Danny Casolaro, INSLAW, and the Octopus: The Last Circle - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

The Third Man · 05-22-2012, 09:46 PM

A couple years ago my wife bought a book for me called The Last Circle by Cheri Seymour. I've never heard mention of the book on this forum, and I couldn't find a thread exclusively about the Casolaro case, so I decided to start this thread on both the book and the case.

I'd like to start by reviewing the book, but...The Last Circle is almost an unreviewable book. That doesn't mean it's a bad book: on the contrary, as it's one of the most gripping true-crime books I've ever read. It's unreviewable because the book is so sprawling and wide-ranging it's almost impossible to know where to start with it. Consider this: the first chapter features government corruption in Maricopa County, CA; a mysterious accident involving a police escort of Queen Elizabeth II (for real!); drug trafficking in the US National Parks Service; and a citizen's group called "Decency In Government" that disbands after a mysterious call, allegedly from a White House staffer (again, for real!) causes the leader of the group to leave town and never return. And, well, that's the first six pages of the book....and Casolaro doesn't make an appearance for the first couple of chapters!

The Last Circle is by turns informative, enlightening, shocking, and...to be blunt, bonkers. Sometimes it's all of the above at once. Shot through it all is an incredible sense of paranoia. Just reading the book you get a real sense of what Casolaro was feeling during his last days. The book features a number of passages where the principals either openly say or act as though they are being watched. A man in a federal prison says over the phone "I can't talk about (XYZ) because the private company I'm talking about has agents here." Several characters prefer to do all their business outdoors a la Whitey Bulger because they think their house is bugged. The author herself goes with the wife of one of the principals on a midnight run to an abandoned trailer in the desert to get key documents and computer files--they go at midnight because the wife thinks they'll have a better chance of seeing people following them if those people have to put on their headlights. Oh, and there's a guy who tape records every phone conversation he has and has his wife transcribe it.

But Casolaro, you say. Right, well...I think Seymour makes a pretty good case that he was murdered. Several of her sources say that he was "suicided" or make similar references. But there is one other thing that his family brings up, which I don't think was part of the UM segment (I'm going to have to re-watch it): Casolaro was a very devout Catholic. Catholic theology teaches that those who commit suicide are not admitted to heaven. Now, yes, that alone isn't a smoking gun, but combined with the last line of his "suicide note", it seems that Casolaro was trying to say something at the last. He wrote, "I know God will let me in." Was he trying to say that he didn't die at his own hands? His brother is also quoted in the book, as he was in the segment, as saying Danny was fearful of blood and sharp objects. Why commit suicide in such a manner as he did, then, by slashing himself to death in a bathtub?

I'm going to post more on this case and book very soon--and there's a lot more to talk about.

The Third Man · 05-22-2012, 11:25 PM

To be honest, part of the reason Seymour's book is so hard to follow is that bits of information seem to be scattered randomly through the book. I know it's a confusing case, but unfortunately Seymour makes it a little harder to understand. So I'm going to try to break it down by starting with some of the pieces the UM segment talked about.

Danny Casolaro started his work by researching the alleged theft of a computer software program called PROMIS written by a company called INSLAW. INSLAW had a strange history: it was originally a non-profit agency founded in the 70's called the Institute for Law and Social Research. Part of its interest was to put together analytics software for social researchers. When the government wound up the Institute, a guy named Bill Hamilton (who is part of the UM segment) who worked for it founded a for-profit successor organization called INSLAW which hired some of its other employees and bought up the Institute's assets.

Following along? Good, because it doesn't get easier from here on out. In its non-profit days INSLAW developed a computer program designed to track criminal offenders and share information between databases. This sort of program seems obvious now, but back in 1980 it was revolutionary stuff. They called it PROsecutor's Management Information System. In 1981 the company gave it to two Attorneys General offices, then continued to improve the software. In 1982 the US government awarded them a contract to supply 22 Attorneys General offices with the PROMIS software. Sure, said INSLAW, and sent the offices the software they'd developed in 1980. The government then claimed that they weren't going to pay INSLAW for something that the government had already paid the Institute to develop: they wanted the new version of the software which INSLAW had invested private money in. Hogwash, said Hamilton, that was never part of the contract. Fine, said the government, we're just not going to pay you. Unfortunately for INSLAW, since the PROMIS software was the only product they had, that meant they were going to go out of business, and fast.

Now Hamilton's story and the government story start to diverge. Hamilton and his wife started hearing from "sources" that the flap about not getting the "enhanced" version of PROMIS was just a way of the government backing out of paying for the software. What's worse, they claimed, the government then illegally copied the version of PROMIS they'd gotten and sent it to at least 25 more offices. As if that weren't enough, the government then tried to get INSLAW's status changed from Chapter 11 (bankruptcy) to Chapter 7 (forced liquidation of assets) so that not only would they have the PROMIS software, they'd have legal title to do whatever they wanted to it.

And "whatever they wanted" was going to be big. The Department of Justice (again according to Hamilton's "sources") hired out a company to work on specialized modifications to the software. One of these ("Modification 12") set up a "trap door" in the software that allowed information in the databases to be viewed discreetly by an outside agency. In other words, a bug could be set up in the database, and the owners of the database would never know about it. Another modification would allow the outside agency to make discreet changes to the database, and yet another would allow PROMIS to be used for banking operations or money transfers or to monitor transactions. In short, PROMIS could be used to clandestinely spy on offices, send money around the globe without anybody else knowing about it, or--when PROMIS was sold to given to other countries, which it was--to spy on other countries' domestic activities.

Now the Hamiltons did not know about the modifications until 1988--back in 1983 they were just concerned about getting their end of the deal paid. But their appeals fell on deaf ears until they got former US Attorney General Elliot Richardson (he is the elderly distinguished man in the segment) to listen. Richardson took the extraordinary step of suing then-current AG Dick Thornburgh to try to get the DOJ to start prosecution efforts against itself. According to Seymour, Thornburgh first tried to claim government immunity, then eventually let Richardson--who was still extremely respected on Capitol Hill--know through a third party that the National Security Agency was involved in the process and the modifications. By the time they finally got anywhere, eight years had gone by and the Hamiltons were pretty much broke.

It was also around this time that Danny Casolaro was starting to track down some of the major players in the INSLAW affair. He was having daily conversations with a guy named Michael Riconosciuto, a former computer whiz kid who allegedly was responsible for Modification 12 and was at the time serving ten years in prison for "drug trafficking" (more on that later). He also was talking to a shadowy man named Robert Booth Nichols, who worked for the company which engineered Modification 12 but who also owned an Indian casino, an arms factory, and several other strange enterprises.

told Casolaro that he had been threatened by a DOJ employee named Peter Videnieks to not talk about his involvement with Modification 12, and if he did the DOJ would "screw" him with false prosecution. Considering Riconoscuito was serving a ten-year sentence for drug trafficking which for all intents and purposes seemed a classic frame-up job, it appeared he made good on those threats. Casolaro wanted to talk to Videnieks despite Riconoscuito's concern, but Videnieks was obviously a hard man to find (to quote John Fairbanks

). Just by coincidence (copyright Sammy Wheeler

) in August 1991 Casolaro was approached by a man in a Washington DC bar and told, I can arrange a meeting with Videnieks for you. Most of us would have turned tail and ran, I suppose, but I guess Casolaro felt he was in deep enough by talking to Riconoscuito, Nichols, and some of the other major players. A week later Casolaro went to West Virginia to talk to Videnieks.

As we know, that's when Casolaro was found dead in the bathtub. And, for the most part, that's the part of the story that the UM segment covered.

thinwhiteduke74 · 05-23-2012, 01:05 PM

According to the evidence the show presented and what I've read on my own, Casalaro's death was suspicious enough for me to conclude that he was probably murdered. The BCCI case makes for fascinating reading on its own. But "The Octopus" shows all the weaknesses of conspiracy theories: coincidences and chance encounters accumulate until the case is so big that ANYONE can be involved. No wonder that book you cited sprawls.

The Third Man · 05-23-2012, 02:20 PM

Yes, I have to agree to some extent with that assessment....I'm going to try to keep my opinions about the book's contents out until I go over it as best I can. But I still think Seymour is to blame for The Last Circle's confused sprawl: the book is pitched as an analysis of the events surrounding Danny Casolaro and INSLAW, but Casolaro's death isn't discussed until Chapter 6 and the INSLAW case isn't discussed in full until about Chapter 12. Not only did the INSLAW case precede Casolaro's death by several years, so the timeline of the book is all out of whack, putting the examination of INSLAW after the study of Casolaro's death means Seymour is constantly having to repeat herself. Furthermore, Seymour records most of her conversation with major INSLAW player #1, Riconoscuito, in Chapter 3, and doesn't talk about her conversation with major player #2, Nichols, until well after the INSLAW overview.

So for a book that's sold as a review of the Casolaro case, the reality is that the book scatters that information all over the manuscript in a haphazard order, while surrounding it with all kinds of other potentially-related material, things that are likely BS, or sheer dead-ends. Seymour admits that it's largely her fault because the book was put together in "her" timeline (which I'll talk about later) instead of a "real" timeline, but an editor really should have taken a heavier hand with it.

Carbon Tiger · 05-25-2012, 02:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thinwhiteduke74

According to the evidence the show presented and what I've read on my own, Casalaro's death was suspicious enough for me to conclude that he was probably murdered. The BCCI case makes for fascinating reading on its own. But "The Octopus" shows all the weaknesses of conspiracy theories: coincidences and chance encounters accumulate until the case is so big that ANYONE can be involved. No wonder that book you cited sprawls.

It's a shame too. Casalaro in my estimation likely was killed. Now for the why of it I'm of two minds on the subject. One it was in relation to illegal theft and sale of highly specialized computer software. Or he simply ran afoul of the wrong people while following the paper trail of some very dubious sources. Having Riconoscuito as a key witness hurts the case due to his own lengthy criminal background and his own outlandish claims which you don't have to dig too deep into before you hit new world order UFO territory.

Dazinho · 05-25-2012, 04:11 PM

Dunno if anyone has seen this before - carries some links both to this case and the Henry & Ives segment:-

http://etherzone.com/body.html

dynoguy88 · 05-25-2012, 07:22 PM

Was there any mention of Charles Morgan in the book? As we learned from the 'Mistaken hit' segment, Casolaro contacted Don Devereaux for information regarding Morgan's illegal gold transactions that took place in the early to mid 1970's. But Casolaro ended up dead before Devereaux could even mail his research to him. I was always a little confused how those transactions had anything to do with INSLAW. Although like you said, there are many mind boggling things this saga is connected to and this is probably just one of them.

05-22-2012, 11:25 PM	#2
The Third Man Member Occasional Poster Join Date: Mar 21, 2007 Posts: 92	INSLAW To be honest, part of the reason Seymour's book is so hard to follow is that bits of information seem to be scattered randomly through the book. I know it's a confusing case, but unfortunately Seymour makes it a little harder to understand. So I'm going to try to break it down by starting with some of the pieces the UM segment talked about. Danny Casolaro started his work by researching the alleged theft of a computer software program called PROMIS written by a company called INSLAW. INSLAW had a strange history: it was originally a non-profit agency founded in the 70's called the Institute for Law and Social Research. Part of its interest was to put together analytics software for social researchers. When the government wound up the Institute, a guy named Bill Hamilton (who is part of the UM segment) who worked for it founded a for-profit successor organization called INSLAW which hired some of its other employees and bought up the Institute's assets. Following along? Good, because it doesn't get easier from here on out. In its non-profit days INSLAW developed a computer program designed to track criminal offenders and share information between databases. This sort of program seems obvious now, but back in 1980 it was revolutionary stuff. They called it PROsecutor's Management Information System. In 1981 the company gave it to two Attorneys General offices, then continued to improve the software. In 1982 the US government awarded them a contract to supply 22 Attorneys General offices with the PROMIS software. Sure, said INSLAW, and sent the offices the software they'd developed in 1980. The government then claimed that they weren't going to pay INSLAW for something that the government had already paid the Institute to develop: they wanted the new version of the software which INSLAW had invested private money in. Hogwash, said Hamilton, that was never part of the contract. Fine, said the government, we're just not going to pay you. Unfortunately for INSLAW, since the PROMIS software was the only product they had, that meant they were going to go out of business, and fast. Now Hamilton's story and the government story start to diverge. Hamilton and his wife started hearing from "sources" that the flap about not getting the "enhanced" version of PROMIS was just a way of the government backing out of paying for the software. What's worse, they claimed, the government then illegally copied the version of PROMIS they'd gotten and sent it to at least 25 more offices. As if that weren't enough, the government then tried to get INSLAW's status changed from Chapter 11 (bankruptcy) to Chapter 7 (forced liquidation of assets) so that not only would they have the PROMIS software, they'd have legal title to do whatever they wanted to it. And "whatever they wanted" was going to be big. The Department of Justice (again according to Hamilton's "sources") hired out a company to work on specialized modifications to the software. One of these ("Modification 12") set up a "trap door" in the software that allowed information in the databases to be viewed discreetly by an outside agency. In other words, a bug could be set up in the database, and the owners of the database would never know about it. Another modification would allow the outside agency to make discreet changes to the database, and yet another would allow PROMIS to be used for banking operations or money transfers or to monitor transactions. In short, PROMIS could be used to clandestinely spy on offices, send money around the globe without anybody else knowing about it, or--when PROMIS was sold to given to other countries, which it was--to spy on other countries' domestic activities. Now the Hamiltons did not know about the modifications until 1988--back in 1983 they were just concerned about getting their end of the deal paid. But their appeals fell on deaf ears until they got former US Attorney General Elliot Richardson (he is the elderly distinguished man in the segment) to listen. Richardson took the extraordinary step of suing then-current AG Dick Thornburgh to try to get the DOJ to start prosecution efforts against itself. According to Seymour, Thornburgh first tried to claim government immunity, then eventually let Richardson--who was still extremely respected on Capitol Hill--know through a third party that the National Security Agency was involved in the process and the modifications. By the time they finally got anywhere, eight years had gone by and the Hamiltons were pretty much broke. It was also around this time that Danny Casolaro was starting to track down some of the major players in the INSLAW affair. He was having daily conversations with a guy named Michael Riconosciuto, a former computer whiz kid who allegedly was responsible for Modification 12 and was at the time serving ten years in prison for "drug trafficking" (more on that later). He also was talking to a shadowy man named Robert Booth Nichols, who worked for the company which engineered Modification 12 but who also owned an Indian casino, an arms factory, and several other strange enterprises. told Casolaro that he had been threatened by a DOJ employee named Peter Videnieks to not talk about his involvement with Modification 12, and if he did the DOJ would "screw" him with false prosecution. Considering Riconoscuito was serving a ten-year sentence for drug trafficking which for all intents and purposes seemed a classic frame-up job, it appeared he made good on those threats. Casolaro wanted to talk to Videnieks despite Riconoscuito's concern, but Videnieks was obviously a hard man to find (to quote John Fairbanks ). Just by coincidence (copyright Sammy Wheeler ) in August 1991 Casolaro was approached by a man in a Washington DC bar and told, I can arrange a meeting with Videnieks for you. Most of us would have turned tail and ran, I suppose, but I guess Casolaro felt he was in deep enough by talking to Riconoscuito, Nichols, and some of the other major players. A week later Casolaro went to West Virginia to talk to Videnieks. As we know, that's when Casolaro was found dead in the bathtub. And, for the most part, that's the part of the story that the UM segment covered.
	Last edited by The Third Man; 05-23-2012 at 09:34 AM.

05-22-2012, 09:46 PM	#1
The Third Man Member Occasional Poster Join Date: Mar 21, 2007 Posts: 92	Danny Casolaro, INSLAW, and the Octopus: The Last Circle A couple years ago my wife bought a book for me called The Last Circle by Cheri Seymour. I've never heard mention of the book on this forum, and I couldn't find a thread exclusively about the Casolaro case, so I decided to start this thread on both the book and the case. I'd like to start by reviewing the book, but...The Last Circle is almost an unreviewable book. That doesn't mean it's a bad book: on the contrary, as it's one of the most gripping true-crime books I've ever read. It's unreviewable because the book is so sprawling and wide-ranging it's almost impossible to know where to start with it. Consider this: the first chapter features government corruption in Maricopa County, CA; a mysterious accident involving a police escort of Queen Elizabeth II (for real!); drug trafficking in the US National Parks Service; and a citizen's group called "Decency In Government" that disbands after a mysterious call, allegedly from a White House staffer (again, for real!) causes the leader of the group to leave town and never return. And, well, that's the first six pages of the book....and Casolaro doesn't make an appearance for the first couple of chapters! The Last Circle is by turns informative, enlightening, shocking, and...to be blunt, bonkers. Sometimes it's all of the above at once. Shot through it all is an incredible sense of paranoia. Just reading the book you get a real sense of what Casolaro was feeling during his last days. The book features a number of passages where the principals either openly say or act as though they are being watched. A man in a federal prison says over the phone "I can't talk about (XYZ) because the private company I'm talking about has agents here." Several characters prefer to do all their business outdoors a la Whitey Bulger because they think their house is bugged. The author herself goes with the wife of one of the principals on a midnight run to an abandoned trailer in the desert to get key documents and computer files--they go at midnight because the wife thinks they'll have a better chance of seeing people following them if those people have to put on their headlights. Oh, and there's a guy who tape records every phone conversation he has and has his wife transcribe it. But Casolaro, you say. Right, well...I think Seymour makes a pretty good case that he was murdered. Several of her sources say that he was "suicided" or make similar references. But there is one other thing that his family brings up, which I don't think was part of the UM segment (I'm going to have to re-watch it): Casolaro was a very devout Catholic. Catholic theology teaches that those who commit suicide are not admitted to heaven. Now, yes, that alone isn't a smoking gun, but combined with the last line of his "suicide note", it seems that Casolaro was trying to say something at the last. He wrote, "I know God will let me in." Was he trying to say that he didn't die at his own hands? His brother is also quoted in the book, as he was in the segment, as saying Danny was fearful of blood and sharp objects. Why commit suicide in such a manner as he did, then, by slashing himself to death in a bathtub? I'm going to post more on this case and book very soon--and there's a lot more to talk about.

05-23-2012, 01:05 PM	#3
thinwhiteduke74 Member Frequent Poster Join Date: Mar 16, 2011 Posts: 387	According to the evidence the show presented and what I've read on my own, Casalaro's death was suspicious enough for me to conclude that he was probably murdered. The BCCI case makes for fascinating reading on its own. But "The Octopus" shows all the weaknesses of conspiracy theories: coincidences and chance encounters accumulate until the case is so big that ANYONE can be involved. No wonder that book you cited sprawls.

05-23-2012, 02:20 PM	#4
The Third Man Member Occasional Poster Join Date: Mar 21, 2007 Posts: 92	Yes, I have to agree to some extent with that assessment....I'm going to try to keep my opinions about the book's contents out until I go over it as best I can. But I still think Seymour is to blame for The Last Circle's confused sprawl: the book is pitched as an analysis of the events surrounding Danny Casolaro and INSLAW, but Casolaro's death isn't discussed until Chapter 6 and the INSLAW case isn't discussed in full until about Chapter 12. Not only did the INSLAW case precede Casolaro's death by several years, so the timeline of the book is all out of whack, putting the examination of INSLAW after the study of Casolaro's death means Seymour is constantly having to repeat herself. Furthermore, Seymour records most of her conversation with major INSLAW player #1, Riconoscuito, in Chapter 3, and doesn't talk about her conversation with major player #2, Nichols, until well after the INSLAW overview. So for a book that's sold as a review of the Casolaro case, the reality is that the book scatters that information all over the manuscript in a haphazard order, while surrounding it with all kinds of other potentially-related material, things that are likely BS, or sheer dead-ends. Seymour admits that it's largely her fault because the book was put together in "her" timeline (which I'll talk about later) instead of a "real" timeline, but an editor really should have taken a heavier hand with it.

05-25-2012, 04:11 PM	#6
Dazinho Member Occasional Poster Join Date: Dec 09, 2011 Location: England Posts: 64	Dunno if anyone has seen this before - carries some links both to this case and the Henry & Ives segment:- http://etherzone.com/body.html

05-25-2012, 07:22 PM	#7
dynoguy88 Member Forum 3000 Club Member Join Date: Apr 01, 2000 Location: Michigan, USA Posts: 3,672	Was there any mention of Charles Morgan in the book? As we learned from the 'Mistaken hit' segment, Casolaro contacted Don Devereaux for information regarding Morgan's illegal gold transactions that took place in the early to mid 1970's. But Casolaro ended up dead before Devereaux could even mail his research to him. I was always a little confused how those transactions had anything to do with INSLAW. Although like you said, there are many mind boggling things this saga is connected to and this is probably just one of them.