From The Octopus, Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro
by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith
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Casolaro documented the most grisly of the Cabazon murders in his notes, that of Riconosciuto associate Paul Morasca: "In 1982, the body of the thirty year old Paul Morasca was found hog-tied and fatally strangled in his condominium on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. Morasca, who had been working among the Cabazon Arms confidantes, reportedly had the access codes for offshore accounts containing hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money ostensibly for covert operations (Casolaro's notes, p. 88).
Michael Riconosciuto offered his own comments on Morasca's death" "And then my associate Paul Morasca was found murdered. I was the one who found him. And Nichols and others tried to keep me away from our condominium office in San Francisco. It was suspicious to me. And after almost fourteen days of not seeing Paul--and then a day after he missed a critical meeting that there's no way he would have missed--that's when I went looking for him. And Nichols tried to get me down to the desert on an emergency basis to work on some project so that I'd be otherwise occupied. And I said that I'd be down there as soon as I found out what happened to Paul. And he was really pushy and really stressed out. When he came across to me on this, it made me even more suspicious. And other people that I talked to tried to dissuade me, and it was just not normal, the amount of pressure and emphasis they were putting on this situation. I knew in my gut...Paul was dead! He'd been slowly strangled to death." (Casolaro's notes, p. 104).
Three days after Paul Morasca's murder, a woman named Mary Quick--63 years old, a school teacher and Women's Auxiliary president of Fresno's American Legion--was headed toward Legion Post 509 when she was killed by a single gunshot to the head, an apparent unrelated mugging. A year after the murder, however, police learned that Riconosciuto claimed a business association with Mary Quick's nephew, Brian Weiss. Police sources told the San Francisco Examiner that Weiss gave his aunt a bank card with secret account numbers, perhaps the same access codes that may have led to Paul Morasca's murder. According to the police, "She had no connection (to any of the principals) and could be trusted. Mary Quick was to be instructed to give information only to Paul (Morasca) or Michael Riconosciuto. She was not aware of what the computer card was for and had never received the card." Riconosciuto claimed that Mary Quick's murderers were probably trying to recover the card. (Littman and Taylor).
p. 34-35