My feeling is that Casalaro got played by fantasists. The inescapable nature of ‘the octopus’ conspiracy is that its extremely undercooked in terms of evidence. Casalaros investigations point towards CIA laundering of drug money - but we already know about Iran Contra, it was known in the early 90s, and the world greeted it with a shrug. It’s a big leap from there to the realms of literal ‘shadow government’ type conspiracy.
So why did guys like Micheal Rioscutto or Booth Nichols spin these stories?
Riocsutto claims he has it all worked out. In reality, he is trying to work out his own life. Yes he was involved with intelligence, these kinds of operations are compartmentalised and its likely he never understood the significance even of his own role. Now as a washed up pawn of no importance to anyone, having sold his life to the most grubby and evil enterprise and having been burned for it, his desire to understand - combined with a narcissistic refusal to realise his own insignificance - leads to him creating fantasies of being an integral part of an earth-shattering conspiracy of power.
Nichols Booth is a similar story, although probably more self-conscious. Recall the scene in the documentary where a female journalist tells of him showing the ‘true’ Zapruder film. Her interpretation is that this is to ensure plausible deniability (ie her reporting of such an obvious fake would discredit anything else he said in meeting with her). My interpretation is it was rather the actions of a narcissistic conman trying to weed out a sucker. Is she prepared to go along for the ride with him, or does she have the critical thinking skills that will ultimately lead to her doubting him (and thus crippling his self importance) - if it’s the latter, best not to waste time in the first place. So show her something absurd straight away.
I dont know if Danny was murdered or not, but regardless I think his life was effectively stolen by these creeps, and it’s a dead end as far as conspiracies go.
What do you think? Apologies if it’s been discussed here already
Edit: none of this is to suggest that the idea of an old boys intelligence network involved in all sorts of heinous shit isn’t plausible in theory, just that Cassalaro’s sources were the worst possible combination of dangerous and useless
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I just finished listening to the Octopus series from Ghost Stories For The End Of The World after listening to a recent CTH Poppy pt4 ep.
Basically the Netflix doc fixates too much on some people and details that obscure the larger picture. For example the PROMIS software seems to be the basis for much modern day intelligence data collection and analysis like for PRISM and what 972 revealed about Israel’s AI targeting. There were also connections to Robert Maxwell and Adnan Khashoggi not really touched on in the doc. Another is that Reconosciutto is an odd character whose importance may be overstated in the doc but who does have weird connections to all of the other characters. There is a much larger web of many more relevant people who operated in many areas at the same time.
The way Danny imagined the Octopus was that it was just the same 8 dudes (hence octopus) who pulled all the strings instead of being people and groups whose interests often aligned (capital) but were distrustful of each other (spy agencies). Danny himself may have had a libertarian streak and was influenced by the larouchites who operated a lot around that time and in the same circles.
If you’re interested in this topic then go and listen to that podcast