For more than a year, Danny Casolaro, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist, had been sorting through a web of intrigue — the S&L debacle, BCCI, Iran-contra, the contra-connected Wackenhut Corp., the Wackenhut-connected Inslaw case, and the Inslaw-connected “October Surprise.” The “Octopus,” as Casolaro called it, began with the U.S. Justice Department which, according to a federal bankruptcy court for Washington D.C., “stole” computer software (called Promis) from Inslaw Corp., a private firm, ‘by trickery, fraud, and deceit.”
During the week of August 5, Casolaro told a number of friends that he had just come back from meeting with a source, and that he now knew everything about Inslaw and Promis. He also told them that he was going back to West Virginia to meet a source who was to help him nail down the last piece of evidence in his investigation.
On Saturday, August 10, Casolaro was found dead in Room 517 of the Martinsburg, W.Va., Sheraton. His body was found with twelve incisions in his arms in a bathtub of bloody water. Though police have ruled Casolaro’s death a suicide, Casolaro’s family and many familiar with the case find suicide implausible. Unexplained questions include:
Death threats. In the weeks before his death Casolaro had spoken frequently about threats on his life. In fact, just before he left for Martinsburg he told his brother, “If anything happens to me, don’t believe it’s an accident.” For reasons unknown, Casolaro’s family wasn’t notified of his death until two days after his body was discovered. And by that time, his body had already been embalmed illegally. Additionally, the hotel almost immediately brought in an industrial cleaning company to sanitize the room, thereby greatly diminishing any opportunity for an independent forensic investigation.
The day before he died, Casolaro met with a source at the same hotel. But the stack of documents given to him by the source, as well as his tape deck and a briefcase containing a draft copy of his book, which he always carried with him, have never been found. Also unexplained, is a half-empty bottle of red wine and a broken wine glass that police found next to the bathtub, and an empty can of beer found inside the tub. No alcohol was found in Casolaro’s bloodstream.
‘The key thing about the death of Casolaro,” says former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, who is representing Inslaw, “is that although others were seeking to delineate … the ‘octopus,’ he was the only one who told people who have no reason to misrepresent what he said that he had hard evidence, and was on the point of getting conclusive evidence. … The idea that he committed suicide with a razor blade under these circumstances seems highly implausible.”
