Kenn Thomas
Steamshovel Press
SteamshovelPress.com
If they want to withhold those photos then they shouldn’t complain about conspiracy theories. The left-behind stealth helicopter is much more of a security breach than any photos of Bin laden would be.
But there's another secret tech issue: it was once rumored that the FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen indirectly sold bin Laden the PROMIS software, which of course figures prominently in The Octopus book. Why PROMIS failed him in this instance is a question. If it ever happened, if there ever was such a one.
The story is in the second edition of Octopus, but here's an old Mike Ruppert report about it:
Promis Software - Bin Laden's Magic Carpet
From Mike Ruppert
mruppert@copvcia.com
12-7-1
http://www.rense.com/general17/maf.htm
An October 16 FOX News report by correspondent Carl Cameron indicating that convicted spy, former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, had provided a highly secret computer software program called Promis to Russian organized crime figures - who in turn reportedly sold it to Osama bin Laden - may signal a potential intelligence disaster for the United States. Admissions by the FBI and Justice in the FOX story that they have discontinued use of the software are most certainly a legal disaster for a government that has been engaged in a 16-year battle with the software's creator, William Hamilton, CEO of the Inslaw Corporation. Over those 16 years, in response to lawsuits filed by Hamilton charging that the government had stolen the software from Inslaw, the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Justice have denied, in court and under oath, ever using the software.
Bin Laden's reported possession of Promis software was clearly reported in a June 15, 2001 story by Washington Times reporter Jerry Seper. That story went unnoticed by the major media. In it Seper wrote, "The software delivered to the Russian handlers and later sent to bin Laden, according to sources, is believed to be an upgraded version of a program known as Promis - developed in the 1980s by a Washington firm, Inslaw, Inc., to give attorneys the ability to keep tabs on their caseloads. It would give bin Laden the ability to monitor U.S. efforts to track him down, federal law-enforcement officials say. It also gives him access to databases on specific targets of his choosing and the ability to monitor electronic-banking transactions, easing money-laundering operations for himself or others, according to sources."
In a series of excellent stories by The Times, and as confirmed by parts of the FOX broadcast, it appears that Hanssen, who was arrested in February, in order to escape the death penalty this summer, agreed to provide the FBI and other intelligence agencies with a full accounting of his sale of Promis overseas. Reports state that almost until the moment of his capture, Hanssen was charged with "repairing" and upgrading versions of the software used by Britain and Germany.
On October 17, two different spokespersons at the FBI's Office of Public Affairs told FTW, "The FBI has discontinued use of the Promis software." The spokespersons declined to give their names.
On October 24, Department of Justice spokesperson Loren Pfeifle declined to answer any questions about where, when or how Promis had been used and would say only, "I can only confirm that the DoJ has discontinued use of the program."
Inslaw had two limited contracts to provide Promis to Justice in 1982 and 1983. Neither application had anything to do with tracking terrorist activities. Hamilton's suits charged that Reagan Administration officials, including Edwin Meese, pirated the software, modified it for intelligence and financial uses and made millions by selling it to the governments of Israel, Canada, Great Britain, Germany and other friendly nations. After the installation of a CIA-created "back door" into the program, Israel, using its lifelong Mossad agent Robert Maxwell, reportedly sold the software to "unfriendly" nations and then secretly retrieved priceless intelligence data.
The statements of FBI and Justice sources in the FOX story on October 16 have made Hamilton's case. They also give but the barest hint of the security breaches that may now be helping the most wanted man in the world. Bin Laden's reported possession of Promis may also explain the alleged threatening messages that were received by President Bush while aboard Air Force One on September 11th.
A mild uproar erupted in the days after the WTC attacks when Presidential aide Carl Rove indicated that threatening calls had been placed to Air Force One just hours after the attacks while President Bush was onboard. Some journalists excoriated Rove for suggested that bin Laden might have a mole in the White House who could have given bin Laden the secure codes to reach the aircraft in flight.
Bin Laden's possession of Promis would provide a possible explanation. According to Hamilton, under the right circumstances, Promis could have enabled the threatening calls to be made. "I have no way of knowing whether any Promis-related base has dial-up access to Air Force One. But if that happens, and if you have Promis, it's a straightforward thing to do. But one would still need to have access to the targeting computer.
"There is a central locator system to track members of the National Command Authority 24/7. If that is a database created with Promis and if anyone had access you could do it."
Such a penetration using Promis might also explain why Vice President Dick Cheney was hurriedly whisked out of sight and reportedly taken to a secure underground facility, where he reportedly works to this day. Cheney's prolonged absences from the public eye would also be explained by such a breach of security.
Numerous news stories, books and investigative reports, including a September 2000 story in FTW (Vol. III, No.7), spanning nearly two decades, have established that Promis holds unique abilities to track terrorists. The software has also, according to numerous sources including Hamilton, been modified with artificial intelligence and developed in parallel for the world's banking systems to track money movements, stock trades and other financial dealings. Systematics - since purchased by Alltel - an Arkansas financial and technical firm headed by billionaire Jackson Stephens, has often been reported as the primary developer of Promis for financial intelligence use. Systematics through its various evolutions had been a primary supplier of software used in inter-bank and international money transfers for many years. Attorneys who have been connected to Systematics and Promis include Webster Hubbell, Hillary Clinton and the late Vince Foster.
If true, and if claims by the FBI and the Department of Justice that they have "recently" discontinued the use of Promis are accurate, the likelihood than bin Laden may have compromised the systems the U.S. government and its allies use to track him is high. Additional information in the FOX broadcast indicating that Britain stopped using the software just three months ago and that Germany stopped using the software just weeks ago are equally disturbing. These are mission-critical systems requiring years of development. What has replaced them? And even if the U.S. government has replaced the software given to its allies with newer programs - several of which FTW knows to be in existence - the FOX report clearly implies that bin Laden and Associates have had ample time to get highly secret intelligence data from both Britain and Germany. Those systems might, in turn, have compromised U.S. systems. The WTC attacks had - by all reckoning - been in the works for years, and bin Laden would certainly have known that the U.S. would be looking for him afterwards.
What is Promis and what does it do?
Promis stands for Prosecutor's Management Information System.
In the late 1970s the legal system of the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) was comprised of more than thirty semi-autonomous regional U.S. Attorneys (USA) offices. Each had a computer system to track case management for prosecutions, investigations, and civil litigations. The problem was that they used as many as seven different programming languages. This made the transmission and sharing of information between offices virtually impossible. The computers in the USA's office in San Francisco could not read files sent from the USA in New York.
The genius of Hamilton and Inslaw was to create a software program that could access files in any number of databases and programming languages and translate and then unify them into one consistent file. Promis was the Rosetta stone of computer languages.
Inslaw won a $10 million, three-year contract in March 1982 to install a 16-bit architecture version of Promis, which the government had the right to use but not the right to modify without paying license fees to Inslaw, on government computers in the 22 largest U.S. Attorneys' Offices. In April 1983, the second year of the three-year contract, the government modified Inslaw's contract in order to obtain delivery of a 32-bit architecture version of Promis, which the government could not even use without paying license fees. In modifying the contract, the government promised to pay license fees if it decided to substitute the 32-bit version for the 16-bit version. In May 1983, the month following Inslaw's delivery of the 32-bit version of Promis, the government reneged on its contractual agreement to pay license fees and simultaneously began to find fault with Inslaw's implementation services as justification for withholding services payments.
The Justice Department thereafter withheld $1.77 million in services payments forcing Inslaw to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 1985.
In January 1988, following several weeks of trial in 1987, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court issued fully litigated findings of fact that the Justice Department "took, converted, stole" the 32-bit version of Promis "through trickery, fraud and deceit," implemented the 32-bit version of Promis in the 44 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices, and then tried to force INSLAW out of business in order to incapacitate INSLAW from litigating the Justice Department's theft of Promis. The Bankruptcy Court imposed a compulsory license on the 44 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices for the perpetual use of the 32-bit version of Promis and issued a permanent injunction against any further dissemination of Promis by the government except under license from Inslaw.
Subsequent appeals by the government saw the original rulings overturned on legal, not factual, grounds. Legal actions in the case continue to this day. Hamilton told FTW that none of the uses described above had anything to do with any licensing agreements for the software's use to track terrorists, intelligence matters or worldwide financial transactions.
The paper tracking of the refinements in Promis after the legal dispute erupted between INSLAW and the Reagan administration, verifies that at least one version of Promis was given to Martin Marietta, now Lockheed-Martin, which is now the nation's second largest defense contractor. Until late 2000, Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney sat on Lockheed's board of directors. Research conducted by many investigative journalists has indicated that Promis has spread widely throughout the defense contractor network. FTW has received multiple reports of Promis use by companies and institutions like DynCorp, Raytheon, Boeing, SAIC and the Harvard Endowment as well as by government agencies such as the Financial Criminal Enforcement Network (FINCEN) and the U.S. Treasury.
Here's how powerful the software is.
Approximately two weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the History Channel aired a documentary entitled "The History of Terrorism." In that documentary, a law enforcement officer described some of the methods used to track terrorist movements. He stated that "computers" were able to track such things as credit card purchases, entry and exits visas, telephone and utility usage etc. It was implied that these diverse data base files could be integrated into one unified table. He gave an example that through the use of such a system it would be possible to determine that if a suspected terrorist entered the country and was going to hide out, that by monitoring the water and electrical consumption of all possible suspects in a given cell, it would be possible to determine where the terrorist was hiding out by seeing whose utility use increased.
Conversely, it would be possible to determine if a terrorist was on the move if his utility consumption declined or his local shopping patterns were interrupted. Aren't those "club" cards from your supermarket handy?
This is but the barest glimpse of what Promis can do. Mated with artificial intelligence it is capable of analyzing not only an individual's, but also a community's entire life, in real time. It is also capable of issuing warnings when irregularities appear and of predicting future movements based upon past behavior.
In the financial arena Promis is even more formidable. Not only is it capable of predicting movements in financial markets and tracking trades in real time. It has been reported, on a number of occasions, to have been used, via the "back door" to enter secret bank accounts, including accounts in Switzerland and then remove the money in those accounts without being traced. Court documents filed in the various INSLAW trials include documentation of this ability as well as affidavits and declarations from Israeli intelligence officers and assets.
The one essential weakness of Promis is that it must be physically installed on a targeted computer for it to be effective. Hence, if Osama bin Laden is able to penetrate a U.S. Government system it must mean that Promis is there.
FTW has previously reported that the CIA uses Promis to track stock trades in real time. Thus, as described in FTW stories on insider trading directly connected to the September 11 attacks, the Agency had the ability to determine that immediate impending attacks were planned against both American and United Air Lines. The Israeli Herzliyya Institute for Counterterrorism was able to publish a detailed accounting of the trades within days of the attacks and their report underscores the connection between counterterrorist efforts and the monitoring of financial markets. [See FTW Vol. IV, No 7 - Oct. 15, 2001] Suspicions of CIA advance knowledge of the attacks were heightened when FTW disclosed that the current Executive Director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard was, until 1998, the CEO of A.B. Brown, the company which handled many of the suspicious trades.
All of these abilities were a given when this writer met with members of the RCMP National Security Investigation Section in the summer of 2000. Our meetings were reported in the Toronto Star and are described in the previously referenced issue of FTW. A key question that lingered after the meetings with the RCMP was how many versions of the software had the CIA and the U.S. government given out and might they not have been also using a back door against "friendly" nations for economic motives to give advantage to U.S. companies. It was not a question that the RCMP dismissed as unlikely.
FOX news reported that Osama bin Laden once boasted that his youth "knew the wrinkles of the world's financial markets like the back of their hands and that his money would never be frozen." He may be right. And an administration so lost in covering up criminal conduct - no less than the conduct of the ones which preceded it -- while trying to fight a war at the same time -- might find itself doubly wounded by the software of Bill Hamilton and Inslaw.
Showing posts with label The Octopus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Octopus. Show all posts
Friday, May 6, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
JFK & UFO
Military-Industrial Conspiracy and Cover-Up from Maury Island to Dallas
Kenn Thomas
5.5 x 8.25 · ISBN: 9781936239061 · Paperback · B&W photographs · $17.95 · Available Spring 2011
http://feralhouse.com/jfk-ufo
In 1947 six flying saucers circled above a harbor boat in Puget Sound near Tacoma, Washington, one wobbling and spewing slag. The falling junk killed a dog and burned a boy’s arm. His father, Harold Dahl, witnessed it all and brought his partner, Fred Crisman, down the next day to see yet another UFO. The Maury Island incident became the first UFO event of the modern era.
In 1968, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison subpoenaed Fred Crisman as part of his investigation into the JFK assassination, which became the subject of Oliver Stone’s 1992 JFK movie. Garrison believed that Crisman was the infamous grassy knoll shooter. And he’s the central figure in the “Mystery Tramp” photo of the Dallas rail yard hobos.
Illustrated with rare newspaper images, JFK & UFO interconnects the lingering mysteries of America’s most notorious assassination and its weird ufological subculture. It examines the denizens of the bizarre, semi-spook underground reflecting a stranger and more true history than offered by the mainstream.
This is a revised version of an earlier edition, which went out of print in 2004 and is now a collectors’ item. New research in this edition includes:
* What Kenneth Arnold came to believe about UFOs.
* Ray Palmer and the original “moon hoax.”
* The obsfucated analysis of Maury Island by Ed Ruppelt, author of “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.”
* The Nazi connection.
* Close-up on Guy Banister, an FBI agent inked to both Maury Island and JFK. Oswald worked for him as part of his “Fair Play For Cuba” cover.
* Fred Crisman: right wing radio talk show host before his time, with material from heretofore unseen newsletter from The Institute for American Democracy.
* From Danger Man to The Invaders: the changing image of the TV spy. (Crisman felt The Invaders was based on his life.)
* Gerald Heard and the missing Maury Island chapter.
Kenn Thomas works as a conspiracy investigator, university library archivist, and editor and publisher of the conspiracy magazine, Steamshovel Press. For Feral House he has written The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro, which helped expose the Inslaw scandal of the Reagan years. Thomas also co-edited (with Adam Parfrey) Secret and Suppressed II: Banned Ideas and Hidden History into the 21st Century.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
The Octopus Conspiracy: One Woman’s Search for Her Father’s Killer
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_octopus_conspiracy/all/1
The Octopus Conspiracy: One Woman’s Search for Her Father’s Killer
Andrew Rice
February 4, 2011
On the morning of July 1, 1981, three bodies were discovered behind a shabby, concrete ranch house on Bob Hope Drive, a main drag in a sand-swept stretch of California’s scorching Coachella Valley. The corpses were sprawled in a semicircle, on chairs and beds that had been dragged into the backyard. Each of the victims—the house’s owner, Fred Alvarez, his girlfriend, Patricia Castro, and a guest named Ralph Boger—had been killed by a single .38-caliber gunshot to the head. Police surmised that Alvarez and his friends had been planning to sleep outdoors to escape the heat of the house, which had no air-conditioning, and were surprised in the dark by one or more assailants. There were few clues and no witnesses left at the scene; the crime had all the hallmarks of a professional hit.
Boger’s daughter, Rachel Begley, who was 13 at the time, says she learned of her father’s death from a television news bulletin. Her parents were divorced, and though she spent occasional days with her dad, riding in his motorcycle’s sidecar, she didn’t know enough about his life to make sense of what had happened. The police would eventually conclude that Boger and Alvarez were killed in connection with shady doings at the nearby Cabazon Indian reservation. But Begley’s mother shielded her from all the murky details of the investigation.
After the murders, Begley went through a rebellious phase and fell in with a bad crowd. By the time she was 15, she was pregnant and had dropped out of high school. Eventually she got her GED and moved to Iowa. She says she would periodically wonder about the case and check in with the police, who never seemed to have any new information. Beyond that, she didn’t have time or tools to delve too deeply.
Then one night in 2007, she idly typed her father’s name into Google. She didn’t find much, but as she clicked through the few results that came up, she found a book entitled The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Based on the work of a fringe freelance journalist, the book argued that the 1981 triple slaying was wrapped up in an enormous plot involving arms dealing, private-security firms, and the upper echelons of the Reagan administration. Skeptical but intrigued, Begley dug deeper and discovered that over the years the murder case had taken on a curious life of its own, preserved on obscure websites and nurtured by a grassroots community of obsessives. To these conspiracy theorists, Boger’s killing was the work of a secret syndicate that they called the Octopus, because its tangled tentacles supposedly reached into some of the most powerful organizations in the world.
Begley’s simple Google search launched a four-year-and-counting odyssey, during which she has devoted herself to tracking down forgotten documents, corresponding with federal prisoners, putting questions to Oliver North, and even confronting the man who may have shot her dad. Her work, she says, has placed her own life in danger and made her a target of the same forces that killed her father. And yet she cannot stop. She keeps following the siren song of the conspiracy theory, the same beguiling cognitive path that lures others to the JFK assassination and Area 51. What was once a family tragedy has blossomed into something else entirely, a vast puzzle whose solution promises to illuminate not only her father’s death but the dark forces behind the world’s apparent chaos.
On a sweltering afternoon last June, Begley was sitting in front of a wheezing Dell Dimension 8300 desktop, beneath a photocopy of a prayer for protection from “evil spirits who prowl about the world,” trying to sum up the dimensions of the Octopus conspiracy. “You’ve got the drug people, mixing with the mafia, mixing with the Hells Angels, mixing with the government—various governments, actually,” she says as she clicks around on the computer. “This is where I piece it all together.”
Begley lives and works in a rickety house at the end of a gravel road, next to a small pond and a rotting wood barn in a rural town outside Louisville, Kentucky, that she doesn’t want named for security reasons. Out front, her “guard dog,” an aging flat-coated retriever named Lucky, lazes beneath her porch. Begley is 43 and heavyset, with piercing blue eyes. On this day, her air conditioner is broken, and her round face glistens with sweat. She has four children, and for the moment she is collecting unemployment and selling a line of weight-loss shakes to make money on the side.
Before she heard about the Octopus, she never gave much thought to politics or read the newspaper, and she certainly didn’t size up her dad—a bearded mechanic who liked to drink, smoke pot, and ride motorcycles—as the type to be tied up in byzantine plots. “I thought it was a normal thing,” Begley says of the killings. “Well, murder is never normal, but I thought somebody went to try and rob them or something.”
In fact, within days of the crime, investigators had fixed their suspicion on John Philip Nichols, who was serving as financial manager for the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, a group of fewer than 30 descendants of a desert people that had long inhabited the Coachella Valley. Nichols was encouraging the Cabazons to open a casino, a radical idea at the time that caused clashes with the police and attracted some alleged mob associates to the reservation. Boger’s friend Fred Alvarez, a dissident tribe member, opposed the plan. Before his death, Alvarez had approached a local reporter to talk about blowing the whistle. “There are people out there who want to kill me,” he warned. No one knew what Alvarez was preparing to disclose, but initial speculation involved embezzlement.
When Begley stumbled upon The Octopus, though, she found a more nefarious explanation: Nichols proposed to use the tribe’s sovereign status to build an arms factory on the reservation and ship weapons to Central American rebel groups like the Contras. Drawing heavily on a San Francisco Chronicle investigation, the book reported that he had struck a partnership arrangement with Wackenhut, a private-security firm with alleged ties to the CIA and Republican Party.
That strange story was widely reported in the early 1990s. But since then, others had embroidered those findings with more bizarre information, speculation, and extrapolations. Before long, Begley was tearing through websites and bulletin boards, finding herself drawn into the conspiracy. Much of what she found traced back to Danny Casolaro, the freelance journalist who had been the first to write about a shadowy “international cabal” of covert operatives he dubbed the Octopus. Casolaro tied the Cabazon tribe’s arms company to a Reagan crony, who figured in the so-called October Surprise of 1980 and was connected to a computer program called Promis, which was supposedly used for spying. In 1991, the writer was found dead in the bathtub at a West Virginia hotel, his wrists slashed. Authorities deemed the death a suicide, but others presumed Casolaro was killed because he knew too much.
“Most of the stuff, I didn’t believe,” Begley says. “I thought all these people were making money off my dad’s murder, writing these books.” She was angry enough, in fact, that she was determined to prove the speculators wrong. At the time, Begley was working in customer service for an Internet service provider, which was moving its back-office operations to another state, and she was spending her days sitting idly at her computer, waiting to get laid off. Begley had once worked for a collections agency, and she knew how to track people down. “I went into it with a mindset, I guess, almost like a police officer would,” she says.
No one had ever been charged in the killings. Nichols was long gone—he had died of a heart attack in 2001. But Begley talked to Alvarez’s sister, who recounted her family’s thwarted efforts to get the police to pursue the case. She then found William Hamilton, the developer of the Promis software, who had collaborated with Casolaro on his investigation. Hamilton called her back on her cell phone as she was leaving work one day, and he talked and talked until his battery died. “It was like—boom,” she later said. “He dumped it all in my lap.” Begley may have started out trying to resist the Octopus, but she gradually gave in to the theory’s implications: Her father had been caught up in a vast conspiracy, and it had killed him.
So Begley dove deeper, into the submerged ecosystem of interconnected message boards where initiates continued to discuss and dissect the Octopus. “I was one of those thinking that the conspiracy people were weird,” she posted on one of these boards in 2008. “Then I had my eyes opened, REALLY FAST.”
As she set out on her search, one of the first things Begley did was fashion a new identity. She came up with a screen name, Desertfae, and introduced her character in a series of YouTube videos. The first ones, set to pounding music, consisted of montages of images—an Indian chief, a close-up of her eyes—and cryptic messages: “I am lost … I need your help and guidance to bring closure … I will be silent no longer … Soon the clues and proof will be found.”
As Begley plunged into the world of the conspiracy theorists, she found more than facts and assertions—she found a community with its own rules, ethics, and currency. And it was a difficult one to penetrate; the cluster of people devoted to studying the Octopus tended not to throw their arms open to newcomers. Over the years, they had built a kind of gnostic society, a belief system that was both all-encompassing—a grand unified theory of everything sinister—and exclusionary, open only to the select few who could accept the devastating truth. They were suspicious of outsiders and divided into factions that warred over arcane points, often accusing one another of being double agents.
With persistence and a convert’s zeal, Begley managed to win the trust of some of the leading theorists. She formed a particularly tight bond with Cheri Seymour, a matronly San Diego woman who had been working for nearly 20 years on a book called The Last Circle. The two sealed their friendship with a transaction of weathered documents, the Octopus community’s customary medium of exchange. Copying Seymour’s files, which the author had gathered from archives, courts, and a confidential source’s hidden trailer, Begley glimpsed the far reaches of the speculation: bioweapons, Lebanese heroin shipments, Howard Hughes, the yakuza.
There were many competing interpretations of the Octopus—Seymour was particularly interested in the alleged role of entertainment company MCA—and they were infinitely adaptable, able to accommodate the Patriot Act or the financial crisis. Devotees found and fought one another on sites like Above Top Secret, conspiracy clearinghouses that host every conceivable thread of discussion. Begley forged an alliance with a retired FBI agent who was exploring a link between the Octopus and Satanic cults. She did battle with a prominent UFO enthusiast who thought the Octopus was hiding the government’s collaboration with a colonizing alien force. (In January, online sleuths discovered that alleged Arizona assassin Jared Lee Loughner was a regular poster on Above Top Secret, but his bizarre ramblings about currency and space travel, widely disdained by other contributors, never touched on the Octopus threads.) Begley also developed a venomous rivalry with Virginia McCullough, a California writer who accused her of being an enemy impostor, not really Ralph Boger’s daughter. When Begley posted a copy of her birth certificate online, McCullough called it “a cut-and-paste job.”
“I do not believe that Desertfae is a ‘victim,’ and she has not posted any information that she is who she claims to be,” McCullough wrote on one message board. “She is a low-stage puppet reporting to the puppet master and two or three of his minions.”
The man McCullough called the puppet master is a federal narcotics prisoner named Michael Riconosciuto, Casolaro’s principal source, who had worked for the Cabazon arms company in the 1980s. The convict, who claimed he’d been framed, continued to play a leading role in the factional wars, penning letters in loopy cursive to numerous correspondents. Shortly after Begley began communicating with Riconosciuto, she posted a new video, entitled “OMG Michael Called!!!!!” Looking rattled, she reported that Riconosciuto had warned that the Octopus was watching. Then she cut to shaky handheld footage of a black helicopter that had appeared over her house.
Begley wasn’t scared off the trail. She interviewed retired cops and unearthed new witnesses. She amassed thousands of documents: news clippings, police reports, Casolaro’s notes, leaked memos, reams of legal filings and depositions. (For a secret cabal, the Octopus was remarkably litigious.) Informants found her website or friended her on Facebook and promised they could tell her about the Octopus from the inside. “If you’re involved with some kind of high-level weird thing,” she explains, “and you’ve held it in for 20 or 30 years, and you can’t talk about it, eventually you’re going to be, like, ‘I want to tell somebody before I die.’”
Begley continued to post YouTube videos documenting her investigations, and before long they started winning a small but avid viewership—and not just fellow conspiracy theorists. It seemed the police were paying attention as well. Back when she had first begun investigating, Begley called the police department in Riverside County, where Coachella is located, telling them the case was bigger than Watergate. She got a dismissive response. But after she started posting her videos, she received a phone call telling her that the cold-case squad was reopening the inquiry into her father’s murder.
Soon, Begley focused her attention on one player in the killing: Jimmy Hughes, a former Cabazon reservation employee who worked for John Philip Nichols. In 1984, in the midst of a business dispute, Hughes implicated Nichols to the police, claiming he had ferried a cash payment from Nichols to some unidentified contract killers for the Alvarez hit, which he said his boss had called a “US government covert action.” The police had looked into Hughes’ claims but gradually shifted their suspicion to the informant himself. At that point, Hughes fled town, and the grand jury investigation into the murders fizzled.
Begley discovered that Hughes had become an evangelical minister based in Honduras. In December 2007, she began trying to contact him, but he ignored her. She had an idea why: On the website of a religious group, she discovered an autobiographic essay Hughes had posted that sounded eerily familiar. In it, he called himself “a hit man with a new mission” and told a story of elite military training and a career as a contract killer, a life that was transformed when he was born again. She also found a list of upcoming speaking engagements, which indicated that Hughes was scheduled to address an evangelical banquet in Fresno, California. Begley booked a flight.
On a rainy evening in February 2008, Begley sat in the gilded ballroom of a historic Fresno bank building as Hughes took the floor to preach. Inside her handbag, she carried a hidden camera that peeked out through a discreet hole she’d cut just beneath the zipper. Next to it sat a loaded pistol—just in case.
Hughes, a stocky 51-year-old with a graying buzz cut and raspy voice, bounded around, bellowing tales of his past brutality. Begley, nervous and bleary-eyed from a sleepless cross-country flight, exchanged incredulous text messages with an accomplice who had come along as backup: Mikel Alvarez, Fred’s son. When Hughes finished his performance, Begley and Alvarez came forward with a rush of adrenaline, introducing themselves to the sweat-soaked evangelist as the children of the murder victims.
“Can’t say nothing about that,” Hughes stammered. “It’s a long time ago—it’s in the past.”
“Not for us,” Begley said, insistently. “We’re trying to get resolution.”
“I don’t care who got killed,” Hughes shouted, attracting the bewildered attention of others at the banquet. “I was trainedin the military. I killed people all over the world, right or wrong, because the government ordered me to.”
Hughes stalked off, fuming, and Begley began to cry. That seemed to bother the minister, because he came back, speaking in a tone that was softer but full of veiled menace. Apparently, he had seen her web videos. “Are you aware that that goes all over the world? Are you a crazy lady?” Hughes said. “Think about your children. They need a mother.” He told Begley and Alvarez that the murder was a “mafia hit,” and though he didn’t explicitly admit to carrying it out, he intimated that he knew much more.
“Your parents were involved in some very dangerous things,” Hughes said. “It’s a lot bigger than just the murder of this guy or the murder of that guy. You’re talking political people. You’ve got babies to take care of, mama. Go home tonight and be at peace.”
Suddenly, the murky crime had come into focus, and the conspiracy theorist confronted an unaccustomed feeling: vindication. Hughes’ outburst seemed to confirm Begley’s deepest fears and also her most far-fetched fantasies. After so many decades of false starts and mysterious ends, Begley had finally hit upon something undeniably tangible—an actual lead in the case. Within two days, Begley posted excerpts of the confrontation to YouTube, ending her video with a postscript in stark black and white: “This ‘crazy lady’ wants the murders solved. The Octopus will be exposed.”
Shortly before Begley confronted Hughes, she began cooperating with John Powers, a Riverside County homicide detective who was investigating the reopened 1981 murder case. When Powers saw the video of her run-in with Hughes, he was impressed. “The statements she got from him,” Powers says, “no police officer would ever have been able to get.” He and Begley went on to form an unusually tight partnership. She shared everything she learned with the man she called “my detective” and helped to persuade a pair of reluctant witnesses to offer damning testimony against Hughes.
Still, the case had to overcome some curious obstacles. Powers was surprised to find that the records of the 1980s grand jury investigation had somehow disappeared. And it turned out that the district attorney of Riverside County, a long-serving prosecutor, was actually related to Hughes. Because of the conflict of interest, the case was transferred to the California attorney general’s office. After much procedural wrangling, a warrant was finally issued. In September 2009, Hughes was arrested at Miami’s international airport. Begley posted a celebratory video, scored to Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” It flashed up an image of Hughes’ mug shot, across which she had scrawled: “Gotcha.”
As fond as he was of Begley, Powers’ arrest complaint completely ignored the Octopus conspiracy. The detective doubted that a jury would believe—or even be able to follow—the abstruse connections that purportedly linked Hughes to the CIA, the Contras, and all the rest. Instead, he wanted to focus on the old dispute over building a casino on the Cabazon reservation. “Nichols thought he was going to be making millions, and Fred Alvarez was a threat to that,” Powers says. “That was motive enough for murder.”
On the afternoon of July 1, the 29th anniversary of the murders, a grim-faced Begley walked into a courtroom in Indio, California, for an important hearing. The chamber was packed with an expectant crowd of reporters, members of Hughes’ family, and a few supporters from the Octopus community, including Cheri Seymour. Hughes was ushered in, wearing chains and an orange jumpsuit.
Then Michael Murphy, a dapper prosecutor from the attorney general’s office, rose and delivered a shocking blow. “We have lost confidence in our ability to proceed with the prosecution,” he said. Begley closed her eyes tightly as the prosecutor gave a vague reason for his sudden about-face, something about “new information” and a reassessment of the evidence. Begley was allowed to address the court. “How many people must die or suffer at the hands of Jimmy Hughes,” she asked, “before he is brought to justice?” But the judge dismissed the charges anyway. It was enough to make you wonder, if you were of a certain mindset, whether the fix was in.
Afterward, Powers stood next to Begley outside the courtroom as she addressed the television cameras, sobbing. The detective was disgusted by the outcome. The attorney general’s office gave no further public explanation for its decision, but Powers sensed that the prosecutors were eager to “dump” the case. Murphy, he said, started to question the credibility of the witnesses Begley had uncovered. Throughout, Begley had used Twitter and Facebook to mobilize the Octopus believers to pressure Murphy, and at least a few called the prosecutor to urge him to look beyond Hughes and dig into the myriad connections they had spent decades documenting. Begley’s devotion and inventive use of the Internet had helped to ensnare Hughes, but the obsessions of her fellow travelers may have helped to undermine the prosecutor’s confidence. (Murphy declined to comment.)
Powers, for his part, doubts there ever was an Octopus. The detective blames Nichols, the self-aggrandizing adviser who convinced the Cabazons to build a casino, for conjuring the intrigue that continued to befog the case long after his death. “Nichols had a lot of people fooled,” Powers says, “believing that he was some secret spook working for the government.” Even Nichols’ own underlings bought into his mystique; Powers thought it entirely plausible that Hughes truly believed his boss gave orders on behalf of shadowy overlords. In that sense, the Octopus may have existed, if only as a deceived and malignant state of mind.
On the night of his release, Hughes emerged from jail into a furnace blast of desert darkness. “Only God can justify and vindicate those who are really innocent,” he triumphantly told reporters outside the Indio jailhouse. Fearing retribution, Begley had already split, driving over the mountains to San Diego, where she holed up at Seymour’s house. “It’s not over by a long shot,” she told me on the phone. Her cell phone kept ringing: the Los Angeles Times, Dateline NBC, her newly materialized pro bono lawyer, a victims’ rights advocate who often appeared on Nancy Grace’s talk show.
Finally, the world seemed to be listening. “Actually, this might be better,” Begley says, sounding curiously invigorated. Though this experience has been draining, it has given her a sense of purpose, of a momentous cause. Hughes might be free, heading back to Honduras, but in a way, defeat offered a perverse validation. The Octopus wouldn’t be the enemy she thought it was if it gave up its secrets so easily. “You’re going to find out real soon,” Begley says, “that the world isn’t what you think it is.”
Andrew Rice (andrewrice75@yahoo.com) is the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget. This is his first piece for Wired.
The Octopus Conspiracy: One Woman’s Search for Her Father’s Killer
Andrew Rice
February 4, 2011
On the morning of July 1, 1981, three bodies were discovered behind a shabby, concrete ranch house on Bob Hope Drive, a main drag in a sand-swept stretch of California’s scorching Coachella Valley. The corpses were sprawled in a semicircle, on chairs and beds that had been dragged into the backyard. Each of the victims—the house’s owner, Fred Alvarez, his girlfriend, Patricia Castro, and a guest named Ralph Boger—had been killed by a single .38-caliber gunshot to the head. Police surmised that Alvarez and his friends had been planning to sleep outdoors to escape the heat of the house, which had no air-conditioning, and were surprised in the dark by one or more assailants. There were few clues and no witnesses left at the scene; the crime had all the hallmarks of a professional hit.
Boger’s daughter, Rachel Begley, who was 13 at the time, says she learned of her father’s death from a television news bulletin. Her parents were divorced, and though she spent occasional days with her dad, riding in his motorcycle’s sidecar, she didn’t know enough about his life to make sense of what had happened. The police would eventually conclude that Boger and Alvarez were killed in connection with shady doings at the nearby Cabazon Indian reservation. But Begley’s mother shielded her from all the murky details of the investigation.
After the murders, Begley went through a rebellious phase and fell in with a bad crowd. By the time she was 15, she was pregnant and had dropped out of high school. Eventually she got her GED and moved to Iowa. She says she would periodically wonder about the case and check in with the police, who never seemed to have any new information. Beyond that, she didn’t have time or tools to delve too deeply.
Then one night in 2007, she idly typed her father’s name into Google. She didn’t find much, but as she clicked through the few results that came up, she found a book entitled The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Based on the work of a fringe freelance journalist, the book argued that the 1981 triple slaying was wrapped up in an enormous plot involving arms dealing, private-security firms, and the upper echelons of the Reagan administration. Skeptical but intrigued, Begley dug deeper and discovered that over the years the murder case had taken on a curious life of its own, preserved on obscure websites and nurtured by a grassroots community of obsessives. To these conspiracy theorists, Boger’s killing was the work of a secret syndicate that they called the Octopus, because its tangled tentacles supposedly reached into some of the most powerful organizations in the world.
Begley’s simple Google search launched a four-year-and-counting odyssey, during which she has devoted herself to tracking down forgotten documents, corresponding with federal prisoners, putting questions to Oliver North, and even confronting the man who may have shot her dad. Her work, she says, has placed her own life in danger and made her a target of the same forces that killed her father. And yet she cannot stop. She keeps following the siren song of the conspiracy theory, the same beguiling cognitive path that lures others to the JFK assassination and Area 51. What was once a family tragedy has blossomed into something else entirely, a vast puzzle whose solution promises to illuminate not only her father’s death but the dark forces behind the world’s apparent chaos.
On a sweltering afternoon last June, Begley was sitting in front of a wheezing Dell Dimension 8300 desktop, beneath a photocopy of a prayer for protection from “evil spirits who prowl about the world,” trying to sum up the dimensions of the Octopus conspiracy. “You’ve got the drug people, mixing with the mafia, mixing with the Hells Angels, mixing with the government—various governments, actually,” she says as she clicks around on the computer. “This is where I piece it all together.”
Begley lives and works in a rickety house at the end of a gravel road, next to a small pond and a rotting wood barn in a rural town outside Louisville, Kentucky, that she doesn’t want named for security reasons. Out front, her “guard dog,” an aging flat-coated retriever named Lucky, lazes beneath her porch. Begley is 43 and heavyset, with piercing blue eyes. On this day, her air conditioner is broken, and her round face glistens with sweat. She has four children, and for the moment she is collecting unemployment and selling a line of weight-loss shakes to make money on the side.
Before she heard about the Octopus, she never gave much thought to politics or read the newspaper, and she certainly didn’t size up her dad—a bearded mechanic who liked to drink, smoke pot, and ride motorcycles—as the type to be tied up in byzantine plots. “I thought it was a normal thing,” Begley says of the killings. “Well, murder is never normal, but I thought somebody went to try and rob them or something.”
In fact, within days of the crime, investigators had fixed their suspicion on John Philip Nichols, who was serving as financial manager for the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, a group of fewer than 30 descendants of a desert people that had long inhabited the Coachella Valley. Nichols was encouraging the Cabazons to open a casino, a radical idea at the time that caused clashes with the police and attracted some alleged mob associates to the reservation. Boger’s friend Fred Alvarez, a dissident tribe member, opposed the plan. Before his death, Alvarez had approached a local reporter to talk about blowing the whistle. “There are people out there who want to kill me,” he warned. No one knew what Alvarez was preparing to disclose, but initial speculation involved embezzlement.
When Begley stumbled upon The Octopus, though, she found a more nefarious explanation: Nichols proposed to use the tribe’s sovereign status to build an arms factory on the reservation and ship weapons to Central American rebel groups like the Contras. Drawing heavily on a San Francisco Chronicle investigation, the book reported that he had struck a partnership arrangement with Wackenhut, a private-security firm with alleged ties to the CIA and Republican Party.
That strange story was widely reported in the early 1990s. But since then, others had embroidered those findings with more bizarre information, speculation, and extrapolations. Before long, Begley was tearing through websites and bulletin boards, finding herself drawn into the conspiracy. Much of what she found traced back to Danny Casolaro, the freelance journalist who had been the first to write about a shadowy “international cabal” of covert operatives he dubbed the Octopus. Casolaro tied the Cabazon tribe’s arms company to a Reagan crony, who figured in the so-called October Surprise of 1980 and was connected to a computer program called Promis, which was supposedly used for spying. In 1991, the writer was found dead in the bathtub at a West Virginia hotel, his wrists slashed. Authorities deemed the death a suicide, but others presumed Casolaro was killed because he knew too much.
“Most of the stuff, I didn’t believe,” Begley says. “I thought all these people were making money off my dad’s murder, writing these books.” She was angry enough, in fact, that she was determined to prove the speculators wrong. At the time, Begley was working in customer service for an Internet service provider, which was moving its back-office operations to another state, and she was spending her days sitting idly at her computer, waiting to get laid off. Begley had once worked for a collections agency, and she knew how to track people down. “I went into it with a mindset, I guess, almost like a police officer would,” she says.
No one had ever been charged in the killings. Nichols was long gone—he had died of a heart attack in 2001. But Begley talked to Alvarez’s sister, who recounted her family’s thwarted efforts to get the police to pursue the case. She then found William Hamilton, the developer of the Promis software, who had collaborated with Casolaro on his investigation. Hamilton called her back on her cell phone as she was leaving work one day, and he talked and talked until his battery died. “It was like—boom,” she later said. “He dumped it all in my lap.” Begley may have started out trying to resist the Octopus, but she gradually gave in to the theory’s implications: Her father had been caught up in a vast conspiracy, and it had killed him.
So Begley dove deeper, into the submerged ecosystem of interconnected message boards where initiates continued to discuss and dissect the Octopus. “I was one of those thinking that the conspiracy people were weird,” she posted on one of these boards in 2008. “Then I had my eyes opened, REALLY FAST.”
As she set out on her search, one of the first things Begley did was fashion a new identity. She came up with a screen name, Desertfae, and introduced her character in a series of YouTube videos. The first ones, set to pounding music, consisted of montages of images—an Indian chief, a close-up of her eyes—and cryptic messages: “I am lost … I need your help and guidance to bring closure … I will be silent no longer … Soon the clues and proof will be found.”
As Begley plunged into the world of the conspiracy theorists, she found more than facts and assertions—she found a community with its own rules, ethics, and currency. And it was a difficult one to penetrate; the cluster of people devoted to studying the Octopus tended not to throw their arms open to newcomers. Over the years, they had built a kind of gnostic society, a belief system that was both all-encompassing—a grand unified theory of everything sinister—and exclusionary, open only to the select few who could accept the devastating truth. They were suspicious of outsiders and divided into factions that warred over arcane points, often accusing one another of being double agents.
With persistence and a convert’s zeal, Begley managed to win the trust of some of the leading theorists. She formed a particularly tight bond with Cheri Seymour, a matronly San Diego woman who had been working for nearly 20 years on a book called The Last Circle. The two sealed their friendship with a transaction of weathered documents, the Octopus community’s customary medium of exchange. Copying Seymour’s files, which the author had gathered from archives, courts, and a confidential source’s hidden trailer, Begley glimpsed the far reaches of the speculation: bioweapons, Lebanese heroin shipments, Howard Hughes, the yakuza.
There were many competing interpretations of the Octopus—Seymour was particularly interested in the alleged role of entertainment company MCA—and they were infinitely adaptable, able to accommodate the Patriot Act or the financial crisis. Devotees found and fought one another on sites like Above Top Secret, conspiracy clearinghouses that host every conceivable thread of discussion. Begley forged an alliance with a retired FBI agent who was exploring a link between the Octopus and Satanic cults. She did battle with a prominent UFO enthusiast who thought the Octopus was hiding the government’s collaboration with a colonizing alien force. (In January, online sleuths discovered that alleged Arizona assassin Jared Lee Loughner was a regular poster on Above Top Secret, but his bizarre ramblings about currency and space travel, widely disdained by other contributors, never touched on the Octopus threads.) Begley also developed a venomous rivalry with Virginia McCullough, a California writer who accused her of being an enemy impostor, not really Ralph Boger’s daughter. When Begley posted a copy of her birth certificate online, McCullough called it “a cut-and-paste job.”
“I do not believe that Desertfae is a ‘victim,’ and she has not posted any information that she is who she claims to be,” McCullough wrote on one message board. “She is a low-stage puppet reporting to the puppet master and two or three of his minions.”
The man McCullough called the puppet master is a federal narcotics prisoner named Michael Riconosciuto, Casolaro’s principal source, who had worked for the Cabazon arms company in the 1980s. The convict, who claimed he’d been framed, continued to play a leading role in the factional wars, penning letters in loopy cursive to numerous correspondents. Shortly after Begley began communicating with Riconosciuto, she posted a new video, entitled “OMG Michael Called!!!!!” Looking rattled, she reported that Riconosciuto had warned that the Octopus was watching. Then she cut to shaky handheld footage of a black helicopter that had appeared over her house.
Begley wasn’t scared off the trail. She interviewed retired cops and unearthed new witnesses. She amassed thousands of documents: news clippings, police reports, Casolaro’s notes, leaked memos, reams of legal filings and depositions. (For a secret cabal, the Octopus was remarkably litigious.) Informants found her website or friended her on Facebook and promised they could tell her about the Octopus from the inside. “If you’re involved with some kind of high-level weird thing,” she explains, “and you’ve held it in for 20 or 30 years, and you can’t talk about it, eventually you’re going to be, like, ‘I want to tell somebody before I die.’”
Begley continued to post YouTube videos documenting her investigations, and before long they started winning a small but avid viewership—and not just fellow conspiracy theorists. It seemed the police were paying attention as well. Back when she had first begun investigating, Begley called the police department in Riverside County, where Coachella is located, telling them the case was bigger than Watergate. She got a dismissive response. But after she started posting her videos, she received a phone call telling her that the cold-case squad was reopening the inquiry into her father’s murder.
Soon, Begley focused her attention on one player in the killing: Jimmy Hughes, a former Cabazon reservation employee who worked for John Philip Nichols. In 1984, in the midst of a business dispute, Hughes implicated Nichols to the police, claiming he had ferried a cash payment from Nichols to some unidentified contract killers for the Alvarez hit, which he said his boss had called a “US government covert action.” The police had looked into Hughes’ claims but gradually shifted their suspicion to the informant himself. At that point, Hughes fled town, and the grand jury investigation into the murders fizzled.
Begley discovered that Hughes had become an evangelical minister based in Honduras. In December 2007, she began trying to contact him, but he ignored her. She had an idea why: On the website of a religious group, she discovered an autobiographic essay Hughes had posted that sounded eerily familiar. In it, he called himself “a hit man with a new mission” and told a story of elite military training and a career as a contract killer, a life that was transformed when he was born again. She also found a list of upcoming speaking engagements, which indicated that Hughes was scheduled to address an evangelical banquet in Fresno, California. Begley booked a flight.
On a rainy evening in February 2008, Begley sat in the gilded ballroom of a historic Fresno bank building as Hughes took the floor to preach. Inside her handbag, she carried a hidden camera that peeked out through a discreet hole she’d cut just beneath the zipper. Next to it sat a loaded pistol—just in case.
Hughes, a stocky 51-year-old with a graying buzz cut and raspy voice, bounded around, bellowing tales of his past brutality. Begley, nervous and bleary-eyed from a sleepless cross-country flight, exchanged incredulous text messages with an accomplice who had come along as backup: Mikel Alvarez, Fred’s son. When Hughes finished his performance, Begley and Alvarez came forward with a rush of adrenaline, introducing themselves to the sweat-soaked evangelist as the children of the murder victims.
“Can’t say nothing about that,” Hughes stammered. “It’s a long time ago—it’s in the past.”
“Not for us,” Begley said, insistently. “We’re trying to get resolution.”
“I don’t care who got killed,” Hughes shouted, attracting the bewildered attention of others at the banquet. “I was trainedin the military. I killed people all over the world, right or wrong, because the government ordered me to.”
Hughes stalked off, fuming, and Begley began to cry. That seemed to bother the minister, because he came back, speaking in a tone that was softer but full of veiled menace. Apparently, he had seen her web videos. “Are you aware that that goes all over the world? Are you a crazy lady?” Hughes said. “Think about your children. They need a mother.” He told Begley and Alvarez that the murder was a “mafia hit,” and though he didn’t explicitly admit to carrying it out, he intimated that he knew much more.
“Your parents were involved in some very dangerous things,” Hughes said. “It’s a lot bigger than just the murder of this guy or the murder of that guy. You’re talking political people. You’ve got babies to take care of, mama. Go home tonight and be at peace.”
Suddenly, the murky crime had come into focus, and the conspiracy theorist confronted an unaccustomed feeling: vindication. Hughes’ outburst seemed to confirm Begley’s deepest fears and also her most far-fetched fantasies. After so many decades of false starts and mysterious ends, Begley had finally hit upon something undeniably tangible—an actual lead in the case. Within two days, Begley posted excerpts of the confrontation to YouTube, ending her video with a postscript in stark black and white: “This ‘crazy lady’ wants the murders solved. The Octopus will be exposed.”
Shortly before Begley confronted Hughes, she began cooperating with John Powers, a Riverside County homicide detective who was investigating the reopened 1981 murder case. When Powers saw the video of her run-in with Hughes, he was impressed. “The statements she got from him,” Powers says, “no police officer would ever have been able to get.” He and Begley went on to form an unusually tight partnership. She shared everything she learned with the man she called “my detective” and helped to persuade a pair of reluctant witnesses to offer damning testimony against Hughes.
Still, the case had to overcome some curious obstacles. Powers was surprised to find that the records of the 1980s grand jury investigation had somehow disappeared. And it turned out that the district attorney of Riverside County, a long-serving prosecutor, was actually related to Hughes. Because of the conflict of interest, the case was transferred to the California attorney general’s office. After much procedural wrangling, a warrant was finally issued. In September 2009, Hughes was arrested at Miami’s international airport. Begley posted a celebratory video, scored to Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” It flashed up an image of Hughes’ mug shot, across which she had scrawled: “Gotcha.”
As fond as he was of Begley, Powers’ arrest complaint completely ignored the Octopus conspiracy. The detective doubted that a jury would believe—or even be able to follow—the abstruse connections that purportedly linked Hughes to the CIA, the Contras, and all the rest. Instead, he wanted to focus on the old dispute over building a casino on the Cabazon reservation. “Nichols thought he was going to be making millions, and Fred Alvarez was a threat to that,” Powers says. “That was motive enough for murder.”
On the afternoon of July 1, the 29th anniversary of the murders, a grim-faced Begley walked into a courtroom in Indio, California, for an important hearing. The chamber was packed with an expectant crowd of reporters, members of Hughes’ family, and a few supporters from the Octopus community, including Cheri Seymour. Hughes was ushered in, wearing chains and an orange jumpsuit.
Then Michael Murphy, a dapper prosecutor from the attorney general’s office, rose and delivered a shocking blow. “We have lost confidence in our ability to proceed with the prosecution,” he said. Begley closed her eyes tightly as the prosecutor gave a vague reason for his sudden about-face, something about “new information” and a reassessment of the evidence. Begley was allowed to address the court. “How many people must die or suffer at the hands of Jimmy Hughes,” she asked, “before he is brought to justice?” But the judge dismissed the charges anyway. It was enough to make you wonder, if you were of a certain mindset, whether the fix was in.
Afterward, Powers stood next to Begley outside the courtroom as she addressed the television cameras, sobbing. The detective was disgusted by the outcome. The attorney general’s office gave no further public explanation for its decision, but Powers sensed that the prosecutors were eager to “dump” the case. Murphy, he said, started to question the credibility of the witnesses Begley had uncovered. Throughout, Begley had used Twitter and Facebook to mobilize the Octopus believers to pressure Murphy, and at least a few called the prosecutor to urge him to look beyond Hughes and dig into the myriad connections they had spent decades documenting. Begley’s devotion and inventive use of the Internet had helped to ensnare Hughes, but the obsessions of her fellow travelers may have helped to undermine the prosecutor’s confidence. (Murphy declined to comment.)
Powers, for his part, doubts there ever was an Octopus. The detective blames Nichols, the self-aggrandizing adviser who convinced the Cabazons to build a casino, for conjuring the intrigue that continued to befog the case long after his death. “Nichols had a lot of people fooled,” Powers says, “believing that he was some secret spook working for the government.” Even Nichols’ own underlings bought into his mystique; Powers thought it entirely plausible that Hughes truly believed his boss gave orders on behalf of shadowy overlords. In that sense, the Octopus may have existed, if only as a deceived and malignant state of mind.
On the night of his release, Hughes emerged from jail into a furnace blast of desert darkness. “Only God can justify and vindicate those who are really innocent,” he triumphantly told reporters outside the Indio jailhouse. Fearing retribution, Begley had already split, driving over the mountains to San Diego, where she holed up at Seymour’s house. “It’s not over by a long shot,” she told me on the phone. Her cell phone kept ringing: the Los Angeles Times, Dateline NBC, her newly materialized pro bono lawyer, a victims’ rights advocate who often appeared on Nancy Grace’s talk show.
Finally, the world seemed to be listening. “Actually, this might be better,” Begley says, sounding curiously invigorated. Though this experience has been draining, it has given her a sense of purpose, of a momentous cause. Hughes might be free, heading back to Honduras, but in a way, defeat offered a perverse validation. The Octopus wouldn’t be the enemy she thought it was if it gave up its secrets so easily. “You’re going to find out real soon,” Begley says, “that the world isn’t what you think it is.”
Andrew Rice (andrewrice75@yahoo.com) is the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget. This is his first piece for Wired.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Stalking the Octopus
http://www.stlmag.com/media/St-Louis-Magazine/August-2008/Stalking-the-Octopus/Stalking the Octopus
For 20 years Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press has been tracking the oily tentacles of world conspiracy — and shaking readers out of their reality tunnels
By Stefene Russell
Photograph by Demond Meek
In 1991, when journalist Danny Casolaro was found floating in a blood-filled bathtub with a shoelace wrapped around his throat, the coroner ruled it a suicide. But people who knew Casolaro and knew why he was at the Sheraton Inn in Martinsburg, Va., where his body was found, never believed it was anything but murder.
Casolaro had traveled to Martinsburg to meet with one last source—the one, he said, who would help him cinch up the book he'd been working on for more than a year. He called it The Octopus, the same term he used to describe the cabal of spies, spooks, crooks and politicians he'd uncovered in his research—a group whose ties he had traced to, among other things, Iran-Contra, the Bay of Pigs, the October Surprise and even Area 51. But whomever it was that Casolaro was to meet in Martinsburg on August 9 never showed up. And on August 10, when two housekeepers found Casolaro's body in the tub, his fat accordion file of notes (which friends say he took with him everywhere) was conspicuously missing, along with his briefcase.
A few months after his brother's death, Tony Casolaro collected what was left of Danny's notes and clippings (the accordion file never resurfaced, and neither did the briefcase), turning them over to ABC News in hopes that the network would follow up on some of the leads his brother had uncovered. When ABC did nothing with the information, Tony took it to a friend at Investigative Reporters and Editors at the University of Missouri–Columbia's journalism school. The files were placed in IRE's archives. And that's where conspiracy researcher Kenn Thomas stumbled on them in 1993.
As it turns out, Danny Casolaro was correct when he guessed that The Octopus would rescue him from obscurity—he just didn't count on the subtitle of the book being Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Penned by Thomas and his late writing partner Jim Keith in 1996, The Octopus is one of the most popular and accessible titles in the conspiracy genre; when the first edition went out of print, it became a collector's item and was priced for as much as $100 on Amazon.com. Thomas and Keith used the thin remains of Casolaro's research as a starting point (the 2004 second edition even includes an appendix listing the contents of Casolaro's news clippings file) but also pulled on "affidavits filed by arms merchants and convicted felons; mainstream and non-mainstream political sources, including some that publish messages received from channeled aliens, others notorious for their far-right connections, lite-left leanings and radical chic pose; unattributed sources on the Internet; anonymous samizdat; participants in Casolaro's investigation; peripheral players; researchers who knew Casolaro; and researchers whose work expanded on the Octopus thesis." Rather than apologizing for this motley—and not always academic—tangle of sources, the pair simply directed their readers to the copious footnotes, encouraging them to "track these sources and make their own judgments concerning credibility."
Welcome to the world of conspiracy research, where Christian Libertarians who see the Illuminati's nefarious influence in everything from world politics to the design of gum wrappers fraternize with '60s hedonists who never abandoned their mission to fight The Man; add to the mix former military and intelligence personnel, professors, journalists, New Agers, geeks, hipsters, whistle-blowers, snake-oil salesmen, housewives, physicists and, of course, genuine paranoid wing nuts. In the conspiracy world, the red state–blue state rift never occurred. "We may all be nuts," Thomas told The New York Times in 1995, "but we're not all the same nuts." Thomas claims the left wing–right wing division is itself part of the conspiracy—as he told The Riverfront Times that same year, "the real division is the top and the bottom."
Thomas was born and raised in St. Louis and at first seems an unlikely conspiracy researcher. When he's not in a suit, he's at least in a dress shirt, with a neatly trimmed beard and a sort of ease that could not coexist with true raging paranoia. He reminds you of those cool sociology professors you had in college who looked buttoned up from the outside but taught units on the Yippies, included Jack Kerouac and H.L. Mencken on the reading list and screened 200 Motels in class. Thomas, who works as an archivist for the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri–St. Louis' Thomas Jefferson Library, has been a key figure in the conspiracy underground for years; his magazine, Steamshovel Press, has deeply influenced the underground conspiracy movement and also surfaced in mainstream popular culture, from The New Yorker to The X-Files to Baseball Prospectus, which opined that Major League Baseball boasted "enough fishy behavior to keep Kenn Thomas swarming for years." Thomas even wonders out loud if he and fellow conspiracy newsletter publishers Greg Bishop, editor of the now-defunct Excluded Middle, and Jim Martin of Flatland were perhaps the inspiration for The X-Files' Lone Gunmen; in fact, he saw smatterings of Steamshovel in Mel Gibson's Conspiracy Theory, too.
"Everything in there, everything this cab driver guy spots, is right out of Steamshovel Press," Thomas says. "There are two anthologies, basically back issues of Steamshovel. Brian Helgeland, the screenwriter, bought both of those books [Popular Alienation and Popular Paranoia] from Jim Martin at Flatland Press." Thomas says he's also seen material from the Steamshovel website show up on TV: "There was a show called Dark Skies on the SciFi channel that mixed in real historical figures with this whole alien story. I did some research one week on Dorothy Kilgallen; the next week, Dorothy Kilgallen was a character on the show. So I write a column about Carl Sagan—in the '60s Sagan presented a paper to all these rocket scientists on aliens—and the next week, Carl Sagan was a character on the show. So they're cribbing off the website." Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. "I've been told many times that I need to go to Hollywood and exploit this," Thomas laughs. "The thing about living in St. Louis is, for $200 you can go to any city in this country, and L.A.-centered stuff, New York–centered stuff—that's part of the conspiracy. It's part of the homogenizing of the world. I don't want to be part of that. I want a bigger picture. And you have to work harder to live in L.A. I think I've stumbled upon the perfect place."
That perfect place is somewhere up in North County, where Thomas bought a really lovely house—"the Everly Brothers' family owned it, it's this 100-year-old Victorian Folk house, and it's got a huge yard"—but doesn't want to go into more detail than that. Years ago, he took out a P.O. box and prefers to keep his address on the down-low. Though the first few issues of Steamshovel didn't attract a lot of attention (the inaugural issue was a stapled-and-photocopied affair, containing a Q&A with Ram Dass [formerly Richard Alpert, who had worked alongside Timothy Leary in Harvard's LSD experiments] that'd been orphaned after a local newspaper reneged on its agreement to publish it), Thomas says he continued to publish in order to get free review books from publishers, and when he switched to conspiracy topics, he immediately regretted printing his home address on the back cover. Weird people started showing up on his doorstep.
"One of them was an old guy who was just driving across the country and living out of his car," Thomas says, shaking his head. "The other guy's actually become a friend of mine and takes me out to the gun range, tries to teach me to shoot. He used to shoot with Burroughs—he went to school in Lawrence. That was another weird little coincidence. It was easy for him to track me down, but this other guy was from Texas …"
Ah, that's the other thing: coincidences. And Burroughs. Thomas studied literature at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs (he spoke at the ceremony when Burroughs' star was added to the Loop's Walk of Fame). The second issue of Steamshovel was dedicated to the theories of Wilhelm Reich, the scientist who developed a kind of chi accumulator he called an orgone box. Thomas (who quips that Burroughs became his neighbor … after he died and was buried in Bellefontaine) says he's noticed that "the grass is lighter around Burroughs' grave, and I tried to make the case that this is because Burroughs sat in the orgone box every day of his life. He was a Reichian. He had more life energy." (It could be true; junkies don't often live to be octogenarians.) Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, were also friends. So Thomas' approach to conspiracy is a decidedly literary one; the third issue of Steamshovel featured poet Amiri Baraka, though even then it seems that conspiracy sneaked in somehow: Baraka talked about being the only member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York; Lee Harvey Oswald was the only member in New Orleans. (Relating this fact makes Thomas roar with laughter.) Much later, Baraka would be jettisoned from his post as poet laureate of New Jersey after delivering an angry, conspiracy-heavy poem about what happened on 9/11.
"But before that third issue, Mae Brussell died," Thomas says. (Brussell was a Jewish housewife in California who put forth her own sort of Octopus theory based on a transcript of the Warren Commission hearings and thousands upon thousands of newspaper clippings.) "Also," Thomas continues, "there was another magazine called Critique, which was a conspiracy magazine—but that guy joined a cult and changed the magazine to Sacred Fire, and the magazine was dedicated to the homilies of his guru. It was like breakin' my heart, because I was putting out this free newsletter to hustle some books and I was into poetry, but it looked like the whole conspiracy world was falling apart—what the heck is going to happen? So I did a call for papers—'People who are interested in conspiracy, send me your stuff.' And then, that must have been '92, and to this day—I just came from the post office—to this day I get things like this …"
He pulls out a newsletter from The Worldwide Conspiracy of Einsteinian Relativity. The return address is San Quentin Prison. "I haven't totally read it yet," Thomas says. "He's even sent me a photo of himself. Still, the people in prison, I want to say, 'If you're so damn smart, what are you doing in prison?'"
It's actually been a light day at the post office. Lately, Thomas has been keeping a low profile; he has been planting lilies in his yard and swears that now that he has a house, "I just want to be landed gentry for a while." He has two kids, a daughter in college and a son who's just on the cusp of high school. It was during a trip to the airport to pick up his daughter that he realized that he didn't miss his life during the '90s and early noughts, especially after 9/11—where he regularly showed up on shows like Kevin Nealon's The Conspiracy Zone or stepped off airplanes only to be greeted by a constellation of flashing camera bulbs. "I remember one time flying into London, and I was received like I was one of the Beatles," he laughs. "There were flash cameras going off, guys with microphones saying, 'Can you talk about this, Mr. Thomas …?' I was blown away. But then there were other times when I used to do the Reich talk—it's very difficult to talk about, he was a very complicated guy who used his own language and created his own technology, so the talk can sound a little academic. I remember one time going to a conference, doing a little workshop on Reich, where like only six people signed up."
He doesn't, he says, miss the rock-star life. He'd rather be planting hostas. After his distributor, Fine Print, went belly-up around 2000, Steamshovel—like many small presses—had a tough time getting distributed, and Thomas didn't actually print Steamshovel Press No. 23; it's a PDF. Everything was, rather logically, rolling to a nice, clean stop.
But somehow, this spring Thomas once again found himself getting ready to embark on another rock-star tour: the first stop being RetroCon, a UFO conference held at the Integratron, a stylized, flying-saucer–shaped building constructed in the Mojave Desert in the '50s by a UFO contactee, George Van Tassell, who swore it channeled positive energy from the universe. Thomas delivered two lectures, one on a UFO sighting at Maury Island in Washington State and one on "Jack Kirby, Conspiracy Theorist." (Kirby was the co-creator of a number of Marvel Comics heroes, including the X-Men, Captain America, the Hulk and the Fantastic Four.) Then it was off to the Beyond Knowledge Conference in Liverpool, where he delivered another Maury Island lecture and one on Reich. And this doesn't even take into account a possible book tour in the fall, when Feral House, the publisher of The Octopus, releases Secret and Suppressed II, Thomas' follow-up to Jim Keith's 1993 book, which, among other things, introduced the term "men in black" to the mainstream—and contained the essay that eventually became The Octopus.
Now, before we proceed any further, it's important to know that the term "conspiracy theorist" is considered pejorative by guys like Thomas. The term "conspiracy researcher" is OK; "parapolitical researcher" is infinitely better: "Politics, of course, is going out and voting for people," Thomas says. "The 'para-' is everything that goes on behind the scenes in that process." And the popular perception of the conspiracy theorist "is a cartoon picture created by the media to keep people from taking these kinds of issues seriously," Thomas says, with a touch of crankiness in his voice, relating the term to a phenomenon he calls "the laughter curtain." Area 51 is the classic example: Disseminate enough dopey misinformation about little green men, and no one will pay attention to the trillions of dollars being funneled into the military-industrial complex via Area 51's black budget.
Of course, a cursory look through any of Thomas' dozen books, or an issue of Steamshovel, will clue you in to why the term irritates him so. As an archivist, his research is naturally both sweeping and impeccable. He's filed thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests. (Tip: File multiple times for the same material, and one day you'll get a clueless clerk—that's how Thomas ended up with all of Wilhelm Reich's prison correspondence.) He's made multiple trips to the National Archives for material related to the JFK assassination, which is more difficult than it sounds. You have to know what document to request before the archives will hand it over to you, so doing research there requires a lot of preresearch. He's a Jedi with LexisNexis and other research tools; he knows how to dig for information that other people don't know how to dig for, and then he publishes it. Nothing sexier than that. No tinfoil hats, no special Google-fu, no channeling. Just enormous stacks of documents.
"You have to create a triangulation of research, the bulletin-board model of research where you take the bits of data that come in and every one of them has a bias, you have to find out where the bias is, pin it up on a bulletin board," Thomas explains, sounding every bit the archivist. "When you find a certain kind of information clustered somewhere, you realize you're onto something. That's the whole metaphor of Steamshovel Press—your desk gets piled up with bits of information, and you need to create a metaphor for pushing it out of the way. It actually comes from a Dylan song: 'takes a steam shovel to clear out my head.'"
In an attempt to correct the semantics a little, Thomas created the motto "All conspiracy. No theory," which you'll see at the top of his site, steamshovelpress.com, and above the magazine's logo. Though bypassing the theory part sometimes gets him in trouble (he's pissed off some people by documenting, for instance, that it was indeed a plane that hit the Pentagon, not a missile, as some 9/11 conspiracists allege), his only-publish-what-you-can-document approach has earned him the respect of those who normally dismiss conspiracists, and he's absolutely spooked out the true believers; Bob Girard of Arcturus Books said Steamshovel would "feed that dark feeling in the pit of your gut." But Thomas' good friend Greg Bishop says that's not the point.
"It's informed by history and creativity and radicalism and basic mistrust of people in power," he says. "Kenn's about eight or nine years older than me, but I also admire William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and Leary and Ginsberg and all those people. I include a lot of UFO writers and paranormal writers and psychedelic researchers in my universe of what's going on. Kenn does not quite as much, but we still have that same spirit of being suspicious of people that don't have most of the population's interest in mind."
That lack of magnanimousness seems to especially extend to segments of the population that like to go poking around in the Octopus' business. Casolaro was warned several times, sometimes by his sources, that the information he was compiling could be dangerous to his health. And Thomas' friend and co-author Jim Keith, who wrote for Steamshovel, also died under mysterious circumstances; after suffering a knee injury at Burning Man in 1999, he was taken to Washoe Medical Center in Reno. Before being taken into surgery, Keith told his nephew, "I have the feeling that if they put me under, I am not coming back." He was correct. Though the hospital ruled that Keith's death resulted from a blood clot that moved from the site of the injury to his lung, Thomas theorizes that it possibly resulted from tissue contaminated with clostridium bacteria, incidentally one of the superbugs being bred in government laboratories for warfare purposes, which Keith had discussed in his last book, Biowarfare in America (anthrax is another popular germ in weapons labs). Two years later, Ron Bonds, publisher of IllumiNet Press, which had issued Biowarfare, died of clostridium poisoning after eating in a Mexican restaurant—right around the corner from the tissue bank that had been the source of clostridium-infected tendons that had resulted in the deaths of several people undergoing knee surgery. Of course, one is tempted to ask Thomas: Does he ever get nervous about these things?
"Well, you know, Jim Keith and I used to have this discussion: 'How come they don't come after us?' It's not a conversation I can have with Jim Keith anymore," Thomas says. Though he'll josh about black helicopters and aliens, this is not a subject he can approach with levity, not yet. "I have no proof, but Jim Keith, it's a horrible burden to try and communicate what kind of guy he was, because he was funnier and more charming than I will ever be. In Casolaro's case, he thought what would protect him would be to turn this into a fictional novel. It doesn't matter—if you start doing a real investigation and start talking to people, they don't care if you're going to write a novel or a story for The New York Times. They just know that you're poking around where you don't need to be. And that could've been what happened to Keith."
And who are "they"? Thomas laughs. "'They' are different people at different times. This whole question of why haven't they killed me—why did they let Abbie Hoffman go for so long? He's part of the Octopus story. He was delivering his write-up of the Iran-Contra affair when he was forced off the road by a truck. So why don't they just form an army and go out and shoot every dissident in the country?"—he's again laughing now—"But they don't. Sometimes they kill people, sometimes they have the laughter curtain. They make us look like crazy people. That's the thing about great journalists—they know what not to ask! In some cases, it's just to maintain access to power, sometimes just to stay alive." And besides: "My mentor into the world of the weird was Timothy Leary. And Timothy Leary would never accept negative energy. Never. He was in prison, I remember seeing footage of him in 1970 where he was talking about 'Whoa, how cool is this? I can slow down. I can just sit here and write and read and learn.' He did that, and then he escaped! He went over the wall. For a while, he was in a cell right next to Charles Manson. He taught me that there's nothing to be afraid of. There's no reason to let it get you down. Soak it up. Fight back. And do dharma combat with it."
Perhaps it's naive to say this, but it seems that things have changed a bit since the early 1990s, when Danny Casolaro was intrepidly chasing the Octopus like a cross between Columbo and Jacques Cousteau. Whether it's the transparency brought about by the Web or the brazenness of the current administration in consolidating power in the executive branch or even the conspiracy underground's success in mainstreaming concepts like black helicopters and MIBs (men in black), it seems to have a slightly less opaque ink cloud to hide behind. Oddly enough, Thomas is finding this phenomenon a little irritating, at least as far as finishing the manuscript for Secret and Suppressed II goes. "We came up with the idea, believe it or not, of trying to—and this must've been in January—of trying to expose what a wacky church Barack Obama belonged to. That was obscure at that point!" Thomas laughs. Though the book's being released to coincide with the 2008 elections, Adam Parfrey, Thomas' editor at Feral House (which published both editions of The Octopus), says that's why they're concentrating on the bigger-picture stuff, like the larger implications of Diebold's electronic voting machines—and the Freemasons. "We have definitely discussed investigating Freemasonic influence—there's a lot of interest in that with The Da Vinci Code," Parfrey says. "Though we're trying not to have these bizarre intimations about the Vatican, but address Freemasonry as really a large issue in the military as well as the government—with actual, supportable evidence."
And though the lilies behind Thomas' house are no doubt flourishing (the Everly Brothers would be happy to know), his spring tour has him wondering how to knacker Steamshovel's distribution problems; Nexus magazine, he notices, is still on the stands, so there must be some way to do it. "I consider myself a permanent fixture," he says. "What I may do is stop the magazine at that and create a smaller, comic-book–sized zine, hold onto the name and put that at the top, so it'd be Steamshovel Press presents, say, Popular Alienation or Popular Paranoia and make it smaller and less expensive enough that it can come out more frequently."
And why abandon the life of the landed gentry? Same reason he always has. "It's just like when I first started Steamshovel—it was basically out of paranoia that because Mae Brussell had died and the other magazine that did conspiracy stuff had disappeared, I had to make sure it was there for me to consume," he says. "But even more so, now that the country's changing again … we have to stimulate and encourage a variety of points of view, eccentricities, the creative life.
"I try to get that across to the people who take this stuff too seriously," he says. "It's hard to do, because they're locked into reality tunnels—that was Leary's concept. You're locked into these certain reality tunnels, and you can't see the bigger picture and can't sympathize enough with another tunnel to see that there's something else."
Visit Kenn Thomas on the web at steamshovelpress.com; Secret and Supressed II will be released in October and will be available at Barnes & Noble, Borders, local bookstores, Amazon.com and feralhouse.com.
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