From The Octopus, Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro
by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith
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This was only the beginning of the suspicions that spread out like waves behind an octopus swimming off after an attack. The first involved the recent death of Alan Standorf, the electronic intelligence specialist who, according to Rodney Stich, Casolaro had met through Michael Michael Riconosciuto--someone Casolaro had called a key source. After Danny's death, when Art Weinfield accompanied Casolaro's sister Mary Ellen and son Trey to the Martinsburg police station to recover Danny's car, they ran into detectives who identified themselves as working for the National Airport Authority in D.C. (Ridgeway and Vaughan described the authorities as nothing more than "aggressive, professional suburban public servants." The Com-12 Briefing suggested, however, that "Wackenhut Special Services Teams, along with NSA officials, informed the Martinsburg Police Department that they would secretly conduct the investigation of Casolaro's death and the police were to maintain this cover," and that "Casolaro had received 60 pages of whistle-blowing documentation on a major defense contractor. The material was repossessed that night by the assignment team from NSA and Wackenhut.") The detectives explained that they were looking into possible connections between Danny's death and Standorf's, a "low-level" civilian NSA employee at the restricted Vint Hill military facility. Standorf was killed by a blow to the head in early January; if not for the sake of stealing the $500 he had just retrieved from an ATM, then his body was made to look that way. It had been discovered at National Airport in late January, wrapped in his coat in the back seat of his car, money missing. The detectives explained that army intelligence officers joined their investigation of the case twice before an anonymous caller mentioned the link to Casolaro. While the detectives never came up with evidence connecting the two cases, according to Ridgeway and Vaughan, they did discover that their anonymous tip came from one of Casolaro's last informants, Bill Turner. (Ridgeway and Vaughan, "Last Days," p. 42).
Fearful that he might be the next target of the Octopus, Bill Turner got himself arrested in late September on a bank-robbery charge. (A similar strategy had been used by a spook named Richard Case Nagell when he realized he was entangled in the conspiracy to kill JFK. In September 1963 Nagell shot up a bank in San Antonio, was arrested and thereby removed as a player. (Russell, Dick, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carrol & Graf, 1994). Less than an hour and a half after a bank robbery in the rural town of Gore, police picked up Turner and matched him with images from the bank's security camera.
Was Turner justified in such actions, steering the police to connect Danny's death with Standorf's and fleeing into police custody? Turner failed to make two appointments to discuss this with the authors of this book and thereafter his telephone number became unlisted. One person who would support Turner's fears, though, is Harry Martin of the NAPA Sentinel. "Basically what we're dealing with is Air Force counter-intelligence," said Martin in an interview. "What Casolaro was finding was procurement fraud, manufacturing fraud and kickbacks. He didn't start out in that direction, but that's what he stumbled across. And, of course, that is what did him in...One of my contacts in the Air Force came back from Virginia the same weekend as Casolaro's death. Of course, it hadn't quite been reported. He came back and his knuckles were raw and he had scratches on them and he talked about beating up this guy in a hotel in West Virginia."
"Again," Martin adds, "I didn't have Casolaro on my mind at the time...At the same time the contact indicated that he had gotten ahold of all these papers from this guy and that he destroyed those papers. When you put two and two together--the contact had these papers and he dealt with Hughes Aircraft--and the fact that the guy had been in a fight..." (Interview with Harry Martin by Kenn Thomas, 10/25/94). Martin declined to give the name of his contact.
p. 115-116