American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders (2024) s01e01 Episode Script
The End
1
[phone ringing]
[eerie music playing]
[phone continues ringing]
[line crackling]
[man on phone] Hello?
[man 2] Hi, is this Detective [beep]
- [crackling]
- [detective] It is.
Hi, my name's Christian Hansen.
I'm a journalist,
and I'm working on a story
that I think you could help me with.
[detective] Yeah.
[Christian] I wanted to talk to you
about your time as an investigator
on the Octopus Murders.
[detective] Um, it's a tough case
to talk about.
Why is that?
[detective] Listen.
I don't know who you are.
[Christian] Yeah.
[detective] I don't know what you think
you'll do, but you're not gonna do it.
You think you think
Danny committed suicide?
[Christian]
That's what I'm trying to find out.
[detective] He didn't commit suicide.
And if you think for a minute
that you're gonna go expose somebody,
you're gonna get yourself killed.
[unsettling music playing]
[man] Um, okay.
So
Uh, what is all this stuff?
This is, um
This is research files. [chuckles]
- [Zachary] This is my friend Christian.
- [chuckles]
[Zachary] Ten years ago,
Christian told me a story
about this journalist
who died under mysterious circumstances
in the early '90s.
[intriguing music playing]
[reporter] In West Virginia,
authorities are investigating
the mysterious death of a journalist.
[reporter 2] Forty-four-year-old
Daniel Casolaro
was found dead over the weekend
in a motel in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
I mean, people always ask me why.
Why I'm working on this.
[Zachary] What do you tell them?
[Christian sighs]
Investigative reporter Danny Casolaro
[reporter 3] found in a bathtub Saturday,
both his wrists slit.
Some serious questions have been raised
about how he died.
[Christian] If he was murdered,
it was for a reason.
And that would be
that his theory was correct.
[reporter 4] Local authorities
quickly ruled his death a suicide,
but Casolaro's family and colleagues
believe he may have been killed.
[man] There is absolutely no way
no way in hell
that Dan Casolaro would kill himself.
He was very charged up
about the story he was working on.
[reporter] He was murdered?
I absolutely believe he was clipped.
There's no two ways about it.
He told us over the last few months
that the story he'd been working on,
he'd been threatened.
[Zachary] In the year before he died,
Danny had stumbled upon
a computer software scandal
that led him
to a series of high-profile crimes
which he said would rewrite US history.
[reporter 5] Casolaro had been working
for a year
on a book about an international scandal.
[reporter 6] Journalist Danny Casolaro
was onto the political conspiracy
of the century.
- [reporter 7] Questions about the CIA
- [reporter 8] High-ranking officials
[reporter 9] Money and arms,
stolen computer software
[reporter 10]
Incredible allegations of spying
on a scale never before imagined.
[reporter 11] He was about to break open
a major story.
[reporter 12] Working on a story he called
bigger than anything he ever dreamed of.
[Zachary] Danny called this conspiracy
- [reporter 13] The Octopus
- [reporter 14]The Octopus
[dramatic music playing]
[Zachary] The Octopus.
[pensive piano music playing]
[Zachary] Christian became obsessed
with the mysteries of The Octopus,
and over the next years,
I watched as The Octopus consumed him.
I'm I'm writing his story.
He just wanted
to report on this one thing,
but everything kept leading
to everything else
and connecting to everything else.
And because of
[Zachary] He spent less time
at his regular job as a photojournalist.
Instead, he would stay up for days,
sorting through stacks of news articles,
court transcripts,
and weird conspiracy literature.
[Christian] In order to figure out
what happened to Danny,
I wanted to see what he was seeing.
[line ringing]
And then I realized I should just finish
the book that Danny was writing.
A lot of people that worked on it
are dead.
I'm not gonna turn and walk away now
just because, you know,
I'm scared, you know?
[Zachary] It all sounded
a little weird to me.
I mean, was Christian,
my friend Christian, this guy,
really about to expose the most dangerous
political conspiracy of the century?
Or had he fallen into
some kind of paranoid fantasy?
So I went along with him as he tried
to finish what Danny Casolaro started
and uncover the secrets of The Octopus.
[woman] It's a dangerous game,
and I want no part of it.
- Stop contacting and trying to contact
- [Christian] Understood.
[man 1] You wanna be
the next Danny Casolaro?
[man 2] This is not your thing.
You don't know this world.
[line ringing]
- [Zachary] Hey, Christian.
- [Christian] Yo.
[Zachary] What's the deal?
[Christian] He said that I could come out
to his property.
The only thing that you're not gonna like
is that I can't bring my phone,
and I have to be blindfolded
on the way out there.
[intriguing music playing]
[man] Well, it was
a hot Saturday afternoon in Martinsburg.
Mid to late summer.
You know, typical summer day.
Walking around, doing the usual things.
Front desk called me on the walkie-talkie.
They said, "We need you in 517."
I said, "What do I need to bring?
A toilet plunger or what?"
They said, "Your courage."
And that's when I walked in and
saw what I saw.
It was just messy.
For lack of better explanation,
it was messy.
[Zachary] What was the mess?
The bloody handprints all over the wall,
and smeared on the wallpaper,
and all over the countertop, and
Just blood everywhere.
The housekeepers told me they didn't know
if there was someone in that tub or not.
I was just ever so slowly
peeking around the edge
just to see if there was a body in here.
And I could see the tub was full of blood.
And I was like, "Man, I don't wanna
look around that corner." You know?
There was just something spooky about it.
So I decided to peek through here,
the hinge crack.
And at that point,
I said, "Th there's someone in there."
"I'm betting they're not alive."
Something very wrong
had taken place in here.
[chilling music playing]
[Zachary] When did you first hear
Danny talk about The Octopus?
Oh, that I heard later,
probably within six months before he died.
But let's start a year before that.
Danny was working with this company
called Computer Age.
['80s pop music playing]
[Tony] It was a newsletter
with inside stories that are taking place
in the computer business.
Remember, computers were new then.
It was a difficult thing to put out,
and he did it with just
a handful of people, he and two others.
My name is Terry Miller.
I was a consultant in computer contracts
for 27 years
in the Washington, D.C. area.
I became well-known
by writing a trade publication
called Computer Age.
And that's how I met Danny.
I felt like it was my fault
'cause I had sicced him
on the INSLAW case.
And I still feel anguish that I did that,
but it can't be helped now.
[reporter] Tonight from CBS News,
a complex and confusing
still-developing case
It's the story of what happened to INSLAW.
that involves improper conduct by
high-level Justice Department officials.
I told him, here's a very suspicious case
involving the Department of Justice.
And he just found an astounding amount
of stuff that nobody knew beforehand.
It all started with the software
and evolved to a much bigger story.
[man] When I first started
at the Department of Justice,
there was no computer on my desk.
The office was stuck in the last century.
I can't tell you how many times
a prosecutor would walk down the hall
and, by accident,
find out that there was another case
pending against the same defendant,
just by talking to a colleague.
It was a pretty serious mess.
So I decided, uh,
naively, frankly,
that what I really needed
was a computer system.
And so we hired one of the best.
[reporter 2] These are
the offices of INSLAW,
a Washington, D.C. computer firm
led by INSLAW founder Bill Hamilton,
that makes software
for law enforcement agencies.
[Charles] Bill has what I like to think of
as an uncommon mind.
He can absorb
an enormous amount of information.
I mean, he became as expert
in what was going on in the court
as I was.
Along with Bill Hamilton and his group,
most importantly Joyce Deroy,
we began to work on
what they called a relational database.
Working on that project
was thrilling and exciting
because nobody had
really done this before.
We worked day and night.
Everybody did whatever needed to be done.
It was a shoestring operation.
Bill got pretty much obsessed
with this whole project.
It was his vision and his understanding
of what software could do.
And it was just groundbreaking.
[Charles] PROMIS.
['80s synthesizer music playing]
[presenter] New from INSLAW.
PROMIS, a powerful new
criminal case tracking system.
Built to automate the tracking of cases,
defendants, and charges
in a prosecutor's office.
This is the future of justice.
[classical string music playing]
[Charles] PROMIS was a remarkably big,
effective, powerful piece of software
in an era where there were not many
big, powerful pieces of software.
This software could find relationships
of all different kinds between cases.
It really was revolutionary.
PROMIS impacted not just
how we operated at the Justice Department,
but it impacted how
the police department operated,
how the courts operated.
Basically, anybody you want to trace,
you can trace with the PROMIS system.
We're talking about tracking
on a nationwide basis.
[rousing choral music playing]
This was obviously a very important
project for the Justice Department.
PROMIS was gonna be
the key administrative tool
of all these offices.
[Joyce] And then it disintegrated,
uh dramatically.
[tense music playing]
- [phone beeps]
- [woman] INSLAW, good afternoon.
[Charles] Everything I had heard
was that the project was going fine,
and all of a sudden, it wasn't going fine.
Hamilton wasn't being paid.
[man] At the beginning of the second year
of the three-year contract,
the Justice Department began
to withhold payments from INSLAW.
They withheld a couple of million dollars
from INSLAW.
Drove INSLAW into chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The Department of Justice,
they knew that this was a company
that couldn't withstand
having these payments withheld,
payments that were required
to keep Bill and his company alive.
[Joyce] Bill was very upset.
Consumed with nothing
except this whole situation
and concerned about losing the company.
That was about the same time
that the guy called and threatened Bill.
[reporter 3] Hamilton alleges he received
a phone call in April 1983
from the chairman of a company with
connections to the Justice Department.
The company, Virginia-based Hadron.
The chairman said to me,
"We wanna buy your company."
When Bill said he wasn't interested,
this guy said to him,
as a mobster might say to somebody
He said,
"We have ways of making you sell."
"We have ways of making you sell."
Well, that's one of the hints
that something is wrong here.
[Zachary]
Do you remember where you were at
when you decided to reach out
to Bill Hamilton?
Yeah.
I was researching the INSLAW case
for about a year.
I basically got to a point
where there was nothing left to read.
The next step was to call Bill Hamilton.
But I was pretty hesitant to, like,
actually begin engaging with this thing.
[line ringing]
[on phone] Bill Hamilton.
[Christian] And then I called Bill,
and, you know,
I was expecting to talk about the past,
but he's talking about all of this stuff
that had never been published.
He started sending me thousands of emails.
He's giving me leads.
He's giving me documents
to corroborate these things.
Before I could wrap my mind around
the first thing he sent me,
he'd send me something else,
and something else, and something else.
It was an unbelievable time in my life.
I was fully dedicated to this story,
and I had this source who was too.
[intriguing music playing]
[Christian] Pretty early on
in my talks with Bill,
he points out that there's an archive
at a university in Missouri
where all or many of Danny's notes
are stashed.
- [camera clicking]
- So I went there
and copied all of it.
It took five days.
[camera clicking]
[Christian] Okay, so these are
these are some of
Danny's handwritten notes.
It's a mess of scribbles,
but I've learned to really
be able to read his handwriting.
Phone numbers, arrows,
names, corporations.
The archive was thousands of pages
of, um, research materials.
I realized it was basically a blueprint
of the book that he was writing.
And it was about a series
of interrelated international crimes,
starting with the INSLAW case.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Charles] Well, Bill is, of course,
a person of the highest integrity,
and so he has been able to find supporters
who are also people of integrity.
People like Elliot Richardson,
whom I worked for
at the Justice Department,
became very interested
in helping Bill solve this.
[interviewer] How high up
could it possibly go?
Let me put it this way.
If what the various informants
say is true,
it's much dirtier than Watergate.
[reporter 4] And Elliot Richardson
knows all about Watergate.
He resigned as Attorney General,
rather than fire the Watergate
special prosecutor.
[reporter 5] Elliot Richardson refused,
in a moment of constitutional drama,
to obey a Presidential order
to fire the special Watergate prosecutor.
That's a stunning development,
and nothing even remotely like it
has happened in all of our history.
He was and continues to be
one of the big heroes
of that terrible, dark time.
Elliot Richardson believed,
to his heart, that the Justice Department
had mistreated Bill Hamilton.
The whole history of the Department's
handling of this case
has certainly been strange,
to put it politely.
[reporter 6] The Justice Department
says the INSLAW case
is nothing more than a contract dispute,
and INSLAW overcharged
and took too long to fulfill its contract.
[Elliot] As I got into it
and found the Department of Justice
totally unwilling to address
the merits of the situation,
I then advised INSLAW to sue.
[Charles] At this point in time,
I'd left the Justice Department,
and I went into private practice,
and Bill was one of my first clients.
And so, along with Elliot Richardson,
we took the case and we tried it.
[man] I know that you would not object
to that, and I wish now in the process
[Zachary] And how'd that go?
Well, it went pretty well.
I mean, we had a resounding victory
in the bankruptcy court.
[reporter 7] Federal judge George Bason.
He handed down an astonishing ruling
that the Justice Department
deliberately drove INSLAW into bankruptcy
and stole its software.
[reporter 6] Bason ordered
the Justice Department to pay INSLAW
$6.8 million in damages.
Basically, they stole
INSLAW's principal product,
PROMIS,
and they did so
by means of trickery, fraud, and deceit.
"Trickery, fraud, and deceit"
echo in my mind, from his opinion.
We had won it walking away.
And I thought
that was the end of the case.
[reporter 6] Three months later,
Judge Bason learned
he would lose his seat on the bench.
They fired him. They moved him off.
And they put somebody else in there.
He was the only federal bankruptcy judge
removed from the bench that year.
[reporter 6] Bason was not only startled
to learn that he wasn't being reappointed
but that Martin Teal Jr.,
a Justice Department attorney
who had argued the INSLAW case
in front of Bason,
would succeed him on the bench.
And then they appoint
one of the DOJ attorneys
from the INSLAW case to replace him.
[George] It would appear a federal judge
could lose his job because he made
a ruling against the government.
[reporter 6] INSLAW had won two court
battles and had emerged from bankruptcy,
but Justice appealed the decision,
and the Federal Appeals Court
reversed INSLAW's legal victory.
It said the company pursued its claims
in the wrong court.
[Zachary]
And what does that do to the case?
Well, the case was dismissed.
They just decided
that's the way to get rid of this case,
and that's what they did.
[Zachary] What does that do for INSLAW?
Well, INSLAW INSLAW INSLAW is
up a creek without a paddle.
It gets nothing
from the Justice Department.
[reporter 7] Did this suggest
something more sinister?
A cover-up from the highest levels
of government?
Well, it certainly suggests
the involvement of people
at a high level in government.
[Charles] The length and breadth to which
the Department of Justice went
to try to destroy INSLAW,
I never understood.
I mean, it made no sense.
And the question was,
why did the Department of Justice do this?
Never answered the question.
[somber music playing]
[birds squawking]
And that's when Danny Casolaro
started working on this story,
trying to help us figure out
what the answer was.
[machine clicking and whirring]
[Tony] Turning it on. Danny.
Tony, I think you're trying to fool me.
That is on. I see a light on.
[Tony] I don't think Danny
thought himself as a reporter.
I think he thought himself as a writer
who happened to be reporting
so that he could write.
Easter, 1985.
Casolaros.
Hi, happy Easter!
[woman] The Casolaros were this huge,
very closely-knit,
big Italian Catholic family.
This was a highly successful family.
Tony was the brilliant younger brother,
- the scientist.
- [camera clicking]
And he's this incredible doctor
that does work for all kinds of people
all over the world.
Danny was the poet,
the writer, the charmer,
the the golden boy.
Danny was my big brother,
and that probably defines
the relationship.
Danny's gonna stand on his toes,
as he always does in family pictures,
or any picture.
[Tony] Danny was the magnet of the family.
[Danny] Danny, coming to dinner on time.
- [Tony] People loved being around him.
- [camera clicking]
By the way,
he was my favorite, so it was okay.
[indistinct]
He had never followed a traditional path,
and I admired him for it.
He loved to write fiction.
[Ann] He wrote a couple books.
He wrote poems.
You know, Danny and I
didn't date for very long,
but we stayed the closest of friends.
I spent more time with Danny
than I did any man in my life ever.
[camera clicking]
He was a great wingman for me. [chuckles]
And I'm not talking about men to date.
I mean, you go out
with Danny Casolaro, okay,
you'll know everyone in the bar
by the time you leave.
[man] Impressive.
He was disarming
in that he was kind and considerate,
and that's how he got people to talk.
And I guess that's what
a good reporter-investigator can do.
[Tony] Twenty years from now, Dan,
I hope you're still sitting there.
[door opens]
[Christian] Danny had been writing about
the computer industry for about ten years.
This was more or less a day job for him.
[ominous music playing]
But when an actually interesting
computer story came along,
he was in a really good position
because he had such a deep background.
So then he reaches out to Bill Hamilton.
[phone clicks]
[dial tone, dialing]
[line ringing]
[Bill] Bill Hamilton.
[Christian] That started a process
of Bill and Danny talking every day.
[Bill] I talked to [beep]
He said that if the investigation
were to mushroom,
a large number of people in Congress
could lose their jobs
'cause so many people
are in on this thing.
[Christian] One of the things
about Bill Hamilton is
he used to work, uh, at the NSA.
[reporter 8] It's not the CIA.
It's the supersecret NSA,
the National Security Agency.
Its budget is secret.
The presidential order that established it
in 1952 is secret.
No law governs its actions.
[Christian] And one of the things
that really kept Danny going along was
Bill would always have new leads
that he'd get from what he'd call
his confidential intelligence sources.
[line ringing]
- [Bill] It's Bill Hamilton.
- [man] Yeah.
[Bill] Anything else new from your guy?
[man] I told you about
spying on each other's citizens
[Bill] Yes.
[man] We need to find out
some more stuff on that
but be very cautious
about how we approach it.
- [Bill] Yep.
- [man] Okay.
[intriguing music playing]
Every time you pick up a rock
in this case, you find maggots under it.
So as Danny is talking to Bill Hamilton,
- he starts looking into powerful people
- [camera clicking]
connected to the Reagan administration
and realizes there's something much bigger
going on than just a contract dispute
over the PROMIS software.
[Elliot] The information
that began to come in
implicated that the real reason
for the theft of the INSLAW software
was to benefit
the administration's friends.
[reporter 9] The friend in this case,
Dr. Earl Brian.
Earl Brian had been in Reagan's cabinet
when he was governor of California.
And after that, he stays close
with the Reagan administration.
And he owns corporations that do
contracting work for government agencies
like the Defense Department,
the Justice Department, and the CIA.
[reporter 9] Brian is now an officer
of a computer firm
that competed with INSLAW.
Hamilton says Dominic Laiti,
the man who runs Brian's company,
offered to buy INSLAW.
[man] Do you recall that conversation?
Of course not.
[Christian] Danny starts finding
all these connections
between PROMIS and Earl Brian.
[reporter 10] Earl Brian says
he never heard of PROMIS software
before reading news reports of INSLAW's
dispute with the Justice Department.
The enduring question is,
the government has the money
to pay whatever they owe Bill Hamilton.
Eight million dollars? Just pay for it.
Like, they didn't pay for it.
They're stonewalling,
and they're clearly covering something up.
So what is that?
What are they covering up?
[reporter 11] Justice Department officials
denied there was a conspiracy.
[line ringing]
[crackling]
- [man] Hi, Bill.
- [Bill] Hi, [beep]. How are you?
[man] Not too bad.
[Bill] I wanted to tell you, um,
Danny got these computer printouts
showing wire transfers from London
through the World Bank
to offshore accounts of Earl Brian
and unnamed employees
of the Department of Justice.
[man] Oh shit. Okay.
[Bill] Yeah.
[Christian] And at that point,
Danny realizes
that the story is huge.
Way bigger than just an article
or even a series of articles
and that it could be
his next big book project.
[Zachary] Do you remember
the last time that you saw Danny?
[Tony] We're gonna find you!
Yeah.
[Tony] We are gonna find you!
[children squealing]
[Tony] We're gonna find all of you!
[Tony] It was July 20th.
Three weeks before he died.
[Tony] Coming in here
to make a little movie.
[reflective music playing]
[Tony] And it was to celebrate
my son's third birthday.
[man] Happy birthday!
[indistinct chatter]
[Tony] And the whole family was here.
All right, Tony, okay
No, that's all right
[Tony] And Danny came in.
He was a bit late
[child] Danny!
which was pretty standard for him.
[child] Danny, watch this. Oh no!
[Tony] And he actually stayed late.
[child giggling]
Happy birthday to you ♪
[man] Everybody in!
[all] Happy birthday, dear ♪
[indistinct chatter]
- Wait a minute. Make a wish, okay.
- [man] Make a wish.
[indistinct chatter]
[Tony] So I remember that
at the end of the night,
Danny and I stood in our kitchen
and talked for a long time
about what was going on.
He didn't tell me a lot of the details,
except that
it was a vast, disturbing conspiracy.
And in this whole world
that he had been looking into,
some of the same people kept appearing.
I don't know why Martinsburg,
but apparently Danny was supposed
to meet with a source in West Virginia.
But I can't tell you
whom he was meeting with.
I just don't know the answer.
Danny told me that he was getting
some funny phone calls and some threats,
and it was then that he said to me,
"By the way, if an accident happens,
it's not an accident."
[Zachary] And were you worried?
[sighs] You know what? I think
I wasn't worried, no.
I mean, "worry" is too strong a word.
I always thought of him as being
somebody who could handle
whatever happened.
So I just assumed he would handle it.
[unsettling music playing]
[sirens wailing]
[man over radio] Two-forty, two-forty.
It came in at 12:21.
[man 2] All right, stand by.
I was actually coming back from a call,
uh, near the Martinsburg Mall.
And I remember hearing the call come out
for an unknown situation at the Sheraton.
Law enforcement were on scene.
We went on in,
and there's already four or five
police officers there in that room.
[camera clicks]
[Don] And one of the investigators said,
"In the bathroom, there's a body."
"But it's just a simple suicide."
I was also told
that he did leave a suicide note
on a legal pad there.
It was a short note.
It mentioned his son in there.
It just said
he was sorry for what he had done.
That was it.
With that in mind, I go in.
I see the gentleman
in a bathtub full of bloody water.
- Dark bloody water.
- [camera beeps, clicks]
He basically bled out
from cut marks on his wrists.
And then in front of the bathtub
was some smeared blood on the wall.
It's not normal. And I thought, "Well"
"What do you think he did?"
"You think he held his hands up
and squirted the wall?"
So we got to looking at the body,
and I remember
pulling his arms out of the tub.
Even at that time,
there were a lot of red flags.
But at that point, the consensus
from the police department was
that this is, you know,
just a simple loser or whatever
comin' through the city of Martinsburg
that just killed himself.
And, you know,
I had no idea who he was.
[officer 1 on tape] C-A-S-O-L-A-R-O.
- [officer 2] The suicide case?
- [officer 1] Right.
White male.
DOB, 6-16-47.
[officer 2] Okay.
[Tony] I was at the hospital making rounds
and got a phone call.
"Dr. Casolaro, line five-six."
So I pick up the phone.
It was
the police in Martinsburg,
and they notified me
that they had found my brother Danny dead.
[line crackles]
[officer 1] Basically, what it is,
is we found this guy
in a tub full of water
with his wrists slit.
[officer 2] Okay.
[officer 1] And, uh,
it was definitely suicide.
[officer 2] Copy.
[Tony] Wait, wait, wait. Suicide?
I was, like a little bit taken aback
because he had just said to me,
"If an accident happens,
don't believe it."
So now I'm asking questions,
and they're like, "No, we think it was"
I said, "Wait, wait. Suicide?
How do you know it's suicide?"
"Well, that's what it
That's what our the coroner said."
[officer 1] Just to let you know that our
coroner has declared this thing a suicide.
[officer 2] Okay.
[officer 1] You know,
we have examined the scene, and, uh,
we didn't find any sign of foul play.
I said, "Wait. Has he had an autopsy?"
"No."
"We don't know that that's necessary."
And then I was told
that his body had been embalmed.
So it does make doing
a comprehensive autopsy more difficult.
[Zachary] What turned out to be
the reason that he had been embalmed?
No one ever answered it.
We never found out who said it was okay.
And, you know, it had been done.
I couldn't change it.
But it just didn't
It didn't sit right.
I now, in my mind, am thinking,
"Oh fuck, they killed him."
I remember I was reading the paper
at my house
and saw "Investigative reporter
found dead at Martinsburg Motel."
My God, this is the guy we had.
So I went back and discussed it
with my lieutenant at the time
and told him what had happened
and what I had seen.
Well, tonight, new details on
what Martinsburg paramedics saw.
[reporter 12] Don Shirley, an experienced
medic in Martinsburg, was on the scene.
Is there anything that appeared suspicious
about this to you?
In my six years as a medic,
I've never seen anybody ever
cut their wrist that many times.
[reporter 12] His wrists were cut
how many times?
Oh, well, the left arm
appeared to have had eight cuts,
and the right arm
appeared to have had four cuts.
[Don] It just did not appear
that he physically could have done that.
These were deep, deep cuts.
Deep enough to the point where
the tendons had been severed.
[camera clicking]
When you picked the arm up,
the wrist basically flopped.
[camera clicking]
Now, I've always said,
you can't ignore facts.
You cut your tendons,
you can't hold somethin'.
Those are simple facts.
And I had the gut feeling at that time
that this possibly could be a homicide.
[Ann] In the days after he died,
we all wanted to get to the bottom
of what happened to him.
Most of us were convinced
that he had been hurt by people
for him covering the story.
[woman] Tony, are you okay?
Yeah.
[Ann] It must have been
very hard for Tony, you know.
He had just lost his brother.
And, uh, all these reporters
just started contacting him.
Well, I didn't know that you could say no
to media who call you and ask you
if they can talk to you.
And I didn't have a script
or anybody to say what to say.
So I kind of stood in front of them
and I told them what I knew.
I remember Danny telling us,
"If I'm in an accident"
"If I have an accident"
"If an accident happens to me"
"Don't believe it."
"Don't believe it." "Don't believe it."
[reporter 13] Dr. Anthony Casolaro
told reporters
there are several unanswered questions
about his brother's death.
Was reporter Danny Casolaro killed
because of what he knew?
There is more information tonight.
Because of the brother,
that's when all this started to surface.
New information about
Danny Casolaro's research.
He had a big, brown briefcase,
and he began to put
all of his INSLAW info in this briefcase.
[camera clicking]
And when his motel room was searched
after his death, it was gone.
[reporter 14] Now we have learned
that after Danny Casolaro's death,
his briefcase and key documents
for his book are missing.
[reporter 15] Missing files and notes
Casolaro kept
on the potentially explosive story
he was investigating.
[Tony] When he was found
in his hotel room on Saturday,
authorities report that they found
no papers in his room or in his car.
Put yourselves in our shoes.
We didn't know who was involved
and what had happened.
All we knew is,
it took two days to find us,
and he had already been embalmed,
which made us a little suspect
as to the process itself.
[reporter 16] I mean,
any time a reporter dies
in the pursuit of a dangerous story,
it threatens all reporters.
I think it's incumbent upon
the Press Corps in Washington, D.C.
and across the country to find out
what happened to this reporter.
I mean, with the shows on TV,
the news agencies and all,
CNN and Headline News,
Fox, Channel Seven, and Channel Nine,
all the agencies in Washington, D.C.
Then things started to heat up.
Was a reporter killed
for investigating the government?
There is strong evidence
pointing to murder.
Danny told me,
in the last week of his life,
that he had gotten
most of the evidence he needed,
and he had one more meeting
in West Virginia.
[reporter 17] Former Attorney General
and INSLAW Lawyer Elliot Richardson
says the possibilities
come right out of a spy thriller.
I couldn't escape the immediate conclusion
that this could not have been suicide.
What Casolaro was going after
was the INSLAW case.
- Now, what INSLAW is about
- [man] Here we go.
I think the guy committed suicide.
I don't know how you murder a guy by
What do you do? Hold his arm
I think it's worth looking into.
The fact that he slashed one wrist
eight times?
Impossible.
[reporter 18] You think
his death is suspicious?
Yes, I don't think it's very persuasive
that it was a suicide.
He was killed for his work.
[Zachary] Do you remember
when you first met Bill Hamilton?
I think we There was an interview,
and I believe he and I were both
at some interview on some show.
[reporter 16] We've been talking about
the mysterious death of Danny Casolaro.
A friend of mine
and a brother of Dr. Tony Casolaro.
Joining us now is William Hamilton,
owner of INSLAW.
He suspects the US Department of Justice
conspired to send his company
into bankruptcy
and steal his computer software.
That's right.
Makes me want to know why it was stolen
and who got paid off
and why they got paid off.
Danny Casolaro was trying to find out.
[Charles] You know,
it was a great tragedy for Bill.
I never dealt with
Danny Casolaro directly, but Bill did.
And I remember
Bill being very sad about it.
- [Anderson] You got to know him well.
- [Bill] Yes.
I talked to him almost every day
for a year.
And in the final three months of his life,
he began to finally
have some major breakthroughs.
Getting people to talk.
My understanding is that Danny had
some sort of lead out in West Virginia,
and he told Bill that he thought
this was really gonna be important.
And the next thing we knew, he was dead.
Tony, what do you think really happened?
Well, Danny had said
the people he was dealing with
were absolutely capable
of doing anything they could
to ensure that he not pursue this.
[Bill] I think that's right, Jack,
and some of the people
in the intelligence community
that I talk to on a regular basis
told Danny that some of the specific
inquiries he was making
could cause him to get murdered.
Bill, who in this case would be that ugly,
that mean, that vicious?
Take us into that world.
[dark music playing]
[Bill] I found stuff, I think.
About a week ago, we got a call
from this computer software guy
out west in Washington state,
from a public telephone.
[man] Yeah.
[Bill] And, um,
he knows a lot about PROMIS.
[man] Do I know the name?
[Bill] Yeah.
Michael Riconosciuto.
He said, at one point,
"I have the PROMIS source code."
- [man] Michael, right?
- [Bill] Yeah.
[man]
Michael's an extremely intelligent person.
[Bill] Yeah.
[man] He's one of the best
in the business.
I mean, you speak to him
about software or whatever
He can move around
in a very impressive way.
[Bill] This former NSA guy says,
"I don't know how you heard that name,
but you can get killed
just knowing that name."
[man] That's very possible.
[Bill] Oh Jesus.
[dark music playing]
Uh, Christian, this is
Michael Riconosciuto.
I'm returning your call.
Uh um
Try me back. Thank you.
Illusions number time ♪
A drunk man's on the lead ♪
Skies and all bleed ♪
And no one can hear ♪
The cry from the ground ♪
It's something to dig ♪
[song fades]
[phone ringing]
[eerie music playing]
[phone continues ringing]
[line crackling]
[man on phone] Hello?
[man 2] Hi, is this Detective [beep]
- [crackling]
- [detective] It is.
Hi, my name's Christian Hansen.
I'm a journalist,
and I'm working on a story
that I think you could help me with.
[detective] Yeah.
[Christian] I wanted to talk to you
about your time as an investigator
on the Octopus Murders.
[detective] Um, it's a tough case
to talk about.
Why is that?
[detective] Listen.
I don't know who you are.
[Christian] Yeah.
[detective] I don't know what you think
you'll do, but you're not gonna do it.
You think you think
Danny committed suicide?
[Christian]
That's what I'm trying to find out.
[detective] He didn't commit suicide.
And if you think for a minute
that you're gonna go expose somebody,
you're gonna get yourself killed.
[unsettling music playing]
[man] Um, okay.
So
Uh, what is all this stuff?
This is, um
This is research files. [chuckles]
- [Zachary] This is my friend Christian.
- [chuckles]
[Zachary] Ten years ago,
Christian told me a story
about this journalist
who died under mysterious circumstances
in the early '90s.
[intriguing music playing]
[reporter] In West Virginia,
authorities are investigating
the mysterious death of a journalist.
[reporter 2] Forty-four-year-old
Daniel Casolaro
was found dead over the weekend
in a motel in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
I mean, people always ask me why.
Why I'm working on this.
[Zachary] What do you tell them?
[Christian sighs]
Investigative reporter Danny Casolaro
[reporter 3] found in a bathtub Saturday,
both his wrists slit.
Some serious questions have been raised
about how he died.
[Christian] If he was murdered,
it was for a reason.
And that would be
that his theory was correct.
[reporter 4] Local authorities
quickly ruled his death a suicide,
but Casolaro's family and colleagues
believe he may have been killed.
[man] There is absolutely no way
no way in hell
that Dan Casolaro would kill himself.
He was very charged up
about the story he was working on.
[reporter] He was murdered?
I absolutely believe he was clipped.
There's no two ways about it.
He told us over the last few months
that the story he'd been working on,
he'd been threatened.
[Zachary] In the year before he died,
Danny had stumbled upon
a computer software scandal
that led him
to a series of high-profile crimes
which he said would rewrite US history.
[reporter 5] Casolaro had been working
for a year
on a book about an international scandal.
[reporter 6] Journalist Danny Casolaro
was onto the political conspiracy
of the century.
- [reporter 7] Questions about the CIA
- [reporter 8] High-ranking officials
[reporter 9] Money and arms,
stolen computer software
[reporter 10]
Incredible allegations of spying
on a scale never before imagined.
[reporter 11] He was about to break open
a major story.
[reporter 12] Working on a story he called
bigger than anything he ever dreamed of.
[Zachary] Danny called this conspiracy
- [reporter 13] The Octopus
- [reporter 14]The Octopus
[dramatic music playing]
[Zachary] The Octopus.
[pensive piano music playing]
[Zachary] Christian became obsessed
with the mysteries of The Octopus,
and over the next years,
I watched as The Octopus consumed him.
I'm I'm writing his story.
He just wanted
to report on this one thing,
but everything kept leading
to everything else
and connecting to everything else.
And because of
[Zachary] He spent less time
at his regular job as a photojournalist.
Instead, he would stay up for days,
sorting through stacks of news articles,
court transcripts,
and weird conspiracy literature.
[Christian] In order to figure out
what happened to Danny,
I wanted to see what he was seeing.
[line ringing]
And then I realized I should just finish
the book that Danny was writing.
A lot of people that worked on it
are dead.
I'm not gonna turn and walk away now
just because, you know,
I'm scared, you know?
[Zachary] It all sounded
a little weird to me.
I mean, was Christian,
my friend Christian, this guy,
really about to expose the most dangerous
political conspiracy of the century?
Or had he fallen into
some kind of paranoid fantasy?
So I went along with him as he tried
to finish what Danny Casolaro started
and uncover the secrets of The Octopus.
[woman] It's a dangerous game,
and I want no part of it.
- Stop contacting and trying to contact
- [Christian] Understood.
[man 1] You wanna be
the next Danny Casolaro?
[man 2] This is not your thing.
You don't know this world.
[line ringing]
- [Zachary] Hey, Christian.
- [Christian] Yo.
[Zachary] What's the deal?
[Christian] He said that I could come out
to his property.
The only thing that you're not gonna like
is that I can't bring my phone,
and I have to be blindfolded
on the way out there.
[intriguing music playing]
[man] Well, it was
a hot Saturday afternoon in Martinsburg.
Mid to late summer.
You know, typical summer day.
Walking around, doing the usual things.
Front desk called me on the walkie-talkie.
They said, "We need you in 517."
I said, "What do I need to bring?
A toilet plunger or what?"
They said, "Your courage."
And that's when I walked in and
saw what I saw.
It was just messy.
For lack of better explanation,
it was messy.
[Zachary] What was the mess?
The bloody handprints all over the wall,
and smeared on the wallpaper,
and all over the countertop, and
Just blood everywhere.
The housekeepers told me they didn't know
if there was someone in that tub or not.
I was just ever so slowly
peeking around the edge
just to see if there was a body in here.
And I could see the tub was full of blood.
And I was like, "Man, I don't wanna
look around that corner." You know?
There was just something spooky about it.
So I decided to peek through here,
the hinge crack.
And at that point,
I said, "Th there's someone in there."
"I'm betting they're not alive."
Something very wrong
had taken place in here.
[chilling music playing]
[Zachary] When did you first hear
Danny talk about The Octopus?
Oh, that I heard later,
probably within six months before he died.
But let's start a year before that.
Danny was working with this company
called Computer Age.
['80s pop music playing]
[Tony] It was a newsletter
with inside stories that are taking place
in the computer business.
Remember, computers were new then.
It was a difficult thing to put out,
and he did it with just
a handful of people, he and two others.
My name is Terry Miller.
I was a consultant in computer contracts
for 27 years
in the Washington, D.C. area.
I became well-known
by writing a trade publication
called Computer Age.
And that's how I met Danny.
I felt like it was my fault
'cause I had sicced him
on the INSLAW case.
And I still feel anguish that I did that,
but it can't be helped now.
[reporter] Tonight from CBS News,
a complex and confusing
still-developing case
It's the story of what happened to INSLAW.
that involves improper conduct by
high-level Justice Department officials.
I told him, here's a very suspicious case
involving the Department of Justice.
And he just found an astounding amount
of stuff that nobody knew beforehand.
It all started with the software
and evolved to a much bigger story.
[man] When I first started
at the Department of Justice,
there was no computer on my desk.
The office was stuck in the last century.
I can't tell you how many times
a prosecutor would walk down the hall
and, by accident,
find out that there was another case
pending against the same defendant,
just by talking to a colleague.
It was a pretty serious mess.
So I decided, uh,
naively, frankly,
that what I really needed
was a computer system.
And so we hired one of the best.
[reporter 2] These are
the offices of INSLAW,
a Washington, D.C. computer firm
led by INSLAW founder Bill Hamilton,
that makes software
for law enforcement agencies.
[Charles] Bill has what I like to think of
as an uncommon mind.
He can absorb
an enormous amount of information.
I mean, he became as expert
in what was going on in the court
as I was.
Along with Bill Hamilton and his group,
most importantly Joyce Deroy,
we began to work on
what they called a relational database.
Working on that project
was thrilling and exciting
because nobody had
really done this before.
We worked day and night.
Everybody did whatever needed to be done.
It was a shoestring operation.
Bill got pretty much obsessed
with this whole project.
It was his vision and his understanding
of what software could do.
And it was just groundbreaking.
[Charles] PROMIS.
['80s synthesizer music playing]
[presenter] New from INSLAW.
PROMIS, a powerful new
criminal case tracking system.
Built to automate the tracking of cases,
defendants, and charges
in a prosecutor's office.
This is the future of justice.
[classical string music playing]
[Charles] PROMIS was a remarkably big,
effective, powerful piece of software
in an era where there were not many
big, powerful pieces of software.
This software could find relationships
of all different kinds between cases.
It really was revolutionary.
PROMIS impacted not just
how we operated at the Justice Department,
but it impacted how
the police department operated,
how the courts operated.
Basically, anybody you want to trace,
you can trace with the PROMIS system.
We're talking about tracking
on a nationwide basis.
[rousing choral music playing]
This was obviously a very important
project for the Justice Department.
PROMIS was gonna be
the key administrative tool
of all these offices.
[Joyce] And then it disintegrated,
uh dramatically.
[tense music playing]
- [phone beeps]
- [woman] INSLAW, good afternoon.
[Charles] Everything I had heard
was that the project was going fine,
and all of a sudden, it wasn't going fine.
Hamilton wasn't being paid.
[man] At the beginning of the second year
of the three-year contract,
the Justice Department began
to withhold payments from INSLAW.
They withheld a couple of million dollars
from INSLAW.
Drove INSLAW into chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The Department of Justice,
they knew that this was a company
that couldn't withstand
having these payments withheld,
payments that were required
to keep Bill and his company alive.
[Joyce] Bill was very upset.
Consumed with nothing
except this whole situation
and concerned about losing the company.
That was about the same time
that the guy called and threatened Bill.
[reporter 3] Hamilton alleges he received
a phone call in April 1983
from the chairman of a company with
connections to the Justice Department.
The company, Virginia-based Hadron.
The chairman said to me,
"We wanna buy your company."
When Bill said he wasn't interested,
this guy said to him,
as a mobster might say to somebody
He said,
"We have ways of making you sell."
"We have ways of making you sell."
Well, that's one of the hints
that something is wrong here.
[Zachary]
Do you remember where you were at
when you decided to reach out
to Bill Hamilton?
Yeah.
I was researching the INSLAW case
for about a year.
I basically got to a point
where there was nothing left to read.
The next step was to call Bill Hamilton.
But I was pretty hesitant to, like,
actually begin engaging with this thing.
[line ringing]
[on phone] Bill Hamilton.
[Christian] And then I called Bill,
and, you know,
I was expecting to talk about the past,
but he's talking about all of this stuff
that had never been published.
He started sending me thousands of emails.
He's giving me leads.
He's giving me documents
to corroborate these things.
Before I could wrap my mind around
the first thing he sent me,
he'd send me something else,
and something else, and something else.
It was an unbelievable time in my life.
I was fully dedicated to this story,
and I had this source who was too.
[intriguing music playing]
[Christian] Pretty early on
in my talks with Bill,
he points out that there's an archive
at a university in Missouri
where all or many of Danny's notes
are stashed.
- [camera clicking]
- So I went there
and copied all of it.
It took five days.
[camera clicking]
[Christian] Okay, so these are
these are some of
Danny's handwritten notes.
It's a mess of scribbles,
but I've learned to really
be able to read his handwriting.
Phone numbers, arrows,
names, corporations.
The archive was thousands of pages
of, um, research materials.
I realized it was basically a blueprint
of the book that he was writing.
And it was about a series
of interrelated international crimes,
starting with the INSLAW case.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Charles] Well, Bill is, of course,
a person of the highest integrity,
and so he has been able to find supporters
who are also people of integrity.
People like Elliot Richardson,
whom I worked for
at the Justice Department,
became very interested
in helping Bill solve this.
[interviewer] How high up
could it possibly go?
Let me put it this way.
If what the various informants
say is true,
it's much dirtier than Watergate.
[reporter 4] And Elliot Richardson
knows all about Watergate.
He resigned as Attorney General,
rather than fire the Watergate
special prosecutor.
[reporter 5] Elliot Richardson refused,
in a moment of constitutional drama,
to obey a Presidential order
to fire the special Watergate prosecutor.
That's a stunning development,
and nothing even remotely like it
has happened in all of our history.
He was and continues to be
one of the big heroes
of that terrible, dark time.
Elliot Richardson believed,
to his heart, that the Justice Department
had mistreated Bill Hamilton.
The whole history of the Department's
handling of this case
has certainly been strange,
to put it politely.
[reporter 6] The Justice Department
says the INSLAW case
is nothing more than a contract dispute,
and INSLAW overcharged
and took too long to fulfill its contract.
[Elliot] As I got into it
and found the Department of Justice
totally unwilling to address
the merits of the situation,
I then advised INSLAW to sue.
[Charles] At this point in time,
I'd left the Justice Department,
and I went into private practice,
and Bill was one of my first clients.
And so, along with Elliot Richardson,
we took the case and we tried it.
[man] I know that you would not object
to that, and I wish now in the process
[Zachary] And how'd that go?
Well, it went pretty well.
I mean, we had a resounding victory
in the bankruptcy court.
[reporter 7] Federal judge George Bason.
He handed down an astonishing ruling
that the Justice Department
deliberately drove INSLAW into bankruptcy
and stole its software.
[reporter 6] Bason ordered
the Justice Department to pay INSLAW
$6.8 million in damages.
Basically, they stole
INSLAW's principal product,
PROMIS,
and they did so
by means of trickery, fraud, and deceit.
"Trickery, fraud, and deceit"
echo in my mind, from his opinion.
We had won it walking away.
And I thought
that was the end of the case.
[reporter 6] Three months later,
Judge Bason learned
he would lose his seat on the bench.
They fired him. They moved him off.
And they put somebody else in there.
He was the only federal bankruptcy judge
removed from the bench that year.
[reporter 6] Bason was not only startled
to learn that he wasn't being reappointed
but that Martin Teal Jr.,
a Justice Department attorney
who had argued the INSLAW case
in front of Bason,
would succeed him on the bench.
And then they appoint
one of the DOJ attorneys
from the INSLAW case to replace him.
[George] It would appear a federal judge
could lose his job because he made
a ruling against the government.
[reporter 6] INSLAW had won two court
battles and had emerged from bankruptcy,
but Justice appealed the decision,
and the Federal Appeals Court
reversed INSLAW's legal victory.
It said the company pursued its claims
in the wrong court.
[Zachary]
And what does that do to the case?
Well, the case was dismissed.
They just decided
that's the way to get rid of this case,
and that's what they did.
[Zachary] What does that do for INSLAW?
Well, INSLAW INSLAW INSLAW is
up a creek without a paddle.
It gets nothing
from the Justice Department.
[reporter 7] Did this suggest
something more sinister?
A cover-up from the highest levels
of government?
Well, it certainly suggests
the involvement of people
at a high level in government.
[Charles] The length and breadth to which
the Department of Justice went
to try to destroy INSLAW,
I never understood.
I mean, it made no sense.
And the question was,
why did the Department of Justice do this?
Never answered the question.
[somber music playing]
[birds squawking]
And that's when Danny Casolaro
started working on this story,
trying to help us figure out
what the answer was.
[machine clicking and whirring]
[Tony] Turning it on. Danny.
Tony, I think you're trying to fool me.
That is on. I see a light on.
[Tony] I don't think Danny
thought himself as a reporter.
I think he thought himself as a writer
who happened to be reporting
so that he could write.
Easter, 1985.
Casolaros.
Hi, happy Easter!
[woman] The Casolaros were this huge,
very closely-knit,
big Italian Catholic family.
This was a highly successful family.
Tony was the brilliant younger brother,
- the scientist.
- [camera clicking]
And he's this incredible doctor
that does work for all kinds of people
all over the world.
Danny was the poet,
the writer, the charmer,
the the golden boy.
Danny was my big brother,
and that probably defines
the relationship.
Danny's gonna stand on his toes,
as he always does in family pictures,
or any picture.
[Tony] Danny was the magnet of the family.
[Danny] Danny, coming to dinner on time.
- [Tony] People loved being around him.
- [camera clicking]
By the way,
he was my favorite, so it was okay.
[indistinct]
He had never followed a traditional path,
and I admired him for it.
He loved to write fiction.
[Ann] He wrote a couple books.
He wrote poems.
You know, Danny and I
didn't date for very long,
but we stayed the closest of friends.
I spent more time with Danny
than I did any man in my life ever.
[camera clicking]
He was a great wingman for me. [chuckles]
And I'm not talking about men to date.
I mean, you go out
with Danny Casolaro, okay,
you'll know everyone in the bar
by the time you leave.
[man] Impressive.
He was disarming
in that he was kind and considerate,
and that's how he got people to talk.
And I guess that's what
a good reporter-investigator can do.
[Tony] Twenty years from now, Dan,
I hope you're still sitting there.
[door opens]
[Christian] Danny had been writing about
the computer industry for about ten years.
This was more or less a day job for him.
[ominous music playing]
But when an actually interesting
computer story came along,
he was in a really good position
because he had such a deep background.
So then he reaches out to Bill Hamilton.
[phone clicks]
[dial tone, dialing]
[line ringing]
[Bill] Bill Hamilton.
[Christian] That started a process
of Bill and Danny talking every day.
[Bill] I talked to [beep]
He said that if the investigation
were to mushroom,
a large number of people in Congress
could lose their jobs
'cause so many people
are in on this thing.
[Christian] One of the things
about Bill Hamilton is
he used to work, uh, at the NSA.
[reporter 8] It's not the CIA.
It's the supersecret NSA,
the National Security Agency.
Its budget is secret.
The presidential order that established it
in 1952 is secret.
No law governs its actions.
[Christian] And one of the things
that really kept Danny going along was
Bill would always have new leads
that he'd get from what he'd call
his confidential intelligence sources.
[line ringing]
- [Bill] It's Bill Hamilton.
- [man] Yeah.
[Bill] Anything else new from your guy?
[man] I told you about
spying on each other's citizens
[Bill] Yes.
[man] We need to find out
some more stuff on that
but be very cautious
about how we approach it.
- [Bill] Yep.
- [man] Okay.
[intriguing music playing]
Every time you pick up a rock
in this case, you find maggots under it.
So as Danny is talking to Bill Hamilton,
- he starts looking into powerful people
- [camera clicking]
connected to the Reagan administration
and realizes there's something much bigger
going on than just a contract dispute
over the PROMIS software.
[Elliot] The information
that began to come in
implicated that the real reason
for the theft of the INSLAW software
was to benefit
the administration's friends.
[reporter 9] The friend in this case,
Dr. Earl Brian.
Earl Brian had been in Reagan's cabinet
when he was governor of California.
And after that, he stays close
with the Reagan administration.
And he owns corporations that do
contracting work for government agencies
like the Defense Department,
the Justice Department, and the CIA.
[reporter 9] Brian is now an officer
of a computer firm
that competed with INSLAW.
Hamilton says Dominic Laiti,
the man who runs Brian's company,
offered to buy INSLAW.
[man] Do you recall that conversation?
Of course not.
[Christian] Danny starts finding
all these connections
between PROMIS and Earl Brian.
[reporter 10] Earl Brian says
he never heard of PROMIS software
before reading news reports of INSLAW's
dispute with the Justice Department.
The enduring question is,
the government has the money
to pay whatever they owe Bill Hamilton.
Eight million dollars? Just pay for it.
Like, they didn't pay for it.
They're stonewalling,
and they're clearly covering something up.
So what is that?
What are they covering up?
[reporter 11] Justice Department officials
denied there was a conspiracy.
[line ringing]
[crackling]
- [man] Hi, Bill.
- [Bill] Hi, [beep]. How are you?
[man] Not too bad.
[Bill] I wanted to tell you, um,
Danny got these computer printouts
showing wire transfers from London
through the World Bank
to offshore accounts of Earl Brian
and unnamed employees
of the Department of Justice.
[man] Oh shit. Okay.
[Bill] Yeah.
[Christian] And at that point,
Danny realizes
that the story is huge.
Way bigger than just an article
or even a series of articles
and that it could be
his next big book project.
[Zachary] Do you remember
the last time that you saw Danny?
[Tony] We're gonna find you!
Yeah.
[Tony] We are gonna find you!
[children squealing]
[Tony] We're gonna find all of you!
[Tony] It was July 20th.
Three weeks before he died.
[Tony] Coming in here
to make a little movie.
[reflective music playing]
[Tony] And it was to celebrate
my son's third birthday.
[man] Happy birthday!
[indistinct chatter]
[Tony] And the whole family was here.
All right, Tony, okay
No, that's all right
[Tony] And Danny came in.
He was a bit late
[child] Danny!
which was pretty standard for him.
[child] Danny, watch this. Oh no!
[Tony] And he actually stayed late.
[child giggling]
Happy birthday to you ♪
[man] Everybody in!
[all] Happy birthday, dear ♪
[indistinct chatter]
- Wait a minute. Make a wish, okay.
- [man] Make a wish.
[indistinct chatter]
[Tony] So I remember that
at the end of the night,
Danny and I stood in our kitchen
and talked for a long time
about what was going on.
He didn't tell me a lot of the details,
except that
it was a vast, disturbing conspiracy.
And in this whole world
that he had been looking into,
some of the same people kept appearing.
I don't know why Martinsburg,
but apparently Danny was supposed
to meet with a source in West Virginia.
But I can't tell you
whom he was meeting with.
I just don't know the answer.
Danny told me that he was getting
some funny phone calls and some threats,
and it was then that he said to me,
"By the way, if an accident happens,
it's not an accident."
[Zachary] And were you worried?
[sighs] You know what? I think
I wasn't worried, no.
I mean, "worry" is too strong a word.
I always thought of him as being
somebody who could handle
whatever happened.
So I just assumed he would handle it.
[unsettling music playing]
[sirens wailing]
[man over radio] Two-forty, two-forty.
It came in at 12:21.
[man 2] All right, stand by.
I was actually coming back from a call,
uh, near the Martinsburg Mall.
And I remember hearing the call come out
for an unknown situation at the Sheraton.
Law enforcement were on scene.
We went on in,
and there's already four or five
police officers there in that room.
[camera clicks]
[Don] And one of the investigators said,
"In the bathroom, there's a body."
"But it's just a simple suicide."
I was also told
that he did leave a suicide note
on a legal pad there.
It was a short note.
It mentioned his son in there.
It just said
he was sorry for what he had done.
That was it.
With that in mind, I go in.
I see the gentleman
in a bathtub full of bloody water.
- Dark bloody water.
- [camera beeps, clicks]
He basically bled out
from cut marks on his wrists.
And then in front of the bathtub
was some smeared blood on the wall.
It's not normal. And I thought, "Well"
"What do you think he did?"
"You think he held his hands up
and squirted the wall?"
So we got to looking at the body,
and I remember
pulling his arms out of the tub.
Even at that time,
there were a lot of red flags.
But at that point, the consensus
from the police department was
that this is, you know,
just a simple loser or whatever
comin' through the city of Martinsburg
that just killed himself.
And, you know,
I had no idea who he was.
[officer 1 on tape] C-A-S-O-L-A-R-O.
- [officer 2] The suicide case?
- [officer 1] Right.
White male.
DOB, 6-16-47.
[officer 2] Okay.
[Tony] I was at the hospital making rounds
and got a phone call.
"Dr. Casolaro, line five-six."
So I pick up the phone.
It was
the police in Martinsburg,
and they notified me
that they had found my brother Danny dead.
[line crackles]
[officer 1] Basically, what it is,
is we found this guy
in a tub full of water
with his wrists slit.
[officer 2] Okay.
[officer 1] And, uh,
it was definitely suicide.
[officer 2] Copy.
[Tony] Wait, wait, wait. Suicide?
I was, like a little bit taken aback
because he had just said to me,
"If an accident happens,
don't believe it."
So now I'm asking questions,
and they're like, "No, we think it was"
I said, "Wait, wait. Suicide?
How do you know it's suicide?"
"Well, that's what it
That's what our the coroner said."
[officer 1] Just to let you know that our
coroner has declared this thing a suicide.
[officer 2] Okay.
[officer 1] You know,
we have examined the scene, and, uh,
we didn't find any sign of foul play.
I said, "Wait. Has he had an autopsy?"
"No."
"We don't know that that's necessary."
And then I was told
that his body had been embalmed.
So it does make doing
a comprehensive autopsy more difficult.
[Zachary] What turned out to be
the reason that he had been embalmed?
No one ever answered it.
We never found out who said it was okay.
And, you know, it had been done.
I couldn't change it.
But it just didn't
It didn't sit right.
I now, in my mind, am thinking,
"Oh fuck, they killed him."
I remember I was reading the paper
at my house
and saw "Investigative reporter
found dead at Martinsburg Motel."
My God, this is the guy we had.
So I went back and discussed it
with my lieutenant at the time
and told him what had happened
and what I had seen.
Well, tonight, new details on
what Martinsburg paramedics saw.
[reporter 12] Don Shirley, an experienced
medic in Martinsburg, was on the scene.
Is there anything that appeared suspicious
about this to you?
In my six years as a medic,
I've never seen anybody ever
cut their wrist that many times.
[reporter 12] His wrists were cut
how many times?
Oh, well, the left arm
appeared to have had eight cuts,
and the right arm
appeared to have had four cuts.
[Don] It just did not appear
that he physically could have done that.
These were deep, deep cuts.
Deep enough to the point where
the tendons had been severed.
[camera clicking]
When you picked the arm up,
the wrist basically flopped.
[camera clicking]
Now, I've always said,
you can't ignore facts.
You cut your tendons,
you can't hold somethin'.
Those are simple facts.
And I had the gut feeling at that time
that this possibly could be a homicide.
[Ann] In the days after he died,
we all wanted to get to the bottom
of what happened to him.
Most of us were convinced
that he had been hurt by people
for him covering the story.
[woman] Tony, are you okay?
Yeah.
[Ann] It must have been
very hard for Tony, you know.
He had just lost his brother.
And, uh, all these reporters
just started contacting him.
Well, I didn't know that you could say no
to media who call you and ask you
if they can talk to you.
And I didn't have a script
or anybody to say what to say.
So I kind of stood in front of them
and I told them what I knew.
I remember Danny telling us,
"If I'm in an accident"
"If I have an accident"
"If an accident happens to me"
"Don't believe it."
"Don't believe it." "Don't believe it."
[reporter 13] Dr. Anthony Casolaro
told reporters
there are several unanswered questions
about his brother's death.
Was reporter Danny Casolaro killed
because of what he knew?
There is more information tonight.
Because of the brother,
that's when all this started to surface.
New information about
Danny Casolaro's research.
He had a big, brown briefcase,
and he began to put
all of his INSLAW info in this briefcase.
[camera clicking]
And when his motel room was searched
after his death, it was gone.
[reporter 14] Now we have learned
that after Danny Casolaro's death,
his briefcase and key documents
for his book are missing.
[reporter 15] Missing files and notes
Casolaro kept
on the potentially explosive story
he was investigating.
[Tony] When he was found
in his hotel room on Saturday,
authorities report that they found
no papers in his room or in his car.
Put yourselves in our shoes.
We didn't know who was involved
and what had happened.
All we knew is,
it took two days to find us,
and he had already been embalmed,
which made us a little suspect
as to the process itself.
[reporter 16] I mean,
any time a reporter dies
in the pursuit of a dangerous story,
it threatens all reporters.
I think it's incumbent upon
the Press Corps in Washington, D.C.
and across the country to find out
what happened to this reporter.
I mean, with the shows on TV,
the news agencies and all,
CNN and Headline News,
Fox, Channel Seven, and Channel Nine,
all the agencies in Washington, D.C.
Then things started to heat up.
Was a reporter killed
for investigating the government?
There is strong evidence
pointing to murder.
Danny told me,
in the last week of his life,
that he had gotten
most of the evidence he needed,
and he had one more meeting
in West Virginia.
[reporter 17] Former Attorney General
and INSLAW Lawyer Elliot Richardson
says the possibilities
come right out of a spy thriller.
I couldn't escape the immediate conclusion
that this could not have been suicide.
What Casolaro was going after
was the INSLAW case.
- Now, what INSLAW is about
- [man] Here we go.
I think the guy committed suicide.
I don't know how you murder a guy by
What do you do? Hold his arm
I think it's worth looking into.
The fact that he slashed one wrist
eight times?
Impossible.
[reporter 18] You think
his death is suspicious?
Yes, I don't think it's very persuasive
that it was a suicide.
He was killed for his work.
[Zachary] Do you remember
when you first met Bill Hamilton?
I think we There was an interview,
and I believe he and I were both
at some interview on some show.
[reporter 16] We've been talking about
the mysterious death of Danny Casolaro.
A friend of mine
and a brother of Dr. Tony Casolaro.
Joining us now is William Hamilton,
owner of INSLAW.
He suspects the US Department of Justice
conspired to send his company
into bankruptcy
and steal his computer software.
That's right.
Makes me want to know why it was stolen
and who got paid off
and why they got paid off.
Danny Casolaro was trying to find out.
[Charles] You know,
it was a great tragedy for Bill.
I never dealt with
Danny Casolaro directly, but Bill did.
And I remember
Bill being very sad about it.
- [Anderson] You got to know him well.
- [Bill] Yes.
I talked to him almost every day
for a year.
And in the final three months of his life,
he began to finally
have some major breakthroughs.
Getting people to talk.
My understanding is that Danny had
some sort of lead out in West Virginia,
and he told Bill that he thought
this was really gonna be important.
And the next thing we knew, he was dead.
Tony, what do you think really happened?
Well, Danny had said
the people he was dealing with
were absolutely capable
of doing anything they could
to ensure that he not pursue this.
[Bill] I think that's right, Jack,
and some of the people
in the intelligence community
that I talk to on a regular basis
told Danny that some of the specific
inquiries he was making
could cause him to get murdered.
Bill, who in this case would be that ugly,
that mean, that vicious?
Take us into that world.
[dark music playing]
[Bill] I found stuff, I think.
About a week ago, we got a call
from this computer software guy
out west in Washington state,
from a public telephone.
[man] Yeah.
[Bill] And, um,
he knows a lot about PROMIS.
[man] Do I know the name?
[Bill] Yeah.
Michael Riconosciuto.
He said, at one point,
"I have the PROMIS source code."
- [man] Michael, right?
- [Bill] Yeah.
[man]
Michael's an extremely intelligent person.
[Bill] Yeah.
[man] He's one of the best
in the business.
I mean, you speak to him
about software or whatever
He can move around
in a very impressive way.
[Bill] This former NSA guy says,
"I don't know how you heard that name,
but you can get killed
just knowing that name."
[man] That's very possible.
[Bill] Oh Jesus.
[dark music playing]
Uh, Christian, this is
Michael Riconosciuto.
I'm returning your call.
Uh um
Try me back. Thank you.
Illusions number time ♪
A drunk man's on the lead ♪
Skies and all bleed ♪
And no one can hear ♪
The cry from the ground ♪
It's something to dig ♪
[song fades]