Danny Casolaro

Joseph Daniel Casolaro (June 16, 1947 - August 10, 1991) was an American freelance journalist and former computer-trade magazine owner. Born in Fort Meade, Maryland, he grew up in McLean, Virginia, attended Providence College until 1968, and married Terrill Pace, a former Miss Virginia, with whom he had one son, Trey. He owned several computer-industry trade publications through the 1970s and 1980s, which he sold toward the end of the decade. In early 1990, he returned to investigative journalism, beginning the work that would consume the last eighteen months of his life.¹

The Octopus Investigation

In 1990, Bill Hamilton, founder of INSLAW, contacted Casolaro regarding the alleged theft of INSLAW's PROMIS software by the Department of Justice. Casolaro's investigation expanded well beyond the INSLAW contract dispute into what he called "The Octopus" - a unified criminal conspiracy he believed linked the PROMIS Software Scandal to the Iran-Contra Affair, the October Surprise, the collapse of the BCCI, drug trafficking by intelligence-connected networks, and organized crime reaching back to the Cold War era.¹²

The theory held that a core group of intelligence operatives, arms dealers, and organized crime figures had operated since at least the 1970s as a self-sustaining criminal enterprise intertwined with official U.S. covert operations. Casolaro was working on a book about this network, at various points titled "Behold, A Pale Horse" and "The Octopus," though he had been unable to secure a publisher; Little, Brown rejected his manuscript more than a month before his death.¹

His primary source was Michael Riconosciuto, a computer scientist and self-described CIA contractor who claimed he had modified PROMIS software at the Cabazon-Wackenhut joint venture in Indio, California, and that Earl Brian had distributed the modified software internationally with DOJ cooperation. Casolaro began interviewing Riconosciuto before Riconosciuto's March 1991 arrest on methamphetamine charges.¹ Other key contacts included Robert Booth Nichols, an international operative with alleged ties to the NSC, organized crime, and the Yakuza, with whom Casolaro spent hundreds of hours on the phone.¹

Casolaro's investigation also touched the Wackenhut-Cabazon weapons venture, CIA "Old Boy" networks involved in drug trafficking since the 1950s, the death of the Army signals-intelligence officer and BCCI source Alan Standorf, and alleged connections between former DOJ official Michael Abbell and the Cali Drug Cartel.¹³ Shortly before his death, Riconosciuto had passed Casolaro a lead about Abbell's Cali connections, warning it might be dangerous. Hamilton, pressed for time, turned the lead over to Casolaro.¹

Final Days

On August 5, 1991, Casolaro phoned retired Army CID officer Bill McCoy claiming Time magazine had assigned him a story on "the Octopus" and that Little, Brown had made him an offer - both claims false.¹ On August 6, he met friend Ben Mason to discuss finances and showed him a 22-point book outline, complaining that a literary agent had been unable to sell it for eighteen months and that late-night harassing calls had been disturbing his sleep for three months. His housekeeper Olga had received calls on his behalf, including one that said: "I will cut his body and throw it to the sharks."¹

Casolaro arrived at the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia on August 8, 1991, to meet a source who had promised crucial information about the Octopus investigation. On the afternoon of August 9, he met Honeywell engineer William Richard Turner at the hotel, receiving documents Turner had brought. That evening, he was seen at the Heatherfields cocktail lounge with an unidentified man described by witnesses as "maybe Arab or Iranian." Later that night, he told adjacent-room tenant Mike Looney that his source had failed to appear. He purchased coffee at a convenience store around 10:00 p.m.; those were his last confirmed movements.¹

Casolaro asked his cousin, Dr. Louis Petrillo, a New York psychologist and part-time author, to help him find an agent, and in September 1990 Petrillo arranged for him to meet a New York City literary agent.⁴ Petrillo attended the brunch in New York with a Creative Artists Agency representative and the December 17, 1990 meeting with Time Warner and Little, Brown and Company representatives.⁴ On August 7, 1991, Casolaro spoke by telephone with Petrillo. In a letter dated August 17, 1991, Petrillo wrote that Casolaro sounded "enthusiastic" and was "looking forward to meeting with a 'source,'" and that in the preceding months he had spoken frequently with his cousin and had seen no "symptoms or character traits" that could be associated with a potential for suicide.⁴ When investigators later spoke with Petrillo, he said he now believed Casolaro "could very well have committed suicide," and that he was prepared to change the conclusions of his August 17, 1991 letter. He also told investigators that Casolaro was absorbing huge amounts of information and had trouble organizing it.⁴ This Dr. Louis Petrillo is a different man from Louis F. Petrillo, the president of Bayshore Bank of Florida in Miami.

Before leaving for Martinsburg, Casolaro had warned his brother Anthony: if anything happened to him there, "it would not be an accident."¹

Death and Autopsy

On the morning of August 10, 1991, a hotel housekeeper found Casolaro's naked body in the bathtub of room 517. Both wrists had been slashed twelve times - seven to eight cuts on the left, three to four on the right, with one cut deep enough to sever a tendon. The cause of death was determined to be exsanguination (blood loss), occurring approximately one to four hours before discovery. The rest of the room was clean and orderly; a handwritten note on legal stationery read: "To those who I love the most: Please forgive me for the worst possible thing I could have done. Most of all I'm sorry to my son. I know deep down inside that God will let me in."¹

Items found in the room included an empty Milwaukee beer can, two white plastic trash bags, a single-edge razor blade under the body, a half-empty wine bottle, and four additional unopened razor blades in a small package. No sign of forced entry, no evidence of struggle. The hotel room had not been disturbed. West Virginia authorities ruled the death a suicide.¹

The investigation's integrity was immediately compromised when a Martinsburg funeral home embalmed Casolaro's body without authorization from officials or his next of kin, as a "courtesy to the family." A second autopsy in January 1992 by Dr. Frost of the West Virginia state medical examiner's office confirmed the suicide ruling but found it impossible to conduct a fully conclusive examination of an embalmed body. Frost noted evidence of early-stage multiple sclerosis of minor severity, detected antidepressants, acetaminophen, and alcohol in the toxicology screen, and concluded that "nothing present in any way...could have incapacitated Casolaro so he would have been incapable of struggling against an assailant."¹

The family disputed the suicide ruling, citing Casolaro's known fear of blood and squeamishness about medical procedures, the difficulty of slashing one's own wrists twelve times, the threatening calls he had received, and his explicit warning to his brother. His research files on the Octopus investigation were missing from the hotel room.¹²

The Missing Briefcase and Joseph Cuellar

Casolaro had packed his notes, handwritten outlines, a 12-page Riconosciuto memo detailing PROMIS allegations, newspaper clippings, and names of former CIA officers and arms dealers into a black leather tote bag and a dark brown briefcase when he left for Martinsburg. The briefcase, which his associates said contained documents central to his investigation, was not recovered.¹

In 2024, Martinsburg police released records under a Freedom of Information Act request by researchers Zachary Treitz and Christian Hansen. These records indicated that another person had visited Casolaro's room on the night of August 9, and that an eyewitness had provided police with a written statement and sketch of this visitor - a description matching Joseph Cuellar, a man who had made contact with Casolaro weeks earlier at a local bar. Cuellar talked of his exploits in the Army special forces, and Casolaro asked him repeatedly to arrange a meeting with Peter Videnieks, the DOJ contracting official central to the PROMIS case, to question him about Riconosciuto's March 1991 affidavit. The Justice Department's 1994 review of the Bua report recorded that Videnieks' wife works for Senator Robert Byrd, and that Cuellar said a former fiancée had worked with her in the Senator's Capitol Hill office. Cuellar called Videnieks, who refused.¹⁵

The 1994 Justice Department review of the Bua report addressed the allegation that Videnieks was involved in the death. The review found "no evidence whatsoever" of his involvement and recorded that Videnieks said he had been at a summer cottage in New York state from August 5 to August 11, 1991. His personnel records reflect leave in that period, and a credit card receipt shows a purchase at a bookstore in Oneonta, New York, on August 9. The review found no evidence linking Cuellar to the death, and recorded that Cuellar was in Washington, D.C., on August 10, 1991.⁶

Congressional and Official Findings

The House Judiciary Committee's September 1992 report noted that Casolaro had "encountered dangerous individuals associated with organized crime and the world of covert intelligence operations" and recommended further investigation into the circumstances of his death. The committee found no evidence that DOJ had sought to influence the local West Virginia investigation.²

The Bua Report, completed in March 1993, stated that "the physical evidence in Casolaro's hotel room strongly supports the conclusion of the local authorities that the death was a suicide," found no DOJ influence on the local investigation, and stated that "there was ample reason to believe Casolaro had a motive to commit suicide," noting that he had been unemployed for months, was dependent on family for support, faced a balloon mortgage, and had been told by a prospective publisher shortly before his death that it would not advance him money on his proposed book about the "Octopus."⁷

The Bua report listed the tests it relied on: handwriting analysis confirming that Casolaro wrote the note found in the room; fingerprint analysis finding his prints and none other except a single print on an ash tray; hair and fiber analysis; an analysis of the bloodstains by Dr. Lee of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory consistent with suicide; and an autopsy finding hemorrhage from the wrist wounds as the cause of death and no evidence that he was unconscious or debilitated when cut. It addressed criticisms that the room was not sealed, that notification of next of kin was delayed while the body was embalmed, and that Martinsburg authorities discounted suspicions about his "sources," stating that "no credible evidence suggested that any of Casolaro's 'sources' played any role in his death." The report also records that Michael Riconosciuto, in a lawsuit against Bua, alleged that one of the FBI agents assigned to the investigation had murdered Casolaro; the district court dismissed the suit as patently frivolous (Riconosciuto v. Bua, No. 92 C 6217, N.D. Ill.).⁸

FBI task force members assigned to examine Casolaro's death privately "questioned the conclusion of suicide" and recommended further investigation; expressing doubt about the ruling reportedly "risked one's career" within the Bureau as of December 1992. FBI documents related to Casolaro remain partially withheld from public release under national security exemptions, while the Bureau simultaneously claims the files are missing - a contradiction noted by MuckRock journalists who filed FOIA requests.¹

In early 1994, the Department of Justice announced it was opening "a nationwide investigation" into Casolaro's death, ordered by associate attorney general Webb Hubbell. Shortly thereafter, Hubbell pleaded guilty to crimes committed while an Arkansas lawyer and resigned from DOJ. Whether the Casolaro investigation proceeded or produced findings was never made public.³

Dark Alliance Investigation

Casolaro's investigation intersected with the drug-trafficking networks documented by journalist Gary Webb. He was investigating connections between the Cabazon Indian tribe, Wackenhut International, and weapons manufacturing for Third World armies including the Contras in Nicaragua. He had told friends he was convinced that "spies, arms merchants and others were using the reservation as a low-profile site on which to develop weapons for Third World armies, including the Nicaraguan Contras." The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Contra leader Eden Pastora had visited a firing range near the reservation for a weapons demonstration in 1981. Casolaro's notebooks also contained the name of former CIA officer John Vandewerker in connection with activities at the Cabazon reservation.³

The research files

Casolaro's research files, photographed by Christian Hansen at the Missouri State Historical Society and published on the Internet Archive, include a folder labelled "Promotional Material" of corporate and weapons literature, hand-numbered "BD|AI|PM-01" onward. Its items are a brochure for the Inter-Probe modular energy transfer catalyzer (PM-01), a printed page numbered 207 on fuel air munitions (PM-02), a Brunswick Corporation defense division cover sheet and drawing for the Rifleman's Assault Weapon for urban warfare dated October 1976 (PM-03), a sales sheet of the defense division of the Chilean firm Industrias Cardoen (PM-04) and a fax of the resumes of the associates of Counter Terrorism Consultants, Inc., whose fax counters run 141 P01 to 141 P12 (PM-05) and whose page headers carry the date June 20, 1990 and times from 16:53 to 17:01.⁹ In the order of the photographs the folder runs PM-04, PM-02, PM-03, PM-05, PM-01.⁹ The packet names Carter Cornick, Eugene Propper, E. Lawrence Barcella, Francis J. McNeil, James B. Motley (a vice president of Wackenhut Advanced Technologies Corporation), Mayer Nudell and a former CIA counterterrorism chief whose entry carries no name.⁹ The files also contain a folder of 1980s newspaper and magazine material on Frank Terpil and Edwin Wilson, folders of Wackenhut annual reports, correspondence, profiles and newsletters, and, in a folder of Department of Defense publications, a magazine article by David Corn on Barcella and the Pan Am 103 bombing.¹⁰

The INSLAW folder of the research files includes a St. Louis Post-Dispatch report of February 19, 1991 that names Industrias Cardoen and its owner Carlos Cardoen. It states that Ari Ben-Menashe, in an affidavit filed in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Columbia, said that Cardoen told him in January 1989 that Cardoen had brokered a deal between Earl Brian and an Iraqi military intelligence representative for the use of PROMIS, and that the sale was consummated in Santiago, Chile.¹¹ Brian called the allegations "nonsense," according to the report.¹¹ The report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua dates the affidavit February 17, 1991.¹²

Bibliography

• Behold, A Pale Horse / The Octopus (unfinished manuscript, never published)