“Danny is a romantic ideal of what a writer or journalist is,” says the film director Zachary Treitz. “In the Hemingway mould.”
He is describing Danny Casolaro, an adventurer, journalist, poet, novelist and charmer. More than 30 years ago, in room 517 at the distinctly prosaic Sheraton hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, Casolaro was found dead in a bathtub. The 44-year-old’s wrists had a dozen slash wounds, deep enough to sever the tendons. There was blood all over the room.
Police ruled it a suicide but his family and colleagues have long suspected that Casolaro was murdered for investigating a conspiracy he called “the Octopus” – a hidden organisation whose arms reached into stolen spy software, unsolved murders, money laundering, drug trafficking, Ronald Reagan’s White House and the Iran-Contra affair.
The head-spinning mystery is the subject of Treitz’s The Octopus Murders, a four-part docuseries that week hit number two on Netflix’s TV show ratings chart. The film follows the journalist Christian Hansen trying solve the riddle of Casolaro’s death – and the conspiracy theory that he claimed would rewrite American history. But Treitz maintains a healthily sceptical eye throughout.
Casolaro grew up in McLean, Virginia, home of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and was fascinated by the world of espionage. He also had a daring streak: at 16 he ran away from home to go to South America to hunt for lost Incan treasure, returning with a business scheme to import corvina fish.
He reported on the Watergate scandal in the 1970s and started writing about computers for an upstart industry newsletter, where he eventually became owner and managing editor. Casolaro was introduced to the founder of Inslaw, a tech company suing the justice department over the alleged intellectual theft of revolutionary criminal-case tracking software known as Promis.
Speaking over Zoom from New York, Treitz, 38, says: “He’d spent about 10 years as a trade journalist, which is maybe not the most glamorous front page of the Washington Post-style journalism. But it is journalism. You have to be actually be more of an expert in a particular field to do what he did. He was covering the nascent computer industry.
“It’s an interesting jumping off point of a guy who could have gone a lot of different directions. Maybe he hadn’t fully realised his ambitions in life and he had a chip on his shoulder about that and wanted to prove himself with a big story. He also had a deep background in understanding the computer industry at that time in the early 90s.”
He adds: “No matter what you think happened to Danny, it was a perfect storm of circumstances. Through both the Byzantine nature of the computer industry and the Inslaw case that he was looking into, it was a hard story for anybody else to cover because you don’t know about this stuff when you’re a political journalist.”
In The Octopus Murders, Treitz follows his childhood friend Hansen retracing Casolaro’s metaphorical footsteps, reading his handwritten notes and listening to his audio recordings, turning over the same stones and talking to the same sources. Hansen formed friendships with many of Casolaro’s own friends.
He even bears some physical resemblance to the young Casolaro (a friend interviewed in the film describes it as “very freaky … very weird … am I in a parallel universe?”) and plays him in the documentary’s dramatic reconstructions.
Hansen, also 38, who worked as a photojournalist for the New York Times and became obsessed with the Octopus a decade ago, says over Zoom from New York: “What connected me with him early on was that he had a dire fear of blood, needles, things like that and I’m the same way. I hide my eyes when I’m watching a movie where somebody’s shooting up or getting a shot or there’s blood or anything like that. It makes me uncomfortable. I don’t love being around real life gore or seeing it on the movies.
“And so the way he died, it made me question early on what was going on because I often try to put myself in his shoes and think about what he was thinking about. That’s a huge part of this process. I’m going through his notes, I’m looking at his handwriting and I am trying to figure out who he is and I have fallen for him. If he was alive I feel very strongly that we would be friends.”
From the Inslaw incident, Casolaro believed he was on to a thread and just kept pulling, revealing a series of interrelated international crimes and what he described as a cabal rising from the spy networks of the second world war. It was formed by an alliance of eight people he called the Octopus.
He wrote: “They are no longer government officials but their tentacles can reach into any part of government in almost any country. They’re not known criminals but they have successfully penetrated all factions of organised crime.” Casolaro asserted that the Octopus gained momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Laos before moving into Australia, Angola, Rhodesia, Iran and Nicaragua.
But he admitted that his contacts were plagued by contradictions and hidden motives. “Possession of a secret is no guarantee of its truth and while these allegations are indeed remarkable they’re also wrought with undocumented little details that make a traditional journalistic effort impossible. It is for this reason The Octopus is subtitled A True Crime Narrative.”
In Casolaro’s telling, the Octopus is a network of mostly former intelligence officers who used their contacts not only within the intelligence sphere but the criminal underworld – a credible scenario given that intelligence operatives often have to use criminal networks to accomplish covert goals.
Hansen comments: “When I got into this story, it quickly led to allegations of the intelligence community’s involvement in trafficking in illegal drugs in the 1970s and 1980s and actually how critical that was to for them to execute whatever kind of agenda they had during the cold war.
“I was so physically disgusted that was happening in my name and that the drugs were coming to the United States and largely affecting people that needed a hand up not to totally have their head pushed down and then filtered into the prison industrial complex. It was so hypocritical to have this war on drugs but also covertly bringing them here. It’s infuriating.
“That was something that surprised and shocked me and actually kind of blew my head off. At that point, what is real and what isn’t and what conspiracy theory is actually a conspiracy that happened or is happening. That was what made me go a little bit insane for a little while.”
Treitz offers his summary of the Octopus theory: “These people are essentially trying to, in his view, suck up as much money and power as they possibly can using their own resources which they’ve developed, which conveniently happen to be people who are in places of both extreme power and extreme secrecy that allows them to get away with a lot of different things.
“Whether that Octopus is as organised or as sentient as maybe the metaphor goes I’m not sure, but a lot of the stuff that he reported on or that he was talking about is not that far fetched if you just look at the intelligence side of how things worked, especially in the 80s and 70s.”
Among the key sources is Michael Riconosciuto, a computer expert claiming to have information about covert government operations. Months before Casolaro’s death, he was imprisoned for drug offences after a justice department official allegedly threatened him for blowing the whistle. His release from prison in 2017 is documented in the film but he proves a not entirely reliable narrator.
Indeed, there are rabbit holes within rabbit holes. Treitz, who never had a particular interest in conspiracy theories before making the film, notes: “It comes with so many caveats because Danny’s theory was evolving as he was writing it and what we have is just the snapshot of various times when he was trying to articulate that. It’s our subjective perspective on trying to tease out what he was actually going after.
“It can get weird or you can look at it as almost like a metaphor and I choose to look at it in a slightly more metaphorical way in terms of what Danny was going after. He was a poet and novelist and he’s trying to sell a book – that’s important to remember. He’s trying to make this thing interesting to people so he comes up with this idea of the Octopus, which is classic organised crime imagery.”
Casolaro warned his brother Tony that if he had an accident, not to believe it was an accident. Weeks later, on 10 August 1991, Casolaro was found dead in a hotel bathtub. A coroner determined that it was suicide; it is possible that Casolaro had reached a dead end on the story, was broke and lost hope. But his body was quickly embalmed without the family’s permission, making an autopsy more difficult. Some close to the case believe it was murder. Treitz and Hansen are uncertain.
Hansen says: “Throughout the process of making the film, we would flip-flop between the two conclusions, sometimes multiple times in a day. It was like a constant going back and forth. Our baseline was: Zach was 51% sure that it was a suicide and I was 51% sure that it was a homicide. For me, it’s tough to say for sure but there are too many unexplained weird things that make this suicide for me too confusing to sit well with.”
Treitz is more cautious. “It’s largely a Rorschach test for where people’s own beliefs are,” he says. “It’s funny how, if I explain this story in a very short way to somebody, nine times out of 10, they’re like, oh, he was murdered by the government, that’s plainly obvious. Our human brains are wired to be conspiracy theorists because in the absence of definite information we, almost from an animal sense, fill in the gaps with the worst possible explanation.
“If you allow yourself to step back from that and look at the facts, it’s worth seeing the journey that we went on and see how we lay out several pretty plausible scenarios for what happened and the people that he was talking to that is more illustrative than a basic yes or no answer.
“That’s kind of reductive and I hate to be this guy but whether he killed himself or not doesn’t actually mean that what he was on to was real or not at the end of the day, because this is murky and he could have had an any number of things going on in his personal life. What he was on to was actually an incredible story and that’s what we set out to tell as well. We saw the adventure side of it in Danny’s writing and we saw the frustration and it’s hard to take one without the other.”
American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders is now available on Netflix
