Title: American Conspiracy – The Octopus Murders
Rating: 4 Stars
By now, I’m sure that everyone knows about QAnon. Unless you’ve fallen completely into the conspiracy vortex, it’s pretty clear that, on the spectrum of conspiracy theories, it’s deep on the batshit crazy end. The fact that it spawned from Pizzagate, the theory that there’s a cabal (theorists love to use the word cabal) of high level Democrats who regularly meet in the basement of a pizza parlor to engage in Satanic, cannibalistic, sex abuse of minors, shows you that you’re probably going to be in for a bumpy ride. The saintly Donald Trump is bravely fighting off this group of pedophiles. Let’s not forget that either the assassinated John F Kennedy or his son (dead in a plane crash) was going to reappear in November 2021 (in case you haven’t noticed, that did not happen) to be Trump’s running mate. Trump also did not get reinstated as President as predicted on March 4, 2021, or on March 20, 2021, or even on August 13, 2021.
In short, it’s madness. The fact that, fairly recently, some twenty-five percent of all Republicans believe it is astounding.
I do have a confession to make. Decades ago, when in my mid twenties, it would be fair to say that conspiracy theories were kind of a guilty pleasure for me. Still a young adult, I probably found the anarchic state of being an adult to be subconsciously unsettling. In some weird way, believing in conspiracy theories gives one some confidence that someone, somewhere, has their hand on the till of reality and is driving it. Even if that person was evil, that would at least imply that there’s some order and control in the world.
Decades older, I understand the foolishness of that. The world is anarchy. There is no meaning. We’re on a infinitesimally small rock floating in the middle of an incomprehensibly large universe, which if some theories holds true, is itself nothing more than one of an even more incomprehensibly large number of multiverses. That’s just how it is. Deal with it.
Be that as it may, in the 1980s and 1990s, I strolled around in the murky world of conspiracy theories. The granddaddy of them all is, of course, the JFK assassination. There are so many more. A certainly not exhaustive list would include: RFK assassination, MLK Jr assassination, New World Order, George Soros, reptilian humanoids, Paul McCartney (he’s dead, you know), Area 51, and fluoridating water as a communist plot. More recent ones include 9/11, Obama’s birth, and all of the people that the Clintons have killed (I believe it’s over forty now).
Yes, most of these are certifiable. However, that does not change the fact that some of the more outlandish theories actually turned out to be true. The classic example is Iran-Contra. It truly is too byzantine to go into here, but if you’re interested I did write about it here. It might be the weirdest theory of them all but a significant chunk of it proved to be true. The same can be said about Watergate, which I wrote about here. OK, maybe I haven’t -completely- gotten over my conspiracy theory phase. 🙂
That brings me to Danny Casolaro. I first encountered him when I was lost on a path in a gloomy wood (semi-obscure Inferno reference for you literary geeks). Casolaro was a charismatic, dashingly handsome man that believed that he stumbled upon the true mother of all conspiracy theories. He was down in Virginia to nail down the last confirmation. Instead he was found in a hotel bathtub dead with multiple slash wounds on his wrists.
The body was quickly embalmed without informing his family and the coroner verdict was suicide. This rush to judgment and closure has caused many to be suspicious of the official line. That, and he was apparently getting phone death threats and had recently told his brother that, if he died in an accident, that it was not an accident.
And away we go.
Many people have tried to pick up Danny’s somewhat cluttered and haphazard breadcrumbs of clues and tried to find the truth themselves. Thus we find ourselves trailing along, in a four part documentary, a researcher named Christian Hansen as he completely immerses himself in Casolaro’s documentation (of which there are boxes and boxes) to see if he can get to the bottom of it.
What, exactly, is this Octopus that Casolaro keeps mentioning? Well, it’s very complicated. I’d call it a mega conspiracy as it stitches together a disparate set of theories into an integrated whole.
It all starts with something called Inslaw. It’s a software company that created a groundbreaking application called Promis. Remember that this is the 1980s. As a software guy, it appears that the groundbreaking application was a relational database. Be that as it may, it proved to be quite lucrative. That is, until the Justice Department arbitrarily confiscated it from Inslaw and gave it to someone else.
Why, you ask? Well, as compensation to a man that apparently paid out forty million dollars to Iranians to make sure that the US hostages would not get released before the 1980 election (to prevent the so-called October Surprise; the Reagan campaign calculated that the only way that Carter could win the election is by negotiating the hostages’ release).
From here connections are made to the tiny Cabazon Native American reservation. There, a John Nichols was working with the tribe to set up a gambling casino and, oh yeah, setting up a shadow defense company to make artillery shells there.
Of course, it probably goes without saying that Casolaro manages to connect all of this up with both the Iran-Contra and the BCCI banking scandals.
As in all good conspiracy theories, there are unsolved brutal murders. One person claimed to have discovered evidence of fraud. He, along with his friends, were shot execution style. Of course, all evidence was nowhere to be found. Another victim was hog tied with wire and allowed to slowly choke to death.
There are two main people whispering secrets into ears. One is Michael Riconosciuto. A self professed child genius (although the filmmakers uncovered a childhood IQ test score of a simply above average 124), he has spent decades in prison for various drug offenses. The other is Robert Nichols (no relation to John Nichols), who presents himself as a deadly dangerous intelligence officer. It seems pretty clear to me that both men were spinning Casolaro in circles, possibly just for their own amusement.
One thing that I did find amusing is that Casolaro believed that President George HW Bush was in the middle of it. Bush is the Forrest Gump of conspiracies. He pops up at the weirdest times. It’s probably not that surprising when you realize that Bush was a CIA Director in the 1970s, was Ronald Reagan’s Vice President in the 1980s (where he allegedly had a role in, yes, Iran-Contra), and then served a term as President. I’ve read about some people that have even tried to place him somehow into the JFK assassination.
There’s so much more. What is the truth? After four episodes, probably unsurprising, the truth is elusive and unconclusive. On the one hand, one of the ‘highly placed’ intelligence sources turned out to be an Aetna office manager that apparently did her research by asking around at the bowling alley that she played at regularly. On the other hand, some twenty-five years after Casolaro’s death, the reporters unearthed evidence that appears to have been overlooked in the original investigation.
That’s how conspiracies work. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle that is just missing a couple of pieces. In your search for these pieces, you discover that the puzzle is just one corner of an even larger puzzle, so you start working that.
Rinse and repeat.
dorkenstein 