------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Aug 91 21:36 EDT From: "Silicon Surfer" Subject: File 5--More on Casolaro (INSLAW) Suicide (Mary McGrory reprint) Tentacles of Scandal Touch Journalist's Mysterious "Suicide" (By Mary McGrory, syndicated columnist) One thing in the sad muck is clear: Before he died, Danny Casolaro saw an octopus. He told his friend Bill Hamilton about it. The tentacles reached into all the scandals we are grappling with in this summer of conspiracies unlimited. The body of investigative reporter Joseph Daniel Casolaro, 44, was found in the bathtub of a West Virginia motel on Saturday, Aug. 10. Martinsburg police pronounced it a suicide and proceeded to embalm the body with extraordinary haste - before they got around to notifying Casolaro's family, which finally heard the news on Monday, Aug 12. His brother, Dr. Anthony Casolaro, doesn't believe it was a suicide. Nor does anyone who knew him - or talked to him in his last days. A crime reporter, Casolaro was a happy, outgoing, gregarious person, the kind who cracks wise with secretaries and waitresses and endears himself to children. The day before he died, according to the Martinsbug Morning Journal, Casolaro told a Pizza Hut waitress that he liked her brown eyes and that he was a member of the Edgar Allen Poe Society. He quoted "The Great Gatsby" to her. He told Hamilton, his brother, his girlfriend and others that he was on the point of cracking the story that had absorbed him for a year. He had begun investigating the Inslaw case, a tangled affair of government perfidy and international intrigue that has been in litigation since 1983. In his explorations, he found out about related scandals - BCCI, S&Ls, Iran-Contra, the October Surprise - but until last week, he found nothing about Inslaw. Then he, joyfully said, he hit Bingo. One more interview and the case was cracked. Suicides do not tell their intimates day before taking the hemlock that they are "ecstatic" or "euphoric". Casolaro did. Nor do they attend family birthday parties, as Danny Casolaro was planning to do hours before he died. The last known call he made was to his mother. He would be late, but he was headed home. A manic-depressive might do that. Nobody ever suggested that Danny Casolaro was one. All the circumstances beg for disbelief, none more than the supposed suicide note. "I'm sorry, especially to my son," from a man who lived by words, just doesn't ring true. Casolaro wrote a novel, a children's book. His prose style, at least as displayed in an outline submitted to Little Brown of a book he proposed to write about the octopus called, "Behold, A Pale Horse," is on the florid side. Such a terse farewell, unless composed or dictated at gunpoint, is entirely unconvincing. The man who could have resolved the Inslaw case, Richard Thornburgh, resigned as attorney general the day the West Virginia police came forward with an autopsy. Excess was the hallmark of his farewell ceremony: an honor guard, a trooping of colors, superlatives from subordinates. Willam P. Barr, his deputy and possible successor, spoke of Thornburgh's "leadership, integrity, professionalism and fairness," none of which Thornburgh - now, by the way, a candidate for the Senate - displayed in his handling of Inslaw. Although the Inslaw case occurred in the time of Ed Meese, Thornburgh took it to his busom. Bill Hamilton, a perfectly nice Midwesterner, invented Promis, a computer software program specially adapted to crime statistics, which he sold to the Justice Department. The second year, Justice stopped paying the bill. Hamilton and his wife, Nancy, believed that cronies of Meese got the franchise to sell it around the world. Promis has turned up in Canada and Pakistan. The link with the October Surprise is Earl Brian, allegedly the agent who paid off the Iranians to keep the hostages. He was paid back with huge profits from Promis. Thornburgh refused to discuss the case with the Hamiltons or their counsel, Elliot Richardson. He did not answer Richardson's letters. He did not return his phone calls. He refused to receive his distinguished predecessor. The Hamiltons have been to court many times. Judges have recused themselves, witnesses have disappeared or recanted. The man who knows the most, Michael Riconosciuto, was picked up in Washington state on drug charges and is in jail. What was merely sinister has now turned deadly. Thornburgh calls the Inslaw case "a little contract dispute." He refused to testify about it to the House Judiciary Committee. Richardson thinks it could be "dirtier than Watergate," and he should know. Thornburgh's conduct is the most powerful argument for believing that Danny Casolaro saw an octopus before he died. Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253