Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Netflix true-crime documentary American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders.What started as a software-pirating case has evolved into one of thegreat conspiracy theoriesof our time. Popular media had, until now, forgotten Danny Casolaro and the decade-long legal battle between Bill Hamilton and the Department of Justice. By the 2010s, the mystery was rendered a footnote to history, ignored by public intellectuals, and reserved only for conspiracy blogs. What’s the big deal? That’s what photojournalist Christian Hansen intended to find out when he dove into the three-decade-old cold case. Directed by Zachary Treitz, and produced by the Duplass Brothers,American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murdersattempts to shine a light on the unusual case in hopes of finally bringing closure to the cursed investigation.
Now available to stream onNetflix, the documentary winds back the clock to the murky period of the eighties when the public was blissfully in the dark about how their government operated. At the heart of this nefarious conspiracy is a web of bureaucrats and white-collar James Bond villains comprised of a former Ronald Reagan Administration official, foreign spies, the United States Department of Justice, and many more.
Casolaro nicknamed the motley crew “The Octopus” for its elusiveness, and expansive and iron-like grip on the levers of power. Avoiding as many spoilers as possible, his labor brought him nothing but trouble, and his body was discovered in the summer of 1991.The mysterious circumstancessurrounding Casolaro’s final hours are contested to this day, a tiny aspect of an epic scandal suspiciously swept under the carpet.
Whether his death was an orchestrated hit or a suicide brought on by the stress of his profession and the weight of the unfinished exposé he was assembling, the journey into the dark recesses of the INSLAW case would end up costing him everything. In an era when everything and anybody is inevitably turned into a conspiracy theory as a form of recreation, it’s important to remember that there exist some authentic cases where skepticism and outrage are due.
An Unlikely Motivation
An unassuming family man by all accounts, Casolaro made a quiet living writing for various computer magazines when computing was still a very niche interest, with the vast majority of computers used only by businessmen. In the late ’80s, allegations began to emerge insinuating that the property of INSLAW, a modest-sized American tech firm, had been secretly poached by the United States Department of Justice.
INSLAW later filed for bankruptcy in 1985, in part due to the fact that the DoJ reneged on payments to the software company. Casolaro, Hansen says, understood the finer details and value of the software far better than most journalists. “This was more or less a day job for him, but when an actually interesting computer story came along, he was in a really good position, because he had such a deep background.”
Nobody outside those in the industry had ever heard of him, INSLAW, nor had any deep insight intoinformation management tech, but what Casolaro discovered had evidently spooked someone, the writer claiming that he had been deluged with threats if he pursued the story further. He investigated the whispers regardless of the dangers. In 1991, in a West Virginia Sheraton Hotel,he was found dead, and written off as a suicide. Based on his body being discovered in the bathtub, and wounds on his wrists consistent with those of someone taking their own life, the police inquiry never dug further.
This is where the story begins to take a very strange turn.Family and friends disregarded the FBI and coroner’s conclusions, deeming both the motivation and method of his demise out of character. To those who knew him, Casolaro was not considered either a depressive nor was he one liable to commit such a grisly act, he was an upbeat personality and committed father.
His faltering finances and loans were pointed to by FBI agents as a contributing factor to his suicidal state of mind, though his brother denied this, telling the press Danny expressed the utmost pride and interest in breaking what was then an unfolding news event, after years of toiling in obscurity. Contradicting the official story, Casolaro’s brother recounted the risk, Danny specifically warning himthat he was going to be murderedfor what he was researching at the time he was meeting with a mysterious figure in room 517.
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Rumors of a Cover-Up
Trade secrets, then as now, were a profitable target, softwareprone to industrial espionageand lawsuits concerning ownership. The INSLAW saga would take this to the extreme. The whole documentary pivots around Bill and Nancy Hamilton, the owners of a piece of software known as Prosecutors Management Information Systems, (PROMIS). Estimated to be worth potentially billions in revenue in recurring contracted work, the software automated casework for prosecutors, allowing users to keep tabs on individuals, based on skimming court records from a swath of available databases — digital data-gathering tech ahead of its time.
Hamilton later asserted that the Department of Justice had different uses for the software. As is accepted now, the feds facilitated the theft of copyrighted intellectual property to be sold off to several nations. A crucialmoment in the scandaloccurred when Israeli intelligence agent Rafael Eitan was identified as a visiting prosecutor looking to purchase the service. Posing as “Dr. Ben Orr,” Eitan acted as a scout of sorts for the DoJ, who had their own plans of selling the tool to foreign nations for their own profit. Polymath Dr. Earl W. Brian was also linked to the theft, whose role would become important later.
A Congressional investigation later corroborated much of Casolaro’s work, finding the Department of Justice hadschemed to seizethe software from Hamiltons, as covered in a separate two-years-long investigation published in 1993 byWired Magazine, lending credence to the idea that the US government defrauded INSLAW. In the aftermath, the INSLAW incident was described by Richard Fricker as a demonstration of “how those within the administration’s circle of privilege were allowed to violate private property and civil rights for their own profit.” That he would kill himself when he was on theverge of his big breakand tantalizingly close to selling the story to a major publisher and exposing one of the greatest cover-ups seems quite implausible.
Should the claims of witness tampering, perjury, and obstruction of justice (to name a few allegations) not pique the interest of curious investigators, the INSLAW crime was stated to have many branches, facets, and concerned parties,supposedly connecting Iran-Contra Affair, the Middle-Eastern Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and intelligence agencies who all had a vested interest in quashing this story and eliminating anyone trying to uncover it.Those more explosive claims remain conjecture. The software was illegally obtained and was used in top-secret spycraft, so says an informant named Michael Riconosciuto, whom Hansen and Trietz tracked down for the documentary. Viewers can judge his credibility for themselves.
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The Long Reach of “The Octopus”?
No matter how deep “The Octopus” connections ran, conflicts of interest guaranteed the investigation was doomed from the start. Earl Brian’s reputation as a Washington wheeler and dealer, skilled surgeon, technology savant, and business mogul was no secret, the proverbial junction box in which all the circuits of the hypothesized conspiracy. In 1988, The Washington Post ran an interview with the venture capitalist, where he opened up about his connections to then-President Reagan, unabashedly bragging about the nascent information-collecting business model:
“If you’re able to organize it and provide it to them, it is a profitable business, and we have a number of technologies and ways to improve the business.”
Regan and Brian had worked side by side in the state of California under Regan’s governorship, and those connections had served him well when he launched his own start-ups. Talk of a conspiracy gained fuel when it was suggested that Edwin Meese III, friend and former counsel to Reagan, skated charges when Attorney General Bill Barr suspiciouslyopted not to pursue any federal inquiriesinto the INSLAW debacle despite much evidence in 1992, a year after the death of Casolaro.
Keep in mind that in 1987 ajudge had already deemed the DoJ culpable, citing their actions as “trickery, fraud and deceit.” The allegations could no longer be ignored, but the larger case against the DoJ ultimately went nowhere. The DoJ was tasked with investigating themselves, not surprisingly, finding no proof of a crime. There was no independent federal appointment made to look into the matter, and INSLAW’s case naming the DoJ as a criminal party was tossed in court.
The truth may have died with him, as no smoking gun has yet to be uncovered, despite Hansen and Treitz’s best efforts retreading the ice-cold leads of Casolaro, recreating them. In that regard,American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murdersis less an investigation than a dramatization of Casolaro’s life. Whether sufficient evidence exists to pinpoint the DoJ, Meese, spymasters, or Brian, is one matter. Trying to link any of them to the death of Casolaro is another, even if the INSLAW trainwreck stands as one of the most ludicrously botched and embarrassing cases in the history of the US legal system. As the journalist’s body was embalmed (without the authorization of the family) the investigation into Casoloro was also permanently terminated, the suicide officially a closed case.
The four-part true-crime documentaryAmerican Conspiracy: The Octopus Murdersis currently available exclusively on Netflix.
