Death of a Journalist
by Harry V. Martin
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
Journalist Danny Casolaro had a tenacious, bull-dog approach to investigative journalism. He would research his subject and then have a face-to-face confrontation with that subject. There were no holds barred. That style of journalism may have cost him his life. Casolaro is one of many journalists, attorneys and investigators who have perished in their search for the truth about this nation, about clandestine government operations, private arms, drug dealers and the CIA.
Casolaro was found dead in a West Virginia hotel room. His wrists had been slashed 10 times. He was not only ruled a suicide, but his body was embalmed and buried before his family was even notified. But was it suicide? Too many deaths, too many suspicious circumstances lay challenge to that pronunciation. But this article is not about Danny's death, it is about his life. The Sentinel has received exclusive inside information on what Danny was doing before he died, who and what he was investigating and where he was receiving his information from.
Danny was writing a book - a book that would blow the socks off Washington. It began to connect the Bank of Credit and Commerce (BCCI) scandal with INSLAW, the Iran-Contra deals, Israeli-U.S. secret arrangements, misuse of Indian tribes, drug trafficking and murder all into one neat and sordid package. Before his death he thought he had cracked all the necessary mysteries to link what he called the Octopus of the American government.
Danny, at one time, worked with Jack Anderson, a nationally acclaimed Washington columnist. One of his key contacts was Alan D. Standorf. According to Danny, Standorf was a key supplier of documents that exposed the giant government scandal in banking, intelligence and underworld ties. Standorf was working in a very sensitive and secret communication center for the U.S. government. He could listen in or intercept message traffic from the intelligence community. Standorf supplied volumes of secret documents to Danny. High speed Xerox commercial duplicating and collating machinery was set up in the Hilton Hotel in room 900, to provide Danny copies of all documents and allow Standorf time to place the documents back in their original files. But then Danny lost his source; Standorf was found dead at Washington, D.C.'s National Airport - he died of a blow to the head. His body was found on the back floor of his car, under a pile of luggage and personal items.
Danny also had contact with Dennis Eisman and Michael Riconoscuito. Eisman, who was to represent Riconoscuito in a criminal trial, was in contact with Danny on a frequent basis. Riconoscuito is a key witness in the INSIAW case and on the October Surprise investigation, as well as Iran-Contra. Riconoscuito apparently was the key electronics man for the U.S. intelligence community. He was arrested eight days after providing Congress with testimony in the INSLAW case. Eisman is now dead with a single bullet wound to the chest; they say it was suicide, as well. Eisman was to have picked up critical information at a parking lot the day he was shot. That information was destined for Danny and Riconoscuito; but it never came to be.
Danny called the INSLAW case the Òfrosting on the cakeÓ of his investigation. He claimed to know all the Washington players in the Octopus; from the White House and Justice Departnent, right down to the intelligence community and mob ties. He was investigating the following individuals and companies at the time of his death:
• Dominic and Bob Bolsano
• Gemini Industries
• The Papago Indian tribe
• The Menominee Indian tribe
• The Cabazon Indian tribe
• The Primerit Bank of Nevada
• BCCI and 300 other financial institutions
• Dr. Earl Brian
• Peter Videnieks
• Community Banking of Southern California
• Homes Savings of Seattle
• Theodore Strand
• Robert Booth Nichols
• Department of Commerce EDA funds
• The Wackenhut Corporation
• Former BofA director Bill Jenson
along with loan sharks, Mafia and mob ties, and links between the deaths of Indians and journalist Don Boyles, who was killed in a car explosion in Arizona many years ago. Danny was also examining the gold-platinum smuggling that came from Southeast Asia through Mexico and then through the Papago Indian reservation in New Mexico. He fingered a corridor between Mexico and New Mexico which was allowed to be opened and which the Drug Enforcement Agency refused to patrol. He was also looking at gold shipments from the Republic of South Vietnam.
According to an inside informant, Danny was threatened by a man who controls the Indian tribes. ÒNow that you know this stuff you will have to die,Ó Danny reported was the threat. He was also concerned with the IBM-Tel Aviv connection which could link the use of lNSLAW's PROMIS software to Israeli intelligence.
Danny was in contact with Bill Hamilton of INSLAW, and was scheduled to meet with Videnieks and Brian about the time he died. He had six file folders with him at all times. Just before his alleged meeting, he brought the folders home. In a search of his house, no documents were reported found. Those documents were seldom left behind by Danny.
Danny had conversations with Allan Michael May, a former Nixon campaign financial aide, who is alleged to have wired $40 million to the Iranians in October 1980 as a down payment on the hostage
deal. May died in San Francisco four days after the Napa Sentinel reported his connections to the October Surprise. At first officials said he died of a heart attack, but the autopsy report was changed to reflect May had polypharmacuticals in his system. Danny was also working with Anson Ng of the Financial Times of London. Both were zeroing in on the Cabazon Indians-Inslaw-Iran-Contra links.Ng was found dead in Guatemala with a single bullet wound in his chest. Like Eisman, like Danny, the verdict was suicide.
Peter Zokosky had close liaison with Danny. Zokosky had direct dealings with the Cabazon Indians at the time the INSLAW software was being converted for Canadian intelligence and also knew about the manufacturing of chemical and biological weapons for the Contras, through the auspices of the Wackenhut Corporation and the Nichols family.
But some of Danny's documents will show such things as a bank in New England which has $400 million in phony bearerbonds - used for collateral because the bank's money has been siphoned off. Another will show multi-million dollar loans based on only thousands of dollars of collaterial by another bank used to finance drug deals. Danny's Octopus was too large and in the end it ate him up...his records and his life forfeit.