A Son Plunges into a Fox Hole
Danny Casolaro’s goal to uncover The Octopus was so all-consuming that it enveloped his physical life and his legacy as a writer. Sleuths across three decades have poured over the remnants of his manuscripts, voluminous notes and eclectic collection of documents.
Few authors, who were unknown en vivo, have unfinished manuscripts which have sustained such public interest. Are the remnants of his notes worthy of editing into a Pulitzer Prize award winning book? Perchance Danny’s real life deserves a reevaluation like his postmortem counterpart John Kennedy Toole - whose A Confederacy of Dunces was published after he committed suicide.
Granted some of Danny’s files went missing, but can we imagine that perhaps there were some things he was too smart to write down? No one warp speeds into a black hole without some precipitating event.
In the summer of 1990, shortly after Riconosciuto had disgorged the details of this story to the Hamiltons, Danny showed up in their offices on K Street in downtown Washington, expressing interest in doing some kind of story on the INSLAW case. And at some point that summer the Hamiltons made available to Danny their twelve-page Riconosciuto memo with its profusion of suggestive and seductive leads, its wealth of references to code names, cover-ups, corporate fronts, cutouts, and covert ops—all of which show up in the notes Danny left behind, many of which go far beyond the October Surprise.
The moment he got his hands on that maddening memo, with its maze of illusion and reality, was the moment Danny’s life changed and he began his descent into the obsession that would lead to his death. He was slowly, then rapidly, sucked into a kind of covert-ops version of Dungeons & Dragons, with that memo as his guide and Michael Riconosciuto as his Dungeon Master.
Reams of Danny’s notes and documents are available on the Internet Archive. People are often under the impression that going down a rabbit hole is a metaphor to get lost in an netherworld of disparate facts and infinite possibilities. Yet, the goal is to find the carrot and bring it into the sunshine… to sift and sort through ephemera in order to tell a streamlined story of the underworld. Too often people try to “follow the money”, but get buried in the receipts.
My introduction to The Octopus was via my research into MCA, Inc. because I was researching the history of the music industry. There were multiple federal investigations into the mafia’s involvement with MCA in the 1980s, but only a few individual players ended up in trouble, such as Sal Pisello, Tommy Vastola, and Morris Levy.
I will explore the “why” of this at another time, but it goes to the heart of the synergistic activities of the entertainment industry, organized crime, government officials and the clandestine services.
In this clip from the TrineDay’s The Journey podcast Cheri Seymour, author of The Last Circle, explains the importance of MCA to the filmmakers of The Octopus Murders:
Eugene Giaquinto was picked up on FBI wiretaps telling Robert Booth Nichols he would get Attorney General Edwin Meese to shut down the investigation related to MCA. The FBI and DOJ investigations were both quickly shut down and the documents were sealed. Giaquinto was also heard saying that he was childhood friends with John Gotti who was the head of the Gambino crime family.
Meese ultimately stepped down as Attorney General in 1988 in relation to an extensive investigation into the defense contractor Wedtech who had received no-bid government contracts. Meese was cleared of wrongdoing in the Wedtech case, but there were issues discovered related to his personal finances.
The Wedtech investigation did take down Maj. General of the National Guard of New York Vito Castellano - who was convicted of tax evasion related to payments from Wedtech. Reportedly, the Maj. General was Paul Castellano’s first cousin - who was the boss of the Gambino crime family prior to John Gotti. As we shall see, a dizzying tapestry of scandals is woven by many of the same players.
When The Octopus Murders arrived on Netflix I watched it at 1.5 speed. I have been dreaming of the day that MCA gets its due. I was sorely disappointed, but everyone has their own predilections when it comes to their tentacle of choice. The documentary did teach me a new angle in which to view The Octopus.
A peculiar fact remains… the feds have voluminous amounts of publicly available documents on their investigations into INSLAW/PROMIS, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the Iran-Contra Affair and more…
My logical leap: MCA must have been acting as an international front for the intelligence services.
I began looking for any mention of MCA and the CIA. I came across this footnote in the book The Last Mogul (p. 339-340).
“According to their own advertisement in the March 14, 1965, edition of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, MCA-Universal seemed to have offices in more cities around the world than the CIA.”
“While USA officials maintained that the agency had no record of any involvement with MCA, the Central Intelligence Agency responded to the author’s three-year old Freedom of Information Act request in June 1998, acknowledging that seventeen separate computer searches revealed MCA did work with the CIA. The CIA refused to release any of its MCA documents on grounds that it might endanger national security.”
I tried to locate the addresses of MCA’s offices and unfortunately the advert only listed the cities. I then found the address to MCA’s headquarters.
MCA’s opulent Beverly Hills headquarters was purchased by Litton Industries in 1964. Strange that MCA would sell their headquarters to a big time defense contractor. What do MCA and Litton have in common besides somehow overpaying their taxes on their real estate transaction? All was well by 1967.
The building is of historical importance given that Beverly Hills City Council placed the building on the Beverly Hills Register of Historic Properties in 2021. It is interesting that the building is still called the MCA/Litton Headquarters Complex.
As I have previously described, MCA faced an antitrust case from the DOJ in 1962. This forced MCA to sell their talent agency and also their headquarters. In turn, Lew Wasserman became the top power broker for MCA, while the founder of MCA - Jules Stein receded to the periphery. Although, Stein did trade MCA’s headquarters for stock in Litton Industries. Curious.
My next step was to do a quick google search for “Litton Industries”. It seems odd that a (primarily government funded) military contractor would move into a regal headquarters fit for a king. Upon the occasion when Litton moved its military arm out of the building a journalist reflected a similar thought:
It remains a mystery how a prime Government contractor, a leading builder of ships and electronics systems, maintained such lavish Beverly Hills offices for almost three decades without scrutiny from Washington.
New York Times, November 6, 1993
There has always been a synergy between military sponsored technological innovation and the entertainment industry. People often forget that media is essentially an intermediary between transmitter and receiver.
For a century California has been a hub for technological breakthroughs and Litton Industries was a centrifugal force. In California, Inc. (1982) Joel Kotkin wrote of the remarkable heights Litton reached with Charles Thornton at the helm:
In 1953, Thornton left Hughes to establish his own high technology company, Litton Industries. A West Texas native who once chopped cotton for 10$ an hour, Thornton ignored the old-line industrial pattern and concentrated on developing such new technologies as data processing, aircraft guidance systems, digital computers, and scores of other advanced electronic devices. Today Litton stands as one of the giants of American industry, employing over 76,000 workers, with 1979 sales of over $4 billion.
I have yet to identify much data on the business relationship between the military contractor and MCA’s entertainment industry monopoly. Yet, there certainly was a personal relationship between Lew Wasserman and Thornton.
Wasserman and Thornton were both listed as being on the Board of Directors in a 1974 brochure for Los Angeles World Affairs Council. The brochure was included in a declassified letter the Council sent to CIA Director William E. Colby offering to host him as their special guest. Other luminaries on the Council’s board included the presidents of the Union Oil Company of California, Northrop Corporation, Aerospace Corporation, and the chairman of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation.
It is documented that MCA has produced electronics for the CIA, while Wasserman and Thornton were both very friendly with President Ronald Reagan.
As George Carlin has said:
You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities and fraternities. They are on the same boards of directors. They are in the same country clubs they have like interests. They don’t need to call a meeting. They know what is good for them - and they’re getting it.
Carlin’s statement is rather conservative when applied to The Octopus - given how many documented intersections there are between these various entities.
My next task was to explore whether there was a relationship between Litton and Danny Casolaro’s investigation. According to FBI documents there was a Litton presence on the Cabazon Indian Reservation as a part of the Cabazon-Wackenhut Joint Venture (C-WJV). A quick summary: Wackenhut sought to use the sovereignty of the Cabazon Indian reservation to manufacture and sell military products to foreign governments and rebels/guerillas/death squads. The aim was to bypass U.S. regulations and limitations on foreign exports of military products.
According to Wackenhut’s internal correspondence the C-WJV was pursuing the opportunity to assemble Litton night vision goggles on the reservation. The deal had to go through Intersect Corporation who had “the apparent exclusive rights for foreign marketing with the Litton Electron Tube Division in third world countries.”
There was discussion that the goggles could potentially be sold to the Guatemalan and Jordanian governments. It is interesting that the deal had to be firmed up at Litton’s Electron Tube Division, Electro-Optics Department in Tempe, Arizona.
The Vice President of Wackenhut Inc. Robert Frye told FBI investigators that Robert Booth Nichols made the initial introduction between C-WJV and the President of Intersect Corporation - John Vanderwerker. There was also talk of brokering a deal for C-WJV to sell Litton night vision goggles to the Nicaraguan government.
It is notable that Robert Booth Nichols made the introduction of Vanderwerker to the C-WJV. Nichols also ran Meridian International Logistics and Eugene Giaquinto served on its board while he was also the President of the MCA Home Entertainment.
After browsing Jane’s Infantry Weapons 1983-84 catalog (p. 757), I deduce that the night vision goggles in question may have been the Model 845 lightweight second-generation. I found some for sale on the Pigeon Watch form if anyone wants to take a closer look!
Danny was investigating the October Surprise, which was the alleged payment future President Ronald Reagan’s cronies made to the Iranians to keep American hostages until after the 1980 election. This was in an effort to make President Jimmy Carter look weak and maim his chance at reelection. There was an alleged $40 million payment made to the Iranians through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which was a bank that was laundering tons of profits made by illicit businesses, including drug trafficking and international arms sales.
In December 1992 Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown issued a report to the Committee on Foreign Relations entitled The BCCI Affair. This report reviewed BCCI documents and found they were acting as a go-between for the Argentine government’s attempt to buy night vision goggles produced by Litton. Small arms. Small world.
Several authorities, including members of Congress, New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and former Customs Service Commissioner William von Raab, have accused the Justice and Treasury Departments of 'foot-dragging' in the investigation of the rogue bank's involvement in U.S. banks.
The Federal Reserve Board Monday fined BCCI $200 million for violating U.S. banking laws and prohibited its officials from ever again dealing with U.S. banks.
But a Central Intelligence Agency paper released Wednesday indicated the agency back in 1986 knew BCCI had secretly acquired control of Washington's largest banking company, First American Bankshares, in violation of Federal Reserve Board restrictions.
- UPI, August 2, 1991
In the above example two entities of Danny’s Octopus, the Cabazon-Wackenhut Joint Venture and BCCI, are involved in the attempted purchase of Litton night vision goggles. It is odd that Litton, one of the U.S.’s biggest defense contractors, is not a more notable component in the conversations around The Octopus. I wonder how often U.S. defense contractors were using third parties to circumvent the legal process of selling military equipment to foreign governments?
Litton was also subject to a federal investigation in the 1980s, just like Inslaw/PROMIS scandal, BCCI and MCA.
In 1988 a former Litton manager, John Carton, filed a whistleblower lawsuit that alleged that Litton had overcharged the Pentagon $25 million between 1981-1987. Litton was charging the Pentagon for computer work that they were actually doing for commercial customers. The DOJ joined in on the lawsuit in 1989. The case was settled in 1994 for $86 million and Carton was entitled to approximately $20 million for exposing the fraud. Unfortunately, Carton died the previous year on a vacation cruise.
Litton would face another DOJ investigation in 1999. Two of Litton’s subsidiaries pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the U.S. government by not declaring the commissions they earned on arms deals to Taiwan and Greece.
Hopefully, it is now clear that Litton is a part of The Octopus. So now let’s switch gears. I will provide insight into Danny’s life and how Litton itself played a role in his life’s story.
There was a Department of Justice inquiry into whether Danny’s death was a suicide or murder. The findings of the Casolaro Reportsuggest that Danny had a life full of tragedy - thus committing suicide is an unsurprising end. Yet, after I conducted a thorough search of newspaper archives it is clear Danny’s family has a history of resilience in the face of tragedy. Additionally, there are a number of curious facts that have been left out of Danny’s origin story which may provide insight into his personal obsession with The Octopus.
Immediately following my discovery of MCA’s relationship to Litton I googled “Casolaro” and “Litton”. I didn’t plan to look into Danny’s family, as I was initially motivated to explain the MCA tentacle. Many articles mention that Danny’s dad was a gynecologist and/or doctor. Yet, I was intrigued to find Dr. Joseph Casolaro’s obituary and discover that he was a founder of what would come to be called Litton Bionetics. Dr. Joseph Casolaro died of leukemia at the relatively young age of 60.
Dr. Joseph D. Casolaro even has a mention in an autobiography of Litton’s founder: The LITTON Adventure That Was: A Tribute to the Founder Charles B. “Tex” Thornton (p. 434).
Dr. Casolaro spent some part of his early career as a space monkey scientist! There were tests run by the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine to learn how well monkeys tolerated the gravitational force of rocket powered travel. They wanted to determine if humans could ultimately withstand the physics required for space travel.
Right now it is unclear to me exactly what Dr. Casolaro’s scientific involvements were prior to becoming a founder Bionetics Research Laboratories in 1961. Bionetics was at the forefront of using animals in biomedical research. Bionetics would merge with Litton in 1968 and by 1969 Litton Bionetics was so well regarded that they had the honor of studying all the bio waste from the first men on the moon.
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