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1992-10-10
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Date: Tue, 27 Aug 91 21:36 EDT
From: "Silicon Surfer" <unixville@news.group.com>
Subject: File 5--More on Casolaro (INSLAW) Suicide (Mary McGrory reprint)
Tentacles of Scandal Touch Journalist's Mysterious "Suicide"
(By Mary McGrory, syndicated columnist)
One thing in the sad muck is clear: Before he died, Danny Casolaro saw
an octopus. He told his friend Bill Hamilton about it. The tentacles
reached into all the scandals we are grappling with in this summer of
conspiracies unlimited.
The body of investigative reporter Joseph Daniel Casolaro, 44, was found
in the bathtub of a West Virginia motel on Saturday, Aug. 10.
Martinsburg police pronounced it a suicide and proceeded to embalm the
body with extraordinary haste - before they got around to notifying
Casolaro's family, which finally heard the news on Monday, Aug 12.
His brother, Dr. Anthony Casolaro, doesn't believe it was a suicide.
Nor does anyone who knew him - or talked to him in his last days.
A crime reporter, Casolaro was a happy, outgoing, gregarious person, the
kind who cracks wise with secretaries and waitresses and endears himself
to children. The day before he died, according to the Martinsbug Morning
Journal, Casolaro told a Pizza Hut waitress that he liked her brown eyes
and that he was a member of the Edgar Allen Poe Society. He quoted "The
Great Gatsby" to her.
He told Hamilton, his brother, his girlfriend and others that he was on
the point of cracking the story that had absorbed him for a year. He
had begun investigating the Inslaw case, a tangled affair of government
perfidy and international intrigue that has been in litigation since
1983. In his explorations, he found out about related scandals - BCCI,
S&Ls, Iran-Contra, the October Surprise - but until last week, he found
nothing about Inslaw. Then he, joyfully said, he hit Bingo. One more
interview and the case was cracked.
Suicides do not tell their intimates day before taking the hemlock that
they are "ecstatic" or "euphoric". Casolaro did. Nor do they attend
family birthday parties, as Danny Casolaro was planning to do hours
before he died. The last known call he made was to his mother. He would
be late, but he was headed home. A manic-depressive might do that.
Nobody ever suggested that Danny Casolaro was one.
All the circumstances beg for disbelief, none more than the supposed
suicide note. "I'm sorry, especially to my son," from a man who lived by
words, just doesn't ring true. Casolaro wrote a novel, a children's
book. His prose style, at least as displayed in an outline submitted to
Little Brown of a book he proposed to write about the octopus called,
"Behold, A Pale Horse," is on the florid side. Such a terse farewell,
unless composed or dictated at gunpoint, is entirely unconvincing.
The man who could have resolved the Inslaw case, Richard Thornburgh,
resigned as attorney general the day the West Virginia police came
forward with an autopsy. Excess was the hallmark of his farewell
ceremony: an honor guard, a trooping of colors, superlatives from
subordinates. Willam P. Barr, his deputy and possible successor, spoke
of Thornburgh's "leadership, integrity, professionalism and fairness,"
none of which Thornburgh - now, by the way, a candidate for the Senate -
displayed in his handling of Inslaw.
Although the Inslaw case occurred in the time of Ed Meese, Thornburgh
took it to his busom. Bill Hamilton, a perfectly nice Midwesterner,
invented Promis, a computer software program specially adapted to crime
statistics, which he sold to the Justice Department. The second year,
Justice stopped paying the bill.
Hamilton and his wife, Nancy, believed that cronies of Meese got the
franchise to sell it around the world. Promis has turned up in Canada
and Pakistan. The link with the October Surprise is Earl Brian,
allegedly the agent who paid off the Iranians to keep the hostages. He
was paid back with huge profits from Promis.
Thornburgh refused to discuss the case with the Hamiltons or their
counsel, Elliot Richardson. He did not answer Richardson's letters. He
did not return his phone calls. He refused to receive his distinguished
predecessor.
The Hamiltons have been to court many times. Judges have recused
themselves, witnesses have disappeared or recanted. The man who knows
the most, Michael Riconosciuto, was picked up in Washington state on
drug charges and is in jail. What was merely sinister has now turned
deadly.
Thornburgh calls the Inslaw case "a little contract dispute." He refused
to testify about it to the House Judiciary Committee. Richardson thinks
it could be "dirtier than Watergate," and he should know.
Thornburgh's conduct is the most powerful argument for believing that
Danny Casolaro saw an octopus before he died.
Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253