Table of Contents
EKO
Artist and bookmaker.
The water in Room 517 was red.
Paramedics arrived at the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, at noon on August 10, 1991. They found the body of 44-year-old freelance writer Danny Casolaro naked in the bathtub. His wrists had been slashed 12 times. The cuts were deep, severing the tendons and extending into the forearms.
The scene was a tableau of despair or, perhaps, a carefully staged still life of it. On the floor sat an empty can of Milwaukee beer and a cheap, single-edge razor blade. On the desk, a single page torn from a legal pad bore a scrawled, melodramatic
I know deep down inside that God will let me in.
The local coroner, a man unaccustomed to the nuances of international espionage, ruled it a suicide. He painted a picture of a desperate freelancer. Broke, depressed, and exhausted by chasing phantoms.
He said Danny Casolaro had simply run out of road.
The coroner was wrong. Danny didn’t go to West Virginia to die. He went there to meet the man who was going to help him kill the Octopus.
(what I’ve come to call the machine)
The Poet in the Ascots
To understand the death, you have to understand the man. Danny Casolaro was no hard-bitten investigative reporter in a trench coat. He was a charming dandy in ascots who bred Arabian horses and wrote poetry.
A character wandered out of The Great Gatsby and into a spy nightmare.
But beneath the polish, Danny possessed the one trait the machine cannot tolerate.
Pattern Recognition.
In 1990, Danny began pulling on a loose thread involving a small Washington DC software company called Inslaw. On the surface, it was a dry, white-collar dispute. Inslaw’s owner, Bill Hamilton, claimed the Department of Justice had stolen his software, PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information System), and deliberately drove his company into bankruptcy to cover up the theft.
Most reporters saw a business story. Danny saw a trap door.
PROMIS was a revolutionary tracking tool. It integrated disparate systems (banking records, law enforcement files, intelligence data) into a single, searchable stream.
It allowed the user to track a target across agencies, across borders, and across the invisible lines of the global economy.
Danny discovered that the Department of Justice hadn’t just stolen PROMIS to save on licensing fees. They had stolen it to weaponize it.
He found the mechanic who had done the work: Michael Riconosciuto.
Riconosciuto was a rogue genius, a child prodigy turned spook who worked in the dark corners of the military-industrial complex. In a sworn affidavit, Riconosciuto testified that he had been hired by the Wackenhut Corporation.
A private security firm built by Feds with deep ties to the CIA to modify the stolen PROMIS software.
His job? Insert a trap door.
A secret entry point that would allow the intelligence community to access the database of anyone who bought the software.
Our government took this “Trojan Horse” software and sold it to intelligence agencies worldwide. To Israel, Canada, Jordan, Brazil, and even, covertly, to the Soviet Union. The NSA wasn’t just spying on its enemies. It was selling surveillance equipment to its allies so it could spy on them.
This theft served as the beta test for global omniscience.
The Unified Field Theory
Danny pinned names to a corkboard. He drew lines between dots that weren’t supposed to be connected. He realized that the theft of PROMIS was just one tentacle of a much larger beast.
He found links to the October Surprise, the alleged 1980 plot by the Reagan campaign to delay the release of American hostages in Iran to ensure Jimmy Carter’s defeat. He found links to the BCCI banking scandal, the global financial institution that functioned as a money-laundering service for the CIA, the Medellin Cartel, and terrorists alike. He found links to the Iran-Contra weapons pipeline, where the same networks moving guns were moving drugs.
He called this network “The Octopus.”
The Octopus operated as a privatized alliance. Rogue spies, fixers, and generals who had turned the Cold War into a profit engine. They worked above the CIA, beyond the FBI, answering only to the deal itself.
They didn’t answer to the President. They answered to the deal.
They operated out of the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Indio, California. Because the reservation was sovereign land, it was exempt from many US laws. Riconosciuto claimed that Wackenhut used this legal gray zone to test fuel-air explosives and biological weapons, and to modify the PROMIS software, far from the prying eyes of regulators.
Danny had found the engine room of the Deep State. And he wasn’t quiet about it.
The Tightening Net
By the summer of 1991, Danny was euphoric. He told his friends he had “matched the head of the Octopus to its body.” He believed he had the evidence to bring it all down.
He packed a black leather tote. He filled his briefcase with a thick sheaf of documents. Computer printouts, wire transfer records, the hard receipts of treason. He told his housekeeper, Olga, that he was driving to Martinsburg, West Virginia, to meet a source who would provide the final piece of the puzzle.
He told his brother, Tony:
If anything happens to me, don’t believe it was an accident.
He checked into Room 517 at the Sheraton on August 8.
He wasn’t acting like a man on the edge. He was acting like a man on a mission. Witnesses saw him at the Pizza Hut, flirting with a waitress, literally quoting Gatsby. He met with William Turner, an engineer from Honeywell who had blown the whistle on illegal tech transfers. He was seen in the hotel lounge, drinking with a man described by witnesses only as “Middle Eastern”.
Suicide was the last thing on his mind. He was hunting.
But the Octopus was hunting him, too.
The harassment started weeks earlier. Strange cars parked on his street. Hangups in the middle of the night. Then, the threats became explicit.
While Danny was in West Virginia, the phone rang at his home in Virginia. His housekeeper picked it up. A voice on the other end said:
I will cut his body and throw it to the sharks.
Another call came. No words. Just the sound of music. A funeral march? Or perhaps just static. The psychological warfare was ramping up. They wanted him terrified before they made him dead.
The Cleanup
The death scene in Room 517 was a masterclass in erasure.
The police arrived, but the protocol was all wrong. The authorities embalmed Danny’s body before his family was even notified. Embalming destroys toxicology evidence. It flushes the blood. It makes a second, independent autopsy almost impossible.
The hotel room was scrubbed by a professional cleaning crew before a proper forensic investigation could be completed. The blood was bleached. The evidence was trash-bagged.
And the briefcase?
The leather accordion file Danny carried everywhere? The one containing the Riconosciuto affidavits, the bank records, the manuscript of his book?
Gone.
The official narrative solidified instantly.
A troubled writer, overwhelmed by debts and conspiracy theories, took the easy way out. They pathologized him. They called him “obsessive.” They used his own passion for the truth as evidence of his insanity.
But the machine didn’t just want him dead. It wanted to send a message.
At Danny’s funeral, a stranger appeared. He was a man in a military uniform, highly decorated. He walked to the coffin, placed a medal on the lid, stood at attention, saluted, and then turned and walked away.
No one in the family knew him.
No one has ever identified him.
It was a silent acknowledgment from the machine to a fallen combatant.
You fought a war you didn’t understand, soldier. And you lost.
The View from Today
Why does a dead writer in a bathtub 35 years ago matter now? Why should we care about a software theft from the late ’80s?
Because Danny Casolaro was the first casualty of the 21st century.
He was investigating the beta test of the New World Order.
And exactly one month after his body was found, on September 11, 1991, President George HW Bush stood before Congress and formally announced a “New World Order” in a televised address.
The “Octopus” he found didn’t die with him. It grew, it won, it molted.
The PROMIS software simply evolved. The concept of a “backdoor” into critical infrastructure became the standard operating procedure for the surveillance state. The ability to track a citizen across banking, travel, and communications networks is no longer a secret government project.
It’s the business model of Silicon Valley.
The “Trap Door” Danny found is now a feature in every single smartphone, every single smart TV, every single router in your home.
We are all living in the database Danny died trying to warn us about.
The network he tracked, the merger of state intelligence and organized crime, became the blueprint for modern governance. The ‘privatization of intelligence’ he saw with Wackenhut is now the norm with contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and Palantir. The ‘gray zone’ operations of the Cabazon reservation are now the ‘black sites’ of the War on Terror.
Danny Casolaro tried to fight the Octopus with journalism.
He believed in the old rules. He thought if he could just gather enough facts, if he could just stack the evidence high enough, the public would wake up, the courts would act, and the bad guys would go to jail.
He didn’t realize the Octopus owns the journalism.
It owns the courts.
It owns the jail.
When they killed Danny, they sent a message to every other journalist in America. There is a line. Cross it, and we won’t just kill you. We will rewrite your story. We will turn you into a cautionary tale. We will make you look like a quitter.
The Ghost of Christmas Past
So here we are, on the edge of 2026, knee-deep in the wreckage of the last century’s wars.
Tonight, I’m thinking of Danny. He wasn’t the first. But he was one of the last real ones. The kind who risked his life for the truth.
He was vain. Obsessive. Naive. But he had the raw courage to look the Octopus in the eye and write down its name.
He struck a match.
They blew it out.
But the spark landed.
And once you’ve seen that light, even for a split second, you can’t unsee what it revealed.
The Octopus is still here. Its tentacles are everywhere.
But thanks to Danny, we know its name.
Danny didn’t kill himself. The story didn’t end.
It became a relay.
We walk in his footsteps. We connect the dots. We keep the spark alive.
As long as one of us is still striking matches, the dark doesn’t win.
He risked everything to show us.
We make sure it wasn’t for nothing.
This article was originally published by EKO Loves You.
