The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal by Cheri Seymour

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Press Release – Part II – Exposing the Octopus, Circa Hollywood: Revelations of Former DOJ Prosecutors in 2009.

Journalist Danny Casolaro’s death was like a stone hurled into a pool of water.  Ever expanding circles of shock-waves rippled from the epicenter in Washington D.C. to the furthest reaches of the nation’s consciousness. When the last circle wave crashed upon the West Coast, its psychological effects prompted California journalists to seek answers to what had been contained in Casolaro’s files, stolen on the eve of his death. The Last Circle book follows the trail of his investigation which he termed “The Octopus.”

Just prior to his death on August 10, 1991, Casolaro ecstatically told friends he would be traveling to Martinsburg, Va. to “bring back the head of the Octopus.”  Instead, his body was found in a blood filled bathtub at a Martinsburg hotel, his wrists slashed deeply ten or twelve times.  No papers were found in his hotel room or in his car, though his housekeeper said he filled his briefcase with documents and took them with him when he left home.  The hotel room was cleaned and his body was embalmed before relatives were notified; authorities had assumed it was a suicide.

During the last week of his life, Danny had discovered a connection between a former director of international affairs for the Justice Department, the Cali Drug Cartel, and Robert Booth Nichols, an international intelligence operative whom he had been interviewing extensively for months.  Danny’s last phone bills indicated he’d spent hundreds of hours on the phone with Nichols, most of the calls averaged one to two hours.  This in effect, was one tentacle of Danny’s Octopus.

Danny had confronted Nichols about the former DOJ director and the Cali Cartel while staying in Martinsburg.  It was the last conversation Danny ever had with Nichols, and with Bob Bickel, a friend whom Danny confided in.  Bickel subsequently confirmed the conversation, but for reasons unknown, the Cali Cartel connection was never published in any of the official investigative reports on Danny’s death.  These included the DOJ report of September 27, 1994.

Nevertheless, Casolaro’s tragic death opened a Pandora’s Box which the DOJ was never able to close.  The former DOJ career official was ultimately indicted in June 1995 for money-laundering, drug conspiracy and racketeering in connection with the Cali Cartel.

The DOJ also found no relevance to the fact that a few days before his death, Casolaro had been warned by his source, Robert Booth Nichols (RBN), to drop that aspect of his investigation, but instead, Danny had called FBI Agent Thomas Gates in Los Angeles and related Nichols’ warning, explaining that Nichols had even flown to Martinsburg to convince Danny of the danger of his probe. Danny also called Richard Stavin, head of the Los Angeles Organized Crime Strike Force, because both Gates and Stavin had investigated RBN’s affiliation with organized crime and the entertainment conglomerate, Music Corporation of America (MCA), in Hollywood.

The FBI wiretaps had recorded Robert Booth Nichols communicating with Eugene Giaquinto, then president of MCA Home Entertainment Division, and a self-professed life-long pal of John Gotti, boss of the Gambino crime family in New York City.  Giaquinto was also a board member on Nichols’ holding company, Meridian International Logistics, under investigation by the FBI as a “source of funding for the purchasing of narcotics/controlled substances and the allocation and use of the proceeds from its trafficking,” according to the wiretap application.

Gates and Stavin learned more than they anticipated through the wiretaps and soon found themselves on a collision course with the Justice Department when they plugged into the DOJ’s collusion with MCA, and MCA’s cozy accord with La Cosa Nostra figures from the Gambino organized crime family.

In the Fall of 2009, Richard Stavin and another former DOJ career prosecutor, Marvin Rudnick, gave interviews for The Last Circle in which they divulged the astounding proportions of the cover-up that took place within the DOJ when their respective organized crime investigations were immediately shut down and the wiretaps sealed.

Stavin first noted for the record, “I never believed for a moment that Danny Casolaro committed suicide. I spoke to him for about 45 minutes the week before [his death] and this was not a despondent man. The first question he asked me was whether he had to be concerned for his safety because he was going to meet RBN.”

Author Cheri Seymour had obtained copies of the FBI wiretap applications along with memorandums of the actual wiretaps, including FBI internal reports on Robert Booth Nichols.  One of the main reasons she had contacted Richard Stavin was to corroborate the following: (excerpted from The Last Circle, Chapter 22, entitled “The Octopus Exposed”)

“Mr. Stavin: Can you please confirm that the FBI wiretap revealed a conversation between Eugene Giaquinto [board member of MCA and Gambino associate] and Martin Bacow in which ‘Giaquinto told Bacow that he would call Edwin Meese and have the FBI’s investigation stopped.’ Stavin, replying to what is in the public record, confirmed it in an e-mail.”

The wiretap applications and affidavits submitted by Stavin and Gates evidenced a belief that Robert Booth Nichols was providing government information and printouts to Giaquinto, MCA and the Mob in Hollywood. Stavin had listened to almost every call made when the wiretaps were in effect, spent countless hours at the listening post alongside numerous agents who were assigned on a shift basis to monitor the wiretap. He said that he and Thomas Gates “were astounded by the comments Giaquinto made about Robert Booth Nichols as to what information he could get from the federal government.”

Giaquinto told Martin Bacow that the computer printouts being delivered to him by his “government man” contained indictments and other ongoing investigations as well as IRS cases.  Stavin remembered one incident in which RBN had been under surveillance and photographed exchanging materials with Eugene Giaquinto in a Hollywood parking lot outside the Le Dome restaurant on Sunset Boulevard.

The intercepted conversations captured Giaquinto referring to Robert Booth Nichols as a “super sleuth” and other similar terms.  Martin Bacow had boasted to Giaquinto about his man in the LAPD-OCID (Los Angeles Police Department’s Organized Crime Intelligence Division), and Giaquinto boasted back about his “government man [RBN] being higher than the CIA.”

Marvin Rudnick commented that with Richard Stavin’s subsequent resignation from the DOJ, it proved that the DOJ was involved in a cover-up. “I knew they were under tremendous pressure from above,” he said.  In an e-mail to Stavin, Rudnick wrote: “I remember Bill Wagner telling me that your wiretaps included a call that went right into the White House …”

The wiretaps were so spectacularly successful that they were dismantled and the investigation was shut down when DOJ headquarters learned what they contained.  In effect, the FBI and prosecutors were ultimately obstructed and betrayed by the Justice system that they worked for.  However, unknown to the DOJ, all three of these honorable investigators had secretly and individually provided the wiretaps to an investigator for the House Judiciary Committee.  They were stored in the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland until 2001 when copies were provided to author Cheri Seymour and other individuals.

Seymour said when 15 first draft chapters of The Last Circle were placed on the Internet in 1996 by someone at Cornell University, she had no idea there was a last circle represented in Dante’s Inferno, but in retrospect it seems fitting, she reflected.  In 1306 A.D., Dante poeticized nine circles, the ninth being the last level before the final descent into Hell. “The last circle housed those souls who had been traitors to their country, their friends, and their Lords.”  This indeed was Danny Casolaro’s Octopus. The theme of the cover of The Last Circle book was predicated on this verse from Dante’s Inferno.

Read more about The Last Circle at:   http://www.ark-roundtable.com/book.html

Cheri Seymour has worked as an investigative reporter, newspaper editor, and private detective for two decades while pursuing a career as a non-fiction writer.  Her previously published works include the book “Committee of the States, Inside the Radical Right” in 1991.

The Last Circle book was released on September 16, 2010 and can be purchased at Barnes & Noble book stores, Amazon.com on the Internet, and directly from Trine Day Publishing, P.O. Box 577, Walterville, OR 97489 – Tel. 1-800-556-2012 – Website: http://trineday.com/