Christian Hansen and Zach Treitz dissect the mysterious death of journalist Danny Casalero, theorizing he was murdered by a shadow network dubbed "the octopus" rather than committing suicide. They trace connections between Wackenhut Security, the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, and arms dealer John Philip Nichols, who allegedly exploited tribal sovereignty to manufacture weapons and bypass state laws. The hosts analyze conflicting accounts regarding stolen Promise Software, potential CIA involvement in the 1980 election, and the elusive Robert Booth Nichols, ultimately presenting an unresolved ecosystem of surveillance, disinformation, and unresolved conspiracies that challenge traditional narratives of truth. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Journalist Degree and Childhood Story00:02:12
Yo, congrats on your new Netflix documentary.
It is fantastic.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.
You're welcome.
Yeah.
How's it doing?
Millions of views?
Yeah.
As far as we understand it, yeah.
They don't give us too many details, but yeah, it seems to be doing well.
It was in the top 10 for at least two weeks.
So I think that's good for a pretty humble little show like ours.
It was the top 10 in.
44 countries, I think.
And four in the world at one point, number two in the US at one point.
After Avatar, Avatar the Last Airbender, which is a tough competitor.
Tough hill to climb for us.
You guys have been friends for a long time, right?
Yeah.
It's like childhood.
And how long ago did you start working on this story?
I started in about 2012.
And Zach started in about 2017, but he was always sort of like a sounding board for me.
You know, he was someone when I had questions or when I had learned something really interesting, I would, you know, tell Zach about it.
So by the time he actually started, he was, he had been talking to me about it for five years and he wasn't like totally oblivious as to what was going on.
You know, he was able to hit the ground running.
So what were you guys doing when?
Or what were you doing specifically when you started investigating this?
Were you just doing it as like a side hobby or were you working like reporting on it for a publication or how much time were you spending on it and what was your life like at that point in time?
My timeline is a little bit confusing and we kind of like compress it in the show.
Right.
But I basically dropped out of college when I was after my junior year of college at Western Kentucky University and moved to New York City and started shooting for the New York Times as a freelance photographer.
I did that for about three years until I was about 25 or 26.
And my little sister got cancer and I went home to Kentucky to be, you know, close to her.
And basically she's fine now.
Prisons, Scandals, and Private Prisons00:10:41
Oh, good.
While there, I decided to like finish my degree.
Rather than, I was studying photojournalism before and rather than finish in that, I'd already been shooting for the Times for three years.
It had, you know, front pages and, you know, good clips from that time.
I finished with a degree in journalism writing, which was something that also interested me.
And the final, sorry, I feel like I'm being so boring talking about my college.
It's not boring.
I fell asleep, sorry.
Yeah, and I'm falling asleep talking.
But the final semester, we had to write a magazine-style investigative piece on the theme of the role of money in politics.
Okay.
And while I was in college, the New York Times would continue to give me assignments in Kentucky when stuff would come up.
And so I was trying to figure out what I was going to write about on this theme.
And the Times called and sent me to a factory in Campbellsville, Kentucky that was going to lose its military contract to make shirts for the Navy and, you know, or an underwear for the Army, you know, something like that.
And basically, and the reason why they were likely going to lose their contract was because this next round of bids, they were going to be competing against prison factories, and you can't really compete with basically slave labor.
Wow.
So that kind of turned me on to the idea of prisons.
And then, you know, I'm digging into prisons.
I'm like, I'll probably write something for this class about prisons.
And that led me to the Wackenhut Corporation because they were the second largest private prison company in the US and also the first.
What do you mean?
They were a private prison company?
Right.
They contract with the BOP as a private corporation to, you know, they basically they're basically running a hotel that you can't leave and they're getting paid by the day by the.
by the prisoner because there's so many prisoners in the United States.
The BOP can't, you know, they don't have enough facilities and these kind of private companies moved in to try to help alleviate that.
So Wackenhut was paying the BOP?
No, The BOP is paying Wackenhut to imprison people for them.
Okay.
And they also do a lot of like, the name has, is that there, the Wackenhut Corporation was a giant private security company in started by George Wackenhut.
Started by this guy, George Wackenhut, who was in the FBI.
It was founded actually down in South Florida in Coral Gables, but they had offices eventually all over the world.
They did kind of like security and kind of espionage type work, but then they eventually got into this private prison.
That was like a subset of the company called Rob.
They were just always looking for new business opportunities.
The first one I think that they started was an immigration prison.
It was the first private prison in America, and it was an immigration detention center.
Wow.
got George Waganhutt and his board of directors, I guess, eventually, which were all of these people.
We go into it in the show, these three-letter agencies, former heads of three-letter agencies, FBI, CIA, NSA.
Weirdly, JCPenney is one of them.
It's like, what are they doing?
They were finding new business opportunities, private prisons.
They ran a lot of security for just regular office buildings.
I think our composer was talking about how he grew up in Florida and his neighborhood or something, there was a neighborhood association or something, or the gate or whatever had their logo on it.
You've got the book Area 51.
They had the contract to guard the test site at Area 51.
There's a lot of mention in Annie Jacobson's book about knucklehead stuff that whack and hut guards got up to on those grounds, like crashing helicopters, I think, and this other trevor Burrus, Jr.: So the whack and huts when you discovered Wackenhut, somehow that led you to Danny Casalero?
Yes, because Danny Casalero – so I'm basically just pulling a lot of research materials, articles about Wackenhut, and I pulled an article that mentioned both Wackenhut and Danny Casalero.
It was an article from 1993 in Spy Magazine, which was an account of Danny Casalero's death and what he was kind of working on that led to his death.
people he was talking to.
It was written by a former NYPD detective named John Connolly.
But when I find this thing, not in the magazine itself, but just on some third-party website, I read it.
It mentions Wackenhut.
It mentions this journalist I'd never heard of who died.
And I thought it was – no joke, I thought it was like Iran-Contra fan fiction.
Like somebody kind of just made all this stuff up.
They were really into Iran-Contra and they invented this journalist because it seemed so it seemed so absurd.
It seemed made up.
seemed made up.
And then, you know, but I'm like realized because, and I'd never heard of Spy Magazine because I was born in 85 and it shut down in 93 and whatever.
I just didn't know about it.
Turns out that looking back, it was one of the great magazines, I think, of all time.
Right.
And so, yeah, so that I, and that article is actually part of a trilogy.
There was like a separate piece about Wacken Hut and there was a separate piece about what was going on on the Cabazon reservation.
And that's how it comes up in this piece about Danny.
He was looking into, Wackenhut and what they were doing in this joint venture with a tiny Native American tribe near Indio, California, at that time called the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians.
Basically, Wackenhut was – and the Cabazons had plans to develop biological weapons and night vision goggles and small arms for guerrilla armies in Central America.
So for people that are listening who – there's probably a few of them out there who have not seen your documentary yet.
Can you basically give us like a 40,000 foot overview, very brief description of what the story is?
I'm going to let the brilliant director do it.
I'll try.
It's a complicated story, but it's fascinating.
So I'll just do it quickly.
Wait, wait.
Actually, I want to tee it up first.
Tee it up.
When I meet people in an elevator or whatever, I say it's a elevator pitch?
Yes.
I say it's a murder mystery spy thriller documentary.
And then it centers around the story of a journalist who died under mysterious circumstances in 1991, and it delves into what he was investigating that sort of led to that point in his life where he died.
That's the other picture.
I think of the story, it's almost like a sort of like Russian nesting doll kind of thing.
On its very outside core, it's kind of about me seeing my friend Christian go into this investigation as like a sort of citizen researcher, just a sort of random dude going into this story.
And the story that he's going into is essentially his attempt to finish the work and find out what happened to this journalist, Danny Casalero, who died in 1991 in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia, about an hour and a half outside of Washington, D.C., who had been – and his death was ruled a suicide by the authorities, and his family and friends and colleagues at the time, once they found out that he had died and that they were calling it a suicide,
they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second.
You need to understand, we don't think it's a – suicide because of who Danny was, but mainly because of what he was looking into, which was this dangerous story.
And that dangerous story with dangerous characters was, he had started one year earlier in August of 1990.
And it started essentially with him looking into this software program called Promise and how that was allegedly stolen by the Justice Department and used as spy software.
And then that led him to a source who said that he had, been involved with that out of the Capizan Indian Reservation where the stuff that Christian's been talking about is going on with Wackenhut and there was a triple homicide.
This is still unsolved murder there.
Other people who were around this source of Danny's, Michael Reconosciuto, had died also in San Francisco.
And then it leads him to another people in this world who claim that it's actually connected to all these other scandals.
scandals.
Danny's story eventually becomes that he is proposing to write a book about this whole thing that he dubs the octopus.
The octopus is kind of these interconnected, mostly intelligence-related, military intelligence-related political scandals from mainly the 1980s but also decades before that,
sort of the cast of characters who are all usually associated with the CIA or the its predecessor, the OSS, who had this network – the octopus is kind of in his telling this network of intelligence operatives who have gone rogue and are responsible,
sort of the hidden network behind many of the scandals of the 80s that came to surface then, which was like Iran-Contra, this banking scandal, the savings and loan scandal, BCCI, which was this kind of third world but operating globally, the first kind of global third world.
Bank that had a private army.
Another bank called Nugent Hand.
Another CIA related bank called Nugent Hand.
All these different scandals, Iran Contra and.
Yeah, Edwin Wilson, who was arming Libya kind of maybe rogue or maybe with the CIA's approval.
Yeah, all these intelligence guys, and including his investigation of this software, Promise, are interrelated.
And he calls this network of intelligence people the octopus.
Danny's Death and Disinformation00:15:26
Yeah.
It feels like.
the murder of this journalist, Danny Casalero, is just the very tip of the iceberg or like a tree that's above ground and below that is this giant root ball of shadow government that I did not expect when I started this.
Because I didn't know anything about this.
I just thought this was a true crime investigation on a guy who got whacked and tried to figure out who was behind it.
Allegedly got whacked.
That's literally like, I mean, it's woven throughout the story beautifully, but it literally seems like it's maybe 10% of the whole entire meat of the whole thing.
This is a lot of A lot of documentary series about, you know, kind of murder mystery documentaries are too long.
And, in your opinion?
No, in a lot of people's opinion.
They stretch it out.
They stretch it out.
But this is like, it's so dense and packed and deep and layered.
We just struggled to get what we got in there because there's so much stuff.
What made you guys decide to make it only four parts?
Netflix.
Netflix did that?
Yeah.
Well, when we.
We wanted to do eight, obviously.
We originally, before we even pitched it to anybody, it was like, well, obviously it's eight tentacles.
It's eight episodes.
And then by the time we were pitching it, we pitched it as five.
And then they were like, yeah, it could be four or five.
And then it just took us, frankly, so long to make this thing.
I think way longer than we ever wanted it to be.
But it was so.
And we're proud of the end product.
I'm happy that we took the time to do it.
But it was just.
How long was the production of it from the first time you guys met with Netflix to the.
to now.
Well, it was greenlit in 2019.
Yeah, but then there was a pandemic that set us back about six months, which was actually weirdly beneficial to us because we really needed, we'd never done anything like this before.
We needed the extra time to just to prep, research, prep, call people, like figure out what the heck we were doing.
So 2019, we, we had the meeting with them and, and were greenlit, but then it was like pandemic happened.
We really started filming it in late 2020.
We shot our first interview, but we had shot, you know, we had shot things over the years before that because we picked Michael up from prison in 2017, you know, so the chronology gets twisted and stuff because, you know, if we started where we started in 2017, nobody had any idea who Michael is.
So it's like, well, we got to put that like a little later.
And so if you're really paying attention, we're accurate, you know, pretty accurate with the dates, but like it's not.
It's a story with multiple chronologies from the now, from the early 2000s.
Well, Danny's chronology is 1990 to 1991.
But then the book he's writing starts in about 1980.
So we're also telling that story that starts with the 1980 election.
And then we're telling our chronology in the 2000s.
Did you start this thing with the goal of writing a book?
Yes.
Okay.
Are you still going to publish a book or no?
I still have enough research to do the book.
Um, to write the book, I want Zach to help me with it, but we also want to do more documentaries.
I don't have eight arms, you know, I'm not an octopus.
I think I'm gonna do another.
Are you guys gonna do another follow up to this?
I mean, we can't say for sure, but there's just so much stuff that we wanted to do, and so many things that I feel like we've sort of like hinted at in this that we just feel compelled to finish some of these stories and push the ball a little further.
Plus, there's, I mean, we've hinted that we've gotten more stuff coming.
Over the Transom and we want to do it.
But it's like, do we have plans, do we have a contract to do it?
Absolutely not.
So if Netflix slams the door in my face, i'll hit up uh, an illiterate agent, get you know.
Going on the book, you know right, i've got at least two options.
So at the I was kind of shocked at the end of the documentary it seems like you believe that and maybe i'm wrong that he did kill.
Danny Castellaro, did commit suicide.
Is that right?
I do believe that.
Um wait, did he?
Oh, sorry.
I spaced out.
Hey, clip that, Steve.
You asked me, do I think that Dan no, I mean, there's a point where I basically, throughout this whole process, you can make a really good case for murder and a really good case for suicide.
The problem is that both of the arguments are so there's so much kind of compelling data on both sides.
As a researcher, you're once when you're looking at this stuff, you're kind of getting ping ponged back and forth between these two conclusions.
And Zach's captured and showed that feeling of, oh, maybe he did kill himself or then maybe he got killed.
You're always, you know, sometimes in one day, you're experiencing those.
There's got to be a fatigue to this, to spending so much time and getting the factor of getting burned out.
Yeah, we burned out.
We burned out and relit the candle many times over.
Many times.
But yeah, I think like at the end, you know, we show this that there was, you know, the police had said he was alone in Martinsburg and then we showed this composite drawing that clearly he had been with someone.
Basically, I mean, how I view it is like another person saw someone entering the room and so now we're like dealing with this information and christian christian disinformation, not disinformation, but there is disinformation out there as well.
I think Christian's like how I see it, his default position, right?
Is kind of like, throughout this process, was kind of like 51%.
And it would vary widely, both of them very widely on this, sort of going over the edge on this.
Either way, of like 51% Christian is kind of like the, I think Danny was murdered guy.
And I'm kind of like the 51% Danny committed suicide guy.
You know, that's kind of my default position.
I'm just like inherently a skeptic of like conspiracy stuff and just like the idea that this would be such an organized, it's very difficult murder to pull off cleanly where you have zero out.
Physical evidence linking it to you know, for it to be such a bloody room and and right no, bad for a century no, no bloody footprints, you know yeah, and so suicide note.
So, but we would, we would kind of do they, did they analyze the handwriting from the suit, from the suicide note?
I never claimed they did it.
I, it looks like his handwriting, does it?
Yeah okay yeah, I mean, there's also importantly, a suicide note.
Wasn't he also missing three fingernails?
And I Like his, the one of the biggest parts of it is his tendons were severed.
Like how do you sever your own tendons and use your thumbs to sever the other tendon?
When we interviewed the, when we interviewed the, um, one of the paramedics who found him, who's now a medical examiner, actually, which is interesting to me.
Um, that was his big point, right?
Is like, and we show it in the documentary is like, how do you hold a razor if your tendons are severed?
Cause you can't grip anything with your opposable thumbs, right?
Was it an actual razor blade used?
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, and so, you know, and I think that's a really good point, but, but we, He or they.
Right.
You're saying that.
Right.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
Or the person.
Or the person.
Yeah.
What's his name?
Joe?
Joe Cuello.
Uh huh.
Potentially.
So, anyway, what I'm trying to say is like, we would go back and forth about this constantly.
And I think that you see that tension, a little bit of that tension of us trying to grapple with this throughout the process.
I would say that, like, for me, when I read the FBI's report on what the DOJ FBI report on what happened to Danny Castellaro, that was basically there were.
There were several investigations, but there was the Martinsburg police investigation, which was immediately after Danny's death.
And then there was a follow-up investigation by Jan Areno's Justice Department.
And it's on a federal level.
And they were reviewing the Martinsburg police department's thing, and then they were re-interviewing people.
But when I read that thing, I found it to be a very compelling snapshot of what Danny's life was in the year before he died.
And their conclusion is that Danny committed suicide.
And they lay out, it's a good you know, useful timeline of what they knew of what he was doing in Martinsburg and all this stuff.
But as we show, and this is sort of like a spoiler alert, I would encourage anybody to really go on the ride of watching the movie before listening to what I'm about to say.
But once we and Christian got the documents from Martinsburg Police Department that nobody had seen since they were created outside of the police, which we had been told Repeatedly, we were under seal from the Department of Justice, from the Federal Department of Justice.
We were told we can't fulfill this FOIA request because the DOJ says we can't.
That was what they told Christian years ago.
I came back to them and I said, Please show me a piece of paper that says that the DOJ has this under seal.
Because how do they show us anything?
Show us anything.
And they fought, they sort of would push back.
And then eventually, and you see it in the show, their lawyer called me, really nice guy, and he said, You know, I can't find anything.
like you're welcome to see these things.
And so after pushing on them pretty hard and banging down the door, we finally got access to that.
And what I'm trying to get at is that the story, the official story of what happened to Danny Castellaro, according to the authorities, which is the Martinsburg Police Department and the FBI and the DOJ, is clearly not the real story.
Right.
Because they suppressed a letter or a witness.
They just never brought, they essentially, in my view, and I don't, you know, I don't cast.
Even blame or aspersions is a complicated story.
Even if there's nothing pernicious going on, evil, DOJ, cover up, like it's just a complicated story.
And like Christian says, if you want to conclude that Danny committed suicide, that's a solid couple months of your life investigating it.
If you want to conclude that he was murdered, it opens up so many problems because it's like what Danny was looking into, the people he was dealing with are so difficult to pin down.
Their role, their connection to the federal government is.
Pretty messed up.
And it just creates problems, right?
And it just creates a lot of time.
You just have to go.
It took Christian 12 years to do this thing, right?
And you could argue we didn't get fully through everything.
So it's a lot easier to say he committed suicide.
And that's what they said.
And so whether they were disingenuous or not, the problem is that the evidence they presented was all the evidence that supports their conclusion.
Yes.
And they didn't include any of the stuff that.
raises questions like, oh, well, there was somebody who saw somebody else going into his room.
Why did they hire her?
Why not follow up with the woman and ask her more questions?
Or there was somebody who gave a sketch of somebody else.
If your theory is Danny was depressed, screwed around by all these conspiracy nuts, went to Martinsburg, had no evidence to back up this wild story that he had been fed by these con artists.
was so depressed that he had no money, he commits suicide in a bathtub in Martinsburg in 1991.
Okay.
And he met no one.
He didn't meet anybody that weekend.
Okay.
Well, if you have anything that shows that he was meeting with people, it's a problem.
And they didn't include that stuff.
So what I'm getting at is the official story.
Also, there were no work papers.
He didn't have any research papers on him at all.
He wasn't working on the story.
And this note.
In his shoe, there's like, oh, yeah, we never even bring that up in the show just because it's like there's so many stuff that we just couldn't fit into the program.
But it's good to be able to come here and kind of tell all the stuff that we couldn't fit in, you know.
But the note in the shoe is really weird.
What's the note in the shoe?
He has like a chapter outline for, um, well, the tell it like the note in the shoe.
There was a piece of paper in his shoe that was sent off to the West Virginia State Police for an.
They sent all the evidence, all the stuff that was with Danny.
Physical evidence.
All the physical evidence.
And one of the people in the lab found just a blank piece of paper in his shoe.
But this enterprising dude who we could never get access to, he would never return our calls, he's a lab technician and he does some sort of chemical analysis on it or something.
And it shows that it's actually got an imprint on it that was written on the same legal pad.
legal paper that the suicide note was written on.
And it's an outline of the first chapter, right, of Danny's book.
So it's like, okay, he has no papers with him in Martinsburg, except he obviously is like working on this thing when he's, you know.
It's very strange.
And why is that piece of paper in his shoe?
It's, I mean, it doesn't give us any sort of, you know, it's like, wow, that's the smoking gun, but it's just like, it's just weird.
It's the sizzling data point.
Yeah.
It's just, it's just crazy because, I mean, the whole first.
80, 90% of the documentary just like is blatantly in your face that this guy got murdered, you know, even leading up to the couple of weeks before he got or the weeks before he died when he's getting calls, people threatening to kill him.
And he's telling his brother and telling people like, if something happens to me, it was not an accident.
Right.
And then so if he's doing all this stuff and telling the story to all these people, why would you go kill yourself?
Well, that's just to make some grandiose.
That's what doesn't sit well with me is that.
If he did kill himself, he was also conning his family into believing that he was murdered in this elaborate thing because they're Catholic and whatever.
And as I've gotten to know the Casalero family and what I've learned about Danny, that also just does not seem kosher.
And I don't like that.
That's a tough part for me that he would lie to his brother and con his family.
As a caveat, and Tony, his brother, says this in the documentary, it's like anybody can commit suicide for any number of reasons.
Keeping an Open Mind About Suicide00:02:19
You know what I mean?
It's like we're not psychologists, nor are we like qualified to really weigh on in this, but like I like to keep a very open mind.
It's like there's no, there's no, you know, just like, oh, well, he definitely didn't commit suicide because, you know, it's a complicated subject matter that's too complicated for us to even like have fully gone into and told his story and the thing.
So we keep an open mind about that.
You know, I just want to say that.
If this sort of shadow organization or shadow government of people whose job it is to assassinate people and traffic drugs and weapons across the world and do things to avoid laws.
If that existed in the 90s, there has to be remnants or echoes of it now.
And that being said, were you guys ever worried about the same fate?
That happened to Danny.
Like, did you guys ever get contacted by anyone?
Were you guys ever fearful?
Did you guys get any calls?
Or there were a lot of people who said that we should be worried.
This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Mudwater.
Mudwater is a coffee alternative containing four adaptogenic mushrooms.
With only a fraction of the caffeine as a cup of coffee, you get energy without the jitters or the crash of coffee.
And each ingredient was added for a purpose cacao and chai for a hint of caffeine and hot chocolate like flavor, lion's mane to support focus.
Cordyceps to help support physical performance, and both chaga and reishi to support your immune system.
What I really love about Mudwater is that it tastes great, and they took their time to find all the perfect ingredients to develop a product that helps you feel better every single day.
Mudwater donates monthly to psychedelic research and treatments as they believe the country is in a mental health epidemic and see psychedelics as useful tools for individuals with depression, PTSD, anxiety, and other mental health experiences.
So get 15% off and a free frother by using my link below, mudwater.com forward slash Danny.
And use the code DANI at checkout to get 15% off.
That's M U D W T R.com forward slash Danny and use the promo code Danny at checkout to get 15% off.
It's linked below.
Now back to the show.
Modern Assassins and Leave No Trace00:04:06
You know, who were from the, who knew parts of the story, who would tell us.
And you hear it in the show, people saying.
There was a guy that told us like we should definitely either A, stop immediately what we're doing and, or B, let him mail us this plutonium tip bullet and this adapter to a like 45 millimeter.
It was a, he was like, like a suicide pill?
No, like a, like a stop anything in its tracks, uh, bullet, you know?
Yeah, he was like, he was like, oh, look, if you're, if you're really going to go into this thing, if you're really serious about it, listen, buddy, like, you got to be careful because when those guys come through the door, you need to be ready.
And he's talking about essentially like, I don't know, intelligence assassins, probably CIA related assassins or something that were going to somehow come through the door and kill Christian.
Um, but he's like, he's like, here's what we're going to do.
I'm going to send you a 10 millimeter, not a 9 millimeter, a 10 millimeter modified barrel that shoots these special bullets.
And I'm going to, he's like, what's your mailing address?
And Christian's like, what?
I'm not going to, I don't think that you should be mailing me gun parts to New York City.
You know, I'm not going to carry around plutonium-tipped bullets in Manhattan.
It's not.
And he was just like, he's like, these people, ultimately, all you got to do is point and shoot because they're dumb as rocks.
You know, it's like, right.
Who did this guy work for?
How did you guys get in contact?
But basically, the story, your question, though, Like you have to be so paranoid.
Yeah, paranoid, but also like a bit cavalier.
And we also believe in what we're doing.
Right.
So like, I don't know.
It felt more important to me to like continue on than to chicken out.
Right.
And then plus like there weren't, we didn't really have that much heat.
And what you were saying about if there's like modern leave no trace assassins, like deploying them is a really big deal.
And are you deploying them over a 30 year old case that's already so confusing and, you know.
Either way, we're whatever.
I think we did a good job with the documentary, but it's like we're still discussing.
We still don't know everything.
We don't know everything.
So you send about to some, you know, those assassins go to much bigger targets than us, you know?
One would hope.
Right?
I mean, the idea is like it's some of the stuff that you guys are uncovering.
It's kind of like an example would be the Kennedy assassination, right?
By and large, that they know what was going on.
They know that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone assassin, but it's like the government doesn't really need to come out and defend itself.
All it has to do is just shut up because, I mean, there's just such a dissent and people kind of know what happened.
And there's been all these declassified documents.
It's kind of like already out in the ether.
Like, yes, everybody knows what's going on, but we know.
And the Intel organizations fuel the dissent and the confusion.
That's part.
We discussed that in the show.
That's part of their modus operandi.
They intentionally seed confusion into this.
And make it work for us.
It's almost like I look at it almost like they just can't lose in terms of this thing coming out because it's like if you believe – and I think that we show clear evidence of intelligence operations that have gone probably very far away from their – original if there was ever a noble intent, you know?
Know.
But like, if you look at those, it just in my mind helps them just as much as as not knowing about it, because it's like okay well, the CIA and the intelligence community gets away with all kinds of stuff and they're, they look like badasses, they look like people who can take you out for doing whatever.
So it's like that helps them too, that they're smart, they seem one sound like they know they're, they're, they're on top of this stuff and it says to their enemies of you know abroad or wherever, don't with us, you know.
The Unsolved Mystery of Danny00:09:08
It's like it's, it's all good for them.
In my mind it's that's.
It's kind of depressing, but that's kind of how I see it.
This film, in 1993, this story was an unsolved mystery episode.
Yes.
Unsolved mysteries.
Unsolved mysteries.
In the early days, I used to, people were like, what are you doing?
Like, what have you been doing, Christian?
I'd be like, I'm trying to solve this.
I'm working on an unsolved mystery.
Is that the guy with the amazing voice?
It was Robert Stack.
Yeah, I think that's the guy.
Yeah.
And then later, Dennis Farina.
Yeah.
In a trench coat.
Robert Stack would be like walking through a park somewhere near the fog.
Yeah.
So, the Unsolved Mystery, they interview Michael Racconnachudo, one of the main characters, and Tony Casalero and Ann Clank, who appear in our show.
And Bill Hamilton.
And Bill Hamilton, the founder of the company.
Yeah.
So.
But the show, just to give a background, it's mainly about.
Kind of like our first episode almost.
It's mainly about the scope of the story Danny died under mysterious circumstances in a hotel room and he was looking into this software program.
That's really what they mainly talk about.
Anyways, so at the end of the show, the sort of cliffhanger that it ends on is this account that people that were at Danny's funeral have of a man in military formal uniform, looks high ranking, lots of medals, puts a medal on Danny's grave before it goes away.
Yeah, and it doesn't say anything and just kind of approaches the grave, puts a medal on it, and that medal is presumably underground in the cemetery in Fairfax or wherever.
If you're looking at the actual episode, there's usually two per thing, so it's halfway through.
Shuttlehead.
And Elliot Richardson.
There we go.
Here's the funeral scene.
Yeah.
Full screen this?
Is this a reenactment?
Yeah, this is a reenactment.
So they tell this story about there was a kid.
A mystery man at the funeral who nobody knew from the family, nobody knew who this guy was.
And he shows up and he lays a medal down on Danny's gray.
He puts a medal down on Danny's casket.
And everybody's like, whoa, like, was Danny, like, the implication is, like, was Danny actually secretly working for some sort of intelligence operation or military, you know, thing?
Like, was Danny's life actually much deeper and darker than we even knew about, you know?
Uh huh.
And so it was just sort of like this like unsolvable.
Was the guy wearing all that military brass like that?
He was wearing his full uniform.
Oh, wow.
So anyways, basically at this point, this is probably like 2012 or 2013, my earliest phase of doing research for the book.
And basically, and also one thing that there is some writing about Danny Castellaro out there, there are two books.
Books, but they don't really go in.
It's not like kind of like a traditional biography.
One of them is kind of about, just kind of pulls different newspaper articles and magazine articles and kind of is a sort of like collage of kind of different secondary source material.
And then the other one is Sherry Seymour's book, which is like a wild book.
And that's her investigation into like what was going on on the West Coast.
And there's a little bit about Danny, but it's not a biography of Danny.
So I've always found it interesting that he worked in computer trade publications.
He worked, he published computer industry newsletters and I thought that was interesting because a software scandal propelled him into this story and that kind of like had never been dug into.
And I thought it gave him credibility as a journalist.
Like this guy knew about software.
There weren't a lot of reporters who knew about computer software back in 1991.
So basically I wanted to like kind of dig in and like really paint a picture of like what life was like leading up.
to him getting into the case and just writing about computers for this newsletter.
Called under the heading Computer Age was the publication.
So I would look at the old issues of it and there'd be on the masthead just names of different people that worked there.
So I just started calling people that worked there, lived in the Virginia area.
They'd tell me what life was like working for this newsletter with Danny and they'd tell me other people that worked there to call.
I called this guy.
I guess I'll leave his name out just for whatever reason.
And he, it was told to me that he worked in the print shop.
You know, they would print the newsletters and they'd mail them out every day or whatever.
Right.
And, you know, I'm just, I'm not, I got zero expectations for this call other than, you know, in little, maybe little Danny Lag.
What was Danny Lag?
What was it like working with him?
So basically the guy picks up the phone and he's like, I've been waiting, you know, however many years it had been at that point, 20 years for this call.
And I was like, yeah.
And he's like, yeah.
And I'm like, why?
And he's like, well, I'm the guy.
And I'm like, what guy?
He's like, have you seen the Unsolved Mysteries program?
I was like, yeah.
And he's like, I'm the guy.
And I'm like, what guy?
And he's like, you know, the guy in the military uniform who puts the medal on Danny's grave?
And I was like, yeah.
And he's like, That was me.
And I was like, well, why didn't you ever come forward?
There's all this question about it.
He's like, look, if anybody's going to figure out what happened to Danny, they better be able to figure out who I am.
You know what I'm saying?
If you can't figure out who put the metal on the grave, like, you're definitely not going to figure out what happened to Danny because this guy, he was there, you know?
That was kind of his point.
And he was like, you know, you found me.
Good job.
And so I was like, what's the story, dude?
You're going to tell me, why'd you do it?
Right.
And so.
Basically, he and Danny after work would sit out in the parking lot of this sort of business park in Virginia and they'd have a beer after work.
They were very close friends.
They didn't really hang out socially, but they were close at work.
Danny had told him at a certain point that he wished he had been in the military.
He wished he'd gone to war because he wished he had gotten a medal.
This guy was in horrible combat in Vietnam and had won many medals and suffered from really bad PTSD that when we met with him later, it was very palpable.
Basically, when he went to go to the funeral that morning, he remembered Danny telling him about Wish how he wished he'd gotten a medal and he decided to put on his military formal uniform.
He was retired.
He obviously worked at the print shop now and he brought his best medal and he gave it to Danny.
Wow.
That's pretty wild.
We interviewed him.
Really sweet guy.
It couldn't fit it in the mood.
It was like to bring that story up, we'd have to go into the whole unsolved mystery thing.
We had so many timelines and things.
It was like, it's so it doesn't get us any closer to actually solving the things we set out to solve that it just kind of sat on the.
Cutting room floor, but I love that story.
And he's such a sweet dude that I kind of, you know, I miss not being able to put that in the movie just because he's such a cool guy.
But now it's a concrete exclusive.
Concrete exclusive, baby.
Yeah.
One of my buddies who he used to be, produced documentaries for Vice back in the day.
And he put it to me best.
He goes, Editing, especially stories like this, when you're editing, he's like, it's just deleting.
Just go through and start deleting shit.
And I imagine for a story that takes this long, like deleting stuff has got to be really hard.
Painful.
Yeah.
What?
Was what was the part for you that was the hardest to remove from the final cut?
Oh my god, I mean, there were you know, since it's four episodes, it's like you know, so many things.
I think for me, my biggest sort of I don't know, regret or wishes is that we had been able to get into the conclusion to the Cavazon story, which goes beyond sort of Danny's story of it because he was really interested in the intelligence side and what was going on with Wacken Hut.
Tribal Gaming and Mob Connections00:14:28
But it really and it would take us out the reason we couldn't do it is so hard to like keep our once again the chronologies going and people would just kind of watch Cuts of this and be like yeah, okay.
This is cool guys, but I simply am so lost, you know, and so we couldn't do that we can't just lose everybody mm-hmm Because then we've made nothing essentially but so This is the interesting story of I'll just try to give a an overview, but it I think some of the details are important right so Our story is about Part of our story, essentially episode two, is about a guy named Dr. John Philip Nichols,
white dude who had been living in Florida but had gone all around the world doing all kinds of weird, in my mind, operations, likely intelligence-related in some respect.
He brings his family, his three sons and his daughter and his wife, to the Coachella Valley to the Cabazon Indian Reservation, where he sets up as a grant.
He's like a grant writer, federal grant writer, and he becomes the tribal administrator of this small tribe.
Our story we take it from the moment he arrives to him starting a tax free cigarette operation to raise money, tax free alcohol operation to raise money.
Then he opens up the first poker casino in an Indian reservation.
What we didn't really have time to get into was just the constant conflict of those entities and the local law enforcement because it was illegal what he was doing according to California and according to local officials in India, California, which was selling tax-free cigarettes and tax-free alcohol and opening a poker room.
You're not allowed to do that without a license.
Was he essentially just trying to launder money?
Tons of people are going to come in.
You can do a mail in business.
You can just raise funding.
But a lot of them just didn't work out.
The tribe kept on being like, Where is the money going?
Like, you say you're making all this money, but we're going bankrupt.
Like, the cigarettes thing went bankrupt.
They had all these legal, they were constantly being, the poker casino was raided all the time by like the Indio and then the share, I think the whatever, state police, law enforcement kept on raiding them, shutting them down, opening up.
They sued the state of California.
And This is where like we don't get into this in the documentary at all.
And I wish this is an opportunity to kind of get into it was just like that lawsuit that that sort of strife started in the early 80s and then John Philip Nichols we do mention You know, there's a triple homicide that right was sort of covered up there and he was in our view I think Definitely involved with that triple homicide and he was never caught for that but he was in 85 arrested for Uh,
solicitation of murder, he had hired five murders and he accidentally, you know, hired it from an informant.
And and that, oh, right in 85.
And so he goes to jail, he gets arrested for solicitation of murder.
Hold on, in 85.
Hold on, 85 is that before the Triple Homicide?
Triple Homicide is in 81, and that it said, Got it, Triple Homicide is in June of 81.
Then the Maraska, the financier for the night vision.
Goggles on the Capuzon reservation.
That's six months later in San Francisco.
Yeah, okay, and we then explained all that story and it's five.
Okay, he's he's gone, you know, and it's just like a different scene at the There was a there was a really nice moment that I wish was in there that our editors put together where it's Bobby Moses Nichols who's his son who we interviewed for the movie Talks tells this story.
He's like he's like and then I get a call from my dad and he does this interprogression.
He's like Bobby I'm in jail million dollars bail And he's so he goes, he gets arrested for the solicitation of murder.
And in that, when he was hiring this person to murder these, like, essentially drug dealers or drug related people, he also says, I think this is really telling.
I've got more work for you in South America if this works out.
So it's like, wait, 85?
Like, is he still active in like Central and South American politics?
Or, you know, right.
Parapolitics, or whatever you want to call that, assassinations, or business, or something.
It's like very strange, or drugs, or whatever it is.
Anyway, he goes to jail.
While he's in jail, the case, Cabazon versus the state of California, is winding its way through the court system and ends up in the Supreme Court.
In 80, I believe, it's ruled by the Supreme Court that they were right, that Cabazon and this Nearby tribe, Morongo.
I think it was.
No, I thought that either 86 or 87, but one year later is the Indian Gaming Act.
Okay.
So I think that I thought that was 87.
87.
I thought the verdict was 86, but essentially, but it might be 87, 88.
Yeah.
So they say actually, Cabazon versus like the Cabazons are right.
Like they have tribal sovereignty.
They are allowed to operate this gaming, you know, what they call gaming, poker, bingo, all this stuff on their own land, and they can make money off of it.
And that ruling is a huge deal in tribal, you know, in American tribal relations because it's, For them, for it's a precedent for all of it, all of Native American gaming.
Why we have like nationwide, why we legally have, you know, the whatever casinos all over the country that are legally allowed to operate, which I think has this kind of to my, you know, when I didn't know anything about this, had as this kind of like, oh, Native American casinos, like what's really going on there?
Like can't be good if it's gambling, you know, it's like that's kind of my like stupid, ignorant perspective on things before I went into this.
But if you really talk to, Native Americans that we've talked to, it's such a big deal because it's the first time that they have money that is not like grants.
You know, it is not being doled out to them in some sort of like recompense for like the horrors that the American government for 400 years of broken treaties.
It gives them the ability to be financially independent, employ their own tribe members, and make money without just relying on some handout, some treaty that.
Gets broken.
That's a handout from the, from the federal government.
It's really important and it comes from our story.
It comes from John Philip Nichols.
That get profit sharing um, it's in, they get, it provides college uh tuition, health care, all that stuff, housing.
So that was the lawsuit that set the president for this Amazon FOR nationwide California.
Yeah and, and it's, and it was uh, John Philip Nichols, our controversial, one of our controversial main characters.
This crazy documentary It's his vision.
He's responsible for it.
I mean, probably other people had the theory, but he's kind of like was the guy that threw the bowling ball down the line.
And tribe members obviously were involved in this thing, but it was just kind of, it's just complicated because such a difficult to pin down, morally difficult to pin down dude started Native American gaming in some respect.
You can kind of kick it back to him.
So what was the reason he picked an Indian reservation to test out all these weapons and military?
It goes back to the same reason that that exists, which is tribal sovereignty.
You can't fire automatic weapons in California without the right kind of permits.
It's a way to not have to deal with state laws.
So the laws are different on that piece of land?
Yeah, tell them the shrimp story.
I'll give you the shrimp story.
I'll give you the shrimp story, but just the sort of overview is like whenever you're manufacturing arms, you have to have what's called like And things like that, end user license certificates.
Yeah, things like that that are designed for people to be able to trace where arms came from and where they're going and make sure they're not, quote unquote, ending up in the wrong hands or whatever.
And so, this was, I think, according to John Nichols, the tribal sovereignty was almost like they were their own country.
It's like a country within a country.
It's a country within a country.
California or even the US, the silencers came from this sovereign tribe that is within a nation within a nation.
Right, right.
A way to stay in the shadows, basically.
Easy to get the in-ducers certificates if you're printing them yourself at the local office.
So we were, you know, we called tons and tons and tons of people.
But one of the people we found sort of through our research was this arms manufacturer who was going to do business with John Philip Nichols.
We found some paperwork with his name on it and we called him up.
He was like, Really nice.
It was surprisingly open, and we were driving around California just looking for.
We were in this guy, he's like, Oh, yeah, I remember that guy, John Nichols.
Really strange guy.
You know, he wanted me to manufacture silencers.
So he brought me into the tribal office there, and we're sitting in there.
He was like, How many phone books would you need to be able to test this thing?
He's like, right here.
He's like, yeah, how many phone books would the bullet, you know, not be able to penetrate?
He's like, I don't know what it's five or something like that, right?
So he calls John Philip Nichols, calls the secretary in, and it's like, get us five phone books.
They bring it in.
And she's like, okay, anything else?
He's like, no.
And he's like, leave the door open.
And so this guy we're talking to tells a story about sitting in the office and shooting these phone books right there.
And then John Nichols calls the secretary.
He's like, hey, you know, Cynthia, whatever her name is, come in here.
And she's, He's like, Did you hear anything?
And she's like, Hear any?
What?
No.
She's like, What is that smell?
It's the gunpowder.
And so he's like, Oh, pretty good silencers.
And then, but I was like, Well, so what happened with the deal?
You know, he's like, Well, he wanted to pay me in shrimp.
And we're like, Who wanted to pay in shrimp?
John Nichols wanted to pay him in shrimp.
And he's like, He's like, He's like, this guy is so bizarre.
You know, it's like, He's like, you know, he's just up to his eyeballs and CIA stuff, but you never be able to like, pin it down.
But he's telling me that he wants to ship all these small arms over to the Philippines and he's like they, you know, fighting this sort of like war of independence right um, that was a kind of Reagan era initiative, um.
And he's like, but they don't have any money.
What they do have a lot of is shrimp.
So they're gonna, we're gonna, take the guns, we're gonna put them on only federal, only federal roads, like they're gonna go from the reservation only on federal roads to the shipping port, So, they never have to cross into, technically, into California where they can get seized.
And they're going to be put on boats, taken over to the Philippines.
And then the Philippine government or whoever is on the receiving end is going to send back boatfuls of shrimp.
And he's like, I deal in money.
I don't deal in shrimp.
No deal.
No deal.
But it was just like, whoa, this guy.
I almost look at John Philip Nichols in a certain respect as like, You ever read a photo of this guy, Steve?
You ever read Catch 22?
There's like the Milo Meindenberger character who's basically a war profiteer who keeps on hustling new ways to find money in the war, in the military industrial complex, which is at the time World War II in that book.
And he's like, he buys all this surplus cotton and then he's like, and then he doesn't know what to do with all the cotton because he bought too much cotton.
Like integrating it into the food, you know, it's like it's just endless ways to find money within the military.
Yeah, it's like mobsters, right?
Well, and he had mobsters who are in business with the military.
He had mob connections that we go into, and there's more that we didn't even get into in the show.
One of his sons, his son Mark, who recently passed away, his godfather on his birth certificate was one of the top Milwaukee heads of one of the Milwaukee crime families.
Oh, that's nice.
Where John Nichols lived and raised his family first.
And he was tied in with Jimmy Hoffa, and he was up high with the Teamsters.
Because the Teamsters, they had some.
He got in trouble for something he was doing with the Teamsters and he ended up with a federal warrant.
And that sent him off to South America.
It's all very.
This all gets like so crazy.
But yeah, basically, it's like John Nichols is like.
We were talking to Bobby about this.
It's like he's a mob, CIA, grant writing, social worker, psychologist?
Slash like doctor of divinity, allegedly.
He had like a mail in doctorate for.
For being a religious leader when he was doing stuff in Chile in South America, and then later on all over the world, really.
Yeah, he looks like he'd be a good cult leader.
And that was the amazing thing, really, for us is like we got audio recordings of him talking in his own words about what he's up to.
And it's like no non law enforcement person had ever heard them before.
Roan Clothing and Cult Leader Claims00:03:16
And how'd you guys get that?
We're not going to tell you or anybody else, but we just don't want to give up any sources.
Plus, like, Christian and I are, I mean, I'm new to this world.
I've never done anything investigative journalism wise.
Like, I. Just get really weird anonymous source you keep them that way we keep them anonymous just an anonymous source yeah sources actually yeah, but but what we're very proud of and I don't think that we really made it as clear as it could have been in the show is like being able to hear John Nichols in his own words Talking about all this crazy and we don't make a big deal about it in the film you just like kind of like you just in the world and you hear this all these recordings you're talking about right now.
They're in the film.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, you hear John here him talking about Michael And how valuable he is, Michael Reconosciuto.
You hear him talking about Philip Arthur Thompson and how great of a guy he is, and how the FBI has a close relationship with him.
And it's like, oh, yeah, the serial killerslash terrorist, rapist, whatever.
Yeah, great guy.
It's just, for me, it's really special and really amazing to hear it in his own words while he's saying, like, yeah, and I'm a psychiatrist.
I'm a psychiatric social worker for Mike.
I'm just helping Mike out.
It's like, By manufacturing weapons with him?
Like, what are you?
Where's the help start?
How do you guys?
This is a question I asked Annie Jacobson, but this is very relevant to you guys because you guys are talking to the same kinds of people.
You're in the same exact world.
How do you discern whether somebody is trying to spin a web or like spin a story with you and try to point you in a different direction than give you the truth?
This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Roan.
If you're a fan of this podcast, you're already aware that I am one of the most stylish, best dressed people in the world.
Not really, but when I do have to go to a fancy event, a dinner party, or even one of those fancy golf courses that makes you wear slacks and a collared shirt, my go to is Roan.
And it's because they fit the best, they're the most flexible, and they don't shrink or wrinkle.
Roan's commuter collection is the most breathable, comfortable, and versatile set of clothing products known to man.
Roan has clothing pieces for everyone and for every occasion.
Whether you're one of those guys who likes to wear skinny pants on the tee box, or you like to wear a pink polo or a blazer, no matter what it is or what you're doing, They have a clothing piece for you that can be worn individually or mixed and matched with other Rhone products.
And their signature four way stretch fabric is breathable, flexible, and will work anywhere from your commute to the office to the 19th hole.
This clothing is high tech.
The commuter collection not only features their wrinkle release technology that is 100% machine washable, it's also treated with Gold Fusion anti odor technology.
So you can get more wears between washes and stay fresh all day long.
And if you're like me, you probably don't have tons of extra time to go to the mall, try on tons of clothes just to bring them home and have them not fit anymore.
And on top of that, all my other clothes are always wrinkled, not with Roan.
So if you want to support this podcast, check out Roan.
Today, it's roan.com/slash Danny, and you can get 20% off your entire order.
It's spelled rhone.com/slash d a n n y for 20% off.
It's linked below.
Now, back to the show.
Arms Dealers and CIA Involvement00:15:21
I think that's an interesting question.
Um, I mean, one thing is that there is, um, at least for me, any kind of like person that I would seek out to talk to, I would be asking them, um, You know, ideally, their firsthand account of this series of events that we're focused on in this film, right?
So there are names, dates, you know, and there's this like kind of like inherent logic to what really happened because A affects B, affects C, and, you know, there's a chronology of actual events that I'm very familiar with.
So if someone is telling me a story and their logic is flawed or their dates are wrong, like wildly wrong, or the names, the associations don't, match with like what, you know, three other people, you know, said.
Right.
If, if someone asked the three of us, what happened today?
We should all have a similar, and it's obviously film, but if it wasn't film, we'd all have a similar account of what happened.
Right.
Right.
It's hard to describe, but, you know, it's like someone that is just like mouthing off, like, and didn't know anything.
You can tell fairly soon.
Um, There's some pretty slippery.
There's some slippery characters in our thing and we gave them the other problem is that some of this sort of misdirection that I think some of our characters gave us and Danny and various people who look into it, that's also kind of part of the story, right?
It's part of Danny's story if he's dealing with people who are giving him misinformation.
It's kind of part of our story because we do a very firsthand there's a subjective layer to this whole thing, which is just this is what it feels like to go into this story if you're a guy like Christian, or eventually a guy like me, or anybody who kind of walks into it blind without a lot of, you know, without a motive or some sort of like some sort of dog in the fight, you know?
But also, the people that we talk to aren't I mean, maybe there's exceptions, but they're not usually completely out of left field.
We'll find their name in some sort of deposition or some sort of police report or something somewhere.
We're not just like pick calling random numbers in the phone book and be like, do you know anything about the Maraska murder?
You know, we're like a lot of them are.
telling us or some people told us stuff that was like you could plainly tell was not true or a version of the truth is not true but but there's value in knowing that like that was what was being fed to Danny or it's being fed to us it's like well what's the motivation for that?
Well it's fed to them because they oftentimes think they don't even know.
We think is definitely not true.
They think it is true you know they don't mean to be lying or deceiving but they misunderstand themselves in some cases.
So I guess that's what I think is like kind of differentiates this documentary movie show whatever you want to call it from other maybe like more like straight-laced journalism is like we're interested in the misdirection.
We're interested in like because there's a story behind it.
A story behind it.
And so when you deal with some of these people, it's fascinating to watch them work and watch them tell you the story and see where it goes with it.
And I think that we get into that, especially with Sherry, when you sort of see this misdirection that she's experiencing with the JFK tape and all that stuff.
That was wild.
Yeah.
And that is very similar to what she talks about in Area 51.
I don't know if you're, I'm sure you guys talked about earlier, but in Area 51.
So you meant the amazing ending?
Well, no, no, no.
I'm talking about when they were test.
Uh, doing test flights on the first jet propelled airplanes at Groom Lake, they would send the CIA pilots when they would go up, they would bring gorilla masks in the cockpit with them.
So when they got into visual distance of a commercial airplane, they'd put the gorilla mask on to basically discredit whoever told the story.
I saw a jet plane, there was a monkey flying it.
So yeah, that's very similar to kind of what I think Sherry's view of what happened with Robert Nichols and the JFK tapes, plural, um, that she was shown.
So yeah, explain to people what happened at the end of that.
And we haven't introduced that guy, uh, Robert Booth Nichols.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Also, I want to say, like, I didn't mean to seem like such a conceited jerk when I was saying that, like, oh, we're not going to tell you who the, like, who, where we got this.
I sounded like I was, like, a little conceited with it, but it's like, I just mean that, like, we just can't tell about where the sources are.
I didn't mean to sound like I was holding it over you or something like that.
I'm so special.
But so the Robert Booth Nichols is, was a, why don't you tell who Raru Nichols is?
Because he's a friend of Mike's originally.
It's also interesting, like, I, It's important to keep in mind that when Danny was talking to these people, he didn't know what they looked like.
He'd never heard of them before, and pretty much very few people had.
That goes for Michael Reconosciuto, and that goes for Robert Booth Nichols.
Until Danny eventually meets them face to face, these are voices on the other end of a phone that he's having late night conversations with.
He's frantically taking notes and they talk in the case of Robert Booth Nichols, they talk for hours and Robert's out in California, so Danny will call him at midnight and you see on his phone bills that they talk until 3 in the morning and then Danny wakes up or Bill calls Danny at 6 a.m. to Bill Hamilton.
Danny's just getting pulled.
He's not sleeping.
He's getting pulled in all directions and he's just it's just important to paint the picture that nobody knows who this guy Robert Booth Nichols is at this point in time.
For us, he's like this icon in the octopus lore for Krishna to me.
He's like this iconic dude, you know, who's like got all this like oozing mystery and stuff like that.
He looks very like the Clark Gable thing going on.
He's like the ultimate bad guy.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Or like a James Bond ish kind of either depending on your side of it, villain or hero.
Right.
And so so so so then and he's like taught he's cryptic and seems all knowing and travels the world and unclear what he does for a living.
He's tall and handsome and tough.
Tough and scary.
Right.
And I mean, the way he entered, I mean, he was out at Cabazon.
He had this patent for basically like a Mach 10 submachine gun that he was working.
Pedaling.
Yeah, pedaling to the Cabazon Wagon Hut joint venture.
Interestingly, he had a license in California at the time to manufacture automatic weapons, which is not like I don't think.
talking to people who also have that license that we've talked to, not an easy thing to get necessarily in California, even at that time.
So he's like a on paper and he had a criminal record.
He had a criminal record.
On paper, he's an arms dealer.
That's his sort of like baseline, right?
But yeah, he'd also.
But he also didn't really sell.
It was called the G77.
We could never really find records of him actually successfully selling the G77.
Maybe he did, but.
Are there pictures of this G77 online?
Yeah.
We have them in the show.
Oh, they are.
Okay.
You see some pictures.
From a.
I mean, it would take you.
It would take a lot of like five minutes.
I can't even have the time because it would be a gun, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a gun.
I don't think you'll Google Mac 10.
It looks like a Mac 10.
Oh, it looks like a Mac 10.
Oh, okay.
I don't think it's not like a pop.
Was it that thing with the silencer on it?
Yeah, there's black and white.
It's similar to that.
Okay.
We talked to an arms dealer and we were like, Have you heard of the G77?
And he's like, Send me a picture.
He's like, Ah, there's a lot of people trying to make these Mac 10 ripoffs.
That was a big popular thing at the time.
They always jam.
I can't count on these things.
Right.
But Bob was, Robert with Nichols was.
ostensibly selling those out at Kabazon.
They did a weapons test.
It was under his license that they were able to really actually do the weapons test that we show in the thing.
But he met Michael and Ricardo.
Ricardo Ricardo and John Philip Nichols.
Michael Ricardo, we should mention, is like, I don't think we ever set this up.
He's Danny's source that says, I'm the one who put the backdoor into the Promise software, Danny's original story about Promise.
And I did it out at Cabazon.
Sorry for anyone watching this.
Oh my God.
People watching this are so fucking lost by now.
I met someone at a party recently who had listened to a podcast that we did.
We did a two part on this podcast called Truanon.
And she's a fan of the show.
And she was like, I listened to it.
I had no idea what you guys were talking about.
Then I watched the show.
I loved it.
In hindsight, the podcast made more sense.
So, Robert Nichols meets Mike Ricardo Sciutto out at Cabazon, and then Danny started talking to Robert with Nichols later on.
You know, this is it's two different timelines.
The Cabazon stuff is happening in the early 80s.
Danny's talking to these people in the early 90s, right?
About what they've been up to for the last 10 years.
And what Bob Nichols has been up to for the last 10 years since Cabazon is like real hard to pin down and very strange.
Really?
Yeah.
When did he die?
He studied banking in Switzerland.
He had.
Dodged the draft and ended up in Honolulu.
He got under the mentorship of this guy named Harold Akimoto, who was involved in gambling.
According to an FBI document that we have, he was connected to the Yakuza, Japanese organized crime.
Not sure.
His son said, certainly not, but who knows?
You never want to admit that your dad's in the Yakuza.
Yeah.
And I haven't seen Harold's back tats.
I'm not sure.
Oh, yeah.
The cues are all super tatted up, right?
Yeah.
So who knows?
This mentor of Robert Nichols, at least, was a good friend.
And that seems to be his entrance into.
Robert Booth Nichols grew up.
His dad was a very, I think, like a doctor to the stars.
I mean, he's a very prestigious Hollywood doctor.
They grew up in the Hollywood Hills.
He has three siblings and the parents were kind of like socialites and the kids had Porsches when they were teenagers.
Yeah, and kind of unsupervised.
How did he get into this arms business?
I think through his kind of intelligence.
What was also claimed was that essentially that in Hawaii when he went there to dodge the draft and then he got caught for dodging the Vietnam draft.
And that the judge in his case.
This is the story, right?
That's the story.
I mean, that's his story.
It's hard to say because it's like, where's this stuff coming from?
And it's like, if Bob's saying it, I don't know if you can believe it, but is that the judge in that case introduced him to someone in the CIA who said, like, look, kid, you could do some work for us, or intelligence at least.
I don't know if he had said specifically CIA, but it was like, it started off small with little errands.
Like, I want you to just go up to this person and find out this piece of information from them at the at a bar, at this restaurant, at the hotel, you know, and that it grew from there.
He's not, he doesn't have the badge.
He can't, he doesn't have the lanyard.
He can't go into Langley or, you know what I'm saying?
He's not a staffer.
He's like a trevor Burrus, Jr.: Like an agent.
Like an agent.
Like a freelance, like covert operative.
That's his sort of story.
We do know that he was at that time involved in some kind of organized crime.
And I think but he's also in business with this guy, Bob Mayhew, who is both a critical liaison between U.S. intelligence and organized crime, specifically in their attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, using the mob in Cuba to and this guy, Bob Mayhew, was kind of like coordinating with organized crime in those efforts in Havana.
And he was in business.
E. Howard Hunt was a big part of that, too, right?
Yeah.
E. Howard Hunt was the guy who was in charge of that anti-Castro hit team or those paramilitary guys.
What was interesting to me, if you read The Last Mafioso, which is a A biography of just this kind of mafia hitman.
He makes the point, which I think is, you know, who knows if it's true or not, but it's an interesting idea is like that the mob guy who was kind of tasked by Bob Mayhew with coordinating the plan to assassinate Castro was actually just ripping off the CIA and he was just hustling them, like that they'd never even bothered to hire anybody in Cuba.
He would just come back to the CIA.
And like any mafia scheme, he was a scam artist, right?
That's what essentially most of the mob operations are.
They're scams.
So he was scamming the CIA.
And they obviously don't have the agents to be able to disprove whatever he's coming back with.
So he's like, oh, another boat was knocked out.
And we got to get more money because the operation failed.
And he's just sitting there in Vegas or whatever and not doing anything and just taking the money, which is, that's a whole other layer of what is really going on with the CIA.
Bob Mayhew, who was a former FBI agent, and the mob.
It's like that reminds me of a totally unrelated story.
I got to get it on Waxo.
So I met this dude in Kentucky, and his grandfather gave him a deathbed confession.
He had been in the Navy.
And so, this is what this dude's deathbed confession was Amelia Earhart.
I'm hearing a plane, so it's cool.
Amelia Earhart's plane went down, and the US Navy did this in the immediate aftermath, did this big search to try to find her.
Search to try to find her.
But what this guy told his grandson was that they weren't looking for her at all.
They didn't even try.
They were using it that as an excuse to uh, do whatever.
Intelligence spying, naval ops.
You know where did her?
Where did where?
Did they think that her plane went down in the Pacific?
I know nothing about Amelia right, me neither.
Anyways, it's just like somebody that listens to this show should.
Who's investigating the Amelia Airhart case.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah, Because that's a common thing, right?
I mean, the Gladio operation was sort of similar, right?
Wasn't it like they had like a cover story?
I don't know.
Anyway, it's just a common thing.
Glomar Explorer and Nuclear Secrets00:03:39
What was Gladio again?
That's where we get the thing that we often, that Christian would often get with FOIA requests, right?
Which is we can neither confirm nor do it.
No, no, that's not Gladio.
I'm sorry, Glomar.
Sorry, sorry.
I was thinking of Glomar.
I'm so sorry.
The Glomar Explorer.
Gladio is the European relationship with the intelligence relationship with the organized crime.
During and after World War II.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I'm so sorry.
Okay.
Yeah.
Glomar was the Glomar disclosure.
People are going to be like, that guy has no idea what he's talking about.
The Glomar is where we get the, we can neither confirm nor deny, which has a Bob Mayhew connection because it was Howard Hughes who was, Bob Mayhew, the FBI guy, was Howard Hughes's right hand man.
Howard Hughes was the person that was tasked with building a submerged.
No, no, no.
A Soviet.
Howard Hughes is something that I, that, That's a whole thing.
Danny Sheehan introduced me to the connection with Howard Hughes and Reagan, I think, before Reagan was president, and how Howard Hughes was really one of the key players in setting up the assassination teams to take out Castro.
Oh, right.
Well, that one, Mayhew, is his right hand man, who I think was actually the one doing it.
Okay, got it.
Mayhew, hang on a second.
Steve, is your mic on?
Checkity, checkity.
It's sort of muted.
I think I can hear breathing.
I don't know if it's your mic or.
Might be one of our.
No, I don't think it was your mic because your mic's not that loud.
I don't know what that was.
Maybe it's the CIA agent in the other room.
Oh, yeah, it's you through your nose.
Okay.
You're a loud nose breather.
That's better than being a mouth breather.
A partial nose breather.
A Soviet submarine had sunk in the Pacific, well off the coast of California.
Uh huh.
And the US government knows that it's there.
The Soviets don't know that the US government knows that it's there.
And the US government, but also it's like, well, you know, it sank and it's at the bottom of the ocean.
So it's impossible to extract it and bring it back.
It's like so far deep.
It's so far underwater.
There's nukes on it, right?
There's nukes on it.
There's secrets on it.
There's encryption on it.
Like, it's like everything you want is on this sub.
So the CIA, Enlists Howard Hughes to build this massive ship that has basically a bay that opens underwater and this like thing.
And it's called the Glomar, right?
It's called the Glomar Explorer.
Can you pull this up?
Glomar.
And a claw machine claw, basically, that can go down and grab the submarine and bring it all the way back up and bring it into the ship.
Okay, go to that one down there, the bottom left, the colored one.
Oh, there you go.
Is that like a Glomar Explorer?
And so, you know, it's this huge ship.
It's this massively expensive project.
So eventually, you know, Jack Anderson, whatever reporters are like asking the CAA, so we heard that you guys are building this giant ship to pull his nuclear.
And they basically would say we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the existence of this giant ship or this operation or whatever.
So that's where that's the grid.
That's called the Glomar disclosure when they tell you when they from then on out when when you get FOIA requests that they don't want to fulfill, but they don't want to lie and say like, you know, we we we don't have it, but like years later it's going to turn out they did have it.
Zapruder Film and Bob Lazar00:12:25
It's that language.
We can neither confirm nor nor deny the existence of XYZ these records, whatever.
Right.
And so we got that Christian got that a fair amount.
Especially when you start talking about people like Philip Arthur Thompson, or you know, I don't think we ever even finished like who Bob Nichols is, but oh, yeah, he wanted to know some story.
So, Bob Nichols, yeah, I think Robert Booth Nichols, or I'm sorry, Robert Booth Nichols.
The reason we got on to his story, I wanted you guys to basically explain who he was because there was a we were talking about strategic deception in the Kennedy video, right?
That is why you're good at this job, you can you meander and get us back.
That is a real skill.
I gotta take that ship and pull you back out of the rabbit hole.
We're in good hands here, so so Bob is uh somebody who.
Had been in business with Michael after Cabazon, you know, met him at Cabazon.
Michael, his business partner, Paul Marasco, was viciously murdered.
And he attributes that murder to John Philip Nichols, his old guy.
And he goes with it sucks because there's so many Nichols in this story, right?
Robert Booth Nichols, John Philip Nichols.
Robert Booth Nichols is a completely different person who was also at Cabazon when John Philip Nichols, the guy who we've been talking about with the cigarette business, the gambling business, They're not related.
They're not related.
But so Robert Nichols essentially, I think, basically told Mike, like, you got to get out of Cabazon because you're going to be next.
Like your business partner was assassinated.
Come with me and we'll get into business together.
And so they start a company, basically, Meridian, that was them and some other people.
And they get up some stuff.
They have a falling out while in Australia.
And by the time Danny comes on the scene in 1990, 1991, Michael Ricconnichudo and Bob Nichols hate each other.
And when Mike goes to jail, while Danny's working on this thing, he says it's retaliation for him coming forward about this whole story.
And he's basically talking to Danny, Bob's talking to Danny.
They're using Danny as like a go between.
Yeah, that's Bob on the right there.
They're using Danny as a go between to find out kind of what the other person's revealing about the other person.
And Bob just has this, like we said, just like this seeming connection to the intel world, to organized crime, to the secrets of the universe, of how the intelligence world, he seems to be a kind of low to middle level operative who can show Danny.
I look at him as he's like his Virgil going into the ninth circle of hell, taking taking Dante in and showing him around, right?
Right.
And so the story that he tells is sort of his own personal experience.
But he's a three months after Danny died, this woman, it's going to sound so confusing.
This woman, Sherry Seymour, who we interviewed and I think, who wrote a book sort of about parts of our story, she picked up on Danny's trail because she was on the West Coast.
She was interested in sort of drug operations that were related to the federal government.
And she, Gets a call, I think on like New Year's Day or New Year's Eve from Robert Booth Nichols.
And he's like, they eventually arrange a meeting and she goes over to his house and he's.
And she said it might have been a safe house.
He had a couple places in the LA area.
He had a place in Marina del Rey, his like apartment.
And then he had another apartment-ish, condo-ish thing in Sherman Oaks.
Sherman Oaks.
Okay.
And so she goes over there.
Ellen, his wife is there.
He also had a place in Italy.
He had a place in Honolulu.
He had a place in.
Balling for a guy who has.
Has never paid taxes and has no discernible means of income.
Who flies first class everywhere, stays in the four seasons when he's not going to one of his like villas.
Wow, like pretty cool little life he's got going on for himself, tax free.
Um, so she goes over there, she's asking, you know, what is what happened to that guy Danny who died just a few months ago?
Yeah, that you were talking to, you know, and he's super cagey about it and he says, he says all kinds of stuff about like, well, like.
Nobody who – No journalist has done enough work.
Yeah, no journalist has done enough research to know the answer to that story, to answer that question.
But he shows her – towards the end of their conversation, he shows her a tape.
He puts on this tape, and it's of a version of the Zapruder film that she's never seen before, that nobody has seen before, quote unquote, that is what he calls the real Zapruder film.
And she tells the story of the movie.
It shows the driver turning around and shooting JFK in the head.
And then she's looking at this and she's just like, what is going on here?
Like, is this real?
What is happening?
And then he's like, yeah, it's the real one.
Let me show you the tape that you've seen in the media.
And this is a time, you know, 1982.
There's no YouTube.
It's hard to access these videos.
I mean, the Zapruder film itself wasn't even shown on television for more than a decade, I think, after it was taken.
It was shown on the Geraldo show, actually.
We beat our heads against the wall trying to find a decent resolution version.
It's still hard to find.
Yeah, it's crazy.
It's really hard to find a high res Zapruder film.
A nice film scan.
It's for the most famous piece of film ever created.
Why is that?
It must have to do with I mean, the ownership is now with the Sixth Floor Museum, and they have like a version that's online, but maybe they just have never bothered to like nicely digitize it and do like a nice high res thing.
You can see it on their website, but it's pretty low res.
And so, so, so.
He plays her the quote unquote real version.
Right.
And he's like, pauses it midway through.
I mean, we tell the story in the thing, but yeah, I'll try to be quick.
He pauses it midway through and he's like, look at this tree, this tree that you're looking at there.
There's, there's, and she says, like, half of the trunk is, or half of the tree's gone.
He's like, that's, that's the one you're seeing in the media.
It's the one that's been altered.
The one I'm showing you with the guy shooting the guy, shoot, with the driver shooting him, that's the real one.
You've been fed this doctored tape.
He says that it's like, his contention is that the, What he's telling her is that the original roll of film had been spliced and that very quick turnaround and shoot was cut out.
Excised from it.
That's his contention.
Which is why he claims half of the tree was missing.
In the doctoring process, that it wasn't well done.
When they re spliced it together.
Which doesn't even actually make sense.
Right, because if you watch the Zapruder film online right now, the whole tree is there, right?
Yeah, that's not how film works.
Right.
If you're just cutting out frames.
Right, exactly.
But if you're painting, you can imagine there's some sort of superimposition going on.
Yeah, they had some sort of CGI back then.
Well, they did it with the moon landing.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm joking.
So, the story, the takeaway that Sherry has, which I think is the important moral of the story, because some people, I think, see this scene and they're just like, damn, these guys have the real Zapruder film.
Like, it's like, it's like, that is not our contention in any way whatsoever.
It is to give you this feeling and make you want to go online and watch the original one and be like, what the fuck is going on here?
Are we allowed to curse on this?
This is YouTube, right?
Yeah, that's YouTube.
Okay.
Or Spotify or whatever.
So, What the hell is going on here?
And put your brain into this world where you just don't.
That was the hope in editing that scene together in the way that Sherry tells the story, is to give you this sort of unsettling feeling that you do not know what reality is, that you've lost touch with the truth.
And that, like the grill mask that you were talking about in the play.
Right.
Like Sherry says, if, you know, she'll report on this meeting she had with Robert Booth Nichols and say at the end, he.
I saw the reels approved for him.
You guys won't believe it.
Right.
And she looks like an idiot whack job.
Yeah.
And she's like, to anybody, she's journalistically toast.
Yeah.
I think it could have been the same thing with, I don't know if you're familiar with the Bob Lazar story.
Oh, yeah.
He's the guy who was contracted to go out to Area 51 or S4 and back engineer.
Oh, do you know that story very well?
Yeah.
There's like a part of it where one of the things that were really kind of profound that he brought to light in the 80s was this like hand scanner.
Yes.
Okay.
That, I knew about that hand scanner because that was in, that was Wacken Hut.
Manufactured that.
What?
Yeah.
And so, in their annual reports, that I found their annual, Danny Castellaro had these like full color, whack and hunt annual reports that I got from Danny's archives.
And there you have these like, you know, kind of like, you know, very annual report, well lit, you know, photographs of like women putting their hands on this, like, at the time, very advanced technology.
A bone density scanner in your fingers.
Yeah.
Can you pull that up?
There's photos of it online, Steve.
Just type in really we have good versions of it, you know area 51 hands from this from this annual report They also use that same scanner in close encounters of the third kind or yeah, yeah Anyways Bob Lazar so yeah anyways, so in his story he that's it right there in the top left right?
Yeah, that that's it.
Yeah, so Wacken Hut made that Yeah, or or at least like bought the company that that made it.
Yeah, they're marketing it.
Yeah, so so allegedly in his story He claims he was and they never worked Apparently, total crap.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Oh, that's even better.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, allegedly, in his story, he was contracted to go out to S4 and try to do back engineering on these flying saucers or whatever.
And he claims when he was leaving the first day he went out there to look at this stuff, they purposely walked him by a window that was open where he looked in the window and he saw a little alien being with like guys standing over it.
So, My interpretation of that is that was the same thing that was going on with that Disupruder film.
Yeah.
My smart.
My Bob Lazar.
Okay.
Robert Booth.
I've never contacted Bob Lazar, but Robert Booth Nichols claims to be friends with Bob Lazar.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And then my fate after the David Grush congressional hearings last summer, I revisited Bob Lazar because those hearings were so Lazar, Lazarian, Lazar esque.
Lazarian.
That's a good word.
And so I, you know, just kind of.
Quickly revisited what Bob Lazar's claims are.
The one that I think is so cool is that he said there were like five or six different crafts that he was working on.
But the one he said he was working on was found in an archaeological dig.
And I was just like, wow, that's, I mean, who knows?
But that's just like a beautiful thought that, like, you know, this spacecraft is found in an archaeological dig.
I just love the drama of that, the like X-Files episode.
Yeah, what that does to my imagination.
Yeah, it's interesting too when you hear.
What does it say about time travel?
Right.
Yeah.
A lot of people think that the technology in the future, the saucer technology never changes.
Is that because it's the pinnacle of technology or because they are jumping around our timeline?
The saucer technology never changes.
But they always look like saucer.
There's like pictures of them in, you know, saucer pictures that are fed from the federal government, the images of like, here's what the flying saucers look like so that they won't pay attention to the drone and stealth, like, right weapons programs that are going on.
My theory, crazy theory.
La Honda, Drones, and Saucer Tech00:03:06
Sorry, I rang that up.
My theory is that all that, all that stuff in the drones and the ticks.
tax that all the military pilots are filming is just to keep our attention off of, you know, spending $5 million on these Columbia class nuclear submarines that we're building and all this other crazy shit that we're building.
We sure do like spending money on expensive military toys in this country, don't we?
Yeah, that something that has not ended since World War II.
That's for sure.
But on this like topic of conspiracy stuff, Zach and I haven't, we've really only studied this like case.
I can't speak with authority on pretty much anything outside of these specific cases, which they are numerous and kind of interlocking and sprawling.
But from like 1980 to like 1995, I'm like, I don't know.
It's okay.
I can't speak with authority on literally anything either.
That's why you asked the question.
That's right.
So, one of the main characters in the show that we haven't really talked about yet, who's a recurring, he's one of them, I would say, The main figures in the whole story and really important is Michael Reconosciuto.
Yeah.
Can you explain who Michael Reconosciuto is and give me like a little backstory into how you discovered him in the first place and what your relationship with him is now?
Yeah.
And that also, like, I could tag onto that, like, how Robert Booth Nichols enters the picture as well for Danny and for Bill Hamilton.
So.
Michael Reconosciuto is a child prodigy, a child science prodigy from the Pacific Northwest.
Who, when he was 16, when he was very young, he rewired his neighborhood's telephone system and undercut Ma Bell's phone system and kind of like everyone in his neighborhood didn't have to pay their phone bill for a while because he had kind of like rejiggered.
There's an article about that in the Tacoma News Tribune.
He had won science fairs and Then he went down to Stanford when he was 16 to work on lasers with the soon-to-be Nobel laureate for lasers, this guy, Dr. Arthur Shalla.
And then he studied.
He went to this all boys school called the Woodside Priory in the Portola Valley, which is one of the most wealthy and prestigious areas in the whole United States.
And it's also very close to La Honda, where Ken Kesey's fun and games were happening concurrently with the Hells Angels and LSD and the Grateful Dead.
And so then Michael graduates from high school.
He says that they would hitchhike over to La Honda and But I'm not sure.
Ken Kesey and Hells Angels Links00:02:19
I don't know if, you know, Ken Kesey would film a lot of stuff.
Maybe he, it would be cool to find Michael, you know, as a teenage Michael, like with the Hells Angels in, you know, at his crazy parties in La Honda.
But anyways, Michael, we do know that Michael ends up in California or in San Francisco in the 60s during the hippie movement, the Haight-Ashbury movement.
Interesting.
And he's connected to this.
Theater, this avant garde theater and dance venue called the Straight Theater, which is right on Haight and Ashbury.
Sorry to interrupt, but did Tom O'Neill ever come across him in his research?
Yes.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
We found out about Tom O'Neill's book when we were sort of in the early stages ish of kind of interviewing people for the movie.
And we contacted him through circuitous means.
And they said, no, we're super fans of Tom O'Neill.
And Zach's girlfriend made t shirts, like bootlegs, which had the cover of his first edition of Chaos on it.
Oh, when he sent you a cease and desist, that's how you met him?
No, no.
And then on the back, it had his dust jacket portrait.
And then my girlfriend at the time tagged, I was wearing the shirt, and she took a photo of me and posted it on Instagram and tagged Tom.
And he wrote to her, like, what is going on here?
Where'd you get these shirts?
He wasn't mad, but he was stoked.
Yeah.
And then he just thought that there were these kids in New York that, were obsessed with his book and he didn't know anything about us.
And so then when I was in Los Angeles later, I messaged him.
I was like, I'm the guy with the shirt.
Like, I'd like to give you one, which was actually my one.
So now I don't have one anymore.
And so I gave him, I met him for lunch at this diner in Los Angeles.
Oh, really?
And gave him the shirt.
And then I told him like what I was up to.
And we ended up talking for three hours.
I mean, the time just like flew by.
We didn't even know how much time had passed.
And then the meter maid was like trying to give me a ticket.
because like whatever it was, you know, long since the, you know, meter had long since run out.
And then Tom's like, whoa, I can't be sitting here all day.
Intertwined Investigations and Memos00:06:22
I've got stuff to do.
I've got to go.
And I'm like, I got to go too.
But this is amazing.
I was, you know, but so that's how we met first, met Tom.
But and over one of the reasons why that lunch was so compelling was because we had, we knew the same people.
Like we'd the sort of farther reaches of our investigation connected to the farther reaches of parts of his like he had he had a file on Michael Ricconnichudo in his files.
He had a file on Earl Bryan in his files.
He actually called Earl Bryan before he died.
So it's really funny how it kind of reaches just like just barely touches on the chaos world and I think touches on it ultimately probably a lot.
Yeah, more than touches.
I mean, it's very intertwined.
But but but so yeah.
In essence, like, here's how I like to think about Mike is like, I think of him if you look at sort of the stuff he got busted for as like the connection between the 60s, a prism through which to see the transition from the 60s, late 60s LSD scene in San Francisco, Haight Ashbury, the freak scene, to the harder 70s and early 80s amphetamines takeover,
essentially.
And potentially, if you want to go there, the relationship between the federal government and those drugs.
Well yeah, the mass importation of those drugs.
Ashberry Clinic was doing studies on amphetamines and lsd simultaneously, which is interesting.
So um, and Mike told me that he went to the Free Medical Clinic you know the Haight Ashberry Medical Clinic and said they knew a lot of people there.
Um okay, so flash forward to 1990.
Bill Hamilton is trying to figure out.
He's successfully won.
Bill Hamilton, we should just say, is the founder of this company called Inslaw.
Inslaw.
Developed the Promise Software.
The starting place for Danny is.
We haven't even explained what the Promise Software is.
We're doing this like backwards, essentially.
But that's fine.
You know, just want to put it out there just very concretely.
Like, this is where Danny Castellaro, the journalist that Christian became so interested in, who died in the bathtub in 1991, he started his investigation looking into a piece of software called the Promise Software.
Which had been allegedly stolen by the Justice Department and used to do.
Nobody knew at the time what happened to this piece of software that was developed for the DOJ, and a court had ruled that it had been stolen by the DOJ.
And so, enter.
And Bill Hamilton's in charge of that company.
Enter Mike Reconosciuto.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, basically, Bill Hamilton is trying to figure out.
He tracks down Michael Reconosciuto as someone who knows what happened to his software.
He knows that the Justice Department stole it, but what he can't figure out is why.
And he hopes that Michael Reconosciuto can help.
Flesh out that question of why.
And basically, Mike, he gets a hold of him through some former FBI agents and is able to track him down.
And eventually, Michael calls Bill.
And Bill also is former NSA and he also had done contract work with the CIA.
Just to add a little more spice.
That's nice.
Some podcasters say that we didn't mention it in the movie, but we do mention it in the movie.
So, um, that's neither here nor there.
Well, it's in the movie.
Uh, so, uh, so basically, Michael has this two hour long phone call with Bill, and he says that the promise, you know, the first thing he says is like, just he just describes what the Wagon Hut Corporation is.
He's like, it's this like, you know, giant, you know, security company.
And I was the director of research on the Cabazon Wagon Hut joint venture in the Coachella Valley.
And one of our projects was to modify the purloined INSLAW software promise and install a secret back door in it,
which would then be sold through front companies to intelligence agencies and police stations and corporations all around the world so that all of that data that would then be tracked by those institutions could be like Pulled accessed and pulled into like a master global database that has no national restriction.
They were using it by the US government and then also by Israel because apparently there were two channels happening.
Anyways, Michael's the other informants talk about the Israeli aspect.
Michael's talking about the American channel of this backdoor software.
Right.
And so he so basically they had this long conversation.
And Bill then, you know, makes like this like memo, like just so we can like keep track of like had this call with Michael on this date, April 1990, like da da da.
And then it's like this probably like 13 page memo of like all of these points that Michael made in this call.
And basically, Bill on his own, he's a great researcher in his own right, just starts going through line by line, trying to fact check these wild claims that this guy on the other end of the phone somewhere in rural, Washington has told him.
And so he finds this guy named Peter Zakowski through this journalist who wrote about the savings and loan scandal, who had used to be in business with John Philip Nichols.
And he's like, oh, you know, if you really want to know what was going on with Mike and all this stuff, you should talk to this guy, Robert Booth Nichols.
So that's how, like, then Robert Booth Nichols enters the picture and he calls Bill one day out of the blue.
So now Bill's talking to these two guys.
And then when Danny comes along a few months later, Bill gives Danny this, like that's that a copy of that memo, that from Mike, from that first call with Mike, and then eventually like gives him Robert Booth Nichols's phone number and like, and then so Danny's like kind of off to the races, like dealing with these, these two guys.
William Casey and Iran Contra00:15:25
And so One of the other claims that Michael makes is that the way that the, the promise software, gets to the reservation is through the rigging of the 1980 presidential election, which was a critical player, and it was this guy, Earl Bryan, who was an American businessman and physician and friend of Ronald Reagan.
Earl Bryan was.
Earl Bryan was.
Earl Bryan was a physician who had been in Reagan's cabinet when he was governor of California.
When Reagan was governor of California, Earl Bryan was this like kind of wonder kind young neurosurgeon who had just come fresh from a couple years serving in Vietnam.
I'd love to know more about that.
And then lands in his cabinet as the California Health and Human Services Secretary.
He was, I think, the youngest secretary in California at that time.
He was this brilliant guy.
Not from California, though.
He was originally from the South.
And then after he had started founding tech companies and healthcare companies.
And he was basically a part of the company that was a competitor to Innslaw, right?
Right.
He started.
a sort of umbrella of companies.
Was it all under Hadron?
Hadron was like a it was like an infotech company.
Infotech, I think was it.
Info Technology was like maybe the umbrella company.
And he owned, we don't even truly get into all of his little things.
It's pretty interesting though.
He was, he bought Financial News Network.
Financial News Network.
UPI.
Which eventually became CNBC.
Financial News Network was a cable, a fledgling cable business news station.
UPI, which was the major competitor to the AP at the time, United Press International.
It's like Newswire service.
A newswire service that was a.
Probably either the biggest or second biggest at the time competing with AP.
Yeah.
And still around.
Kind of.
Like a skeleton of it.
All the biggest companies are kind of still around.
Right.
And Hadron, which was a competitor to InSlaw.
Right.
And Bill claimed that Hadron had tried to, before he really understood what was going on with the Department of Justice sabotaging his contract, they tried to buy him.
Tried to buy him and then threatened, like said something to the effect of, we have ways of making you sell the Promise software.
And Bill claims he's like, What is it?
I didn't even realize it at the time, but looking back on it, I'm realizing, oh, we have ways of making you sell.
It means Earl Bryan's homies with Reagan and they're going to bankrupt us and steal the software.
So, Earl Bryan is, I just want to mention, because we might just move on from him.
It's really, we never talk about it in the show, but eventually he goes to jail in the 90s after Danny died.
He went to jail because he was doing stock manipulation with financial crimes.
With all these companies, and he bankrupted.
I think he bankrupted, right?
FNN.
Eventually, FNN got the reason it's CNBC now is because he was messing around with them and he lost control of the company because he went to jail for that and he went to jail for that and the UPI stock fraud.
There's also an epic scene that didn't make the show where Anne Clank, Danny's best friend, works at.
CNBC as a she worked at FNN.
She's an executive producer works, you know, for this news station.
We, yeah, we didn't talk about that because it was like yet another like whole thing we'd have to explain.
But like, it was really interesting that Anne and some people in this kind of like octopus conspiracy universe are like, well, Anne Klink worked for Earl Bryan.
Like, what does she have to do with Danny's death?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's like, dude, he's the boss who sits out like, you know, it's like if you work for Facebook.
I mean, the equivalent is essentially, maybe it's not this scale, but it's like Facebook.
You're like an engineer at Facebook, and somebody's like, Well, what did Mark Zuckerberg tell you yesterday?
It's like, Dude, I've never met Mark.
You don't have a relationship necessarily with the boss, boss, boss guy.
But Danny's looking into Earl Bryan in the summer.
I'm not sure whether it was the summer of 1990.
It was probably, if it was like maybe late summer 1990 or 1991.
And The company picnic is going down, and Danny's like, Man, you got to invite me.
You got to invite me.
Because Earl Bryan is going to be there at this company picnic in like rural Virginia or something like that.
And they end up playing volleyball against each other.
Oh, wow.
And basically, I mean, Earl Bryan is way out of shape.
He's a big and this guy, really heavy set, kind of seemingly out of shape guy, but he plays a lot of tennis and.
And he's got a mad volleyball game, and he just schools Danny.
Really?
Yeah.
In volleyball.
Huh.
The volleyball version of dunking on him.
Wow.
So she told us this great story.
I would, you know, it'd be cool if it was in the movie, but it's, it's, it doesn't really take us anywhere, but it's just a, it's just an amazing image of Danny thinking like, I've got him.
I'm going to get Earl Bryan.
Like, I'm going to get to the bomb and I'm going to do it.
My entry is like playing volleyball against him.
And he just gets like shamed, you know, by how badass Earl Bryan apparently is in volleyball.
And Danny was no slut.
She was a Golden Gloves boxer.
Like, he's an athletic dude.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Earl Bryan had founded all these, um, All these tech companies, basically.
And I think he had a lot of government contracts or whatever.
And he had sold computers and technology to Iran to the point where he had learned Farsi.
And that's sort of like what.
That's how Michael ties him to.
Brings him to the table, how he's said to have been involved in these negotiations to. keep the U.S. hostages in Iran until after the election.
Oh, right, right.
Because he's homies with Ronald Reagan.
Reagan, this is Michael's story.
He's homies with Ronald Reagan, and he's going to deliver $40 million to the Ayatollah to keep the hostages in Iran so that Reagan looks like like Jimmy Carter can.
Jimmy Carter looks weak.
Reagan looks like a badass.
And what ends up happening, I mean, this is why it ties so neatly to the history lesson is that, of course, Ronald Reagan wins the election and within an hour, 30 minutes, whatever of his inauguration speech, the hostages are on a plane going back to America.
And it's like, wow, like Reagan won and he got the hostages back.
It definitely has.
And also his campaign manager is william Casey, who's this OSS super spy mastermind, wily motherfucker.
Wasn't he the head of the CIA?
For Reagan.
For Reagan, after he does this secret squirrel mission in Iran to get the governor of California to become the president.
Wow.
He's then made the.
But this, just to be clear, this is.
We're kind of like.
That's not necessarily even Michael's story.
It's not Michael's story.
This is Christian's.
I don't think Michael really went to Iran.
I don't he needs the onus is on Michael to come forward with some passport, photographs, some documentation that shows that he and Earl Bryan went to Iran and helped do this deal.
Regardless of that, I think it definitely did happen that the hostages were kept until after the election intentionally to benefit the Republicans.
Right.
If you look at what we ended up doing, I mean, we did a lot more research on the October surprise than ended up in the movie.
And we talked to, you know, several people who had some relationship to it or had investigated it.
And then, of course, last year, the New York Times came out with this piece saying that, you know, somebody, what's his name?
Peter Baker, the New York Times, came out with this piece saying somebody in Texas had admitted that he was, that he had been there for negotiations between that Texas congressman.
What's his name?
And that the October surprise really did happen that way, which is interesting because if you look at the people who really went into the October surprise investigation on the journalistic side, guys like Robert Perry, they didn't have that story.
They had other stories about William Casey's shenanigans.
And what seems like to me might be the true picture of what happened is that William Casey, like any smart spy, had a bunch of things going on, many different sort of wheels within wheels and many different plans at foot.
And one of them worked out.
You know, like maybe one of them worked out.
And if you have a lot of different things, it also creates an echo chamber where it's like, wait, how could that be happening the same time this is happening?
How's, you know, it's like, well, maybe they're actually all happening.
Just because multiple things seem like they are mutually exclusive doesn't mean that they are, I guess is my point.
At the time, Iran was fighting a war with Iraq.
And what Iran needed were parts for planes.
They had a bunch of planes that didn't have tires.
American-made planes from after the revolution in 1979.
America stopped giving them parts.
And they needed bombs and guns.
The time that those meetings would have happened, the guns started flowing to Iran and they didn't stop.
You know, I think that there's like the Iran Contra, like I think arbitrary is the limited hangout version of Iran Contra is like they pick an arbitrary point in time for that scandal to start.
But it really started, especially if the October surprise happened, which I do believe it did.
It started then.
That's when those like the relationship, the relationship and the And the arms traffic, which it's a perfect mirror, not an imperfect, but a pretty close mirror to what happened with Iran Contra six years later, which is that there was another hostage crisis and we were using weapons to negotiate for hostages.
And it's like, well, how'd we get that idea?
Like, maybe, you know, the easy answer would be that we got that idea from ourselves when we did it.
If you're the Reagan administration, anyway, William Casey, just to put a little button on that, he becomes the CIA director.
He, when called to testify in front of the Iran Contra hearings, he, the day before he's supposed to testify, dies.
Just so inconveniently for people who want to find out the truth if he was going to tell the truth.
Bill Casey?
Yeah.
And one other little octopus tentacle to throw in there is that he was outside counsel before all this to Wackenhut.
He was a lawyer before that to Wackenhut.
So it's like, would you think Wackenhut is this?
It's like this boogeyman, right?
But it's like, has this funny name.
But you really look into them, and they was up to some bad, bad stuff.
They also had, didn't they have the largest private rep repository of information, surveillance, and other information on American citizens?
Yeah, yeah.
They got that from the House on Americans Activities Committee.
Yeah.
I think there's actually like 26 feet or something ridiculous of.
Information on people illegally, surveillance surveillance that's, I believe, sitting in the NYU library, because they got the Wacken Hut files from some like other.
They got those Wacken Hut files from something.
Um anyway, they digitize them and put them on their promise.
Yeah, and they really want to get and.
And Danny somehow got access to talking about yourself.
Yeah myself, back in 1990 when I was three years old.
Um, he somehow got access to the, The checks that were written by the Kuwait royal family for like, Adnan Khashoggi.
Yeah, I mean, those had been around.
We have like CBS nightly news reports that show those same checks and reports on them.
The Khashoggi stuff, you know, a lot of the Iran Contra stuff that Danny was looking into had happened in hearings a couple years earlier than that.
What was interesting was.
Who was the guy from Oregon?
Brinicki?
Yeah, he got those checks from Brinicki.
Ah, okay.
And so what Danny was doing, I think it's like, well, what was Danny doing that's so special?
It's like what he was doing was.
Looking at Iran Contra and then looking at the implosion of Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the bank we talked about that was happening.
It's connected to Iran Contra.
Right.
The implosion of that bank was happening in 1991, right when Danny's doing this.
He's looking at the savings and loan crisis.
He's looking at all these things and he's like, oh my gosh, all these people in Wackenhut, they're all actually literally connected.
They all know each other or are part of the same thing.
Maybe the savings and loan scandal is really part of an intelligence operation or It's like popping up in that little place and it's popping up here and it's popping up here.
And it's about essentially how money and power are moving around the world through intelligence networks of these like kind of dudes.
And if you want to get deep, deep into it, as like our editor Eric really got into, is like it's where their expulsion from the CIA after the church, after the various like church hearing, church committee hearings and things like that in the 70s, you know, Stansfield Turner comes into the CIA during.
Under Carter, and he's like, Everybody's gotta go.
He likes cleans out cleans house 30%, or some huge amount of the CIA gets kicked out because it's like, You guys have been up to so much right bad stuff, like so much illegal stuff.
Like, we got a clean house here.
But now you have all these spies, they've got a particular set of skills, you know, in the don't adapt that well to civilian life, and they got contacts all over the world, right?
And they've done things like Operation, and I'll try to get it right this time.
Privatizing Military Intelligence Networks00:02:12
Gladio, things like that, where you're, you know, these guys, when you're working in the CIA, what is your, and you're in operations, what are you doing?
You're generally going to other countries and committing crimes.
Like espionage in those countries is a crime, and the way you're doing it is often, sometimes at least, working with criminals.
And so Danny's idea, Casalero, is that these guys are all the intersection between like a bunch of disaffected, pissed off spies who were kicked out of, um, The administration under Carter.
And it fits nicely because it's like, well, you do have William Casey, who's an ex OSS officer, as Reagan's campaign manager, with George H.W. Bush as the vice presidential candidate who was the CIA director.
It's like them coming in under Reagan's cabinet, under Reagan's administration, and potentially engineering the return of or the ascendancy of Reagan over Carter is basically a.
You could see it as the world's biggest fuck you to Stansfield Turner and Jimmy Carter of being like, oh, you're kicking us out?
Well, guess who's back, baby?
And we're taking over.
You know, like there's a way you can actually see that sort of thing where all these dudes and Iran Contra kind of becomes an exponent of that.
I'm sorry if I'm just droning on here, but Iran Contra becomes an exponent of that because it's former intelligence, military intelligence people who are working with the current administration, the Reagan administration.
They set up a private supply network.
Private supply network.
Supply network.
It's, if you want to see it in a related way, it's about the privatization of military intelligence, you know?
And whenever Reagan's like, you know, saying things like, you know, the worst words, the worst sentence in the English language is, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
It's like, well, that's a really convenient viewpoint for somebody who's working with a lot of people who are about to make a shit ton of money off of like military intelligence under your administration.
Israeli Intel and Promise Software00:15:55
Mm hmm.
That's what Iran Contra was.
Right.
That's what, you know, all this stuff is.
So, one thing that we haven't really explained that I'm kind of a little bit fuzzy on is what was so special about the Promise software that made all these different nations around the world want to buy it?
And I understand the logic of selling it to all these nations and creating a backdoor.
That was created by Michael Reconosciuto, right?
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
We always have to throw the A word in there.
I understand using that, selling the software to everybody and creating a backdoor so you could go in there and gather all the information that they have.
But how did the Promise software help them on the Cabazon reservation and specifically with the arms sales?
Well, that's problematic because, I mean, we've got done, we did a lot of reporting about what.
sort of the facilities.
I mean, the weapons development facilities, we have the blueprints.
They never got built.
You know, they did build a casino, but the tank ammunition shell plant that they wanted to build and the chemical and biological weapons manufacturing facilities that they wanted to build, they never got built because probably because John Philip Nichols was hiring all these murders and Wackenhunt got spooked and pulled out.
It got too hot because John Philip Nichols just couldn't help but kill people.
And speaking of got too hot, I mean, in order to run those VAX computers that the Promise Software ran on these DEC VAX mini computers, I don't think they could fit in this room.
They would take up a huge portion of this room, but you need to.
Like vacuum tube computers?
Yeah.
They're like these.
We show them in the film.
They play like this.
Run on this magnetic tape.
It's after the fact.
The real to real.
The real to real computers.
Yeah, yeah.
And you basically need to like kind of raise floors.
You can look up the deck vax D. 11C vax.
11780.
You know, basically, there were some dusty old, there was a card room and there were some trailers out on this reservation.
Look at these.
You know, look at this room where they're running these.
Or type in 1170, 11780.
Deck Vax 11780.
After Vax.
At the After Vax.
Or even that.
Even that's fine.
Yeah.
1178.
It's suggested right there.
Boom.
We actually found a working one of these and filmed it.
Oh.
Which was sick in our recreation.
We can't find any evidence that A, these machines were on the reservation or B, that they could have even supported it.
That's a great sales envelope right there.
That one that says skip Walter.
Yeah.
Down.
It just looks cool.
I like their sales.
marketing stuff.
And even Bill, as he went through fact checking that stuff that Michael had initially told him and talking to all these people and networking with all these people initially, he was able to corroborate everything Mike said about Cavazon, Wagonhut, and all these murders and all this stuff.
Stuff that's actually much more incriminating and crazy, but he couldn't nail down the promise story being out there, which doesn't mean.
I mean, we remain pretty open to it.
There's also other.
sort of stories about other avenues through Israel and all kinds of other things that promise was hacked by those guys.
But the story about Michael specifically doing it at Cabazon, we've never been able to like nail that one down.
It's danny said many times throughout his notes, possession of a secret is no guarantee of its truth.
I think that's a really important you know, people tell you, just because someone tells you in confidence or whatever, tells you this secret and this like thing, it doesn't mean it's true.
Right.
And I think some people might say, well, then what are you guys doing here?
What's your documentary about if you don't think some of this stuff is true?
It's like, well, what we found was that that might have been true or not.
There was this weapons exploration thing going on out there.
There was a series of unsolved homicides that I think Christian does a pretty good job of laying out what actually happened and that they were for people working with intelligence agencies.
All the other stuff that Danny was onto turned out to be pretty right on about how these intelligence networks work.
And people like, you know, how people like Robert Wood Nichols and Michael Reconestrudo, the stuff that they were involved with that was true, was equally, if I would say not, more chilling and strange and bizarre than just like what was going on with Promise at Cabazon.
I think it's a really interesting open question of like, well, then what's the point of Michael saying all this stuff about.
Promising Cabazon and why would he bother?
And, you know, we don't truly get into like the whys and wherefores of that.
But I guess in answer to your question, like, so there's a Mike Reconnaciuto promise thing, but I think it is important to kind of like lay out Bill's vision and maybe not even Michael's vision of why promise, right?
What would it?
Because he's not, Michael's not the only one.
Like, Ari bin Manashi, another slightly slippery character, Israeli spy.
We mentioned him in the show.
He has a whole other take on what's going on with.
A related but other take on what's going on with Promise and Israeli intelligence and the sort of worldwide distribution of Promise, right?
And it's related.
It's essentially that Promise here's like the kind of canonical story, right?
Promise was developed to organize information files for the Justice Department.
This is true, right?
It's a database.
In an era when there's not that.
Many similar programs, right?
You know, sort of early to mid computing when you're using giant $2 million machines like the DEC VAX, right?
But that's like early 80s.
By the time this is happening, Promise is a pretty powerful, very powerful, according to some, definitely Bill Hamilton, like 500,000 lines of code that can, that what's special about it is it can organize all this information, but it can sort the information and it can like find patterns within information.
So you're looking for, if you're in the criminal system, you're looking for what like, you're sorting the basics of like the judge on the case is the same and here's this defendant who's the same.
But then you can track other cases and be like, oh, there's a pattern of crime here.
Here's how this criminal is actually involved with all these other crimes and here's like the kind of information network and Promise is good at sorting that.
One of its early findings found that 10% of police police detectives in DC closed 100% of the cases that were closed in that.
So basically, like 90% of the detectives weren't able to take their cases from arrest to conviction.
Only 10% of the DC detectives were able to do that.
And that was just unclear until they were able to take That's hard data.
It's called the super cop study.
It's data mining.
Outside of even our documentary, we don't really get into the details on this, but it was a powerful research tool.
Right.
In addition to its work for the Justice Department, I think Charles Work, who we interviewed, who was one of the kind of godfathers of this project, who brought Bill into the Justice Department to do it, wanted to do research so they could make the criminal, you know, ostensibly make the criminal justice system more just or more effective and find out patterns in law enforcement.
That would be better for victims, for closing cases and things like that.
And so they had these pretty cool big papers that were written from research done on these massive databases of promise information.
So then it's like, okay, well, then how does that come?
How do you get to go from that to a global surveillance network, right?
Well, the idea at least is, according to people like Ari or Michael Reconosciuto and other people, is, well, it's just a, you know, It's just a matter of what information you're throwing in there.
So, if you're throwing in as a comparison, say instead of legal cases, you're throwing in the phone bills and the water bills and the utility bills of people in Palestine, you could sort those names or, you know, or Jordan or whatever it was.
You could sort those names and find out, oh, this person has like a spike.
In their water bill for like the last two weeks.
Maybe that means that more people are staying there.
Maybe that means there's unreported people staying in there.
There's some sort of like operation going on in like an insurgent, you know, in their minds, like insurgent, essentially military campaign, right?
Right.
That's happening within the population.
So you can find patterns, just depends on what you're looking for.
And those can be very, you know, valuable.
The sort of Next layer is then so, say you are Israel and you sell that to Jordan, and you're finding out you're seeing that you're then tapping into Jordan's information.
They're tracking this information, and then you're pulling that information out and you're sorting it against what's going on in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, whatever, and you're seeing an even bigger picture.
Keeping tabs on what's going on.
So, Ari's point that he says.
In interviews that we have, is that this was like- He was the Mossad spy?
Well, he was IDF.
Oh, IDF, okay.
But Israeli intelligence operative that they just- I mean, man, we should tell his story.
Story.
It's like there's so many amazing sort of like things that we didn't even get into.
Like he was separately one of the reasons that we know about Iran Contra.
He leaked the first article about Iran Contra, it was an article that was based on information that he leaked.
So it's like to a Lebanese news magazine, I think.
Right.
So, you know, years later, he was arrested in 1990 or 89 or something like that for selling like.
C-130s.
Three C-130s that were illegally being sold, and he gets arrested and tried in Manhattan.
He gets a public defender.
Israel disavows him, says that he has nothing to do with the idea for Israeli intelligence, and then he gets a bunch of letterhead and stuff that shows, oh, yeah, he is working for Israeli intelligence.
They're like, oh, well, he's just a low-level translator.
Then he gets his passport, and it's like as thick as the Bible full of like, Travel to North Korea, travel to like Peru to like visit the Shining Path.
You know, it's like a low level translator who's going to like 90 countries in this thing.
And so he actually argued his way out with a public defender, argued his way out of federal charges, got off not guilty for illegal arms ship, illegally shipping these C 130s.
And he's so annoyed, he starts telling anyone who will listen everything he knows about everything he knows.
Right.
Is his story.
And so his point is that Promise Software was this like better than cheaper and better than satellites for gathering information on whatever Israeli intelligence wanted to know about in the early 80s, early to mid 80s.
And the story of how it got to Israel from basically INSLA or the DOJ was that this guy, Dr. Ben Orr, who was an emissary from the Ministry of Justice in Israel, Comes to.
This is Bill Hamilton's perspective.
This is Bill Hamilton's story.
The president of Inslaw.
I'm just throwing that out there.
Comes to Inslaw and basically wants like a show and tell.
I hear you got this new DOJ supporting prosecution software.
Maybe we want it over in Israel.
This is in the early 80s.
This is before all the problems, all the lawsuits, and all that stuff.
Dr. Bill Hamilton.
So he comes to kick the tires on Inslaw and Promise.
Basically they, you know, spend whatever the day together and the guy, uh, the guy leaves.
He leaves and Bill never hears from him again at the ministry of justice.
And then through the course of, I think there's lawsuits against the department of justice.
And then through the course of, I think there's lawsuits against the Department of Justice, I believe somehow they get a document that shows that the Justice Department did actually give Dr. Ben Orr a copy of promise that he took back with him to Israel.
But then somehow Bill figures out that Dr. Ben Orr...
Well, Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general who's now Bill's lawyer fighting against the Department of Justice, does this photographic lineup or something.
Or something.
Where he's showing people in Innslaw pictures of people you might know.
And one of them is a picture that Bill's like, I know that guy.
That's Dr. Benjamin Orr.
He came and looked at our software years ago.
And Elliot Richardson is like, That's not Dr. Benjamin Orr.
That's a guy named Rafi Etan.
Who's a legendary Israeli Mossad spy who was part of the operation to get Eichmann out of Argentina when they brought him back for trial, the Nazi back for trial?
He was called Rafi the Stinker in Israeli intelligence because he had been in some operation early on that he had done.
He had like go through the sewers or something, and he got this moniker.
I think he was like a little dude who, according to the people who knew him, was just a hard nose, right wing, like tough as nails.
You know?
We got his number from one of our friends in Israel.
And like, You know, we were a little bit.
We basically wanted to like really.
Supposedly late, like years later, supposedly Rafa Eitan claimed that the seizure and implementation of this, basically this Israeli promised software operation, spy.
You know, it signals intelligence operation was like the greatest achievement that of Israeli intelligence during his tenure.
You know, he told this to a journalist named Gordon.
Has a lot of, you know, just basic factual inaccuracies in his book.
Users Groups and Spy Operations00:05:24
So it makes me like wonder, like, what we're.
What's really going on?
Because it's not vet.
It's like, you know, he says Danny Getzler died in 1990.
It's just sloppy.
You just, as you're kind of skimming through, you're just like, that's wrong.
That's wrong.
So you start to doubt, like, it's like, so did.
Is it true that Rafi Aitan took you aside and like said, like, don't turn the cameras off and like, let me tell you my greatest achievement, which happened?
It's like the only time that Rafi tells this to any journalist.
Like, Like, is my theft of the Promise software?
It's like, what is he even going?
What is true?
What is not?
And that's part of the reason.
I think another one was just, we're condensing so much.
That's part of the reason none of that, the Rafi Etan story did not end up in our documentary because it was just became too much of like, wait, what is real?
What is not?
Like, we have no way of verifying this, but we did.
We got his cell number from our friend in Israel.
And then we took like too long.
We didn't call him.
And he died like two months after we got his cell number.
Felt so stupid.
We just didn't expect him to die.
Brutal.
Yeah.
Now, how does this all connect to.
You're getting that look on your face that I recognize a lot from dinner parties before we made this movie when it would be like hour six of telling this story.
And people are like, all right, wait.
So it's like people are still interested, but they're just like, wait, what's going on?
So, but I want to know how it got implemented in these nuclear submarines.
Well, that's the sort of like Norma D. G. Asinto story.
Right.
And Cy Hirsch.
And Seymour Hirsch.
Okay.
I mean, it's all through Bill Hampton, essentially, is telling these stories.
Because there was the lady in the documentary that you guys interviewed her in front of her door.
There's like, I can tell the longer version of the story, but I basically, like, one of my closest friends was dating Cy Hirsch, a legendary investigative reporter, was dating his son.
They were living at his apartment in New York.
Wow.
And so I was like, dude, you've got to give me Cy's email.
You've got to give it to me.
And so she did.
And I basically started.
Trying to verify if, like, this story that Bill told me was true.
And he was, I mean, he was an interesting person to communicate with.
And his point, his ultimate point was I never ended up writing about Innslaw.
So I only talk about stuff that I printed.
You know, I don't talk about stuff that I did.
Speculative.
I don't, you know, because that way it's like that.
If it makes it into the New Yorker or the New York Times, it's real.
It's fact checked.
It's real.
He'll talk about it.
Right.
He doesn't, he just, as a policy, doesn't talk about.
about even though he pitched it to, according to Bill, he pitched it to the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the Atlantic.
And the Washington Post, right?
No, I don't think those are the three.
The Washington Post story is different.
That's a Bob Woodward story.
Right, right, right.
Sorry about that.
But anyways, I was trying to get him to confirm anything about the Inslaw case, and he basically said the threshold is too high on Inslaw, on this story.
I was like, what does that mean?
Yeah, what does that mean?
What does that mean?
I don't know what he meant by that.
One speculates that the idea is like it's such a classified and intensely guarded secret that you can't open that box that's inside of the intelligence community and find out the answers cleanly.
But circling back a little bit, one of Inslaw's clients was this insurance company called Aetna Life and Casualty.
Because they had, just really quickly, they had stopped selling to the federal government after the federal government.
Built them out of $7 million worth of contract.
It was going to be the largest contract in the Department of Justice history, eventually, when it was like a several hundred million dollar contract that it was supposed to grow into.
And so they started selling it to private companies.
I just wanted to throw out that they continued on even though the DOJ had kind of like screwed them out of all this money.
And so by the 90s or late 80s, they're working with Aetna and this will matter.
And they have this like promise users group where Different clients could kind of all convene together for like a breakout session where they talk about, you know, whatever, maybe bugs or new software updates.
Or, you know, I'm not sure exactly what they would talk about at the Promise Users Group meetings, but I could only imagine probably software.
And, you know, afterward, they'd kind of like built this relationship with Norma because she was kind of like really good at explaining how to use the software to new clients.
And I think they would kind of like pull her aside and like help.
Because from the perspective of a lay person, she could really help people learn how to engage with this tech.
They liked each other.
She asked after one of these users' group meetings, What's going on with your case?
Bill had recently met Michael Reconosciuto.
Being Played and Suicide Theories00:15:50
He's like, I don't know.
I met this guy.
He said that our software was.
is all over the world now with a secret back door in it.
It's part of this massive spy operation and the CIA is involved and the Department of Defense and the NSA.
And she's like, hmm, well, I could probably help you with the CIA aspect.
This is a story that Bill told me in 2013.
And he said, and so then it's like, Bill's like, oh, you can?
You can help me with the CIA part?
She's like, and I need to reiterate, this is a story that Bill told me in 2013.
She said, according to Bill, that her husband was a clandestine services operative for the CAA for many years.
So she basically could run it up the chain with him and see.
Bill allowed me to tape this conversation, have it on tape.
So, you know, I wanted to find – and so then basically the story is that she calls Bill and she's like, I got this – finally, I've got the information.
What I don't have are documents to prove it.
But what I do have is – The story, basically.
Like obviously paraphrasing, but I don't want to talk about this over the phone come to our office in Mclane Virginia, and like we'll get into it and i'll explain Mclane.
Just obvious, just fun little fact also where the CIA is located.
It's just such a like the whole story is in this like CIA Spook.
So Northern Virginia intelligence universe where Danny lives.
Danny was born in Mclane.
Danny Castelero was born in Mclane, Virginia.
Just his neighbor was, um uh, Jesus Angleton, John Jesus Angleton, Danny's neighbor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh my God, dude.
Like as a child, you know, like you'd see him like mowing the grass or whatever.
I mean, I don't know that detail specifically.
All I know is that.
So she says, okay, the, you know, has this whole story about James Angleton.
His son lives right on the street from here.
Or his grandson, maybe.
What?
Your name's Danny.
Oh my God.
James Angleton.
He's.
And you kind of look like him.
Like who?
Danny.
I thought you were the one that looked like Danny.
I guess we both kind of look like him.
Anyways, so I was kind of swimming in this story because, like, there's so many different offshoots.
So, basically, a day in the life of production of us trying to tell this story is just like interconnected story, interconnected story.
She says that the software is on these nuclear subs, that the joint chiefs of staff are the only people that have, you know, access to the information.
It's on, you know, it's on nuclear subs.
It's all, I think the idea just to like kind of.
Why would it be on nuclear subs?
I think the idea and I'm oh, it was to like it was so it's this data tracking and analytics data mining type software, right?
And so if it was taking Soviet sonar and like pings and it was able to like somehow triangulate where underwater, you know subs are.
Subs are.
That's the theory.
That's sort of the theory.
I have an anecdote that I love about submarines.
I was this is like our eighth submarine movie.
I'm sorry.
Submarines are fun to talk about.
I was photographing this, actually, it was a mob wedding in Long Island.
And I funded my early years of research on this by working as a photographer, usually for the New York Times, but I would do the occasional wedding.
I'm embarrassed I am to admit that.
I've been there.
I think we've all been there.
I think we've all been there.
So basically, I meet this guy at the wedding.
We're standing to the side.
We're talking.
And he's like, I was like, so, you know, what do you do?
And he's like, well, I'm in the Navy.
For the CIA.
And I was like, well, what do you do in the Navy?
And he's like, well, I'm a submarine commander.
And I was like, oh, cool.
So what are you guys, what are you guys doing down there?
Like, what's going on down there?
And he's like, you know, very disdainful, like looks at me and he's like, dude, if I could just tell you at a wedding what I do, I wouldn't have to do it underwater.
You're right about that.
Oh my God, that's so fucking funny, man.
It's so true.
So they're using Promise and playing with the Vax computers, I guess.
But no, I don't know.
The submarine shit is wild, especially if you think about nuclear war and deterrence and where all the submarines go.
In Annie's new book, Nuclear War, she has some of this declassified submarine highway lanes in her book that you can see.
You can't find it anywhere online, but it shows you.
Basically, the submarine highways for China and Russia, and they literally come within like a hundred miles of the east coast of the U.S., like right off the coast of Florida and North Carolina, and then all the way up the west coast, right off the coast of Los Angeles, and like the huge circles throughout the ocean everywhere.
Submarines are literally, nuclear submarines are literally littered throughout the oceans.
It's pretty bizarre when you think about it.
Bing!
Bing!
So then, so that's the Norma story.
And for years, I'm like, well, I, you know, her husband, I got to talk to her, man.
I got to talk to her husband.
He confirmed all this stuff about Promise.
I mean, that's the thing.
I got to find her.
I got to find him.
And there are four or five Norma D.G. Jacintos in the United States.
And I called all of them.
None of them would call me back.
So I don't know which one's which.
But I make kind of like an educated guess and I choose this one in South Carolina.
I think we say in the show it's Conway, Seth God.
It's basically Myrtle Beach.
And so now we have funding, right?
Did you reboard?
No, I didn't.
Damn.
But we know what it's one of the we're on this giant road trip already, like going up and down the East Coast interviewing people, and we're like, well, let's stop in there.
You know, Netflix is paying for our gas and our hotels and everything.
So we're, you know, like it's hard to do this research when you're not funded, right?
It's a lot.
It costs a lot of money to do like an investigation.
Of course.
So so, anyways, so we go, we pull up at her house and we ask her, you know, her version of the story because we've only ever heard it from Bill.
And it's like similar but different.
Because she didn't learn it from her husband.
She learned it at a bowling alley, which like, and I'm like, I'm like still like on board.
I'm like, okay, okay, okay.
So it's just everything's the same except for one change.
And that's that the spies weren't her husband, but they're at the bowling alley.
I'm on board.
I'm tracking along.
And Zach's like, whoa, no, no, no, dude, no, dude.
Dude you're getting played or we're getting played, or like she was getting played, like you know that was.
Something is going on here and it is not the same story that Christian was told.
Like that was sort of, yeah, it's.
That's a really inconvenient thing that plagues a lot of journalists, right.
When you spend so much time researching something and then you find something that just doesn't fit, that like kind of fucks up everything that you've been the lattice work.
It fucks up like the direction you've been going the whole time.
People like to just either dismiss it out of convenience or, if it proves their story, they'll obviously use it to Reinforcement.
Yeah, it totally kind of, for me, I guess, being in that moment and just having, maybe it was this having such high expectations because we felt like we had done the work and gotten Norma and we were there on the porch and we were just so stoked.
And we're, you know, we're always looking for this whole story is like a story about addiction.
It's the story of being addicted to the feeling of like grabbing that next vine and like, oh, if I get this next thing, like we've got it.
We've got the story.
We've got promise.
It's in the submarines.
Like that.
That will then prove all this other stuff true, and instead it's like a freaking shovel and we just are like digging ourselves deeper into like a hole that we do not understand.
You know, and this is one of those moments where it was like I simply do not understand what's going on here where, like yeah Bill, who had was such an encyclopedia and a font of knowledge for Christian, his story is simply incompatible with the details of what Norm is saying you know, and And how her story plays out of finding out this information in a bowling alley and her saying that her husband.
She also had been deposed in 1996 and said essentially the same thing she told us about the bowling alley and everything.
Oh, really?
But we didn't know that.
We didn't know that.
She told it to me.
Dell didn't mention that to me in 2013.
So it's like, what's going on?
Is she getting played?
Is Bill getting played?
Are we getting played?
Like, who is playing who?
And it's one of these things where we show his response that we finally elicited from him.
I mean, at the very end, which is he's, I can't remember the exact text of it, but something like, I don't know if, Norma never claimed that her husband was CIA.
Other people told me that, and I believe that her source was valuable and was reliable or something to that effect.
You see, sort of, the exact quote, I think, in the show that he emailed us.
But it's just one of those.
I felt like we had to include it, of course, in the show because it just.
I don't think it discounts, I don't think it ruins our story.
You know what I mean?
It just deepens it in terms of the.
The mental gymnastics that you have to go through to understand.
It's almost kind of emblematic of the octopus.
It's like every time you think you've got something cornered, there's a new angle that's there to throw you off.
And I think that Danny probably experienced that, not specifically with the Norma story, but Danny experienced that constantly.
We've experienced it constantly where you have stories, you have amazing stories from Michael that we find out are true.
And then you have stories that are impossible to verify.
And it's like, what is real?
And it's that.
And there's also from like, There's mundane stories that we're told that we assume are true because they're so boring, and then turns out they're lies.
So to me, it's emblematic.
I think that the frustration is important to understand in the story.
It's emblematic of this hall of mirrors that what it's like to go into these things.
To me, as a layman, really, I think it's emblematic of intelligence or criminal operations where it's so important to see that you're being played or see that.
see that you are never allowed to really hit hard ground and that all of these characters, whether they even know it or not, many of them seem to be there to throw you off of the scent and you're always sort of grasping for like, I know there's something going on.
I know X, Y, and Z, but I can't get the full picture.
I think other intelligence-related stories like how Rob Reiner talks about in his JFK podcast, you see the same pattern play out over and over in these intelligence-related operations.
where it's a cover story on top of a cover story on top of a cover story.
And even some of the players who are telling these stories don't know what's true and what's not.
Didn't Angleton call it the wilderness of mirrors?
Yeah, that's Danny's neighbor.
Yeah, you can't make that up.
What made you decide to end the documentary the way you did with you basically saying, I think you said towards the end of it, the one thing I know is that Danny Rakanashudo is the only person could have killed Danny Riccardo.
No, well, Danny Castellero.
But that's the false ending.
That's the sort of ending before the ending.
I think that we wanted it.
We sort of did it in that way because it shows a process that we went through many times, but that happened in this time.
It was most apparent, which is like grappling with the fact that like on one, you know, the whole documentary, we talk about many reasons why it seems like Danny might have been murdered.
But then you have to come to Grips with the fact that maybe he was played and maybe he was in a position where he killed himself.
I mean, that's you have to grapple with that, you have to take that on.
And that moment of bottoming out, I think after we learned the Norma thing and after we talked to certain people, people like Doug Vaughn, who was an investigative journalist, and they explained to you, like, Doug's position is that Danny killed himself.
Like, we don't go into that in the story, but he's like, I think that Danny did kill himself.
Even though he may have been on to all this stuff, I think he killed himself.
You know, it's like, well, Doug's a really smart guy.
He wrote the piece for The Village Voice, which is, I think, the best piece about Danny Kessler's investigation.
So, anyway, that's the fault.
That's Jim Richway.
We made that the sort of like ending before the ending because we really wanted to land hard on that feeling of what it feels like.
And it happened to us multiple times, but that was just one of them where you're just like, oh man, is this all kind of like for nothing?
But it's like either way, the story killed him.
That's how Doug Vaughn ended his piece in The Village Voice.
And it's a smart way to look at it.
And the story killed him.
The story killed him.
I mean, if he wasn't looking into the story that it wasn't the characters in the story themselves, like the story, his obsession going into this wilderness and years.
The story is why he died.
The story is why he died.
Right.
And it's a good story.
I guess that's almost the for me, we start with this kind of either or.
If Danny killed himself, then and this is how the FBI phrases it, too.
It's like, if Danny killed himself, then he must have been conned and been onto nothing.
And then it's like, and if Danny was murdered, then he must have been onto something and he found something he shouldn't have that's important and dangerous, right?
Right.
And what we found, I think, by the end was that you can actually separate those out.
And that even if Danny did kill himself, it does not discount, it does not mean the other thing, right?
Which is the FBI's point.
Like, yeah, Danny didn't really find anything.
It's like, no.
We have three and a half episodes where we show all the crazy stuff that Danny did find and all these connections that he found and all these amazing characters and scary characters.
dangerous people that he met and was talking to, those were real.
So even if he did kill himself, you get where I'm going with this.
And then the actual ending that we go into, I mean, this is whatever, spoiler alert, but the actual ending is more about what it feels like, which happened many times, but we just show one instance of this when you get sucked right back in, when you're like, I think I'm done.
Like, I think I can walk away.
Sherry talks about the feeling of like, you decide.
Sherry's a the journalist who met with Robert Nichols, you decide when it's over because this is almost, it's a game and it never ends.
Alcohol, Death, and Cursory Exams00:13:37
It's an ongoing thing that never ends.
She talks about the feeling of addiction and the feeling of you never know when to put it down.
I think Christian multiple times over his life, but we showed what the process is of what she calls deprogramming, when you're trying to get out of it.
But as happened to us many times, and you see it here, it's like you get one call.
And it's really hard to like not answer the phone and get that rush back of like, maybe if we just have this lead, maybe if we just get this information, the whole door opens and you get all, you get the window into the full octopus and you get, you solve it.
You solve everything.
The guy, Joseph, I don't know how to say it.
Quayar.
Quayar.
So Danny met with him at a bar like the night before he was murdered.
Is that right?
No, they met.
They met by chance.
Met by chance.
And it was.
It was a couple months, I think, before he died.
It was towards the end of his investigation, but it wasn't like the day before he died.
Was that guy, Kaware?
Was he seen near the hotel where Danny was during that 24-hour, 48-hour period?
That's the question.
The size of his name.
I can tell you that his name was floated to the Martinsburg police many times.
I've got it in their notes.
They never can spell it right.
They have a really tough time with spelling over there at Martinsburg Police Department.
And I think spelling is important.
You're trying to look in databases for people.
Sorry.
Do I sound like a jerk?
No, it's funny.
It's funny.
Okay.
So this, but they don't, no, I don't have any record of them calling him, interviewing him, checking him out, bringing, going, getting a photo of him from the driver's license or for the DMV or from the military or whatever and like canvassing.
Has anyone seen this man?
We do have that sketch and we have a guy that kind of matches his description that another hotel guest was seen entering the room.
We have Cuellar threatening Danny's friend Lynn Knowles to stop asking questions after Danny's death about what happened to Danny and what was Joe's involvement.
Seems like a weird response if you're asking somebody like he said something, it's business, right?
Yeah.
What Danny was investigating was a business.
And if you care about your kids and your own life, just drink some hot cocoa and stop asking questions.
It just seems like an odd response.
And when he also told Tony at some point, I think he floated it that, oh, I'll help the family investigate whatever happened.
Didn't you know, did attend the funeral?
Who attended the funeral?
Quayar, really?
We had man, we spent so much time.
We had a tape that was kind of a pool videography tape.
They allowed one camera into the funeral and then disseminated it because there was so much news interest at that time.
Man, we Christian scrubbed that tape so much trying to find Quayar in the footage, it would have been incredible to find it.
But you know, smart enough guy to either got lucky or was smart enough to stay away from the camera and then.
Additionally, is the story true that he died on a Saturday and they didn't tell the family until Monday?
Danny Casalero.
Danny Casalero.
Correct.
Why would they have waited so long?
Well, that was one of the.
They did.
But the initial thing, his identity was in the room.
It's not like they had to identify who he was.
Right.
The initial thing was, I mean, that was one of the number one red flags for the family.
Just was like, he died two days ago and you've embalmed the body?
Like, what about an autopsy?
And they're like, well, you know.
What, you guys aren't open on Saturday?
You can wait till Monday to cry.
But it's also like there's like very few Casoleros in the United States, and I'm pretty sure they're all related and they all know each other.
You can call any of them and you find out like who to talk to.
But that was like an initial thing of like, what is going on here?
Some sort of conspiracy.
What's happening here?
The mundane truth of it basically, they called the Fairfax, Danny lived in Fairfax County.
So Martinsburg called Fairfax to.
Send an officer to personally notify the family.
So that officer drives to, and Danny is a single man who lives alone.
This officer drives to Danny Casalero's home and leaves a business card.
Please call me.
This is important.
Here's my number.
And nobody calls him because nobody lives there anymore.
God, dude.
But there are other Casaleros in Fairfax, you know.
When did he leave the card?
On Saturday.
Okay.
Yeah.
So it's just kind of like a bad.
A bad police work comedy of errors, tragedy of errors kind of situation for that.
And the people, the guy who you said wrote the article for the Village Voice, who believes that he was killed himself, how does that guy rationalize the fingernails missing and the tendons being severed and the blood everywhere?
I think that he is.
So, go on.
Also, he solved the Lepenka bombing.
If you talk to Danny Sheehan, that's the case that Danny brought forth with the, ended up being like the same thing.
They ran Contra.
They ran Contra.
The Martha Honey Ovargan case.
Yeah.
But I just want to say, and Christian knows more about this, but I just want to say, I think that Doug leaves open the possibility of anything, but his default position, maybe kind of like mine, is just like in the absence of evidence of a murder, you have to, Go with what seems to be the evidence, which is like there's a note and he killed himself.
That's how he sort of looks at it.
Am I right?
Yeah, because he's going based on the physical evidence.
No forced entry.
Unfortunately, the physical evidence is sort of controlled by the Martinsburg Police Department and NGI, what they want to leak out.
We, another Nichols, we, basically a family friend or kind of a family acquaintance.
Medical examiner from Louisville, where we're from.
His name is also Nichols.
No relation.
Yeah, no relation.
We gave him all of the medical forensic files for him to study, and then we had a meeting with him and we went through it all.
He said, and this guy's like, I mean, he founded the medical examiner's office in the 70s, and he's like one of the top guys.
Has he seen people that had committed suicide by cutting their own wrists?
I think he's seen everything under the sun, but basically what he doesn't.
What he said, he was just like, oh, what you got here, boys, is suicide.
Yeah.
But the thing is, here's the thing that nobody talks about in medical examiner offices.
Well, let me give one more thing before you go, because I know where your punchline is.
But the other thing that he said is, the other thing he said, he's like, well, Dr. Frost, the medical examiner of West Virginia who did the autopsy, he's like, he's not doing you a lot of favors here.
There's not a lot of details in the medical examiner's report that would really show everything that you would need to know to understand this case.
You don't know what you don't know.
You don't know what you don't know.
And it's kind of like a slightly cursory examination.
He wasn't like, this is the most beautifully laid out pathology report I've ever seen, boys.
Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
I'm going to teach you.
There's a lot of information.
Yeah.
So anyway.
Leave no trace hitmen.
It's a job that people do.
And the medical examiner doesn't count that in.
I mean, I guess they would go insane every single case.
But what?
Did someone rappel through the window and fly in and did Ethan from Mission Impossible do it?
Right.
I forgot what I was going somewhere with that.
No, what I would be interested in finding out was there's got to be a way to find.
Some sort of record of a history of people who have committed suicide by slashing their own wrists and what it looks like, right?
Like, how deep are the cuts?
Do they typically do eight cuts?
They typically do eight cuts.
They typically cut the tendons.
I mean, in our kind of cursory research on that stuff, I mean, it's, there's everything under the sun.
Also, the fingernail issue that you bring up.
Yeah.
Do you always, yeah.
Danny was a nail biter.
Um, and, uh, and his nails were in the water for so long.
Got it.
You got to, you got to count, you got to, because the skin and the tissue gets like kind of waterlogged and soggy.
And, um, I don't know.
Yeah.
So how long though?
For we don't, hours?
Yeah, I mean, he's found around 12 30 p.m. and they said that the time of death was somewhere around, you know, they couldn't place it exactly, but I think it was like 9 to 9 30 a.m.
Yeah, when you sit in a bath with living tissue, with a beating heart for an hour and you're like all soggy, you know?
Like just getting like a real round table about this right here, you know, which I think is a good opportunity.
Like one thing that we don't go into in the show, because we're really intent on, of course, we want to find out what happened to Danny, but we're really into also.
explaining Danny's story that he was on to because nobody's ever really encapsulated it, I think, in the way that we did.
And so what we don't do is kind of like your traditional true crime thing where you go into like, here's like all the forensic evidence of every single thing.
You know, we're not forensic pathologists and it would have just, it would have been impossible to do it within the four episodes that we had.
And it would have stopped it down to a point where we're not telling a story anymore.
We're just basically doing like a different thing.
It's a different thing and that's a cool thing.
And maybe we'll do something like that in the future.
But I would just.
There's a couple interesting things that the theory of the Martinsburg police is that this guy, Danny Castellaro, spent the entire weekend or week.
He's got there Thursday.
He dies Saturday morning drinking, just like drinking himself to death in some ways.
He's drinking wine.
He's drinking beer.
He's blah, blah, blah.
And he's obviously in their mind wasted because he's so pissed off that he never got anywhere with this story.
And he kills himself in this kind of desperate weekend.
But the problem is like, there's no, there's hardly any trace of alcohol in his, there's no trace of alcohol in his blood.
And there's hardly any in his urine.
But there's like beer cans in the room.
There's beer cans.
There's a half a wine bottle next to the bathtub.
You know, it's like, right.
But there's also shoestring.
There's like a shoestring on his body that came from shoes from his apartment or from his house.
Well, you put that into the other category of like, oh, he planned on it.
There's all kinds of different conflicting evidence.
Totally.
Right.
But yeah, to me, that's well, he never locked his door.
The thing that to me is like, yeah, it's just like, if your theory is that he was drinking the whole weekend and got wasted and killed himself, your heart stops beating when you kill yourself and your liver stops processing alcohol.
So one would think that there would be some kind of alcohol in your system if you're wasted when you're killing yourself.
He also weirdly was last seen at the Sheets coffee shop, which is a block from Sheridan where he died at midnight, buying a cup of coffee.
Yeah, you don't typically mix coffee with booze.
Yeah, and then he died, they think, eight hours later.
Yeah, it's.
So, what was going on?
Right, yeah.
He goes to the Sheets coffee shop at midnight.
There's two women there.
One's behind the counter, another's a customer who's just a friend of the lady behind the counter.
And he orders coffee.
He has to wait for them to brew it because they didn't have any.
So he just.
She's because it's midnight, yeah, it's midnight, so he just hangs out there for like 10 minutes or whatever.
And she's just like, Yeah, you seem like a nice guy, like we just kind of chatted up, or it was like, you know, just like shut the shit for a few minutes.
And then she gave him the coffee for free because she was like, He had to wait, so I gave it to him for free just to be nice.
And then he walks back, presumably walks back to the Sheridan to drink his coffee.
He then becomes so distraught that he can't even write a full suicide note and sign it.
He has a fear of blood, which we don't even get into in the show.
And he had a fear of needles and blood.
And a needle and blood, which I also do.
And so I really empathized with his supposed suicide because I was like, I have that same fear.
Ambiguous Notes and Deep Reality00:14:37
There's no way I would go out that way.
No way.
I would do anything else.
And I obviously don't want to die like life.
Yeah, make that very clear.
But I wouldn't.
Yeah, I wouldn't.
No, no, no fucking way.
Way would I cut myself ever, you know?
Right.
Because I hate my blood, it is really cool when it's inside the body.
What sort of backlash, if any, have you guys gotten from the documentary since it's been out?
We expected, I think that we were expecting a lot more, you know, especially from like, I don't know what we thought would happen, but we really are always worried about like this thing comes out and like.
People are after us, right?
Or it's a flop because it's too confusing, or yeah, which people seem to love it, you know.
But, but so, and and I also, yeah, by the Rolls Royce, you pulled up, and I imagine that was a pretty good popular hit.
Well, you just missed the helicopter, too.
No, Zach had to go around to open the back door because it didn't, the handle is broken on my side.
So, sorry, oh, okay, yeah.
Um, so, so, um, and and I think I make a point of not really reading.
Too much of our press because I find even the positive stuff like slightly depressing because I'm like, that wasn't the point I was trying to make there.
You know, it's like I'm such a critic, I guess.
Right.
But someone said, don't read reviews.
You know, it's kind of like a mantra you hear about people that make films.
And I don't like, I didn't read any of the reviews, but people have mentioned certain things that they've read to me.
It seems like it's mostly been positive.
There's like been one negative review of somebody who wanted it to be a little bit more like cut into.
Bite sized chunks for them to digest it, and it's like, dude, it's like the hardest story to tell that I can imagine.
Just pay attention, like twice.
It's actually, and the headline on that one was uh, new Netflix documentary sheds little light on you know, whatever the Kessler case is.
Sheds little light, dude.
We shed people that got their brains melted, uh, you know, uh, they we shed a lot of fucking light on this story.
I, I, yeah, it's like, I guess, uh, anything that has a Even a remotely, like even intentionally, slightly ambiguous ending.
I don't think it's ambiguous.
So I think it's showing something of a more deeper reality of what this is like.
This story is like, is just like, oh no, like they didn't find anything.
It's like, dude, we didn't find anything.
We've got the tapes of these guys talking about murders that are completely unsolved, that we give like a very logical and well researched theory on what actually happened.
We go into never before seen.
Stuff about a serial killer who's working for the FBI.
You know, it's like that nobody has ever heard of.
Rarely has he been mentioned outside of this show.
There's almost no articles about him, no information, not very much information about him publicly available.
We picked up Michael Rukonashita from prison.
I'm sorry.
I get really irate when I start thinking about people being like, where'd you land on this thing?
It's like, you didn't even know anything about this case before you made this four hour thing.
And we put our lives into this thing.
And I feel like we came up with a ton of stuff.
And I'm sorry if a few things are ambiguous, but you have to grapple with that.
Life is ambiguous.
The intelligence community is extremely ambiguous.
The criminal community is extremely ambiguous.
And you need to be able to grapple with that.
Well, it's kind of like the ending of Tom's book, right?
Tom didn't have a conclusion at the end of his book.
He just kind of like just documents the whole journey and basically like unravels the whole ball of yarn and exposes everything that was a part of it, things people nobody knew about like from the probation officers and all the operations that were tied to it.
And like at the end of it, there's no conclusion, but you can't be mad at it because it's a fucking incredible.
I think there is a conclusion, but it's a conclusion that like if for his book, which is like it's a conclusion of like you need to like extrapolate on this and like sometime, you know, his he wanted to tie Manson directly to the the.
MKUltra.
That was his whole point, right?
And it's like, well, he did a damn good job of getting as close as you can and showing the inter.
Whether it was a direct connection, there's an interconnected nature to it.
And like illustrating, you know, how Operation Chaos and MKUltra functioned so you can kind of like make, you know, logical conclusions.
And, you know, maybe I'm just ignorant, but his stuff about Jolly West, just I didn't know anything about.
And, and, yeah, learning just the fact of his existence and how he existed and what happened with.
With killing the elephant.
Killing the elephant, I you know, and I think, like certain people probably knew that story before.
Tom did this.
This, his like double life of like coming in and being this, like lauded, but him being direct psychology expert, but then all the hypnosis and memory expert like and but Tom Tom, it's like you have to give him all the credit in the world for the simple fact of connecting him with, uh uh, Sid Seamer or whatever it's called, and his like code code name right oh right right right, not Sid Seamer, but that's his code name?
I think No, Sid Seymour is another image.
Oh, shit.
Sid Seymour's, sorry, sorry.
What's it?
Sidney Gottlieb.
Sidney Gottlieb, yeah.
But he's under a code name in the thing.
SG is the initials that he uses.
In their correspondence, yeah.
Sorry.
There's so many SIDS, so many nickels, so many different things.
Yeah.
Anyway, I know that there's been like some people sent us some article that's like critical of us for all this stuff, but it's like, I skimmed it.
It's full of like complete untruths, and it was just like spelling errors.
Christians obsessed with spelling errors.
Yeah, it's just sloppy journalism.
We've spelled things wrong, but we have the graciousness to correct our misspellings and, you know, but just makes allegations about us, about us being CIA mouthpieces.
It's like, it's, I don't know.
What do you, how do you even respond to that?
It's like, how do you, yeah, pull, let me pull up my, let me pull up my, the, Yeah, basically, that article basically concludes that you guys are peddling the CIA narrative of conspiracy theories by labeling the show conspiracy, American conspiracy.
What was the end of it?
Yeah, go back to the very bottom.
Oh, shit.
There's me in a picture where I'm.
Ah, where'd it go?
I think it's the very last.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I blew it up.
There it is.
American conspiracy.
The Octopus Murder effectively serves as the agenda of the CIA and continuing a cover up.
I guess I almost said as much.
Massive crimes surrounding the theft of the Promise software and trying to discourage further investigation into the crimes of the Octopus.
I don't understand how anybody can draw that conclusion from.
I mean, I said earlier, I guess, that we effectively serve the agenda of the CIA by saying that whatever makes the CIA seem badass helps their thing, but we don't help their cover up, nor do we help.
I don't know.
It's like, how do you respond?
Look at this two paragraphs above saying Robert Altman, not one of my favorite directors of cinema, but Robert A. Altman, who worked at this bank, BCCI.
A lot of people have seen Robert Altman on our star map, and they think that's some sort of.
We're talking about a different Robert Altman.
We love.
Nashville.
Okay.
So Robert Ray Altman had reluctantly agreed to meet Casalero, who was threatening to give the checks from the Kuwait royal family to purchase towed missiles.
Okay.
This is saying that this guy that worked at actually its first American bank, not BCCI, was reluctantly agreed to.
Where did they learn that information?
That's based on what?
Let me click the link.
Let's see where we learn about how he reluctantly agreed to meet Gessler.
This article is full of conjecture.
Okay, so it's going to go to another article on the same exact website.
Yeah, it's SEO, man.
That's how you climb the search engines.
Go to it?
Can you go to the other article?
It wouldn't load, so I don't know if it's broken.
It wouldn't work, Joe.
I don't know.
Sun.
So it's then a self-reinforcing thing.
I haven't even looked at this, but I'm just assuming that it's probably going to be.
It's by the same journal.
It's by the same journal.
And so it's going to be circular.
It's what's called a tautology, right?
A circular argument.
Um, and and so it's like, I don't even know how to respond to something like this because there's no way to prove it like a negative of this.
It's like, I don't know, dude.
Like, do we help the cover up?
I don't think so.
Do we bring new information to light that whoever wrote this had never known before?
Absolutely.
It's like, what's your point?
Like, we're helping, we're discouraging research.
Like, in what universe are we discouraging more research?
I think this article also says that the meeting that we had in Conway, South Carolina, it quotes someone saying that that are that.
Meeting was staged in the film.
It quotes a guy from Australia who I've talked to on the phone a few times, but never about that.
Okay, so you can quote a monkey about something.
How do you.
I sound like a monkey.
No, why does he know?
They also didn't ask us for comments.
How is that fair?
I knew if we started going into this, I was going to.
Start getting like so heated and so annoyed.
Every every um footnote of this article uh goes back to this Peter Osborne guy.
He's in Australia.
Oh, that's the Australian guy.
Yeah he, he that's.
Oh, I think that's a picture of him.
There he is, I don't know it's.
It's hard for us to divine what's in Peter Osborne's mind and why he thinks that what he thinks in this article which, I have to be honest, I just haven't actually fully read but uh, the things that we've discussed, like it's just they're just not true.
It's hard to argue with things that are just simply not true.
And we also, like he was one of the guys who spent like he spent the most time investigating this case, right?
He spent like 30 years or something.
I gave him a lot of material in oh, really in 2016 of Danny's of Danny's notes.
He's like the expert on the case, but he was like, you know, you've done a great thing by going to the archive that had all of Danny's notes and copying them.
It's like, well, what took you so long, dude?
Like, it's like the first thing I did, trying to just learn about the investigative Kessler case.
The first thing you do is like.
Go to the archive and get his notes and read those, right?
How much collaboration did you guys have on the research?
Like, even in your early days, like, I'm sure you learned about him.
In the early days, there was.
Like an email chain where this guy Gordon Saville and his partner at the time, Peter, who they've since had a falling out, and then Bill Hamilton, and then this other, like, pretty awesome kind of FOIA expert named Emma Best.
We all just kind of like exchanged information over email for, you know, a few years.
And then it got a little kooky, and Emma left, and I left, or whatever.
It died down, or whatever.
There was, I'm not sure exactly what happened.
Hmm.
But it was mostly Emma's FOIAs and the documents that I got stateside because the other guys were, one guy was in Australia and the other guy was in Canada and they didn't come here and all the files were here.
Right.
But we gave them all the stuff and we put it on archive.
What happened?
Well, what happened really was that Christian had gone to, and we show it in the movie, Christian had gone to the Missouri Archive.
captured pictures of all of Danny's notes and then gave them to Emma, who then, I think without Christian's permission, but it wasn't a big deal, I guess, but put those all on archive.org.
And so, and that's years and years ago.
And you can go to archive.org.
I think anybody, it's funny, like anybody who knew about this case before we released this documentary, a lot of them would have seen documents of Danny's notes on archive.org.
I think and doesn't realize like they actually kind of come from Christian doing the work.
And Emma.
It was me.
And Emma posting them.
And you see his name.
Like she put his name.
She put my Twitter handle under all the stuff that I contributed.
Yeah.
Oh, that was nice.
So Christian, many of the Danny notes missed the end of the day.
It actually got me in trouble later.
I had to go back because the versions that you'll see on archive.org are like really janky.
And like, because I was just like, I wasn't photographing them to put them in a film.
I was just photographing them to have them.
Right.
Right.
And so I'm just like running through.
You know, it takes five days and there's like, they just look like crap in there.
The color balance is bad and the resolution is bad.
And so basically, I had to go back with a good camera and good lighting to get good versions of all of them for the film because we highlight, we show Danny's handwritten notes throughout the whole movie and we've got to like zoom in on them and have them look clean and not like pixelated and gross.
So I did another week back.
you know, photographing them all over again.
But they almost didn't let me come because they like looked me up and they were like, dude, you put this all, you broke our rules.
Like you signed something when you came here saying that like this is for research purposes only and you put it on the internet.
Like what do you think?
And they were like really pissed and I had to like, someone else leaked it.
It wasn't me.
And, you know.
It eventually just went to the castle, rung it up the ladder and it was like.
It was a copy.
It was where they're worried about copyright claim.
But I was like, look, the copyright, the, Tony Castellaro has the copyright of Danny Castellaro's original writing, and he allowed us to use the writing.
So there's not, yeah, there's no copyright concern anymore.
Internet Copyright and Season Hints00:10:52
This is a real entry into the miniscule process oriented parts of us making this documentary.
If you're interested, how has working on this documentary changed your outlook on the world?
Even like your outlook on the media or anything you see in the news or just even living your daily life?
Well, you can do research and you can do deep research.
I feel like I don't know about anything that I haven't researched deeply.
I basically don't know about anything except this case.
It's made me more skeptical.
All the stuff about subterfuge and deception and various cover-ups.
I didn't used to care about any of this stuff.
Sure, it's very similar for you, the people that you've talked to, you know, in these long, intimate conversations and all the research you've done on all these kind of like out there topics.
Like, things aren't as they seemed, you know, when we were in third grade and we assumed the way the world was.
It's not really like that, you know?
Yeah.
Once you start like digging, it's weird.
I mean, the way you put it in the documentary, that scene where you talked about it's like the monster hiding under the bed is real.
Yeah.
And you even show this like crazy, fucking creepy monster hiding under a bed.
Yeah, or the octopus.
Yeah, that was the octopus.
Yeah, we just went full nature show on it, which we've been wanting to do.
What about you, Zach?
How's it changed you or has it?
I'm just the same old dude.
No, I talk about MKUltra all the time.
Yeah, you know, more.
I feel like since Christian had been working on this for 12 years, like I watched it him change, you know, especially in the early years when we weren't really filming much.
That was kind of scary for a little while.
Just to see, like, oh, God, like, is Christian losing it?
And then it's like, oh my gosh, is he dealing with like people who he shouldn't be dealing with?
Like, just multiple levels of freaked outness once you're on the outside of this looking in.
And then for me, it's a shorter time period of me really engaging with this.
And I just simply would not have cared, not cared, but I just wouldn't have known about a lot of this stuff without Christian, you know?
And so it's like a tight time frame, tighter time frame for me.
And it, I don't know if it makes life any easier just being like so skeptical about any narrative you're being fed.
But I guess it also is like by the end of the edit, I was like, I was so, I was so tired.
And I was kind of like another part of like checked out in this.
Just, you know, the last few weeks, I was just exhausted.
And Zach is like got even better sources than me now.
And he's on the phone late at night.
It's like, and he's also like, he's the captain of the, of this like post production ship and figuring out how the pieces go together and.
Help working with the composer and working with the edit and working with and dealing with the executives and the partners and everything.
And I'm just kind of and the poor guy, then he's like just like on the phone, like for hours on end, late into the night, like talking to talking to like these news sources that he came up with who ended up giving us some amazing materials at the last minute.
And like, you know, yeah, but bless his heart, he was like, you know, he's he's so he pretends like he's not, but he's so deep.
How I mean, I would imagine that this coming out would also.
Make a lot of other important information or sources kind of like emerge.
In the course of this three or whatever, however long conversation, I've probably gotten five to eight DMs about other conspiracies or related conspiracies.
Like people are like coming out of the woodwork.
Please only message me if you have actionable intel.
Please keep it succinct.
I mean, like directly relating to this.
Like I would imagine that people would come out of the woodwork that would like potentially be a huge help to.
It's been tough because we thought, A, that we would get a little break releasing the show.
Like, we knew that we would do like some press and try to get the show out there.
A little vacation.
And then we thought maybe like a little vacation, like a little, you know, there's been years that we've been doing it.
It was supposed to only be like a year and a half.
And that hasn't happened.
It doesn't feel like it's going to happen anytime soon because, yeah, as soon as, I mean, I guess we should have guessed this, but as soon as it came out, yes, people started telling us stuff.
And some of it, some of it is at least worth researching and seeing if these people are telling a real story because it's damn interesting.
And it's that same process I was describing earlier where it's like, what names are they mentioning?
And what's the chronology and like, what are stuff that that we know that's not in the film that like, you know, it's a classic thing.
It's like, what do you know?
And how importantly, how do you know it?
Right.
Now it gets even harder too, because now you guys have got you must assume that somebody either either people want to fuck with us because it's fun for them, or you could assume the even worse idea, which is the more the more sinister idea, which is that what if people are actively feeding us disinformation for a because of what we've uncovered, not just to like be internet weirdos, but.
To actually mess with us makes it, oh god.
For me it just starts to starts to just get into this like crazy mind, like like game theory sort of territory where you're like wait, what is real?
Like how do we, how do we, how do we even like go about figuring this out?
But ultimately it's like I guess it is the classic thing we have to be.
We had to be skeptical of every single story before and after.
Well, what are you guys going to do next?
I mean, do you guys have any plans to if you guys Did go back at this story?
Would you have an idea of what angle you would take or where you would go with it?
Or what are your guys' plans?
There's a lot of stuff that we couldn't fit in.
And stuff I know we covered, we talked about with you that would have been nice, but we probably wouldn't do a film on.
I don't think we'd do the follow up on.
I don't know if we could do the follow up on Cabazon.
There's a ton of story.
We probably wouldn't go back into Cabazon.
I'm not sure if we can go to Cabazon.
I'm not sure.
We will probably.
I would like to go back to San Francisco narratively.
Yeah, there's stories that are like.
There's little hints of things that I think maybe if we developed characters and stuff that you might see for a second or that we go into like one part of their story that actually have a huge other backstory that's like worth an episode or worth a half an episode.
There's also like the idea of like what if, yeah, there's entire stories connected to Danny's story that we didn't cover.
There's also all like in episode three, we talk about like the octopus.
There's like the BCCI, Nugent Hand, Savings and Loan, like Wilson Turpal.
Like we, in our film, we only.
Do two arms of the like, we only really dig in, we don't do a deep dive.
Yeah yeah and, and you know, those are all amazing on their own, amazing stories.
That could be.
We could put use our this sort of template of filmmaking that we've kind of that we're using, and it would just, it would pop, it would be, blow people's minds and and we it would be, it would be amazing.
But yeah, there's so many areas to go, it's so little time, right?
Yeah, I think that it's like We designed this to be a self contained thing.
And this idea of like, oh, did you leave the ending open ended?
No, like we left the ending on a feeling that I think is important as a conclusion.
The problem is that I think I was talking about somebody with this.
It's like we're actually making a nature show.
Like we're showing how an ecosystem works.
And there's kind of no beginning and no end to an ecosystem.
And there's questions that we have that are unresolved, of course.
But then there's just like, The rest of the nature program of all the other little creatures inside of the aquarium.
David Attenborough DVD number two.
Yeah.
So there's, but I think that we wouldn't want to do it unless we felt strongly that it would be just as good, if not better than what we've done before.
You know, I don't want to just like pursue stuff because it's like, oh, well, now you got like a brand and you can like keep on like doing all this stuff.
Season one, season two, season two.
Yeah.
It's like, I have zero desire to like brand it as such unless it's like, man, you guys.
Much like the octopus.
It's like you start and you think you've got something cool and then you find something that's like even bigger and bolder, that you can come out with that like people haven't seen before.
That would be dope, mm-hmm.
Do you guys have to uh, deal with people trying to spy on your phones and spy on your emails and I don't know?
I, I don't know.
You never, you never had to even think about it.
I think about it all the time.
I have no qualification for being able to suss that out.
Really, you sleep with a gun under your pillow all the time, don't let anybody forget it.
And we're a good, good freaking shot too.
Plutonium bullets, Kentucky yeah, we got the Kentucky BOYS did get the plutonium bullets.
Yeah, we shouldn't have said we didn't, we did.
And we have a variety of home alone like traps surrounding any residence we've ever, micro machines, paint cans, paint cans.
The third paint can is home alone too.
Yeah yeah, that's amazing.
Well, thank you guys for doing this man.
Thank you so much.
It's been.
It's so fun to talk to you.
Incredible, um other than watching your documentary on Netflix, OnlyFans, Twitter.
OnlyOctopus.
YoChristian on Twitter.
I haven't really embraced Twitter that much yet.
And I usually use Instagram.
I'm ChristianHydeHansen there.
And we should have done a place where it's really just octopus content or something like that.
But we were so busy just trying to finish the dang thing that we didn't get super organized on the social media front.
I want to model my account after Tom O'Neill's, where there's continued stuff.
That hit the cutting room floor that we could start putting out on our social media.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that would be cool to just show people.
Zach finally decided to go public.
He was private for a really long time.
Who?
Zach.
I just like, I don't want to advertise it, but I just find the social media and the internet to be a generally scary world.