Astonishing List: 71 Dead Bankers

Before proceeding to the list, I suggest you reading the following piece: 'Suiciding' the Bankers and Billionaires -- Do You Know Why?

 

I've recently stumbled across a list of top bankers that have been killed in cold blood, died in "accidents" or have allegedly committed suicide. In some of the cases, their deaths are so suspicious that the 'suicide' verdict is simply ridiculous, as you will see.

While searching for news reports documenting their deaths, I've managed to find a lot more cases of high ranking bankers that have been found dead in suspect circumstances. I've added the cases to the list and included the appropriate reference links.

The fact that none of them died of natural causes is absolutely stunning.

1. Nov - Shawn Miller, 42, Citigroup managing director - found dead in bathtub with throat slashed. Murder weapon is missing. - Reference.

2. Oct - Edmund Reilly, 47, a trader at Midtown's Vertical Group, threw himself in front of a speeding Long Island Rail Road commuter train. - Reference.

3. Jan - William 'Bill' Broeksmit, 58, HUNG/POSSIBLE SUICIDE - Reference.

4. June - Richard Gravino, 49, Application Team Lead, JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown/pending

5. June - James McDonald - President & CEO of Rockefeller & Co - apparently self-inflicted, GUNSHOT WOUND

6. May - Thomas Schenkman, 42, Managing Director of Global Infrastructure, JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH, cause unknown/pending

7. May - Naseem Mubeen - Assistant Vice President ZBTL Bank, Islamabad, SUICIDE jumped

8. May - Daniel Leaf - senior manager at the Bank of Scotland/Saracen Fund Managers, FELL OFF A CLIFF

9. May - Nigel Sharvin - Senior Relationship Manager Ulster Bank manage portfolio of distressed businesses, ACCIDENTAL DROWNING

10. April - Lydia (no surname given) 52, France's Bred-Banque-Populaire, SUICIDE jumped - Reference.

11. April - Li Jianhua, 49, Non-bank Financial Institutions Supervision Department of the regulator, HEART ATTACK

12. April - Benedict Philippens, Director/Manager Bank Ans-Saint-Nicolas, SHOT

13. April - Tanji Dewberry - Assistant Vice President, Credit Suisse, HOUSE FIRE

14. April - Amir Kess, co-founder and managing director Markstone Capital Group private equity fund, CYCLIST HIT BY CAR

15. April - Juergen Frick, 48, Bank Frick & Co. AG, SHOT Dead

16. April - Jan Peter Schmittmann - former CEO of Dutch Bank ABN Amro, (Possibly suicide, SHOT)

17. April - Andrew Jarzyk - Assistant Vice President, Commercial Banking at PNC Financial Services Group, MISSING/DEAD

18. March - Mohamed Hamwi - System Analyst at Trepp, a financial data and analytics firm, SHOT

19. March - Joseph Giampapa - JP Morgan lawyer, CYCLIST HIT BY MINIVAN

20. March - Kenneth Bellando, 28, (youngest) former JP Morgan, SUICIDE, allegedly jumping from his apartment building. - Reference.

21. Feb - John Ruiz Morgan Stanley Municipal Debt Analyst, died suddenly, NO CAUSE GIVEN

22. Feb - Jason Alan Salais, 34, Information Technology specialist at JPMorgan, FOUND DEAD outside a Walgreens pharmacy

23. Feb - Autumn Radtke, CEO of First Meta Bitcoin, a cyber-currency exchange firm, "Suspected SUICIDE" - Reference.

24. Feb - James Stuart Jr., Former National Bank of Commerce CEO, FOUND DEAD - Reference.

25. Feb - Edmund (Eddie) Reilly, trader at Midtown's Vertical Group, SUICIDE

26. Feb - Li Junjie, JP Morgan, Alleged SUICIDE after jumping from the JP Morgan HQ in Hong Kong - Reference.

27. Feb - Ryan Henry Crane, 37, Executive at JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown - Reference.

28. Feb - Richard Talley -- A coroner's spokeswoman Thursday said Talley was found in his garage by a family member who called authorities. They said Talley died from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head. -- Reference.

29. Jan - Gabriel Magee, 39, JP Morgan employee, dead after allegedly jumping from the rooftop of JP Morgan HQ in Europe - Reference.

30. July - Julian Knott, 45, JPMorgan Executive Director, Global Tier 3 Network Operations, allegedly shot his wife multiple times, then shot himself dead. - Reference.

The villa where Julian and Alita Knott were found shot dead

31. Jan - Mike Dueker, Suicide -- “Suicide” By 13 Meter Embankment (40-50 feet). He may have jumped over a 4-foot (1.2-meter) fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment.” - Reference.

Dueker worked at Seattle-based Russell for five years, and developed a business-cycle index that forecast economic performance. He was previously an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. - Reference.

32. Jan - Carl Slym, SUICIDE

33. Jan - Tim Dickenson, Communications Director at Swiss Re AG, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown

34. Dec 2013 - Robert Wilson, a retired hedge fund founder, apparent SUICIDE leaped to his death from his 16th floor residence

35. Dec 2013 - Joseph . Ambrosio, age 34, Financial Analyst for J.P. Morgan, died suddenly from Acute Respiratory Syndrome

36. Dec 2013 - Benjamin Idim, CAR ACCIDENT

37. Dec 2013 - Susan Hewitt - Deutsche Bank, DROWNING

38. Nov 2013 - Patrick Sheehan, CAR ACCIDENT

39. Nov 2013 - Michael Anthony Turner, Career Banker, CAUSE UNKOWN

40. Nov 2013 - Venera Minakhmetova Former Financial Analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, CYCLIST HIT

41. Oct 2013 - Michael Burdin, SUICIDE

42. Oct 2013 - Ezdehar Husainat - former JP Morgan banker, killed in FREAK ACCIDENT when her SUV crushed her to death

43. Sept 2013 - Guy Ratovondrahona -Madagascar central bank, Sudden death - cause not confirmed

44. Aug 2013 - Pierre Wauthier, SUICIDE

45. Aug 2013 - Moritz Erhardt, SUICIDE

46. July 2013 Hussain Najadi CEO of merchant bank AIAK Group, SHOT

47. July 2013 Carsten Schloter, SUICIDE

48. July 2013 Sascha Schornstein - RBS in its commodity finance, MISSING

49. April 2013 David William Waygood, SUICIDE

50. Mar 2013 - David Rossi - communications director of troubled Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), SUICIDE

Lethal, but not fatal (more than one way to skin a banker)

51. Fang Fang - JP Morgan, China, DISGRACED

52. Nick Bagnall - Director at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, son accidentally killed himself while trying to re-enact a Tudor hanging

53. Robin Clark - RP Martin -Wolf of Shenfield City banker shot, SURVIVED

54. Kevin Bespolka - Citi Capital Advisors, Dresdner Bank, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, Seriously injured and son dead

55. Robert Wheeler, 49, a Deutsche Bank financial advisor, DISGRACED

56. Chris Latham - Bank of America, ON TRIAL, Murder for Hire

57. Igor Artamonov - West Siberian Bank of Sberbank, Daughter found dead (POSSIBLE SUICIDE)

58. Hector Sants, Barclays - resigned due to stress and exhaustion, after being told he risked more serious consequences to his health if he continued to work - a remarkable turnaround as the Church reportedly approached him two months later and was told he had made a full recovery.

More suspicious deaths

59. April 21st Bruce A. Schaal, 63, died suddenly Banker in Twin Lakes for 35 years

60. April 20th Keith Barnish 58, Died Suddenly (Still working as Senior Managing Director at Doral Financial Corporation. Previously Bear Stearns, Bank of America Senior Vice President).

61. March 12th Jeffrey Corzine, 31, son of MF Global CEO and Chairman Jon Corzine involved in major banking crime was found dead in an apparent suicide.

62. Keiran Toman, 39, former banker who believed he was being stalked by a reality TV crew starved to death in a hotel room, after leaving the "do not disturb" sign on door for TWO weeks.

[Highly suspicious claims, as many of us probably know that the hotel cleaning staff will knock on the door after 24 hours and eventually enter the room if failing to respond].

An inquest was opened after his death in July 2010 but his family asked for a second hearing as they were not informed. Police found all of Mr Toman's possessions in the room, but despite documents mentioning his family, failed to tell them he had died. -- Reference.

63. Nicholas Austin, 49, A former bank manager from Hersden died after drinking antifreeze in an effort to "get high". was found in a coma by his wife Lynn at their home in Blackthorne Road on October 5. He died the same day. - Reference.

"I took special note of the last one - he died drinking antifreeze in an attempt to "get high"! Funny one that is, as if a banker would be stupid enough to try that. The list is shocking, I never saw so many suicides and car accidents. No gall bladder stones, cancer deaths, strokes, or simply falling ill, it is just a litany of action. That pretty much says it all." - Jim Stone Freelance

The list continues...

64. Melissa Millian, 54, Senior Vice President at MassMutual Financial Group, stabbed in the chest near a jogging alley in Connecticut - Reference.

65. Karl Slym, 51, Tata Motors managing director - not a banker, but a top official that could be connected somehow to the others - discovered dead on the fourth floor of the Shangri-La hotel in Bangkok.

66. Geert Tack was a private banker for ING and managed portfolios of wealthy clients in Blegium. The cause of death was unknown at the time of the report, but he disappeared in mysterious circumstances, after driving his personal car to a garage from which he took a replacement car to an unknown destination. His body was found in November 2014 near the shores of the Ostend coast. - Reference.

67. Thieu Leenen, 64, Relatiemanager ABN/AMRO, Eindhoven, Nederland

68. Calogero Gambino, 41, Associate General Counsel and Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, America - Alleged SUICIDE by hanging - Reference.

69. Thierry Leyne, 48, banker at Anatevka S.A., Israël, "apparent SUICIDE"- Reference.

70. Tod Robert Edward, 51, Vice President of M&T Bank, Lancaster and Harrisburg Offices, and served as President of the Mortgage Banker's Assn - died on August 31st, 2014, on Grindstone Island, Clayton, NY, from injuries sustained in an accident. - Reference.

71. Therese Brouwer, 50, Managing Director ING, Nederland - Died in MH17 Crash - For me, this is absolutely HUGE, as I've spent weeks debunking the official story and, IMO, proving the false flag. - Reference.

If you stumble across more suspicious top banking deaths, please post the link in a comment down below and I will make sure to update the list. Thank you!

By Alexander Light, HumansAreFree.com; | Reference: Hang the banker;

- See more at: http://humansarefree.com/2014/12/astonishing-list-of-71-top-bankers-dead.html#sthash.h13my1cP.dpuf

Plot To Sabotage US Economy with Frank Luntz

 Daily Kos

Fri Jun 08, 2012 at 08:15 AM PDT

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan & Kevin McCarthy: Plot To Sabotage US Economy with Frank Luntz

by keepemhonestFollow

    On January 20, 2009 Republican Leaders in Congress literally plotted to sabotage and undermine U.S. Economy during President Obama's Inauguration.
     In Robert Draper's book, "Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives" Draper wrote that during a four hour, "invitation only" meeting with GOP Hate-Propaganda Minister, Frank Luntz, the below listed Senior GOP Law Writers literally plotted to sabotage, undermine and destroy America's Economy.

The Guest List:
Frank Luntz - GOP Minister of Propaganda
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)
Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA),
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX),
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX),
Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI)
Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA),
Sen. Jim DeMint (SC-R),
Sen. Jon Kyl (AZ-R),
Sen. Tom Coburn (OK-R),
Sen. John Ensign (NV-R) and
Sen. Bob Corker (TN-R). Non-lawmakers present Newt Gingrich

    During the four hour meeting:
     The senior GOP members plotted to bring Congress to a standstill regardless how much it would hurt the American Economy by pledging to obstruct and block President Obama on all legislation.     These Republican members of Congress were not simply airing their complaints regarding the other party's political platform for four long hours.  No, these Republican Congressional Policymakers, who were elected to do 'the People's work' were literally plotting to sabotage, undermine and destroy the U.S. Economy.  

    Mitt Romney, who has hired most of Bush/Cheney Policy Advisers, and the GOP party believe they can defeat President Obama, take control of the Senate and maintaining control of the House of Representatives so long as the economic recovery stalls. So they are actively trying to make it happen ... and that's what hate-propaganda Minister Frank Luntz had in mind when he organized the January 20, 2009 covert meeting.
     Republicans do not pay Frank Luntz to offer ideas for good policy to help America, rather, Republicans pay Luntz' to devise lies that will keep Americans dumb and ignorant to facts on policy. For decades Republicans have paid Frank Luntz to tell them (Republicans) what to say in order to brainwash 'the People' with lies and hate to destroy policy.
     Luntz does not use words to merely have Americans "change their minds."  Rather, Frank Luntz uses words intentionally to dumb-down Americans and fill them with lies and hate so as to brainwash and program Americans to hate a given policy.
     Frank Luntz, like many Hate-Propaganda Ministers, loathes the notion of honesty in debate.  Also, like many Hate-Propaganda Ministers, Frank Luntz wants total control ... total control even it if means destroying America.  So, Luntz uses the tactics similar to Joseph Goebbels: spread hate, lies and fear in order to gain control.  (More on Frank Luntz at the end of this Diary).
     Remember, for months prior to January 20, 2009, America had been losing over 750,000 jobs per month because of policies these same elected Republican lawmakers had enacted and their goal, their goal that night, was to plot ways to sabotage and undermine any and all legislation that would pull American families up and out of the economic calamity they [lawmakers] had helped create.
     Two months after their covert meeting where they plotted to sabotage the US Economy, in March 2009, Rep. Pete Sessions said Republicans should follow the model of the Taliban in its battles against President Obama.
     In the March 2009 interview with National Journal Rep Sessions said:

    "Taliban Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban.  Insurgency is the way they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes. And these Taliban -- is an example of how you go about to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that Insurgency may be required when [dealing with] the other side" ~Rep Pete Sessions, March 2009 to National Journal

    Rep Pete Sessions went on to say:

    "If they [democrats] do not give us those options or opportunities then we will then become Insurgency ... I think Insurgency is a mindset and an attitude that we're going to have to search for and find ways to get our message out and to be prepared to see things for what they are, rather than trying to do something about them"

    Also, at their meeting they plotted to suddenly stop supporting any Stimulus Legislation, even though, they all supported Bush/Cheney Stimulus legislation.

    At the meeting, Rep Kevin McCarthy said,
"We've gotta challenge them on every single bill." "Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies."

    Remember, these same Republican members of Congress supported the very Bush/Cheney policies that caused America to teeter on the brink of the 2nd Great Depression and caused the 2007 US Economic Meltdown.

Here's how they all voted:
-- "Yes" to Bush/Cheney January 2008 Stimulus
-- "Yes" to Bush/Cheney bailing out Bear Stern
-- "Yes" to Bush/Cheney bailing out AIG
-- "Yes" to Bush/Cheney TARP (sept 2008)
-- "Yes" to Bush/Cheney TARP (oct 2008)

   And these same Republican members of Congress:

Supported Bush/Cheney keeping cost of two wars out of the Budget. Supported Bush/Cheney spending $4Trillion while giving Top 1% Tax Cuts; ignoring the fact that taxes pay for wars.

     Not only did these Senior members of Congress plot to destroy the American Economy more than it already was destroyed? They actually carried out their mission:  

    Every one of these Senior members of Congress have threatened Government Shutdown over things like: - Funding planned parenthood,
- Raising the Debt Ceiling which, in-and-of-itself, would cause US Economic turmoil.
... oh, and stay current, these same House GOP members of Congress are still, today, threatening a Government Shutdown again over the Debt Ceiling.

    Last year, during the Debt Ceiling negotiations, Eric Cantor and Sen. Jon Kyl abruptly walked out of negotiations and refused to renew discussions with Democrats. As a result, America's credit rating was lowered which put a smile on Republican's faces.

    Senators: Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn, John Ensign, and Bob Corker have: - Filibustered more Bills (over 300) than any Congress combined in US History.
- Voted NO on every single piece of Legislation brought to the Floor including:
NO on Al Franken's Anti-Rape Amendment,
NO on Lilly Ledbetter,
NO on Fair Pay Act,
NO on Anti-Outsourcing Bill (2010)

     How in the hell could any thinking American be against those Bills?  Seriously?!?

    Representatives: Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Pete Sessions, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra and Dan Lungren have voted NO on every single piece of Legislation including:  NO on increasing FEMA during natural disasters.

     These same failed Congressmen have been on tv constantly chanting the lie that they were guilty of ... the lie that "President Obama's policies undermine the US Economy."
Currently: Republicans Using the Transportation Bill to Sabotage the US Economy:
     If the current Transportation Bill expires June 30, there will be no funding for transportation projects and 1.9 million construction workers would lose their jobs.  Eric Cantor and Republicans in the House are refusing to act because Republicans would be overjoyed if almost two million Americans were added to the unemployment rolls this summer before the election.
Other Legislation used to sabotage US Economy
    Republicans in Congress refused to negotiate or even discuss passing President Obama's American Jobs Act that independent economists claim would create 1.3 million new jobs.  God forbid Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy support an actual Bill that would put people to work building needed infrastructure and provide funds to pay to rehire hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public service workers that have been laid off in droves by cash-starved states.
     Republicans are gearing up block President Obama's 2012 Anti-Outsourcing Bill - which is a Bill to discourage the outsourcing of American jobs, which is due to come to the Senate floor around the fourth of July.
     The Washington Post reports that Republicans have made it clear that the Federal Reserve would face fierce Republican criticism if it takes further actions to stimulate the economy before the election. The Washington Post wrote that,

   Republicans... have expressed deep concern about measures taken by the Fed to support the economy -- and could be doubly upset if new efforts goose the stock market and are perceived to work in favor of President Obama's re-election.

Frank Luntz      Like I said above, Republicans do not pay Luntz to offer ideas for good policy to help America, rather, Republicans pay Luntz' to devise lies will keep Americans dumb and ignorant to facts on policy. For decades Republicans have paid Frank Luntz to tell them (Republicans) what to say in order to brainwash 'the People' with lies and hate to destroy policy.
     Luntz is so good at lying, he even lies to himself.  In order to blur reality and not take responsibility for his devising the spread of propaganda through hate and lies Luntz told Matt Lauer

    "I focus on words that cause people to change their minds, change their behavior even change their attitudes." ~Frank Luntz 3/2011 in interview with Matt Lauer

    No, Luntz is not using words to merely have Americans "change their minds" -- Luntz is using words intentionally to dumb-down Americans and fill them with lies and hate so as to brainwash and program Americans to hate a given policy.        Luntz has been the Republican Hate-Propaganda Minister since at least 1993 and his list of words to stop policies that help America are vast:

Don’t say “oil drilling.” Say “energy independence.” Don’t say “inheritance tax.” Say “death tax.”
Don't say "Capitalism." Say "Economic Freedom."
Don't say that the government 'taxes the rich.' Say Government "takes from the rich."
Don't admit Lobbyists are Collective Bargainers for Corporations. Say "Union Collective Bargaining steals your tax dollars."

    Luntz says people hate government so:

Don’t say “healthcare reform.” Say “government takeover.” Don't say "Public workers." Call them "Government workers."

    For the 2012 election, Frank Luntz is training his failed co-harts in the Republican party on what Luntz says are "the three most powerful words to use" to con people is: "I get it." Luntz says:

Don't tell Occupy Wall Street "you don't give a shit." Say "I get it." Don't tell struggling Americans "you're on your own." Say "I get it."
Don't tell Occupy Wall Street "you should protest Wall Street." Say "You should occupy the White House."

   Yes, it is true, the House Republican Leaders: Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy met in secret and plotted to sabotage and undermine the US Economy ... I call them TRAITORS TO AMERICA.      So, the next time you hear the GOP say "Obama wants to destroy the economy" or "Government Shutdown" ... remember ... as Newt Gingrich said after their four hour dinner on January 20, 2009 "You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown."

   To Translate GINGRICH:
 "You'll remember this day as they day we became Traitors to the United States."

    My hope is that Americans and all members of Congress are reminded via twitter, facebook and all other forms of media over and over and over:
     Republican Leaders in Congress literally plotted to sabotage the US Economy on January 20, 2009.

Tags

• Plot to Undermine US President
• Recommended
• Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)
• Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)
• Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA)
• Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX)
• Republican Plot to destroy US Economy
• Republicans Plot to undermine US President
• Sedition
• Sen. Bob Corker (TN-R)
• Sen. Jim DeMint (SC-R)
• Sen. John Ensign (NV-R)
• Sen. Jon Kyl (AZ-R)
• Sen. Tom Coburn (OK-R)
• Traitors
• Traitors in Congress

Danny Casolaro’s ‘Octopus’ Conspiracy Theory

By Mike Devlin on Wednesday, September 25, 2013

“I feel the happiness that an Eskimo must feel when he comes across fresh bear tracks before any other sled.” —Danny Casolaro

In A Nutshell

When journalist Danny Casolaro was found with his wrists cut in the bathtub of his hotel room, it seemed like an open and shut suicide. But an investigation determined that Casolaro had been hard at work on a story that involved a massive conspiracy that reached all the way to the presidency, and his family alleges that he was killed to ensure his silence.

The Whole Bushel
On August 10, 1991, 44-year-old journalist Danny Casolaro was found dead in the bathtub of his Martinsburg, West Virginia hotel room. Both wrists had been slashed open. The blood-splattered bathroom was such a gory tableau that one of the housekeepers who discovered it reportedly fainted. A police investigation would determine this was an open and shut case of suicide. There were alcohol bottles in the room, as well as a note which 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.” The room showed no sign of forced entry. His autopsy indicated Casolaro was in the early stages of multiple sclerosis and toxicology reports showed several drugs in his system, including antidepressants.

After the initial shock and denial common to accepting any death, you would think that Danny Casolaro’s family would accept this overwhelming evidence that he had taken his own life. But there was far more to this story: Danny was actually in West Virginia to meet with a source for a story he was working on about a massive conspiracy that he called “The Octopus.” Journalist Ron Rosenbaum wrote that the case “is enough to drive a sane man to madness.”
At its most basic, “The Octopus” is the story of Michael Riconoscuito, a shadowy figure who made some truly shattering allegations. He claims that he was hired by the US Justice Department to modify a software program called PROMIS (which was designed to organize judicial and law enforcement records), allowing the Department to spy on anyone the program was sold to, which included multiple foreign governments. He also claimed that Earl Brian, a Ronald Reagan insider, had paid the government of Iran $40 million to delay the release of American hostages during the 1980 presidential election between Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Reagan was known for his hard-line approach toward the Iranians, and it is thought that the hostage crisis secured the election for him. It is perhaps not coincidental that the hostages were released 20 minutes after Reagan’s inaugural address. Riconoscuito would later be jailed on drug charges he claimed were a setup to get him to keep his mouth shut.
When Danny Casolaro began following up on Riconoscuito’s incredible story in 1990, he allegedly became a target. He frequently complained of receiving threatening phone calls throughout the night. His housekeeper also attested to answering some of these calls. On the day Casolaro left his home to travel to meet his source in Martinsburg, she claimed to have received multiple chilling calls, including one where a man told her “I will cut his body and throw it to the sharks.”
To this day, Casolaro’s family believes he was the victim of foul play, that someone at the very highest levels of political and economic power had silenced him before he could put all the pieces of a very dark puzzle together.

Show Me The Proof

NY Times: Reporter Is Buried Amid Questions Over His Pursuit of Conspiracy Idea
Casolaro’s Octopus

Project ORCA: Mitt Romney Campaign Plans

Massive, State-Of-The-Art Poll Monitoring Effort

Posted: 11/01/2012 11:07 am EDT Updated: 11/02/2012 10:36 am EDT

WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney's presidential campaign has been quietly assembling a massive, technologically sophisticated poll monitoring program that staffers believe will be their secret weapon in defeating President Barack Obama.
Project ORCA will rely on 34,000 volunteers in swing states on Election Day, in an effort to keep track of who is voting at key polling places. Romney staffers will use the data to help them target their get-out-the-vote efforts before the polls close, in hopes of gaining an edge over Obama's grassroots operation.
"There's nothing that the Obama data team, there's nothing that the Obama campaign, there's nothing that President Obama himself can do to even come close to what we are putting together here," Romney Deputy Political Director Dan Centinello said Wednesday night in a training call for Project ORCA volunteers, which The Huffington Post called into.
On Election Day, the Romney campaign will send one or more volunteers to important swing-state polling places, noting every single person who comes in to vote.
That, in itself, is nothing new; both Democratic and Republican campaigns always monitor turnout to aid their GOTV efforts and generally keep track of progress.
In 2008, the Obama campaign used a system called "Project Houdini," where each targeted voter was assigned a four-digit code. Throughout the day, volunteers then dialed that code into a national hotline to report on who voted.
What's different about the Romney campaign's approach is that it will be utilizing smartphone technology to receive more data in real time, allowing it to quickly redirect resources to areas where there may be low turnout and get voters there out to the polls.
Volunteers will have the Project ORCA web-based app on their smartphone. Once they log in, they will see the names and ages of every eligible voter in that precinct. When someone votes, the volunteer will simply be able to slide a bar and note it. Individuals without smartphones will be able to print a list of voters -- provided by the Romney campaign -- and check off individuals who come to the polling place, and then call that information into headquarters periodically.
If volunteers run into any problems -- such as an incorrect voting list, broken voting machines, fraud or illegal activity -- they can press a yellow button on their phone to instantly report them to the Romney campaign legal team, and staffers will be assigned to help volunteers around the country. Volunteers will also be able to send instant messages -- similar to a Twitter feed or discussion board -- with anecdotes about what they are seeing.
Training materials explaining the technology were provided to The Huffington Post by multiple sources.
At campaign headquarters in Boston, other volunteers will be taking all the information sent in by those working with Project ORCA and combining it with consumer data the campaign has purchased about individuals. They will use the data to organize last-minute campaign efforts, including social media outreach, phone-banking and traditional door-to-door visits.
In addition, Centinello will be in an "inner war room" with the campaign manager, the national political director and Romney himself.
"The governor loves seeing data, he loves seeing numbers and he's a very strategic person; he's a very smart man," Centinello said on Wednesday's Project ORCA call. "So he actually loves being inside these war rooms, seeing the data come in and seeing exactly what's going on out there, so we can all put our heads together and say, 'Okay, we need to move resources here. We need to shift resources from here.'"
On Wednesday afternoon, the campaign sent volunteers a video from Romney, thanking them for their help.
"With state-of-the-art technology and an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on Election Day," said Romney.
"Project ORCA will give us an enormous advantage on Election Day," added Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul in a statement to The Huffington Post. "By knowing the current results of a state, we can continue to adjust and micro target our get-out-the-vote efforts to ensure a Romney victory."
Scott Goodstein, the external online director for the Obama campaign in 2008 and the founder of Revolution Messaging, said that while Project ORCA may use different technology, the overall strategy behind it is nothing new.
"We've already done this through text messaging and interactive voice since the early days of the Iowa caucus in January 2008," said Goodstein, noting that before that, campaigns would give volunteers quarters to call in results at pay phones.
He also questioned whether the strategy would really make as much of a difference as the Romney campaign was suggesting it would, arguing that if a candidate hasn't reached voters by Election Day, it's probably too late.
"In a national campaign, what additional things are the headquarters really going to do to move resources?" he said. "Will an additional auto-call last minute really make a difference in a market like Northeast Ohio, which has been saturated for three months full of auto-calls?"
While some liberal blogs have worried that Project ORCA could be a voter suppression program, the training packet instructs volunteers not to "talk to or confront voters in any circumstances." Centinello also repeatedly told volunteers listening on the training call to follow poll workers' instructions on where to stand and what the rules are in that location.
But Daniel Tokaji, an expert on election law and voting rights at Mortiz College of Law in Ohio, flagged an issue in the "frequently asked questions" section of the training packet that could potentially confuse volunteers.
The answer to Question 13 -- "Am I allowed to speak on my cell phone inside the polling place?" -- states, "Yes you may be allowed to use the smart phone inside the polling place. Please follow your poll manager's instructions." That answer appears to have been swapped with the answer to Question 11 -- "Am I allowed to use the smart phone app inside the polling place?" -- which currently reads, "No, you are only allowed to speak on your phone outside the voting area."
In many polling places, people are not allowed to speak on the phone, and on the call with volunteers, Centinello instructed them not to. They are, however, allowed to use the smartphone app, and the mix-up in the training packet may cause confusion.
In general, Tokaji said, the type of monitoring the Romney campaign is doing with Project ORCA -- and that the Obama campaign will also no doubt be doing -- should be encouraged.
"It's a way of boosting turnout, if the parties are doing this and making sure all their people turn out," he said.
The Obama campaign declined to comment on Project ORCA or whether it has a similar program in place, but a recent memo from the campaign said that in battleground states, it is "recruiting thousands of attorney volunteers to help recruit, train, educate, and observe at polling locations across the country."
Vincent Harris, the founder and CEO of the conservative digital advertising and marketing firm Harris Media, said he wouldn't doubt that the Obama campaign has something similar set up, since it has consistently been on the cutting edge of digital politics.
But he said that Project ORCA will nevertheless give the Romney team a "huge advantage."
"They have so much data and it all is coming to a head on Election Day -- six years of data-capture, six years of data-gathering, all culiminating on Election Day," said Harris. "And this new tool is the key to using that data."

the Death of Danny Casolaro. The Octopus

• By Andrew Rice

Illustration: Rina Kushnir

On the morning of July 1, 1981, three bodies were discovered behind a shabby, concrete ranch house on Bob Hope Drive, a main drag in a sand-swept stretch of California’s scorching Coachella Valley. The corpses were sprawled in a semicircle, on chairs and beds that had been dragged into the backyard. Each of the victims—the house’s owner, Fred Alvarez, his girlfriend, Patricia Castro, and a guest named Ralph Boger—had been killed by a single .38-caliber gunshot to the head. Police surmised that Alvarez and his friends had been planning to sleep outdoors to escape the heat of the house, which had no air-conditioning, and were surprised in the dark by one or more assailants. There were few clues and no witnesses left at the scene; the crime had all the hallmarks of a professional hit.
Boger’s daughter, Rachel Begley, who was 13 at the time, says she learned of her father’s death from a television news bulletin. Her parents were divorced, and though she spent occasional days with her dad, riding in his motorcycle’s sidecar, she didn’t know enough about his life to make sense of what had happened. The police would eventually conclude that Boger and Alvarez were killed in connection with shady doings at the nearby Cabazon Indian reservation. But Begley’s mother shielded her from all the murky details of the investigation.
After the murders, Begley went through a rebellious phase and fell in with a bad crowd. By the time she was 15, she was pregnant and had dropped out of high school. Eventually she got her GED and moved to Iowa. She says she would periodically wonder about the case and check in with the police, who never seemed to have any new information. Beyond that, she didn’t have time or tools to delve too deeply.
Then one night in 2007, she idly typed her father’s name into Google. She didn’t find much, but as she clicked through the few results that came up, she found a book entitled The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Based on the work of a fringe freelance journalist, the book argued that the 1981 triple slaying was wrapped up in an enormous plot involving arms dealing, private-security firms, and the upper echelons of the Reagan administration. Skeptical but intrigued, Begley dug deeper and discovered that over the years the murder case had taken on a curious life of its own, preserved on obscure websites and nurtured by a grassroots community of obsessives. To these conspiracy theorists, Boger’s killing was the work of a secret syndicate that they called the Octopus, because its tangled tentacles supposedly reached into some of the most powerful organizations in the world.

Rachel Begley's hunt started with a simple google search—and became an obsession.
Photo: Andrew Hetherington

Begley’s simple Google search launched a four-year-and-counting odyssey, during which she has devoted herself to tracking down forgotten documents, corresponding with federal prisoners, putting questions to Oliver North, and even confronting the man who may have shot her dad. Her work, she says, has placed her own life in danger and made her a target of the same forces that killed her father. And yet she cannot stop. She keeps following the siren song of the conspiracy theory, the same beguiling cognitive path that lures others to the JFK assassination and Area 51. What was once a family tragedy has blossomed into something else entirely, a vast puzzle whose solution promises to illuminate not only her father’s death but the dark forces behind the world’s apparent chaos.
On a sweltering afternoon last June, Begley was sitting in front of a wheezing Dell Dimension 8300 desktop, beneath a photocopy of a prayer for protection from “evil spirits who prowl about the world,” trying to sum up the dimensions of the Octopus conspiracy. “You’ve got the drug people, mixing with the mafia, mixing with the Hells Angels, mixing with the government—various governments, actually,” she says as she clicks around on the computer. “This is where I piece it all together.”
Begley lives and works in a rickety house at the end of a gravel road, next to a small pond and a rotting wood barn in a rural town outside Louisville, Kentucky, that she doesn’t want named for security reasons. Out front, her “guard dog,” an aging flat-coated retriever named Lucky, lazes beneath her porch. Begley is 43 and heavyset, with piercing blue eyes. On this day, her air conditioner is broken, and her round face glistens with sweat. She has four children, and for the moment she is collecting unemployment and selling a line of weight-loss shakes to make money on the side.
Before she heard about the Octopus, she never gave much thought to politics or read the newspaper, and she certainly didn’t size up her dad—a bearded mechanic who liked to drink, smoke pot, and ride motorcycles—as the type to be tied up in byzantine plots. “I thought it was a normal thing,” Begley says of the killings. “Well, murder is never normal, but I thought somebody went to try and rob them or something.”
In fact, within days of the crime, investigators had fixed their suspicion on John Philip Nichols, who was serving as financial manager for the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, a group of fewer than 30 descendants of a desert people that had long inhabited the Coachella Valley. Nichols was encouraging the Cabazons to open a casino, a radical idea at the time that caused clashes with the police and attracted some alleged mob associates to the reservation. Boger’s friend Fred Alvarez, a dissident tribe member, opposed the plan. Before his death, Alvarez had approached a local reporter to talk about blowing the whistle. “There are people out there who want to kill me,” he warned. No one knew what Alvarez was preparing to disclose, but initial speculation involved embezzlement.
When Begley stumbled upon The Octopus, though, she found a more nefarious explanation: Nichols proposed to use the tribe’s sovereign status to build an arms factory on the reservation and ship weapons to Central American rebel groups like the Contras. Drawing heavily on a San Francisco Chronicle investigation, the book reported that he had struck a partnership arrangement with Wackenhut, a private-security firm with alleged ties to the CIA and Republican Party.

Begley's father was murdered along with his friend Fred Alvarez, who claimed to have some powerful enemies.

Photo: Andrew Hetherington

That strange story was widely reported in the early 1990s. But since then, others had embroidered those findings with more bizarre information, speculation, and extrapolations. Before long, Begley was tearing through websites and bulletin boards, finding herself drawn into the conspiracy. Much of what she found traced back to Danny Casolaro, the freelance journalist who had been the first to write about a shadowy “international cabal” of covert operatives he dubbed the Octopus. Casolaro tied the Cabazon tribe’s arms company to a Reagan crony, who figured in the so-called October Surprise of 1980 and was connected to a computer program called Promis, which was supposedly used for spying. In 1991, the writer was found dead in the bathtub at a West Virginia hotel, his wrists slashed. Authorities deemed the death a suicide, but others presumed Casolaro was killed because he knew too much.
“Most of the stuff, I didn’t believe,” Begley says. “I thought all these people were making money off my dad’s murder, writing these books.” She was angry enough, in fact, that she was determined to prove the speculators wrong. At the time, Begley was working in customer service for an Internet service provider, which was moving its back-office operations to another state, and she was spending her days sitting idly at her computer, waiting to get laid off. Begley had once worked for a collections agency, and she knew how to track people down. “I went into it with a mindset, I guess, almost like a police officer would,” she says.
No one had ever been charged in the killings. Nichols was long gone—he had died of a heart attack in 2001. But Begley talked to Alvarez’s sister, who recounted her family’s thwarted efforts to get the police to pursue the case. She then found William Hamilton, the developer of the Promis software, who had collaborated with Casolaro on his investigation. Hamilton called her back on her cell phone as she was leaving work one day, and he talked and talked until his battery died. “It was like—boom,” she later said. “He dumped it all in my lap.” Begley may have started out trying to resist the Octopus, but she gradually gave in to the theory’s implications: Her father had been caught up in a vast conspiracy, and it had killed him.
So Begley dove deeper, into the submerged ecosystem of interconnected message boards where initiates continued to discuss and dissect the Octopus. “I was one of those thinking that the conspiracy people were weird,” she posted on one of these boards in 2008. “Then I had my eyes opened, REALLY FAST.”
As she set out on her search, one of the first things Begley did was fashion a new identity. She came up with a screen name, Desertfae, and introduced her character in a series of YouTube videos. The first ones, set to pounding music, consisted of montages of images—an Indian chief, a close-up of her eyes—and cryptic messages: “I am lost … I need your help and guidance to bring closure … I will be silent no longer … Soon the clues and proof will be found.”
As Begley plunged into the world of the conspiracy theorists, she found more than facts and assertions—she found a community with its own rules, ethics, and currency. And it was a difficult one to penetrate; the cluster of people devoted to studying the Octopus tended not to throw their arms open to newcomers. Over the years, they had built a kind of gnostic society, a belief system that was both all-encompassing—a grand unified theory of everything sinister—and exclusionary, open only to the select few who could accept the devastating truth. They were suspicious of outsiders and divided into factions that warred over arcane points, often accusing one another of being double agents.
With persistence and a convert’s zeal, Begley managed to win the trust of some of the leading theorists. She formed a particularly tight bond with Cheri Seymour, a matronly San Diego woman who had been working for nearly 20 years on a book called The Last Circle. The two sealed their friendship with a transaction of weathered documents, the Octopus community’s customary medium of exchange. Copying Seymour’s files, which the author had gathered from archives, courts, and a confidential source’s hidden trailer, Begley glimpsed the far reaches of the speculation: bioweapons, Lebanese heroin shipments, Howard Hughes, the yakuza.
There were many competing interpretations of the Octopus—Seymour was particularly interested in the alleged role of entertainment company MCA—and they were infinitely adaptable, able to accommodate the Patriot Act or the financial crisis. Devotees found and fought one another on sites like Above Top Secret, conspiracy clearinghouses that host every conceivable thread of discussion. Begley forged an alliance with a retired FBI agent who was exploring a link between the Octopus and Satanic cults. She did battle with a prominent UFO enthusiast who thought the Octopus was hiding the government’s collaboration with a colonizing alien force. (In January, online sleuths discovered that alleged Arizona assassin Jared Lee Loughner was a regular poster on Above Top Secret, but his bizarre ramblings about currency and space travel, widely disdained by other contributors, never touched on the Octopus threads.) Begley also developed a venomous rivalry with Virginia McCullough, a California writer who accused her of being an enemy impostor, not really Ralph Boger’s daughter. When Begley posted a copy of her birth certificate online, McCullough called it “a cut-and-paste job.”
“I do not believe that Desertfae is a ‘victim,’ and she has not posted any information that she is who she claims to be,” McCullough wrote on one message board. “She is a low-stage puppet reporting to the puppet master and two or three of his minions.”
The man McCullough called the puppet master is a federal narcotics prisoner named Michael Riconosciuto, Casolaro’s principal source, who had worked for the Cabazon arms company in the 1980s. The convict, who claimed he’d been framed, continued to play a leading role in the factional wars, penning letters in loopy cursive to numerous correspondents. Shortly after Begley began communicating with Riconosciuto, she posted a new video, entitled “OMG Michael Called!!!!!” Looking rattled, she reported that Riconosciuto had warned that the Octopus was watching. Then she cut to shaky handheld footage of a black helicopter that had appeared over her house.
Begley wasn’t scared off the trail. She interviewed retired cops and unearthed new witnesses. She amassed thousands of documents: news clippings, police reports, Casolaro’s notes, leaked memos, reams of legal filings and depositions. (For a secret cabal, the Octopus was remarkably litigious.) Informants found her website or friended her on Facebook and promised they could tell her about the Octopus from the inside. “If you’re involved with some kind of high-level weird thing,” she explains, “and you’ve held it in for 20 or 30 years, and you can’t talk about it, eventually you’re going to be, like, ‘I want to tell somebody before I die.'”
Begley continued to post YouTube videos documenting her investigations, and before long they started winning a small but avid viewership—and not just fellow conspiracy theorists. It seemed the police were paying attention as well. Back when she had first begun investigating, Begley called the police department in Riverside County, where Coachella is located, telling them the case was bigger than Watergate. She got a dismissive response. But after she started posting her videos, she received a phone call telling her that the cold-case squad was reopening the inquiry into her father’s murder.
Soon, Begley focused her attention on one player in the killing: Jimmy Hughes, a former Cabazon reservation employee who worked for John Philip Nichols. In 1984, in the midst of a business dispute, Hughes implicated Nichols to the police, claiming he had ferried a cash payment from Nichols to some unidentified contract killers for the Alvarez hit, which he said his boss had called a “US government covert action.” The police had looked into Hughes’ claims but gradually shifted their suspicion to the informant himself. At that point, Hughes fled town, and the grand jury investigation into the murders fizzled.
Begley discovered that Hughes had become an evangelical minister based in Honduras. In December 2007, she began trying to contact him, but he ignored her. She had an idea why: On the website of a religious group, she discovered an autobiographic essay Hughes had posted that sounded eerily familiar. In it, he called himself “a hit man with a new mission” and told a story of elite military training and a career as a contract killer, a life that was transformed when he was born again. She also found a list of upcoming speaking engagements, which indicated that Hughes was scheduled to address an evangelical banquet in Fresno, California. Begley booked a flight.
On a rainy evening in February 2008, Begley sat in the gilded ballroom of a historic Fresno bank building as Hughes took the floor to preach. Inside her handbag, she carried a hidden camera that peeked out through a discreet hole she’d cut just beneath the zipper. Next to it sat a loaded pistol—just in case.
Hughes, a stocky 51-year-old with a graying buzz cut and raspy voice, bounded around, bellowing tales of his past brutality. Begley, nervous and bleary-eyed from a sleepless cross-country flight, exchanged incredulous text messages with an accomplice who had come along as backup: Mikel Alvarez, Fred’s son. When Hughes finished his performance, Begley and Alvarez came forward with a rush of adrenaline, introducing themselves to the sweat-soaked evangelist as the children of the murder victims.
“Can’t say nothing about that,” Hughes stammered. “It’s a long time ago—it’s in the past.”
“Not for us,” Begley said, insistently. “We’re trying to get resolution.”
“I don’t care who got killed,” Hughes shouted, attracting the bewildered attention of others at the banquet. “I was trainedin the military. I killed people all over the world, right or wrong, because the government ordered me to.”
Hughes stalked off, fuming, and Begley began to cry. That seemed to bother the minister, because he came back, speaking in a tone that was softer but full of veiled menace. Apparently, he had seen her web videos. “Are you aware that that goes all over the world? Are you a crazy lady?” Hughes said. “Think about your children. They need a mother.” He told Begley and Alvarez that the murder was a “mafia hit,” and though he didn’t explicitly admit to carrying it out, he intimated that he knew much more.
“Your parents were involved in some very dangerous things,” Hughes said. “It’s a lot bigger than just the murder of this guy or the murder of that guy. You’re talking political people. You’ve got babies to take care of, mama. Go home tonight and be at peace.”
Suddenly, the murky crime had come into focus, and the conspiracy theorist confronted an unaccustomed feeling: vindication. Hughes’ outburst seemed to confirm Begley’s deepest fears and also her most far-fetched fantasies. After so many decades of false starts and mysterious ends, Begley had finally hit upon something undeniably tangible—an actual lead in the case. Within two days, Begley posted excerpts of the confrontation to YouTube, ending her video with a postscript in stark black and white: “This ‘crazy lady’ wants the murders solved. The Octopus will be exposed.”
Shortly before Begley confronted Hughes, she began cooperating with John Powers, a Riverside County homicide detective who was investigating the reopened 1981 murder case. When Powers saw the video of her run-in with Hughes, he was impressed. “The statements she got from him,” Powers says, “no police officer would ever have been able to get.” He and Begley went on to form an unusually tight partnership. She shared everything she learned with the man she called “my detective” and helped to persuade a pair of reluctant witnesses to offer damning testimony against Hughes.
Still, the case had to overcome some curious obstacles. Powers was surprised to find that the records of the 1980s grand jury investigation had somehow disappeared. And it turned out that the district attorney of Riverside County, a long-serving prosecutor, was actually related to Hughes. Because of the conflict of interest, the case was transferred to the California attorney general’s office. After much procedural wrangling, a warrant was finally issued. In September 2009, Hughes was arrested at Miami’s international airport. Begley posted a celebratory video, scored to Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” It flashed up an image of Hughes’ mug shot, across which she had scrawled: “Gotcha.”
As fond as he was of Begley, Powers’ arrest complaint completely ignored the Octopus conspiracy. The detective doubted that a jury would believe—or even be able to follow—the abstruse connections that purportedly linked Hughes to the CIA, the Contras, and all the rest. Instead, he wanted to focus on the old dispute over building a casino on the Cabazon reservation. “Nichols thought he was going to be making millions, and Fred Alvarez was a threat to that,” Powers says. “That was motive enough for murder.”

Begley's prime target, Jimmy Hughes, at a pretrial hearing in July in Indio, California.
Photo: Andrew Hetherington

On the afternoon of July 1, the 29th anniversary of the murders, a grim-faced Begley walked into a courtroom in Indio, California, for an important hearing. The chamber was packed with an expectant crowd of reporters, members of Hughes’ family, and a few supporters from the Octopus community, including Cheri Seymour. Hughes was ushered in, wearing chains and an orange jumpsuit.
Then Michael Murphy, a dapper prosecutor from the attorney general’s office, rose and delivered a shocking blow. “We have lost confidence in our ability to proceed with the prosecution,” he said. Begley closed her eyes tightly as the prosecutor gave a vague reason for his sudden about-face, something about “new information” and a reassessment of the evidence. Begley was allowed to address the court. “How many people must die or suffer at the hands of Jimmy Hughes,” she asked, “before he is brought to justice?” But the judge dismissed the charges anyway. It was enough to make you wonder, if you were of a certain mindset, whether the fix was in.
Afterward, Powers stood next to Begley outside the courtroom as she addressed the television cameras, sobbing. The detective was disgusted by the outcome. The attorney general’s office gave no further public explanation for its decision, but Powers sensed that the prosecutors were eager to “dump” the case. Murphy, he said, started to question the credibility of the witnesses Begley had uncovered. Throughout, Begley had used Twitter and Facebook to mobilize the Octopus believers to pressure Murphy, and at least a few called the prosecutor to urge him to look beyond Hughes and dig into the myriad connections they had spent decades documenting. Begley’s devotion and inventive use of the Internet had helped to ensnare Hughes, but the obsessions of her fellow travelers may have helped to undermine the prosecutor’s confidence. (Murphy declined to comment.)
Powers, for his part, doubts there ever was an Octopus. The detective blames Nichols, the self-aggrandizing adviser who convinced the Cabazons to build a casino, for conjuring the intrigue that continued to befog the case long after his death. “Nichols had a lot of people fooled,” Powers says, “believing that he was some secret spook working for the government.” Even Nichols’ own underlings bought into his mystique; Powers thought it entirely plausible that Hughes truly believed his boss gave orders on behalf of shadowy overlords. In that sense, the Octopus may have existed, if only as a deceived and malignant state of mind.
On the night of his release, Hughes emerged from jail into a furnace blast of desert darkness. “Only God can justify and vindicate those who are really innocent,” he triumphantly told reporters outside the Indio jailhouse. Fearing retribution, Begley had already split, driving over the mountains to San Diego, where she holed up at Seymour’s house. “It’s not over by a long shot,” she told me on the phone. Her cell phone kept ringing: the Los Angeles Times, Dateline NBC, her newly materialized pro bono lawyer, a victims’ rights advocate who often appeared on Nancy Grace’s talk show.
Finally, the world seemed to be listening. “Actually, this might be better,” Begley says, sounding curiously invigorated. Though this experience has been draining, it has given her a sense of purpose, of a momentous cause. Hughes might be free, heading back to Honduras, but in a way, defeat offered a perverse validation. The Octopus wouldn’t be the enemy she thought it was if it gave up its secrets so easily. “You’re going to find out real soon,” Begley says, “that the world isn’t what you think it is.”
Andrew Rice (andrewrice75@yahoo.com) is the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget. This is his first piece for Wired.

Casolaro's Octopus: coups and assassinations

by Kenn Thomas (kennthomas@umsl.edu) - June. 07, 2001

http://www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id901/pg1/

Editor's Note: Kenn Thomas publishes Steamshovel Press, the conspiracy theory magazine. Four issue subscription: $23; single issue: $6, from POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121. The Octopus: The Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro (Feral House, 1995), written with the late Jim Keith, is also available. A revised and updated edition is scheduled for 2002 publication.

Because circumstances have shrouded Danny Casolaro's death in mystery, the single aspect of his research that led to it may never be known for certain. Hotel workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia found the writer dead in August 1991 in what looked like a faked suicide.
The "head's up" warning flashed among students of the conspiracy culture when they learned that files he had on him were missing and the details of his investigative work slowly emerged from friends, family and fellow investigators. Casolaro previously had previously had warned these same people not to believe any reports that might have fallen victim to an "accident." The fishy circumstances of his death and the probable motivations of his possible killers remain obvious.
Danny Casolaro sought to document and expose sea of covert operatives, super-surveillance software and transnational spies. He called the monster he saw swimming in that sea "the Octopus." It consisted of a group of US intelligence veterans that had banded together to manipulate world events for the sake of consolidating and extending its power.
Of course it involved the Kennedy assassination, but that was just one of many coups and assassinations pulled off by the Octopus since the end of World War II. The group had come together over a covert operation to invade Albania that was betrayed by famed British turncoat Kim Philby. The Octopus had overthrown Jacob Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. It had targeted operations against Fidel Castro culminating in the Bay of Pigs. It also had tentacles in the political upheavals in Angola, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Chile, Iran and Iraq.
Casolaro had as his main concern Octopus involvement with putting Ronald Reagan in power--the infamous October Surprise--and the role that played in introducing the PROMIS software into police systems around the world.
Casolaro's catalogue of membership in the Octopus included such notorious spooks as John Singlaub and the late CIA director William Colby. As heads of the Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam they had implemented an early version of the PROMIS tracking software to keep tabs on the Viet Cong. Other Octopus tentacles included characters like E. Howard Hunt and Bernard Baker, who later emerged as Watergate burglars.
Casolaro focused on one person in the periphery of the Octopus as it had developed in the early 1980s, a man named Earl Brian, crony to Reagan's attorney general Ed Meese. Brian had been given PROMIS to sell illegally as a reward for paying off Ayatollah Khomeini to hold on to American hostages until the Carter presidential re-election campaign clearly was doomed. According to Casolaro, Meese used the US Justice department to steal PROMIS from its developers, the Inslaw group, which had its connections to the Phoenix program and also had developed the software at least in part on public money. Two congressional committees eventually agreed, however, that Inslaw was the legal private owner of PROMIS when the US Justice department shanghaied it and Earl Brian profiteered by selling it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Interpol, the Mossad and other international police agencies as well as to the military. One application of the modified PROMIS included the ability to track Soviet submarines in previously untraceable marine trenches near Iceland.
If coded correctly, PROMIS could interface with other databases without reprogramming, giving ability to ostensibly track criminals-but also, potentially, political dissidents--through the computer systems of various police agencies. Casolaro's informant, Michael Riconosciuto added to this the claim that he had personally reprogrammed PROMIS with a backdoor, so it could spy on the methods of the police agencies that were using it for tracking. This gave it added appeal as a covert tool. The US could spy on the very agencies it was selling the software to illegally.
Earl Brian's role in the PROMIS theft was spelled out explicitly by Inslaw lawyer Elliot Richardson, another Watergate figure in The New York Times in 1992. Richardson was the attorney general who actually stood up to Richard Nixon's corruption during the Saturday Night massacre. Brian sued over the New York Times article and lost. Richardson had written the article to encourage investigation of the case, but Brian used the opportunity to start a nuisance libel suit. On November 29, 1995, the New York Court of Appeals dismissed Brian's claim and declared that Richardson's assertions came under free speech protections.
Although never prosecuted over the PROMIS allegations, Brian survived only one more year after the libel suit before other past shady deals began to catch up with him. In October 1996 a California jury convicted him of Federal bank fraud, conspiracy and lying to auditors. Prosecutors charged that Brian had drafted documents to conceal losses of the Financial News Network and United Press International, for whom he served as chief executive, in order to obtain $70 million in bank loans for his other concern, a biotyechnology firm called Infotechnology.
Interestingly, the pattern of financial impropriety in the case was identical to one that happened on assassination day, November 22, 1963. Someone named Tony DeAngelis misrepresented his holdings of thousands of tons of salad oil with faked American Express warehouse receipts in order to get bank loans. The fraud's exposure was the top news story in the New York Times editions that came out before the assassination on that date. Many people profiteered from the short-selling spree on the markets consequent to that and news of JFK's murder, including American Express magnate Warren Buffet and a transnational entity called Bunge Corporation, known in the financial literature of the time. as The Octopus. In a classic work on the JFK assassination, Were We Controlled?, pseudonymous author Lincoln Lawrence argues that DeAngelis, Jack Ruby, and Lee Harvey Oswald were all mind-controlled in their actions on that day. I produced an edition of this book, with an expanded introduction and photographs, as the book NASA, Nazis & JFK: The Torbitt Document and the JFK Assassination (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1997). Add to that the fact that Earl Brian at one time a brain surgeon, and the other Watergate-Inslaw connection, E. Howard Hunt, had a phone relationship with Casolaro, has also been connect to mind control operations, and the Casolaro story takes some extremely interesting speculative turns.
Casolaro's informant Michael Riconosciuto claimed that he had made his modifications to PROMIS on the tribal lands of the Cabazon Indians in Indio, California as part of a joint project the tribal administrators had with a private security firm known as Wackenhut.
Wackenhut provides security services to the notorious secret airbase Area 51. After Danny Casolaro turned up dead and his current research file missing, other notes found at his apartment later clearly indicates his interest in the famed Nevada super-spook facility. The history of the base, of course, is now well-known: it had been around since before it was used to develop the U2 spy plane in the late 1950s and early 1960s, later the SR71 Blackbird and later still, the mysterious Aurora super-plane. As Casolaro made his notes about it, however, it had not yet become the subject of popular lore that it is today. Nevertheless, Casolaro devoted pages of notes to Area 51.
One theory had it that Casolaro's death had less do with the Octopus than it did with manufacturing fraud at Hughes Aircraft, a company that has a long history of exclusive and secret deals with the US government for aerospace technologies, many almost certainly involving Area 51. Casolaro had brushed up against this corruption in his pursuit of his Octopus spook group. A contact he made the day before he died, Bill Turner, gave him documentation of the fraud at Hughes. Turner noted that Casolaro added these papers to the ever-present accordion file of current research. After they found Casolaro's body, Turner got himself arrested on a bank robbery charge in order to remove himself from any further involvement.
The joint venture between the Cabazon Indian tribe and Area 51's Wackenhut did exist, at least between 1981 and 1983, and Michael Riconosciuto certainly was involved with it at least in some capacity. A report from a task force of the sheriff's office of Riverside County, California placed Riconosciuto at a weapons demonstration with Earl Brian ("of the CIA") put on by the Cabazons and Wackenhut.
Riconosciuto also claimed that he had a tape documenting threats made against him by another Justice Department official, but he had thrown it in a marsh near Puget Sound the night he was arrested on trumped up methamphetamine charges. Casolaro spent many days searching the Puget Sound bog to no avail, looking for the tape that ostensibly could verify the claims of "Danger Man," Casolaro's nickname for Riconosciuto.
The Puget Sound location was significant because of its proximity to a famous early UFO event, the 1947 Maury Island incident. That event--six flying saucers seen by harbor seamen that left behind slag debris-had been witnessed, or hoaxed, by the business partner of Riconosciuto's father, a man named Fred Lee Crisman. In the 1960s, Crisman was subpoenaed by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison as part of his investigation of the Kennedy assassination. Some researchers claimed that Crisman was one of the "railyard tramps" arrested near Dealy Plaza on November 22, 1963; others note that he possibly gave refuge on his Oregon ranch to a member of the Minutemen, an early militia group investigated by the Warren Commission.
Little suggests that Casolaro knew of the Crisman connection, or of the significance it might hold for what he already knew about Area 51 and the other secret airbase that held his attention, Australia's Pine Gap.
Pine Gap is the top secret American underground base located near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of the land down under, officially known as the Joint Defense Space Research Facility. It was built in 1968 officially to share program data with the Australians.
Renowned intelligence defector Victor Marchetti, who served in the CIA director's office from 1966 to 1969, now acknowledges that he co-authored the secret agreement between the agency and the Australian Department of Defense on the establishment of the Pine Gap station. Officially, it monitors spy satellites and intercepts and decodes broadcast communications between foreign powers unfriendly to the US. One of Pine Gap's important functions is to monitor geostationary satellites for wide ranging information on enemy telemetry, radar emissions and telecommunications.
Opposition from the Australians to the base grew as its nature as an espionage facility outside of Australian control became clear. In his book Crimes of Patriots (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1987), author Jonathan Kwitny demonstrates that covert manipulation led to the early end (in Australia of the administration of Labor Party prime minister Gough Whitlam because of his opposition to Pine Gap. Casolaro noted with aggravation Kwitny's inability to see the tentacles of the Octopus in the affair. "It didn't take many people to design the apparatus that would insure the renewal of the lease for the Pine Gap installation near Alice Springs, Australia," Casolaro wrote.
"After all, how could a democracy spit up a Prime Minister that could sack the security of the Western Alliance?"
Indeed, Whitlam was rousted after his public complaints about intelligence agency deceptions over the tragic US policy in East Timor, and the CIA's funding of Australia's right-wing Country Party [AKA National Party], as well as his opposition to Pine Gap. Whitlam was not driven from office by an election, but was removed [this event is known as "The Dismissal"], on a technicality--just as George Bush, Jr. "won" the 2000 election in the US on a court-imposed technicality--by a governor-general he had appointed, one who had strong ties to the CIA [and represented the British Commonwealth].
No doubt the paranoia about this destabilization of the Australian government by the US fueled rumors about the underground Pine Gap base involving alien/government collaborations, rumors that Danny Casolaro knew about that were very similar to what he was hearing about Area 51. Certainly the base's potential for surveillance also triggered his interest as well. PROMIS had been used in tracking Soviet submarines; might it also be used to track Soviet satellites? One report told of a Moscow summit conference in 1972 during which an early Pine Gap satellite picked up limousine radio-telephone conversations between Soviet missile designers, Andrei Gromyko and Leonid Brezhnev that revealed a missile secretly being kept from SALT negotiations.
Back on the Area 51 front, Casolaro was hearing rumors that Michael Riconosciuto had worked for Lear Aircraft in Reno, Nevada. This connected him to Bill Lear, creator of the Lear jet, who is often claimed by UFO buffs as having done research on anti-gravity for the government as well as John Lear, a former CIA pilot who also hit the UFO circuit with tales of saucers and aliens in cahoots with the US government. It is now becoming distant history, but back in 1989, a man named Bob Lazar went public with his claims that he had back-engineered alien spacecraft at Area 51. Lear and Lazar lectured widely on the UFO circuit in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with other UFO lecture celebrities like Bill English and William Cooper. Cooper's classic, Behold A Pale Horse (Flagstaff AZ: Light Technology Publications, 1991), shared the title of the first draft proposal of Casolaro's manuscript that eventually became The Octopus.
After Casolaro's death, Michael Riconosciuto made claims that Casolaro had learned nothing more than what one of two intelligence factions wanted him to know in order to embarrass the other faction. One faction was called Aquarius and had a leadership sub-group called MJ-12, the name, of course, of the supposed secret group founded by Harry Truman in the wake of the Roswell flying saucer crash. Riconosciuto even told one writer that he had witnessed the autopsy of an alien body. This was long before the famous [Ray Santilli] alien autopsy film began to circulate. Some have suggested that the tales of extraterrestrials that surround areas like Area 51 and Pine Gap serve as disinformation to deflect attention away from serious issues such as gun-running and black project weapons development. Casolaro's own view, and the extent of his knowledge and interest in this tributary from the Octopus research, and whatever he learned that might have brought the truth closer to the surface of the murky waters in which he swam, may have died with him.