Thomas, Kenn and Keith, Jim. The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Portland: Feral House, 1996. 181 pages.

Danny Casolaro was found with his wrists slashed in a motel bathtub in Martinsburg, West Virginia on August 10, 1991. He was a struggling writer and something of a romantic. Recently he had also styled himself as an investigator, contacting a variety of spooks-turned-victims and weaving their stories into an "Octopus" theory. This would be the book of his career: Danny as dragon-slayer. Now it was a year later, and documents were missing from Casolaro's motel room. Was it suicide or murder?

This book involves Inslaw, Inc. and its Promis software, as well as Michael Riconosciuto, a child prodigy who became a secret agent and drug pusher, and still keeps a bevy of fringe journalists busy by dispatching leads from his jail cell. Mix in several years of affidavits flying like shrapnel, mostly due to Inslaw's reasonable claim that Promis was stolen by the Justice Department. Add Riconosciuto's unreasonable claim that he hacked Promis, making it so magical that U.S. intelligence tried to install it everywhere as a Trojan horse. Include more prominent names than you can shake a stick at, each with loose but spooky connections to everyone else, and throw in a few more investigative trails that end in corpses. Ultimately it just doesn't fly: any philosophy major can tell you that something this big is very nearly the same as nothing at all.
ISBN 0-922915-39-3

Extract the names from this source

Back to search page