cabazon. That is what got him killed because there was literally millions of dollars at stake.” (Ibid) And, in fact, the gambling operation at Cabazon did expand into a very lucrative million dollar business.

The film also features the indictment of Jimmy Hughes for the Alvarez killing. In 2009 Hughes, who worked security for Nichols, was indicted as part of a conspiracy to kill Alvarez.  But that case was dropped a year later: “Deputy Attorney General Michael Murphy requested dismissal citing the quality of evidence and new information.  Judge Dale Wells agreed.” (AP story of July 1, 2010)

                                                    II

Treitz and his writer Christian Hansen try and expand the horizon of this triple murder into a national security case.  But as mentioned previously in this series, there is no credible evidence that Riconosciuto was working to modify PROMIS in 1980 or 1981 at Cabazon. In fact, the evidence is fairly conclusive that he was not. The other method used is a connection to Wackenhut, the giant investigative/security business.  But Powers stated that he had no proof that Alvarez was aware of any such dealings. Peter Zokosky, former president of a nearby munitions plant, said the same: the Wackenhut connection never went anywhere.(Ibid).

Jumping to another case, Treitz and Hansen have Michael Riconosciuto tell us about the murder of Paul Morasca in San Francisco in January of 1992. Again, this is somehow proof of the tentacles of the Octopus that  Danny Casolaro was working to crack open. Riconosciuto says that a man named Philip Arthur Thompson killed Morasca on the orders of Mr. Nichols at Cabazon.  And the hit man was a suspected serial killer named Philip Arthur Thompson.

Again, the problem with this is that the case that Trietz and Hansen present stands largely on the shoulders of Riconosciuto.  The murder of Morasca is an unsolved case.  No one ever went to trial for the crime.  And in fact, one of the film’s own witnesses, Cheri Seymour—writing under the pen name Carol Marshall—wrote that both Zokosky and Robert Booth Nichols named Riconosciuto as the killer.   It was a drug deal gone bad, but Morasca wanted to be paid for it. (See Chapter 12 of the first edition of The Last Circle.).

So if one cannot prove that either the Alvarez case or the Morasca case is part of the so called INSLAW/PROMIS/Octopus that Casolaro was investigating, then why name the film, The Octopus Murders?  And I hope the reader is thinking as I am by now:  Did anyone at Netflix do a fact check on Hansen’s script or the final edited film?

                                              III

I want to conclude this installment with further examination of Riconsciuto and Robert Booth Nichols.

The film tries to imply that the drug charges against Riconsciuto were somehow timed to discredit him as a witness in the INSLAW case. This is not what Judge Nicholas Bua concluded in his report. Bua concluded that Riconosciuto was one part of a larger drug ring investigation that began locally, but then expanded upwards to the DEA. They had videotapes of him delivering drugs more than once. He also had a lab in which he manufactured methamphetamines. But he used the INSLAW case as a defense and that defense failed. At the conclusion of his trial the judge said he was not sure if Riconosciuto could tell fact from fiction. (Bua Report, pp. 67-68) The 30 year term he applied to him was the minimum at that time. What makes this worse is that he had been busted before back in the early seventies on drug charges. He said the drugs were planted on him. Once he even said an FBI agent had killed Casolaro. (ibid, p. 69)

But since Hamilton was in a dire position, he tried to proffer Riconosciuto as a witness. The problem was that this witness could not produce the evidence that he bandied about.  Namely things like his 1099 tax forms with Earl Brian, the pictures of him with Brian in Iran, or the version of PROMIS he said he had modified. He said he would give them to the congressional committee.  He did not. (Bua Report, p. 71) Another problem was that Bua could find no corroborating witness to back up his story about Brian. Bua interviewed almost a dozen people on this score. (Bua Report pp, 53-66; Reno Report p. 33)  Bua found Riconosciuto to be a totally unreliable witness in relation to PROMIS. (Bua Report, p. 72)

Let us now examine another figure that the film features as a major player, namely Robert Booth Nichols, who has also passed away.   Treitz and Hansen use a videotaped deposition with him to add a note of mystery and an aura of power to the man.  But they do not explain fully what the deposition was about.  This is another lacunae in their story because as more than one observer has noted: as Casolaro began to lose faith in Riconosciuto, he began to spend time on phone calls with Robert Booth Nichols, a lot of them. It was Hamilton who provided the intro to both men. (“Suicide is Painless” posted 9/15/21 by Joseph Flatley at Failed State Update)

That deposition was part of a federal investigation of Sam Israel and a Ponzi scheme that Israel had pulled off with something called Bayou Hedge Fund Group, which he founded in 1996. Israel pleaded guilty in September of 2005 and was sentenced to a 20 year term. But before all of that Israel himself was apparently the victim of a  masterful confidence scheme.

Jack O’Halloran was both a boxer and an actor.  According to journalist Guy Lawson, he got Israel to invest  2 million dollars in a company called Debit Direct. But beyond that--and much more interesting and related to our story--he also got him to invest $500, 000 dollars in a book he was writing.  Before revealing what the book was about, I should note that one of the most talked about segments in the Treitz/Hansen film is when writer Cheri Seymour tells the audience about Nichols showing her a version of the Zapruder film in which the Secret Service agent kills Kennedy. Well, O’Halloran’s book claimed the same thing: that the driver was the assassin!  But even more fascinating is this: it was O’Halloran who introduced Israel to Robert Booth Nichols. (Lawson, New York, June 29, 2012) How could that be a coincidence?  And how could Treitz and Hansen not know about it?

Well, from Mr. Nichols Israel found out about PROMIS. And Israel now thought he could use the magic elixir of this software to predict the stock market.

I will not describe in detail the elaborate and highly effective con job that Nichols pulled on Israel—which eventually ended up enriching Nichols by ten million dollars. I will just say that, as Lawson describes it, the scheme recalled the movie The Sting: it included  abandoned offices as false sets, a mysterious Federal Reserve bond box, and even what appears to be a shooting. (See also the CNBC story of 1/27/10, “The Fall of Sam Israel III”)

Casolaro actually met with Robert Nichols in early July about a month before he died. He told Danny that he was in league with the Illuminati and he feared them because he knew them. My point is that, through Hamilton, these were the kinds of people that Casolaro was working with. Namely Riconosciuto and Robert Booth Nichols.

I will end this review with an examination of Casolaro’s death.