OCTOPUS and Danny Casolaro

Danny Casolaro was found dead in a hotel bathtub at the Sheraton hotel in August 1991 — the official verdict was suicide.

At the time of his death, he was investigating a sprawling criminal conspiracy he labelled ‘The Octopus’.

The exact nature and extent of Casolaro’s Octopus, or whether it existed at all has been subject to much debate and speculation since.

The cause of Casolaro’s death itself was disputed, with many authors and investigators regarding the suicide verdict with scepticism, leading to suspicions that Casolaro was silenced because of what he had discovered about The Octopus.

Had Casolaro stumbled upon a vast criminal conspiracy?

Danny Casolaro & The Octopus

The story of Danny Casolaro’s investigation into what he termed ‘The Octopus’ is strange and fragmented. There is divided opinion on whether he knew what he was uncovering when he stumbled upon the threads that pulled the tentacles together. Conversely, there is almost no divided opinion on the cause of his death.

Why would it be in anyone’s interest for a failing writer to be ‘suicided’ ? In Danny Casolaro’s own words, from the early pages of his draft book:

They are not government officials but their tentacles can reach into any part of government in almost any country including legitimate and rogue spy networks. They are not notable industrialists but they can pull the strings of the oil and banking empires at will. They are not known criminals but they have successfully penetrated all factions of organized crime including the Mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, the secret Chinese societies and the terrorist underground.

With its tag-team compartments, its exploitation of hundreds of people and its formidable stealth, The Octopus will help to unravel the most compelling puzzles of the twentieth century.

Know your prey

Perhaps his mistake was not that he didn’t realise what he was getting into; it was that he didn’t understand what he was hunting. When leaving for his ill-fated trip to Martinsburg, he proclaimed in a phone call :

“I am going to bring back the head of The Octopus.”

But what he had uncovered was not just an octopus; it was a Hydra. There would be no bringing back any heads, no big reveal. If, as his and other investigators’ research suggests, there is such an organisation, the stakes are too high. Remaining heads would ensure that they remain in the shadows, no matter how many heads you cut off.

"Hail Hydra"

Dominion is for elections what PROMIS was for the law enforcement - espionage nexus created by CIA.

And now-- The Octopus has just taken power in a coup in the USA.