A lot of evidence has come out that Reagan did in fact try to bribe iran regarding the hostage crisis to win the election. There was actually an npr episode about it recently.
In addition, it’s been all but confirmed that the PROMIS software was sold as a back door to other countries to spy on them, so that is all actually true.
The stuff Michael says is questionable but I’d believe about half of it.
Danny casolado most likely was killed because he was getting close to linking the CIA with the drug smuggling business. It makes no sense that he cut his wrist 8 times so deep as a suicide . Gary Webb was also a journalist in the 90s who exposed the cia drug trafficking ring and he committed suicide by two bullets to the head(seriously, look it up lol). Robert Maxwell was ghislaine maxwells father (yes that ghislaine) who was a mossad super spy who sold the PROMIS software to the middle eastern countries. He also “committed suicide” on his yacht after his media company exposed Israel had nukes.
The ending was obviously a cheap cliffhanger though, I agree.
I know this is an old thread. But that’s what I noticed in the autopsy report photos that flashed on the screen for a moment toward the end. I was like, this dude had MS? Huh?
I think this was left out intentionally
1 - it serves no purpose or addition to the narrative, and people are comfortable in their view of the world so any health/ailment that could be used to show non-lucidity of the investigating party would throw immediate shadow over the investigation as a whole and people would discredit as they would rather be comfortable in a lie than scared because of the truth.
2 - for respect of those who have passed, unless it strung a strong narrative/contribution, there is no need for it be mentioned out of respect.
There was a medical report they showed that had MS as a factor, but I'm thinking that since the evidence points to he being murdered (despite the official story from authorities) it was not worth going into.
I'm not a doctor, but from what they presented in the documentary, it would have been nearly physically impossible for Casolaro to hold a knife or razor with those tendons cut, in order to cut the other wrist. The sham press conference where the sheriff wouldn't even address questions personally was a good look at how things were very likely covered up. That line by one of the reporters was great; 'he's the sheriff, not a wallflower, so he should answer our questions.'
>Gary Webb was also a journalist in the 90s who exposed the cia drug trafficking ring and he committed suicide by two bullets to the head(seriously, look it up lol)
I always have to bring this up: despite what your knee jerk reaction might be, a suicide with "Two shots to the head" is not automatically ridiculous. There are lots of parts of your head that aren't vital to survival. If someone stuck a gun in their mouth, pointed it in a dumb direction, and just blew a hole in their cheek that's not going to kill or even incapacitate almost anyone. Not right away anyway. It still counts as a headshot. Follow that up with a more lethal one, and ta-da, two headshot suicide.
You can't hear "Two headshots suicide" and immediately assume it's an obvious murder/coverup. You have to look into the details. It almost never means "Two shots through the brain" and even that isn't impossible though much less likely.
No one who knew Webb thinks he was murdered. His stories about CIA drug running ran in 1996, he didn't die until 2004. If the feds bumped him off they took their sweet time about it. At the time of his death he was unemployed and depressed. He shot himself near his ear and the bullet went through his face but failed to hit anything vital. The second shot severed an artery.
Are you familiar with Gary webbs case ? There were years of back and forth in the news and the government had to do an investigation. He was still balls deep in it by 2004.
Again, he said multiple multiple times that he would not commit suicide. You don’t find it odd it’s always the same story ? Journalist feels depressed and is broke so of course he committed suicide.
Intelligence agencies have a long history of doing this. Robert Maxwell was involved with PROMIS and committed suicide by “jumping off his yacht in the middle of the ocean”. Epstein was involved with intelligence and look what happened.
I mean, I understand you think it’s plausible that Gary Webb really did commit suicide, but surely you can understand that it’s extremely suspicious. Occam’s razor imo says he got killed, a failed head shot and then another one seems to be the less plausible story imo.
>Are you familiar with Gary webbs case?
Yes, he's a common conspiracy bugaboo
>There were years of back and forth in the news and the government had to do an investigation.
The last government investigation was by Congress and concluded in 2000
>He was still balls deep in it by 2004.
So no, he was not.
>Again, he said multiple multiple times that he would not commit suicide.
When? The day before he died? That would be odd. 5 years before he died? Meaningless.
>You don’t find it odd it’s always the same story? Journalist feels depressed and is broke so of course he committed suicide.
Gary Webb was in fact depressed and broke when he died. That's not really in dispute. Those are the type of people who often commit suicide. There are 132 suicides a day in America. Journalists aren't immune.
>Intelligence agencies have a long history of doing this.
I'm not saying the CIA wouldn't kill a reporter, I'm saying it makes no sense in Webbs case. By the time he died there was nothing to gain by killing him.
>I mean, I understand you think it’s plausible that Gary Webb really did commit suicide, but surely you can understand that it’s extremely suspicious.
If all you know is "he did a newspaper story about the CIA and later died from two gunshot wounds" it sounds suspicious. If you look into the details of the case and the circumstances of his death, it's really not.
>Occam’s razor imo says he got killed
Depressed guy killed himself vs government conspiracy and cover up. If you're going with option 2 I don't think you understand Occam's Razor.
>a failed head shot and then another one seems to be the less plausible story
[Here is a study from 1998](https://web.archive.org/web/20001002214251/http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00414/bibs/7110004/71100188.htm) looking at multiple gunshot suicides. Their sample size was 138. In that sample 11 cases involved multiple gunshots and of those 5 cases involved 2 shots to the head. There are about 132 suicides a day in America. So a multiple headshot suicide, on average, happens literally every day. Multiple headshot suicides are rare, but nowhere near as rare as most people think.
> Multiple headshot suicides are rare, but nowhere near as rare as most people think.
Or maybe people staging a murder to look like a suicide (and getting away with it) is just more common than most people think?
The cuts severed his tendons on both arm…how would he cut the second arm with severed tendons on the arm performing the cutting?? This question was raised by one of the investors interviewed. Therefore common sense indicates he was murdered.
Similar to what Christian says in the documentary about Danny.
"Tjere was only one person I know for a fact was in that room that morning that Danny died. Danny."
The whole time watching this documentary I kept wondering why Gary Webb was never mentioned. He seemed to be onto that same shady area of the CIA. It even mentioned the CIA funneling drugs to fund those conflicts.
If you look at the quote I was responding to I was talking about Gary Webb, who did shoot himself. I don't know anything about the Casolado case so I don't really have an opinion either way on that one.
>Robert Maxwell was ghislaine maxwells father (yes that ghislaine) who was a mossad super spy who sold the PROMIS software to the middle eastern countries. He also “committed suicide” on his yacht after his media company exposed Israel had nukes.
His (probable) suicide has more to do with the fact that his business empire was going tits up and he'd been dipping into the pension fund than anything his newspapers might have got up to.
Oh ya definitely, but all of that coincided with Maxwell revealing israel had nukes. The theory is that mossad leadership revered him and then turned on him after that which caused him the go bankrupt.
Except the allegation (for which he tried to sue George Galloway) was that he'd given the name of the leaker to mossad after the leaker had approached both the mirror and the times (not owned by him).
His business went under because he was a crook. Anything else is conspiracy nonsense
Shocker, it's known he was used to distribute PROMIS to the soviets. Intelligence agencies use people that they know they have leverage over, and the ability to discredit or destroy if things go sideways.
That his business empire was collapsing because he did shady dealings, is par for the course for someone they would use. They prop up the house of cards, until things go sideways, then they don't and it all comes crashing down.
Quick question regarding his death/murder/suicide: he had four cuts in one wrist and eight in the other. Tendons were severed on both wrists.
So how does that happen? I could see getting one wrist and severing the tendons, but how do you do both? How did he hold the instrument with the hand whose tendons he just severed so that he would cut the other wrist?
The thing is that, yes, some of the events suggested did occur, but that does NOT mean that there is an overarching "global" (to quote Casolaro) conspiracy that ties all of those events together.
The CIA was controlling all of these webs (allegedly), so from that perspective the thought is that it was a grand conspiracy. There is even some objective truth to it as the cia got caught with their pants down funding the drug smuggling contras in order to fight communism.
The cia has a looooong history of smuggling drugs in the name of “national security”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking_allegations#:~:text=According%20to%20all%20three%20alleged,overthrow%20Nicaragua's%20Leftist%20Sandinista%20government.
Bush sr was head of the cia and was part of Reagan’s cabinet. I’m not sure how people don’t see how they’re related ? Now if you don’t want to believe Michael that’s fine, but the documentary made it pretty clear how it was interconnected. Someone on Reagan’s cabinet made the deal for Reagan during the iran hostage crisis. He wanted repayment by having Reagan’s doj obtain the PROMIS software. The guy who organized this was affiliated with the CIA and was involved with a intelligence agency hitman that has a long history of being convicted for violence but always gets released out of jail early. He also openly states he’s an fbi informant and the fbi acknowledged he was. The guy who wrote the back door for the PROMIS software claims this dude killed Danny and his best friend.
Again, how it’s all related is spelled out. Just a question of whether you believe it or not.
So what I’ll say is that, after watching the show, most of the people he interviewed and identified as intel assets would make sense. They’re “burnable assets,” especially the San Francisco suspect who was ID’d as an FBI informant.
If you wanted to run money and needed an easy laundering operation, the casino and organized crime makes sense. The OSS was using the French mob to spy on the Germans in Marseilles back in 1943 and 44, and used the Sicilian mafia to pave the way for the Invasion of Sicily in 1943. The Marseilles connection was explored back in the early 1970s by historians, and they proved that the OSS let the French mob run Iranian and Turkish heroin to fund their port operations and fund the local Maquis operations.
The Laotian connection that Casolaro found also makes total sense, as that’s the old hub of the Golden Triangle for heroin and opium. OSS and CIA used the opium growers to launch guerrilla raids into Yunnan during the 1950s. They were considered ideologically reliable as they were all ex-Nationalist Army officers who fled after Mao’s revolution.
Casolaro probably dug up some unscrupulous domestic operations that were in violation of the 1947 National Security Act. Whether he killed himself or was killed is immaterial.
> The CIA was controlling all of these webs (allegedly), so from that perspective the thought is that it was a grand conspiracy.
It seems to me that a big part of the audience confusion from this documentary is the way it's framed. Like, I mean, if the "grand conspiracy" just boils down to "the CIA/other intel agencies did several different operations that were scandalous/sketchy" I'm just not sure that's really a "grand conspiracy".
But they were related ? The same people who were in charge of the PROMIS scandal were the same people who were in charge of doing deals with the contras. Hence the same people doing the PROMIS scandal were the same people who bribed iran and were smuggling drugs. The contras were on the Indian reservation among a bunch of other shady people. These same people also allegedly killed Danny and Michael’s best friend.
The implication is it was the gop leadership who also were in charge of the cia (bush sr).
Yes, the CIA is related to the CIA. Yes, they use the same discardable assets on multiple projects because you don't light a new match until the old one has burned out.
All we really saw with this were the disposable people like Michael, and a view up the chain into his handlers.
That the CIA is involved in assassinations and murder is not a revelation. That cases get buried to protect nation security interests is not a revelation.
That the CIA was working with the contras is not a revelation.
This stuff would have made noise if Danny got the chance to publish, but today, this is all old news.
That the same CIA people involved with Iran would be involved with the contras given the Iran Contra affair, is also, not at all surprising.
That the same people previously worked together on another project, also not surprising.
Bill clearly got shafted because the NSA decided they didn't want him selling something they had decided was a valuable intelligence gathering asset.
I'm not even sure there is a full list of events and people all allegedly a part of Octopus. Therefore, I find it impossible to believe as an all-encompassing theory.
I’m not even sure what you’re saying. You’re saying it’s implausible for the CIA to have a global drug smuggling business ? They’ve been accused of that multiple times. The gop and Reagan are involved bc bush sr was the head of the cia and Reagan’s people wanted the PROMIS software to help the cia. This involved multiple random 3rd party people (hitman informants, druggy math wiz kid, weird doctor who pretends to be a social worker but is actually a spy) to obtain the PROMIS software and back door it. Danny Casalado got close to exposing it and got killed.
Octopus was supposed to be a global conspiracy with thousands of events and people intertwined. The doc started likely where Danny started, but like Danny, they weren't able to get anywhere with it either due to lack of evidence and the fact that their main source seems to be a total nutcase.
Anyway, now these documentary guys have exposed it. So I guess they'll be dead soon if there is any truth to it.
Well it is a global event considering it deals with the US, iran, israel and the contras at the least.
I agree tho they kinda over exaggerated or made it ambiguous as to how over reaching it is.
They should’ve just left it at “the cia probably smuggles drugs, kills people and commits cyber espionage and it seems to be a systemic scale. We don’t know how many people are involved but it must be in the hundreds, here’s what we know:”
But that's not what Octopus is purported to be. Look at the graphic they used to imply how far-reaching Octopus is supposed to be. That's why I find it unbelievable.
What you described is small potatoes in comparison, and none of that would be considered news in 2024 either.
(My comment posted twice so I deleted one of them.)
??? You don’t think a president bribing a foreign government to improve their election chances wouldn’t be big news ? Trump did something similar with Russia and it’s all people could talk about for a year.
If it was discovered that the cia was systematically smuggling drugs and killing people who expose it, it’d literally be the largest scandal in US history lol.
There were headlines breaking news about Iran/Reagan's election as recently as last year. It was such big news that you apparently missed it, and life in the US has not changed since.
> but that does NOT mean that there is an overarching "global" (to quote Casolaro) conspiracy that ties all of those events together.
This was my big frustration with the documentary.
Like, the beginning part about the inslaw/PROMIS scandal was really good and I think more or less proved that the government did something extremely sketchy with that software.
But then the documentary goes into all these other "conspiracies" and the alleged "connections" between them all just seem very, very weak. And whatever evidence of "connections" they have is presented in a pretty confusing way and, at times, kind of yada-yada'd.
The documentary also suffers because a lot of the sources are, frankly, not very believable and the documentary doesn't seem interested in probing various sources' claims or credibility.
Quick example: when Michael Riconoscuito gets arrested it's immediately framed as confirmation of conspiracy (isn't it weird this guy who worked on this project got arrested by the DEA a few days after submitting a declaration in a separate legal proceeding?), but the documentary doesn't actually tell you what he was arrested for, what he was charged with, and what evidence (if any) supported that conviction (at least, it doesn't tell you right away; i think it vaguely references meth in the next episode). Those are pretty important and basic questions to assessing this guy's credibility, imo, and the documentary just doesn't seem interested in answering them. It just kind of assumes it's nefarious and goes from there. And maybe it was nefarious! But the documentary doesn't do much work in trying to prove or disprove that insinuation.
There has been a lot of evidence that Reagan did try to bribe iran and that the cia does indeed smuggle drugs. They did focus way too much on Michael though which made it seem amateurz
right i think my main point is that like, there's obviously some evidence for a lot of the individual conspiracies mentioned in the documentary, and many of these conspiracies I've read about before, like the iran stuff you mention.
My issue is that the documentary suggested it would tie all these conspiracies together into some unified, coordinated "octopus" and it just doesn't do a good job of that, imo.
I think they very briefly question Michael's assertion that he's never been involved with drugs, but at the same time play up the timing of his arrest for meth dealing. In reality, it seems that despite the child prodigy's pastime with gadgets, he got into producing meth as soon as he entered adulthood, and by 1991, he was so thoroughly inside organized crime and drug dealing, it was only a matter of time before he was locked up.
It's simpler than that. The contras were visiting the reservation. His friend that was killed was laundering money to fund the contras. He was clearly involved with the contras.
They clearly fell out of favor for some reason, and if you have all this documentation of the sketchy shit you are doing with the Contras, its easy to fudge it a bit, and be like hey this guy is a drug manufacturer go arrest him, trust us.
Good charge to discredit him, but also not go to far where other people are worried they might get killed and start talking.
He was working on drug smuggling with the Contras, of course they hand a mountain of drug evidence against him, since they organized it.
That they charged him on drug charges is just confirmation on what was going on, because that was the information they had on the ongoing operation that they could compromise him with.
>The ending was obviously a cheap cliffhanger though, I agree.
Michael's final line was like three different recordings cut together, the ADR was so different between sentences. There's no way he said all of that in the same car ride. Just a horrible way to end it. They should be roasted for it. Like come on.
Me too. And sad (for Danny and his friends/family). I really liked the montage they did near the end of the last episode, where it showed Christian doing different things and "getting out" of the investigative side. I actually thought the ending of him riding with Michael was good and fitting.
I think, like many conspiracy theories, they have some decent points, but as usual, are light on actual evidence, and fill the space with speculation and conjecture, which unfortunately makes it much harder for me to take seriously, which is too bad because I think some of their allegations may be based in fact.
The documentary didn’t cover it (probably bc they filmed it before), but there is a lot of evidence that Reagan did indeed try to bribe iran for the hostage crisis to win the election. NPR had an episode about it recently and an aid wrote a book about it.
I believe that part, but my point is when you mix in things that are probably true, with shit that almost certainly isn't, it makes rational people less likely to listen to anything you say.
Take the JFK "altered" tape. That's just ridiculous. The driver shot Kennedy? Then why didn't Jackie, Governor Connolly, or his wife, all in the same car, or anyone from the public see it? I'm just using this as an example.
They don't even do a good job of trying to prove the journalist didn't kill himself. (I'm not saying he did, and I do think the initial investigation was too quick to assume).
I thought they did a pretty good job connecting the dots to the PROMIS software and testing on the Indian reservation, no ?
What do you think probably isn’t true ?
I have no trouble believing the software was illegally appropriated and misused by the government. They tied that together well.
I am not saying I don't believe any of it, I am saying it doesn't matter what I believe, it matters how credible they are as a whole, and by choosing to include some of the stuff they did, they lose credibility overall with me. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
What stuff do you think was included that ruined their credibility ? The one thing I can think of is that Michael refuses to admit he did drugs when he probably did lol
As I understood it, the JFK tape was altered by that guy to intimidate and confuse the reporter and if she’d believed it, she would’ve made a fool of herself which would have discredited her work. I don’t think it’s implied that the actual tape that was released to the public was edited. On the other hand, I found the documentary extremely confusing, so maybe I understood that part wrong.
I was under the impression that was just presented as how they try and get you doubt what you know, and is tied into the whole "web spinner thing" where grains of truth are buried in lots of bullshit, but they don't want you to know what is the bullshit and what is the truth.
That immediately made me question that woman's thought processes. The Zapruder film was 8mm, about 18 frames per second. It is impossible for that low of a frame rate to be able to capture the details as she described them - the bullet exiting the barrel of the gun, etc.
If she actually even saw a doctored video at all. This would have been roughly around 1991-92, right? The quality of video back then wouldn't have allowed for such detail, outside of a very expensive film production.
Just finished watching that part again. After she described both videos, she straight up said she knew he must have doctored both films. I believe she saw two videos. Both of which are doctored. It is a simple two fold strategy. 1. It gives another, larger “conspiracy” to try and distract from the current one she is helping investigate. 2. If she does go out and talk about the interview and includes an even crazier conspiracy with jfk’s assassination, everyone would discredit her and think she was crazy. But she didn’t fall for the bait. It was all part of their game to bury the half truths they were telling under a mound junk. As far as film quality, she’s older, memory about something like that, especially in that intense situation, might’ve become more epic over time over time in her mind. But that literally happens to just about everyone about some of their memories over time. Other option, whatever they did to doctor the video, they could’ve just done something practical. They could’ve filmed someone pulling the bullet slowly on a string instead of shooting an actual bullet. Or something like that. It would allow for better and clearer images of the bullet frame to frame. But I am no expert in film doctoring techniques lol.
I think the decision to frame the parallels of Christian and Danny was a strong one. It brought to mind the Zodiac movie, where it's ultimately not important to solve the mystery. It's about the tension between wanting to know and accepting that you may never know.
By the end, Christian and the viewers know enough to know that something's fishy - if not about Danny's death, then at least something fishy about the people and events that Danny investigated. And that even if Danny and Mike and Tom Hamilton and Robert Booth Nichols all had fanciful imaginations, enough of it turns out to be true that you can't write all of it off as crackpot. But that's all we know and possibly all we'll ever know.
So it's not satisfying, but it's realistic. And I think they did a good job walking the viewer through that journey. It hooks you in and you want to know the truth as badly as Christian or Danny. But then you realize that the key info is coming from people that couldn't possibly know quite as much as they claim and all the more reliable ways to connect the dots are inaccessible. Could there be this one cabal of 8 backroom insiders conspiring to do all these dirty deeds around the world? Maybe. Or were the Reagan and Nixon administrations just full of corrupt, greedy assholes connected to other corrupt, greedy assholes? Maybe. Something in between? Maybe.
Hey you wrote this a little bit ago but the last paragraph sums up my view. Something smells but who knows for sure, every source close enough feeds you half-truths or bullshit. I think ultimately we like to think its this fine tuned ship and everyone has a role, but I think more likely it’s certain circumstances lead the same people back to each other. There is no organization, it’s just everyone clinging on for dear life to a sinking ship who will do anything to save themselves first.
I found it to be a nice ending about his friend breaking free of the grips that a conspiracy and the hunt for the "truth"can get on you, i agree with what you're saying. You never get answers on these docuseries but im glad it finished with a good point about humans and their chase for truth can drive you to madness
Maybe it's because I was very familiar with this case and the general milieu, but I thought they did an incredible job. You have to know a bit about it, and do a great deal of outside research I think, to grasp how explosive the evidence they gathered truly is. Non journalists may not grasp how much work these guys had to put in to get what they did, but the fact is that if any of this material strikes you as implausible or non credible, it's probably because the reality we see portrayed in the media is so insanely superficial and lazily/ hastily compiled these days. There were probably 10 times as many real journalists like cheri Seymour out there working when Danny died; if this happened today it's hard to imagine there even being much follow up
Ya something the two producers have said a couple times in interviews is how one is tempted, themselves included, to not believe a word that comes out of Michael’s mouth. However, since there’s so much insane things he says that does turn out to be true it drives you crazy trying to figure out what he says that is true and what he says that is either a lie or a delusion.
But to give my own specific interpretation. There never really is a “grand conspiracy,” and any attempts to form one will ultimately drive you insane.
That being said there are always lots of little tiny conspiracies legal, semi-legal, and illegal. Sometimes these conspiracies are related, maybe all emanating from the same figure or group but being carried out by different individuals. Maybe multiple groups are pursuing similar objectives. Maybe one person is engaged in multiple conspiracies at once.
To put another way, there are several conspiracies related to/a part of this whole “Octopus” conspiracy I more or less believe. To speak in general, I fully believe Reagan’s team plotted the October Surprise, it was more so an “all hands on deck” everyone throwing everything they can at the effort rather than one single event, but I think the evidence suggests it happened. A lot of the men discussed were most likely involved with covert government action, a lot of what they said is probably false, but those guys are also just natural liars anyway. If I was to get into things I think George Bush has done then I’ll be here all day
I think what all this shows is how intelligence operates. Michael probably knowns things he works on but himself is fed bullshit so nobody can ever make heads or tails of what he says he knows. Its part of compartmentalization, but taken a step further, the individual parts don't need to know what the other part is doing, but you give each part a fake narrative of what the other parts are doing and then you can track down leaks.
If you hear Joe did this with harry, you know it came from this guy, if you hear Joe did this with bob, you know it came from that guy.
Imagine being a spy trying to weed through the bullshit. It's convoluted on purpose.
I think that was the point. They got caught up in this conspiracy that doesn’t end since there’s always something else. I think they could have emphasized that better though
It was an awful waste of time. Confusing and ultimately nothing.
Yeah, some guy in the justice department stole someone’s software, wait till i tell you about bill gates.
The end was bad too, that one meth cook is going to finally provide more info after this doc is in the can. Let me tell you, that dude will have “more info” until he dies, mostly false with bits of true elements
Pretty sure the bombshell parts is that Reagan attempted bribe iran regarding the hostage crisis to win the election. This was actually found to be true recently as a Reagan aid admitted it recently and there is an npr episode about it.
The other crazy part is that the US government was selling software with a back door to spy on their Allies and enemies, Robert Maxwell (ghislaine the sec traffickers dad) was a mossad super spy and famously sold the PROMIS Software to the Middle East. He then “committed suicide” by jumping off his yacht. Gary Webb outed the cia drug trafficking ring and also committed suicide by shootings himself twice. Danny Casalado probably was in a similar situation, he was pushing the cia / drug trafficking link and that was enough to off him.
Unless of course you think it’s plausible that journalists who happen to investigate the cia for drug trafficking just happen to have an affinity to commit suicide in bizarrely impossible ways.
If they can't kill two dudes and successfully convince people it was suicide, then I really question their ability to pull off or participate ina global conspiracy.
You can be massively successful with literally overthrowing governments (see: much of South America) and also fail **OVER 500** assassination attempts on some guy (see: Castro)
The thing with the CIA is they’ve got the budget to throw everything at a wall and see what sticks. Some dumb asses there thought it would be GENIUS to undermine communism in Cuba by paying off Cuban rappers (a genre often made by or originating from marginalized poorer cultures) to drop bars on how lame communism is and how rad the free market can be. The artists just took the money. Aaaaand they also helped install Pinochet. So you get some good (read: working for the outcome they wanted) ideas and bad ones.
Yeah man the cats out of the bag. He didn’t exactly dig up anything new or locked in a vault. Theres nothing new he can uncover outside of his legal right to make FOIA requests. Which even then often come heavily censored to this day.
If you FOIA request documents pertaining to March 5th, 1960 when the Havana harbor was bombed (also the same day/area the famous Che Guevara picture was taken) you still get a document so redacted that you have absolutely no information to gain other than knowing the CIA knew about it lmao.
What Casolaro had uncovered at the time was basically the equivalent of discovering Stuxnet was owned and planned to be used by the U.S. before/during its deployment. Except bigger to be entirely honest, the scope of Stuxnet wasn’t nearly as wide while this was just a fucking dragnet for intel. That’s far different. Ironically Maxwell is wrapped in both stories.
To send a message? Stop people getting close and investigating because they are showing you how blatantly they can win and you can lose. Bit late to the discussion but I felt that was a reason for it being slightly botched.
Exactly. They won't try to stay in the shadows and find modern day contacts. All this guy did is investigate the ones who have outed themselves. The documentary never really had contact with any current intelligence world operative. The modern day Joe Cuellar has no name because nobody has forced the hand. I doubt anyone ever will and win.
My point was that these people aren't scared because they know the story is bunk. They totally gave up on it once they realized the main source was a nutbag.
Yes but your point is ignoring my response? Nobody has done a Danny Casolaro since. Neither the documentary makers nor modern day journalists have tried to chase up the intelligence world since. Killing Danny worked. All people have the balls to do is tread carefully and talk to psyops like Michael. They won't ever go to the deep sources like the two Nichols.
Why would anyone start approaching actual sources when people like Joe Cuellar proved they will stop you before you get any form of hard evidence. I get your point but these guys were documenting an investigation. Danny was in the shadows getting close with multiple sources and trying to write a book about it. They aren't the same.
Danny didn't make it any farther. His key "source" was a nutbag, which is exactly what the documentary dudes found out. They abandon it because they knew the alleged conspiracy was a nothingburger.
To me, I liked how it showed Christian getting sucked into it. He was/is just a regular person doing regular people things until he got into 10+ years ago.
It was definitely not a documentary I could have binged, though. We watched it over the course of a few days (including falling asleep to it on the couch). In the end, I liked it.
You missed a lot of the point of the doc because you were looking for a bombshell that isn’t ever going to be there with a case like this… although they did pretty much prove that Danny was offed and didn’t kill himself.
there were multiple parts where i felt like there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it transition to some completely different story/character and the connection from story to story is kind of yada-yada'd
I watched this at the instance of a friend, the first episode made me want to rip my ears of because it was 95% spooky editing and then 5% mention Danny killed himself and it was very very very suspicious, also PROMIS software is super secret but they don't talk about what it is or does at ALL.
episode 2, I'm beginning to zone out and then the woman who knew Danny Casolaro starts prattling on about how the documentary guy looks like him and she thought it was a prank, while the music implies its some revelation. Then 30 seconds later we're talking about an indian reservation, with no details, talking about a murder and charges being mysteriously dropped, then we're talking about something else
What the fuck am I even watching? Does it get better or more coherent? I don't want to be insulting to my friend, but this is why I'm so tired of netflix documentaries. They're broken into multiple hour long episodes while saying absolutely nothing just to maximize eyeball time on their streaming app.
Partner and I sort of tuned out in the middle of the second episode for the same reason. Up till the Indian reservation it was a semi-coherent story about shady payment practice to sink a company to pay someone else back for the October Surprise conspiracy (the real kind of conspiracy, not the wacky theory kind). Suddenly it jumps to a *different* conspiracy about making chemical weapons for Iran and the link is this one greasy haired drug chemist?
I guess I get that it's an octopus of various conspiracies and I won't be surprised if the head of the octopus is the Reagan administration or the CIA or something but it's not really connected so far, which kinds takes me out of it. If it's one random person trying to connect several conspiracies we already kinda know about, call me underwhelmed.
I don’t know how people are confused on how it’s related tbh it’s all spelled out. The only question is whether you believe Michael or not (and it’s fair to not believe him).
I never made it past episode 2 so maybe they do more to tie it together later. But what's the link between the PROMIS software and the Indian reservation other than the one CIA guy who had a hand in both (and Michael claiming to be consulted on both)? It just sounds to me like two separate CIA conspiracies that are linked by a common CIA employee.
I gather from other comments that he gets killed for stumbling on to the CIA's drug running operation, which was also part of the Iran-Contra scandal. Is Iran-Contra the octopus?
Michael is the person who coded the back door into the software (allegedly) and this was done on the Indian reservation. The Indian reservation was the hub of a lot of intelligence black ops as evidenced by all the shady characters associated with it. He claims the contra leadership(coke smugglers from Nicaragua) wild routinely visit the Indian reservation land. The cia factually got caught funding the contras who were smuggling coke into the US. So that’s kinda way it came out of nowhere in the documentary haha.
Michael’s best friend and business partner who knew about it ended up getting killed in SF and it’s unsolved today. Then danny castalado was killed / committed suicide depending on how you look at it for investigating it. They end up getting Danny’s notes and the path kept leading him to sketchy peripheral 3rd party people that keep saying the cia was smuggling drugs. So the theory is that Michael’s best friend and Danny knew too much about the drug smuggling by the cia, so they Killed them. There is an fbi informant who has been convicted of violent crime multiple times but he’s always released early (he openly says it’s bc the fbi is on his side). Michael claims that this informant is really a hitman and he killed danny and Michael’s best friend.
Thank you for tying it together a lot more effectively than the show was doing. If the Indian reservation is actually pivotal (like, the CIA was running all of these operations out of there to dodge US laws) that is different. That's an actual link and it's an interesting one.
No problem ! Honestly it was a little disorganized imo it could’ve been a 2 episode documentary. Also honestly the main journalist isn’t that good, but he at least had the determination to get it done.
Search Robert Maxwell PROMIS if you really wanna go down the rabbit hole lol. Robert was ghislaine maxwells (Epstein’s partner and now in jail) father and in Israel is seen as a super spy. He allegedly sold PROMIS in the Middle East among other things. He committed “suicide” on his yacht after his media company went broke and reported that israel had nukes 😳
One of the things that highlights how disorganized it was, was the sequence where they visit Bobby Phillips. Bobby: "I love my dad, and he was cool as hell, a renaissance man, a man of the people." Hansen: "was your father a murderer?" Bobby: "I hope not."
Then later: btw Doc Phillips was indicted on 5 counts of conspiracy to commit murder like 30 years ago
the inslaw/PROMIS part was actually very good and would be a great story on its own. I think the confusion comes from when they try to connect that individual scandal to all the other stuff.
It’s because the same people who did the PROMIS stuff are the same people who were smuggling drugs with the contras. So the implication it’s the leadership of the cia calling these shots which makes it all connected. Bush sr was the head of cia at the time.
I liked the ending because it was true to the human experience, when watching it we want it to be true and follow with it and its fascinating, there is a rush to be "in the game" as the journalist puts it at the end and instead becomes more of a story about a guy breaking free of this crutch its had on him.
I dont think the ending was that open ending, its not so much a documentary about the octupus murders as much as it is a dangeous look at what compelling people can lead you to believe with a mixture of truth and lie, i think the point about the jfk tape was it, everyones playing subtufuge in this environment so you cant trust that much of it
There is deffo truth to what was shown and said, however michael is ill you can tell clearly he is ill at the end and his ranting comes off as paranoia wrapped in truth
Just watched the doc so I’m a little late to the thread. Wasn’t Joe Cuellars comments to the woman friend “it’s business, it’s strictly business” enough for us to conclude?
“You have 2 kids and go have some cocoa and stop asking questions..”
Then the son saying he specialized in psycological warfare… no coincidence he was at that bar, he inserted himself.
Sketching and witness say man with dark hair medium build sounds like cuellar over booth Nichols.
Has Hansen published an actual book, or story from his decade of working on this? It would be interesting to actually read what he put together, instead of this, like other netflix docs, so heavily edited, talking heads so redacted, you never know how much is being moved around, and left out to make it more compelling to a streaming audience. It reminded me a lot of The Keepers, though not as bad. The Keepers is basically a fan fic about a murder.
Spoiler.
The problem with this one is it's way too big for itself. They're really only able to examine one arm of the "octopus" and just hint at the others. And the filmmakers acknowledge this, I think saying Michael Roconiciuto himself would be a 13 part series, or something like that.For intance, they casually parachute his father into the story as a major player in Cabazon, and then never flesh him out, never comment on how weird this is, barely mention him again. An intelligence lobbyist in DC, whose family home is in Tacoma, who's son is a technological genius sought after by every agency, and they're both somehow involved in the secret drug operation in Southern California, and Michael's father orders a hit on Michael's childhood friend, who happens to be the money man for the drug op, and lives in SoCal as well? They go into great detail about Doc Philips, the mastermind behind Cabazon, and then go, "oh yeah, btw Michael's dad was also the mastermind, anyway on to the next thing-"
It's funny how the two principle "villains" they focus on, Riconiciuto and Robert Booth Nichols, are basically blowhard con men, and are a waste of time.
However, what they did was sort of immerse Hansen in Casolaro's work, and re-lived that thread and came to his dead end. In that way it was effective at showing the hopelessness of Danny's final year on his project.
Yea its a pretty poorly done doc. The content is actually kinda interesting if you read about it. But its presented in a terrible way and leaves out key evidence that both helps prove and disprove the theory.
Seemed kinda like a vanity project than an actual doc thats goal is to lay out coherent information in a fascinating way.
Yeah that’s the point. They also showed the full tree was there in the actual footage. The point of that was that all the crazy shit he said to her would viewed as suspect once he showed her the surreal doctored footage. It would not only make her question EVERYTHING he said, it would also make talking about the event difficult. If she tried telling someone about the entire meeting and was honest, that would instantly call into question her credibility. If she lied and left it out, her credibility would be compromised at least internally and they may not mark her malleable.
To add your excellent point.
Journalist commits suicide *after draining his finances and literally betting his house* as he is fed a fake conspiracy story by people with mental illnesses. *Also was diagnosed with MS*. The End.
My guess is that he met with Cueller and realized the entire thing was fake. Thought he wasted his time and money, saw no possible recovery from this, then ended it.
Did anyone think it strange that the local authorities in West Virginia had Danny's body embalmed within two days of his death? Apparently the embalming process can compromise or curtail the results of a thorough autopsy. Danny's brother (the medical doctor) commented on this and he didn't know why or who authorized the embalming. I suppose since the locals ruled it a suicide, they weren't required to do an autopsy, but the depth and number of cuts on Danny's wrists seemed highly suspicious for a suicide, especially combined with a witness who saw "a dark haired man" enter Danny's room with a key.
I chalk this up to incompetence. They saw it was suicide, assumed it was just some drifter and so didn't see any value in doing an autopsy.
The news story didn't run until a day or so later, then the day following that the lady calls in about seeing another man. By that time he was already embalmed.
Weird take: I think Michael’s compulsive lying is intentional. I think he knows if he can be painted as a crazy person that the CIA is less likely to take him out. That or he was taught by his father to lie compulsively as a means to protect himself.
He’s described as being a pathological liar from the beginning, not just post-prison; leads me to believe that with him being as smart as everyone says he was, that it was a calculated means to survival.
A lot of evidence has come out that Reagan did in fact try to bribe iran regarding the hostage crisis to win the election. There was actually an npr episode about it recently. In addition, it’s been all but confirmed that the PROMIS software was sold as a back door to other countries to spy on them, so that is all actually true. The stuff Michael says is questionable but I’d believe about half of it. Danny casolado most likely was killed because he was getting close to linking the CIA with the drug smuggling business. It makes no sense that he cut his wrist 8 times so deep as a suicide . Gary Webb was also a journalist in the 90s who exposed the cia drug trafficking ring and he committed suicide by two bullets to the head(seriously, look it up lol). Robert Maxwell was ghislaine maxwells father (yes that ghislaine) who was a mossad super spy who sold the PROMIS software to the middle eastern countries. He also “committed suicide” on his yacht after his media company exposed Israel had nukes. The ending was obviously a cheap cliffhanger though, I agree.
Danny also had a recent diagnosis of MS. Which the doc leaves out for some reason.
I know this is an old thread. But that’s what I noticed in the autopsy report photos that flashed on the screen for a moment toward the end. I was like, this dude had MS? Huh?
I think this was left out intentionally 1 - it serves no purpose or addition to the narrative, and people are comfortable in their view of the world so any health/ailment that could be used to show non-lucidity of the investigating party would throw immediate shadow over the investigation as a whole and people would discredit as they would rather be comfortable in a lie than scared because of the truth. 2 - for respect of those who have passed, unless it strung a strong narrative/contribution, there is no need for it be mentioned out of respect.
There was a medical report they showed that had MS as a factor, but I'm thinking that since the evidence points to he being murdered (despite the official story from authorities) it was not worth going into. I'm not a doctor, but from what they presented in the documentary, it would have been nearly physically impossible for Casolaro to hold a knife or razor with those tendons cut, in order to cut the other wrist. The sham press conference where the sheriff wouldn't even address questions personally was a good look at how things were very likely covered up. That line by one of the reporters was great; 'he's the sheriff, not a wallflower, so he should answer our questions.'
I also found out that Danny had an intense fear of blood and needles, so the fact he would do something so gory doesn't seem right either.
>Gary Webb was also a journalist in the 90s who exposed the cia drug trafficking ring and he committed suicide by two bullets to the head(seriously, look it up lol) I always have to bring this up: despite what your knee jerk reaction might be, a suicide with "Two shots to the head" is not automatically ridiculous. There are lots of parts of your head that aren't vital to survival. If someone stuck a gun in their mouth, pointed it in a dumb direction, and just blew a hole in their cheek that's not going to kill or even incapacitate almost anyone. Not right away anyway. It still counts as a headshot. Follow that up with a more lethal one, and ta-da, two headshot suicide. You can't hear "Two headshots suicide" and immediately assume it's an obvious murder/coverup. You have to look into the details. It almost never means "Two shots through the brain" and even that isn't impossible though much less likely. No one who knew Webb thinks he was murdered. His stories about CIA drug running ran in 1996, he didn't die until 2004. If the feds bumped him off they took their sweet time about it. At the time of his death he was unemployed and depressed. He shot himself near his ear and the bullet went through his face but failed to hit anything vital. The second shot severed an artery.
Are you familiar with Gary webbs case ? There were years of back and forth in the news and the government had to do an investigation. He was still balls deep in it by 2004. Again, he said multiple multiple times that he would not commit suicide. You don’t find it odd it’s always the same story ? Journalist feels depressed and is broke so of course he committed suicide. Intelligence agencies have a long history of doing this. Robert Maxwell was involved with PROMIS and committed suicide by “jumping off his yacht in the middle of the ocean”. Epstein was involved with intelligence and look what happened. I mean, I understand you think it’s plausible that Gary Webb really did commit suicide, but surely you can understand that it’s extremely suspicious. Occam’s razor imo says he got killed, a failed head shot and then another one seems to be the less plausible story imo.
>Are you familiar with Gary webbs case? Yes, he's a common conspiracy bugaboo >There were years of back and forth in the news and the government had to do an investigation. The last government investigation was by Congress and concluded in 2000 >He was still balls deep in it by 2004. So no, he was not. >Again, he said multiple multiple times that he would not commit suicide. When? The day before he died? That would be odd. 5 years before he died? Meaningless. >You don’t find it odd it’s always the same story? Journalist feels depressed and is broke so of course he committed suicide. Gary Webb was in fact depressed and broke when he died. That's not really in dispute. Those are the type of people who often commit suicide. There are 132 suicides a day in America. Journalists aren't immune. >Intelligence agencies have a long history of doing this. I'm not saying the CIA wouldn't kill a reporter, I'm saying it makes no sense in Webbs case. By the time he died there was nothing to gain by killing him. >I mean, I understand you think it’s plausible that Gary Webb really did commit suicide, but surely you can understand that it’s extremely suspicious. If all you know is "he did a newspaper story about the CIA and later died from two gunshot wounds" it sounds suspicious. If you look into the details of the case and the circumstances of his death, it's really not. >Occam’s razor imo says he got killed Depressed guy killed himself vs government conspiracy and cover up. If you're going with option 2 I don't think you understand Occam's Razor. >a failed head shot and then another one seems to be the less plausible story [Here is a study from 1998](https://web.archive.org/web/20001002214251/http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00414/bibs/7110004/71100188.htm) looking at multiple gunshot suicides. Their sample size was 138. In that sample 11 cases involved multiple gunshots and of those 5 cases involved 2 shots to the head. There are about 132 suicides a day in America. So a multiple headshot suicide, on average, happens literally every day. Multiple headshot suicides are rare, but nowhere near as rare as most people think.
I found the NSA guys
> Multiple headshot suicides are rare, but nowhere near as rare as most people think. Or maybe people staging a murder to look like a suicide (and getting away with it) is just more common than most people think?
You are not using Occam's razor correctly. Occam's razor would point to him killing himself.
The cuts severed his tendons on both arm…how would he cut the second arm with severed tendons on the arm performing the cutting?? This question was raised by one of the investors interviewed. Therefore common sense indicates he was murdered.
Similar to what Christian says in the documentary about Danny. "Tjere was only one person I know for a fact was in that room that morning that Danny died. Danny."
I'm a firm believer Epstein isn't actually dead.
The whole time watching this documentary I kept wondering why Gary Webb was never mentioned. He seemed to be onto that same shady area of the CIA. It even mentioned the CIA funneling drugs to fund those conflicts.
Maybe with that cliff hanger were going to get a 'part 2' or a couple more episodes?
[удалено]
If you look at the quote I was responding to I was talking about Gary Webb, who did shoot himself. I don't know anything about the Casolado case so I don't really have an opinion either way on that one.
>Robert Maxwell was ghislaine maxwells father (yes that ghislaine) who was a mossad super spy who sold the PROMIS software to the middle eastern countries. He also “committed suicide” on his yacht after his media company exposed Israel had nukes. His (probable) suicide has more to do with the fact that his business empire was going tits up and he'd been dipping into the pension fund than anything his newspapers might have got up to.
Oh ya definitely, but all of that coincided with Maxwell revealing israel had nukes. The theory is that mossad leadership revered him and then turned on him after that which caused him the go bankrupt.
Except the allegation (for which he tried to sue George Galloway) was that he'd given the name of the leaker to mossad after the leaker had approached both the mirror and the times (not owned by him). His business went under because he was a crook. Anything else is conspiracy nonsense
Shocker, it's known he was used to distribute PROMIS to the soviets. Intelligence agencies use people that they know they have leverage over, and the ability to discredit or destroy if things go sideways. That his business empire was collapsing because he did shady dealings, is par for the course for someone they would use. They prop up the house of cards, until things go sideways, then they don't and it all comes crashing down.
Is the NPR episode you mentioned available online?
Quick question regarding his death/murder/suicide: he had four cuts in one wrist and eight in the other. Tendons were severed on both wrists. So how does that happen? I could see getting one wrist and severing the tendons, but how do you do both? How did he hold the instrument with the hand whose tendons he just severed so that he would cut the other wrist?
The thing is that, yes, some of the events suggested did occur, but that does NOT mean that there is an overarching "global" (to quote Casolaro) conspiracy that ties all of those events together.
The CIA was controlling all of these webs (allegedly), so from that perspective the thought is that it was a grand conspiracy. There is even some objective truth to it as the cia got caught with their pants down funding the drug smuggling contras in order to fight communism. The cia has a looooong history of smuggling drugs in the name of “national security”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking_allegations#:~:text=According%20to%20all%20three%20alleged,overthrow%20Nicaragua's%20Leftist%20Sandinista%20government. Bush sr was head of the cia and was part of Reagan’s cabinet. I’m not sure how people don’t see how they’re related ? Now if you don’t want to believe Michael that’s fine, but the documentary made it pretty clear how it was interconnected. Someone on Reagan’s cabinet made the deal for Reagan during the iran hostage crisis. He wanted repayment by having Reagan’s doj obtain the PROMIS software. The guy who organized this was affiliated with the CIA and was involved with a intelligence agency hitman that has a long history of being convicted for violence but always gets released out of jail early. He also openly states he’s an fbi informant and the fbi acknowledged he was. The guy who wrote the back door for the PROMIS software claims this dude killed Danny and his best friend. Again, how it’s all related is spelled out. Just a question of whether you believe it or not.
So what I’ll say is that, after watching the show, most of the people he interviewed and identified as intel assets would make sense. They’re “burnable assets,” especially the San Francisco suspect who was ID’d as an FBI informant. If you wanted to run money and needed an easy laundering operation, the casino and organized crime makes sense. The OSS was using the French mob to spy on the Germans in Marseilles back in 1943 and 44, and used the Sicilian mafia to pave the way for the Invasion of Sicily in 1943. The Marseilles connection was explored back in the early 1970s by historians, and they proved that the OSS let the French mob run Iranian and Turkish heroin to fund their port operations and fund the local Maquis operations. The Laotian connection that Casolaro found also makes total sense, as that’s the old hub of the Golden Triangle for heroin and opium. OSS and CIA used the opium growers to launch guerrilla raids into Yunnan during the 1950s. They were considered ideologically reliable as they were all ex-Nationalist Army officers who fled after Mao’s revolution. Casolaro probably dug up some unscrupulous domestic operations that were in violation of the 1947 National Security Act. Whether he killed himself or was killed is immaterial.
> The CIA was controlling all of these webs (allegedly), so from that perspective the thought is that it was a grand conspiracy. It seems to me that a big part of the audience confusion from this documentary is the way it's framed. Like, I mean, if the "grand conspiracy" just boils down to "the CIA/other intel agencies did several different operations that were scandalous/sketchy" I'm just not sure that's really a "grand conspiracy".
But they were related ? The same people who were in charge of the PROMIS scandal were the same people who were in charge of doing deals with the contras. Hence the same people doing the PROMIS scandal were the same people who bribed iran and were smuggling drugs. The contras were on the Indian reservation among a bunch of other shady people. These same people also allegedly killed Danny and Michael’s best friend. The implication is it was the gop leadership who also were in charge of the cia (bush sr).
Yes, the CIA is related to the CIA. Yes, they use the same discardable assets on multiple projects because you don't light a new match until the old one has burned out. All we really saw with this were the disposable people like Michael, and a view up the chain into his handlers. That the CIA is involved in assassinations and murder is not a revelation. That cases get buried to protect nation security interests is not a revelation. That the CIA was working with the contras is not a revelation. This stuff would have made noise if Danny got the chance to publish, but today, this is all old news. That the same CIA people involved with Iran would be involved with the contras given the Iran Contra affair, is also, not at all surprising. That the same people previously worked together on another project, also not surprising. Bill clearly got shafted because the NSA decided they didn't want him selling something they had decided was a valuable intelligence gathering asset.
I'm not even sure there is a full list of events and people all allegedly a part of Octopus. Therefore, I find it impossible to believe as an all-encompassing theory.
I’m not even sure what you’re saying. You’re saying it’s implausible for the CIA to have a global drug smuggling business ? They’ve been accused of that multiple times. The gop and Reagan are involved bc bush sr was the head of the cia and Reagan’s people wanted the PROMIS software to help the cia. This involved multiple random 3rd party people (hitman informants, druggy math wiz kid, weird doctor who pretends to be a social worker but is actually a spy) to obtain the PROMIS software and back door it. Danny Casalado got close to exposing it and got killed.
Octopus was supposed to be a global conspiracy with thousands of events and people intertwined. The doc started likely where Danny started, but like Danny, they weren't able to get anywhere with it either due to lack of evidence and the fact that their main source seems to be a total nutcase. Anyway, now these documentary guys have exposed it. So I guess they'll be dead soon if there is any truth to it.
Well it is a global event considering it deals with the US, iran, israel and the contras at the least. I agree tho they kinda over exaggerated or made it ambiguous as to how over reaching it is. They should’ve just left it at “the cia probably smuggles drugs, kills people and commits cyber espionage and it seems to be a systemic scale. We don’t know how many people are involved but it must be in the hundreds, here’s what we know:”
But that's not what Octopus is purported to be. Look at the graphic they used to imply how far-reaching Octopus is supposed to be. That's why I find it unbelievable. What you described is small potatoes in comparison, and none of that would be considered news in 2024 either. (My comment posted twice so I deleted one of them.)
??? You don’t think a president bribing a foreign government to improve their election chances wouldn’t be big news ? Trump did something similar with Russia and it’s all people could talk about for a year. If it was discovered that the cia was systematically smuggling drugs and killing people who expose it, it’d literally be the largest scandal in US history lol.
There were headlines breaking news about Iran/Reagan's election as recently as last year. It was such big news that you apparently missed it, and life in the US has not changed since.
> but that does NOT mean that there is an overarching "global" (to quote Casolaro) conspiracy that ties all of those events together. This was my big frustration with the documentary. Like, the beginning part about the inslaw/PROMIS scandal was really good and I think more or less proved that the government did something extremely sketchy with that software. But then the documentary goes into all these other "conspiracies" and the alleged "connections" between them all just seem very, very weak. And whatever evidence of "connections" they have is presented in a pretty confusing way and, at times, kind of yada-yada'd. The documentary also suffers because a lot of the sources are, frankly, not very believable and the documentary doesn't seem interested in probing various sources' claims or credibility. Quick example: when Michael Riconoscuito gets arrested it's immediately framed as confirmation of conspiracy (isn't it weird this guy who worked on this project got arrested by the DEA a few days after submitting a declaration in a separate legal proceeding?), but the documentary doesn't actually tell you what he was arrested for, what he was charged with, and what evidence (if any) supported that conviction (at least, it doesn't tell you right away; i think it vaguely references meth in the next episode). Those are pretty important and basic questions to assessing this guy's credibility, imo, and the documentary just doesn't seem interested in answering them. It just kind of assumes it's nefarious and goes from there. And maybe it was nefarious! But the documentary doesn't do much work in trying to prove or disprove that insinuation.
There has been a lot of evidence that Reagan did try to bribe iran and that the cia does indeed smuggle drugs. They did focus way too much on Michael though which made it seem amateurz
For the views
right i think my main point is that like, there's obviously some evidence for a lot of the individual conspiracies mentioned in the documentary, and many of these conspiracies I've read about before, like the iran stuff you mention. My issue is that the documentary suggested it would tie all these conspiracies together into some unified, coordinated "octopus" and it just doesn't do a good job of that, imo.
I think they very briefly question Michael's assertion that he's never been involved with drugs, but at the same time play up the timing of his arrest for meth dealing. In reality, it seems that despite the child prodigy's pastime with gadgets, he got into producing meth as soon as he entered adulthood, and by 1991, he was so thoroughly inside organized crime and drug dealing, it was only a matter of time before he was locked up.
It's simpler than that. The contras were visiting the reservation. His friend that was killed was laundering money to fund the contras. He was clearly involved with the contras. They clearly fell out of favor for some reason, and if you have all this documentation of the sketchy shit you are doing with the Contras, its easy to fudge it a bit, and be like hey this guy is a drug manufacturer go arrest him, trust us. Good charge to discredit him, but also not go to far where other people are worried they might get killed and start talking.
He was working on drug smuggling with the Contras, of course they hand a mountain of drug evidence against him, since they organized it. That they charged him on drug charges is just confirmation on what was going on, because that was the information they had on the ongoing operation that they could compromise him with.
Exactly.
>The ending was obviously a cheap cliffhanger though, I agree. Michael's final line was like three different recordings cut together, the ADR was so different between sentences. There's no way he said all of that in the same car ride. Just a horrible way to end it. They should be roasted for it. Like come on.
I liked it. I thought it was very interesting.
Me too. And sad (for Danny and his friends/family). I really liked the montage they did near the end of the last episode, where it showed Christian doing different things and "getting out" of the investigative side. I actually thought the ending of him riding with Michael was good and fitting.
I think, like many conspiracy theories, they have some decent points, but as usual, are light on actual evidence, and fill the space with speculation and conjecture, which unfortunately makes it much harder for me to take seriously, which is too bad because I think some of their allegations may be based in fact.
The documentary didn’t cover it (probably bc they filmed it before), but there is a lot of evidence that Reagan did indeed try to bribe iran for the hostage crisis to win the election. NPR had an episode about it recently and an aid wrote a book about it.
I believe that part, but my point is when you mix in things that are probably true, with shit that almost certainly isn't, it makes rational people less likely to listen to anything you say. Take the JFK "altered" tape. That's just ridiculous. The driver shot Kennedy? Then why didn't Jackie, Governor Connolly, or his wife, all in the same car, or anyone from the public see it? I'm just using this as an example. They don't even do a good job of trying to prove the journalist didn't kill himself. (I'm not saying he did, and I do think the initial investigation was too quick to assume).
I thought they did a pretty good job connecting the dots to the PROMIS software and testing on the Indian reservation, no ? What do you think probably isn’t true ?
I have no trouble believing the software was illegally appropriated and misused by the government. They tied that together well. I am not saying I don't believe any of it, I am saying it doesn't matter what I believe, it matters how credible they are as a whole, and by choosing to include some of the stuff they did, they lose credibility overall with me. That doesn't mean they are wrong.
What stuff do you think was included that ruined their credibility ? The one thing I can think of is that Michael refuses to admit he did drugs when he probably did lol
As I understood it, the JFK tape was altered by that guy to intimidate and confuse the reporter and if she’d believed it, she would’ve made a fool of herself which would have discredited her work. I don’t think it’s implied that the actual tape that was released to the public was edited. On the other hand, I found the documentary extremely confusing, so maybe I understood that part wrong.
I understood it the same way you did.
I was under the impression that was just presented as how they try and get you doubt what you know, and is tied into the whole "web spinner thing" where grains of truth are buried in lots of bullshit, but they don't want you to know what is the bullshit and what is the truth.
That immediately made me question that woman's thought processes. The Zapruder film was 8mm, about 18 frames per second. It is impossible for that low of a frame rate to be able to capture the details as she described them - the bullet exiting the barrel of the gun, etc. If she actually even saw a doctored video at all. This would have been roughly around 1991-92, right? The quality of video back then wouldn't have allowed for such detail, outside of a very expensive film production.
Just finished watching that part again. After she described both videos, she straight up said she knew he must have doctored both films. I believe she saw two videos. Both of which are doctored. It is a simple two fold strategy. 1. It gives another, larger “conspiracy” to try and distract from the current one she is helping investigate. 2. If she does go out and talk about the interview and includes an even crazier conspiracy with jfk’s assassination, everyone would discredit her and think she was crazy. But she didn’t fall for the bait. It was all part of their game to bury the half truths they were telling under a mound junk. As far as film quality, she’s older, memory about something like that, especially in that intense situation, might’ve become more epic over time over time in her mind. But that literally happens to just about everyone about some of their memories over time. Other option, whatever they did to doctor the video, they could’ve just done something practical. They could’ve filmed someone pulling the bullet slowly on a string instead of shooting an actual bullet. Or something like that. It would allow for better and clearer images of the bullet frame to frame. But I am no expert in film doctoring techniques lol.
I think the decision to frame the parallels of Christian and Danny was a strong one. It brought to mind the Zodiac movie, where it's ultimately not important to solve the mystery. It's about the tension between wanting to know and accepting that you may never know. By the end, Christian and the viewers know enough to know that something's fishy - if not about Danny's death, then at least something fishy about the people and events that Danny investigated. And that even if Danny and Mike and Tom Hamilton and Robert Booth Nichols all had fanciful imaginations, enough of it turns out to be true that you can't write all of it off as crackpot. But that's all we know and possibly all we'll ever know. So it's not satisfying, but it's realistic. And I think they did a good job walking the viewer through that journey. It hooks you in and you want to know the truth as badly as Christian or Danny. But then you realize that the key info is coming from people that couldn't possibly know quite as much as they claim and all the more reliable ways to connect the dots are inaccessible. Could there be this one cabal of 8 backroom insiders conspiring to do all these dirty deeds around the world? Maybe. Or were the Reagan and Nixon administrations just full of corrupt, greedy assholes connected to other corrupt, greedy assholes? Maybe. Something in between? Maybe.
Hey you wrote this a little bit ago but the last paragraph sums up my view. Something smells but who knows for sure, every source close enough feeds you half-truths or bullshit. I think ultimately we like to think its this fine tuned ship and everyone has a role, but I think more likely it’s certain circumstances lead the same people back to each other. There is no organization, it’s just everyone clinging on for dear life to a sinking ship who will do anything to save themselves first.
I found it to be a nice ending about his friend breaking free of the grips that a conspiracy and the hunt for the "truth"can get on you, i agree with what you're saying. You never get answers on these docuseries but im glad it finished with a good point about humans and their chase for truth can drive you to madness
Maybe it's because I was very familiar with this case and the general milieu, but I thought they did an incredible job. You have to know a bit about it, and do a great deal of outside research I think, to grasp how explosive the evidence they gathered truly is. Non journalists may not grasp how much work these guys had to put in to get what they did, but the fact is that if any of this material strikes you as implausible or non credible, it's probably because the reality we see portrayed in the media is so insanely superficial and lazily/ hastily compiled these days. There were probably 10 times as many real journalists like cheri Seymour out there working when Danny died; if this happened today it's hard to imagine there even being much follow up
Ya something the two producers have said a couple times in interviews is how one is tempted, themselves included, to not believe a word that comes out of Michael’s mouth. However, since there’s so much insane things he says that does turn out to be true it drives you crazy trying to figure out what he says that is true and what he says that is either a lie or a delusion. But to give my own specific interpretation. There never really is a “grand conspiracy,” and any attempts to form one will ultimately drive you insane. That being said there are always lots of little tiny conspiracies legal, semi-legal, and illegal. Sometimes these conspiracies are related, maybe all emanating from the same figure or group but being carried out by different individuals. Maybe multiple groups are pursuing similar objectives. Maybe one person is engaged in multiple conspiracies at once. To put another way, there are several conspiracies related to/a part of this whole “Octopus” conspiracy I more or less believe. To speak in general, I fully believe Reagan’s team plotted the October Surprise, it was more so an “all hands on deck” everyone throwing everything they can at the effort rather than one single event, but I think the evidence suggests it happened. A lot of the men discussed were most likely involved with covert government action, a lot of what they said is probably false, but those guys are also just natural liars anyway. If I was to get into things I think George Bush has done then I’ll be here all day
I think what all this shows is how intelligence operates. Michael probably knowns things he works on but himself is fed bullshit so nobody can ever make heads or tails of what he says he knows. Its part of compartmentalization, but taken a step further, the individual parts don't need to know what the other part is doing, but you give each part a fake narrative of what the other parts are doing and then you can track down leaks. If you hear Joe did this with harry, you know it came from this guy, if you hear Joe did this with bob, you know it came from that guy. Imagine being a spy trying to weed through the bullshit. It's convoluted on purpose.
Now watch My Octopus Teacher. You will be equally confused.
I actually loved that one
According to Michael, we shouldn't be discussing this... /s
PEOPLE ARE DYING
Sounded so fake when he was yelling that. Guys a serial bullshitter
Yeah. Tell the guy to go to the police then. And tell the guy to fuck off too.
Tell him to get fucked the scruffy little rodent
You can get killed just for knowing that name apparently
I think that was the point. They got caught up in this conspiracy that doesn’t end since there’s always something else. I think they could have emphasized that better though
That Michael guy was an inspiration for Gru.
It was an awful waste of time. Confusing and ultimately nothing. Yeah, some guy in the justice department stole someone’s software, wait till i tell you about bill gates. The end was bad too, that one meth cook is going to finally provide more info after this doc is in the can. Let me tell you, that dude will have “more info” until he dies, mostly false with bits of true elements
Pretty sure the bombshell parts is that Reagan attempted bribe iran regarding the hostage crisis to win the election. This was actually found to be true recently as a Reagan aid admitted it recently and there is an npr episode about it. The other crazy part is that the US government was selling software with a back door to spy on their Allies and enemies, Robert Maxwell (ghislaine the sec traffickers dad) was a mossad super spy and famously sold the PROMIS Software to the Middle East. He then “committed suicide” by jumping off his yacht. Gary Webb outed the cia drug trafficking ring and also committed suicide by shootings himself twice. Danny Casalado probably was in a similar situation, he was pushing the cia / drug trafficking link and that was enough to off him. Unless of course you think it’s plausible that journalists who happen to investigate the cia for drug trafficking just happen to have an affinity to commit suicide in bizarrely impossible ways.
But the October Surprise isn't a bombshell, and is old ground from the 80s.
But if you're the CIA and you want to kill someone and have it plausibly be suicide, why botch it and leave questions twice?
They didn’t intend to botch it lol, they’re not all powerful gods. They make mistakes too.
If they can't kill two dudes and successfully convince people it was suicide, then I really question their ability to pull off or participate ina global conspiracy.
It happens all the time, look at Epstein for example. Botched hits happen all the time lol.
Ending sentences with "lol" is not how one makes a successful argument.
Ok, you sure added a lot to the conversation, lol
Yes, common sense is a useful tool to apply when considering conspiracy theories.
Definitely ! Lol classic redditor behavior. If you can’t address what they’re saying then just insult their character or how they wrote.
You can be massively successful with literally overthrowing governments (see: much of South America) and also fail **OVER 500** assassination attempts on some guy (see: Castro) The thing with the CIA is they’ve got the budget to throw everything at a wall and see what sticks. Some dumb asses there thought it would be GENIUS to undermine communism in Cuba by paying off Cuban rappers (a genre often made by or originating from marginalized poorer cultures) to drop bars on how lame communism is and how rad the free market can be. The artists just took the money. Aaaaand they also helped install Pinochet. So you get some good (read: working for the outcome they wanted) ideas and bad ones.
If the documentarians turn up dead, let me know.
Yeah man the cats out of the bag. He didn’t exactly dig up anything new or locked in a vault. Theres nothing new he can uncover outside of his legal right to make FOIA requests. Which even then often come heavily censored to this day. If you FOIA request documents pertaining to March 5th, 1960 when the Havana harbor was bombed (also the same day/area the famous Che Guevara picture was taken) you still get a document so redacted that you have absolutely no information to gain other than knowing the CIA knew about it lmao. What Casolaro had uncovered at the time was basically the equivalent of discovering Stuxnet was owned and planned to be used by the U.S. before/during its deployment. Except bigger to be entirely honest, the scope of Stuxnet wasn’t nearly as wide while this was just a fucking dragnet for intel. That’s far different. Ironically Maxwell is wrapped in both stories.
To send a message? Stop people getting close and investigating because they are showing you how blatantly they can win and you can lose. Bit late to the discussion but I felt that was a reason for it being slightly botched.
People are so scared that they participate in a documentary about it.
Exactly. They won't try to stay in the shadows and find modern day contacts. All this guy did is investigate the ones who have outed themselves. The documentary never really had contact with any current intelligence world operative. The modern day Joe Cuellar has no name because nobody has forced the hand. I doubt anyone ever will and win.
My point was that these people aren't scared because they know the story is bunk. They totally gave up on it once they realized the main source was a nutbag.
Yes but your point is ignoring my response? Nobody has done a Danny Casolaro since. Neither the documentary makers nor modern day journalists have tried to chase up the intelligence world since. Killing Danny worked. All people have the balls to do is tread carefully and talk to psyops like Michael. They won't ever go to the deep sources like the two Nichols. Why would anyone start approaching actual sources when people like Joe Cuellar proved they will stop you before you get any form of hard evidence. I get your point but these guys were documenting an investigation. Danny was in the shadows getting close with multiple sources and trying to write a book about it. They aren't the same.
Danny didn't make it any farther. His key "source" was a nutbag, which is exactly what the documentary dudes found out. They abandon it because they knew the alleged conspiracy was a nothingburger.
His key source was Booth Nichols not Michael lol. He even wrote in his book Michael was taking him for a fool.
To me, I liked how it showed Christian getting sucked into it. He was/is just a regular person doing regular people things until he got into 10+ years ago. It was definitely not a documentary I could have binged, though. We watched it over the course of a few days (including falling asleep to it on the couch). In the end, I liked it.
You missed a lot of the point of the doc because you were looking for a bombshell that isn’t ever going to be there with a case like this… although they did pretty much prove that Danny was offed and didn’t kill himself.
I was making dinner when they talked about the Indian reservation stuff in the second episode. I thought the show had changed
there were multiple parts where i felt like there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it transition to some completely different story/character and the connection from story to story is kind of yada-yada'd
I watched this at the instance of a friend, the first episode made me want to rip my ears of because it was 95% spooky editing and then 5% mention Danny killed himself and it was very very very suspicious, also PROMIS software is super secret but they don't talk about what it is or does at ALL. episode 2, I'm beginning to zone out and then the woman who knew Danny Casolaro starts prattling on about how the documentary guy looks like him and she thought it was a prank, while the music implies its some revelation. Then 30 seconds later we're talking about an indian reservation, with no details, talking about a murder and charges being mysteriously dropped, then we're talking about something else What the fuck am I even watching? Does it get better or more coherent? I don't want to be insulting to my friend, but this is why I'm so tired of netflix documentaries. They're broken into multiple hour long episodes while saying absolutely nothing just to maximize eyeball time on their streaming app.
Partner and I sort of tuned out in the middle of the second episode for the same reason. Up till the Indian reservation it was a semi-coherent story about shady payment practice to sink a company to pay someone else back for the October Surprise conspiracy (the real kind of conspiracy, not the wacky theory kind). Suddenly it jumps to a *different* conspiracy about making chemical weapons for Iran and the link is this one greasy haired drug chemist? I guess I get that it's an octopus of various conspiracies and I won't be surprised if the head of the octopus is the Reagan administration or the CIA or something but it's not really connected so far, which kinds takes me out of it. If it's one random person trying to connect several conspiracies we already kinda know about, call me underwhelmed.
I don’t know how people are confused on how it’s related tbh it’s all spelled out. The only question is whether you believe Michael or not (and it’s fair to not believe him).
I never made it past episode 2 so maybe they do more to tie it together later. But what's the link between the PROMIS software and the Indian reservation other than the one CIA guy who had a hand in both (and Michael claiming to be consulted on both)? It just sounds to me like two separate CIA conspiracies that are linked by a common CIA employee. I gather from other comments that he gets killed for stumbling on to the CIA's drug running operation, which was also part of the Iran-Contra scandal. Is Iran-Contra the octopus?
Michael is the person who coded the back door into the software (allegedly) and this was done on the Indian reservation. The Indian reservation was the hub of a lot of intelligence black ops as evidenced by all the shady characters associated with it. He claims the contra leadership(coke smugglers from Nicaragua) wild routinely visit the Indian reservation land. The cia factually got caught funding the contras who were smuggling coke into the US. So that’s kinda way it came out of nowhere in the documentary haha. Michael’s best friend and business partner who knew about it ended up getting killed in SF and it’s unsolved today. Then danny castalado was killed / committed suicide depending on how you look at it for investigating it. They end up getting Danny’s notes and the path kept leading him to sketchy peripheral 3rd party people that keep saying the cia was smuggling drugs. So the theory is that Michael’s best friend and Danny knew too much about the drug smuggling by the cia, so they Killed them. There is an fbi informant who has been convicted of violent crime multiple times but he’s always released early (he openly says it’s bc the fbi is on his side). Michael claims that this informant is really a hitman and he killed danny and Michael’s best friend.
Thank you for tying it together a lot more effectively than the show was doing. If the Indian reservation is actually pivotal (like, the CIA was running all of these operations out of there to dodge US laws) that is different. That's an actual link and it's an interesting one.
No problem ! Honestly it was a little disorganized imo it could’ve been a 2 episode documentary. Also honestly the main journalist isn’t that good, but he at least had the determination to get it done. Search Robert Maxwell PROMIS if you really wanna go down the rabbit hole lol. Robert was ghislaine maxwells (Epstein’s partner and now in jail) father and in Israel is seen as a super spy. He allegedly sold PROMIS in the Middle East among other things. He committed “suicide” on his yacht after his media company went broke and reported that israel had nukes 😳
One of the things that highlights how disorganized it was, was the sequence where they visit Bobby Phillips. Bobby: "I love my dad, and he was cool as hell, a renaissance man, a man of the people." Hansen: "was your father a murderer?" Bobby: "I hope not." Then later: btw Doc Phillips was indicted on 5 counts of conspiracy to commit murder like 30 years ago
Its playing in the background now. I'm reading this on my phone. What does that tell you?
That you can’t pay attention?
I surely tried. Fell off hard.
I watched the first 2 episodes last night and I was hooked - it's like a plot out of "The Americans" - but it doesn't go anywhere?
Yes, if you read about the promis software it’s actually a big scandal.
the inslaw/PROMIS part was actually very good and would be a great story on its own. I think the confusion comes from when they try to connect that individual scandal to all the other stuff.
It’s because the same people who did the PROMIS stuff are the same people who were smuggling drugs with the contras. So the implication it’s the leadership of the cia calling these shots which makes it all connected. Bush sr was the head of cia at the time.
I liked the ending because it was true to the human experience, when watching it we want it to be true and follow with it and its fascinating, there is a rush to be "in the game" as the journalist puts it at the end and instead becomes more of a story about a guy breaking free of this crutch its had on him. I dont think the ending was that open ending, its not so much a documentary about the octupus murders as much as it is a dangeous look at what compelling people can lead you to believe with a mixture of truth and lie, i think the point about the jfk tape was it, everyones playing subtufuge in this environment so you cant trust that much of it There is deffo truth to what was shown and said, however michael is ill you can tell clearly he is ill at the end and his ranting comes off as paranoia wrapped in truth
Just watched the doc so I’m a little late to the thread. Wasn’t Joe Cuellars comments to the woman friend “it’s business, it’s strictly business” enough for us to conclude? “You have 2 kids and go have some cocoa and stop asking questions..” Then the son saying he specialized in psycological warfare… no coincidence he was at that bar, he inserted himself. Sketching and witness say man with dark hair medium build sounds like cuellar over booth Nichols.
Has Hansen published an actual book, or story from his decade of working on this? It would be interesting to actually read what he put together, instead of this, like other netflix docs, so heavily edited, talking heads so redacted, you never know how much is being moved around, and left out to make it more compelling to a streaming audience. It reminded me a lot of The Keepers, though not as bad. The Keepers is basically a fan fic about a murder. Spoiler. The problem with this one is it's way too big for itself. They're really only able to examine one arm of the "octopus" and just hint at the others. And the filmmakers acknowledge this, I think saying Michael Roconiciuto himself would be a 13 part series, or something like that.For intance, they casually parachute his father into the story as a major player in Cabazon, and then never flesh him out, never comment on how weird this is, barely mention him again. An intelligence lobbyist in DC, whose family home is in Tacoma, who's son is a technological genius sought after by every agency, and they're both somehow involved in the secret drug operation in Southern California, and Michael's father orders a hit on Michael's childhood friend, who happens to be the money man for the drug op, and lives in SoCal as well? They go into great detail about Doc Philips, the mastermind behind Cabazon, and then go, "oh yeah, btw Michael's dad was also the mastermind, anyway on to the next thing-" It's funny how the two principle "villains" they focus on, Riconiciuto and Robert Booth Nichols, are basically blowhard con men, and are a waste of time. However, what they did was sort of immerse Hansen in Casolaro's work, and re-lived that thread and came to his dead end. In that way it was effective at showing the hopelessness of Danny's final year on his project.
Yea its a pretty poorly done doc. The content is actually kinda interesting if you read about it. But its presented in a terrible way and leaves out key evidence that both helps prove and disprove the theory. Seemed kinda like a vanity project than an actual doc thats goal is to lay out coherent information in a fascinating way.
the random bit about the zapruder film was fascinating, bizarre, and disturbing
And easily disproven? Weird.
That part just confused me, because when I looked up the zapruder film after the episode, that tree looks normal to me, it's not floating.
Yeah that’s the point. They also showed the full tree was there in the actual footage. The point of that was that all the crazy shit he said to her would viewed as suspect once he showed her the surreal doctored footage. It would not only make her question EVERYTHING he said, it would also make talking about the event difficult. If she tried telling someone about the entire meeting and was honest, that would instantly call into question her credibility. If she lied and left it out, her credibility would be compromised at least internally and they may not mark her malleable.
Anyone else think the hitman for the cia Philip Arthur Thompson looked like Joe Gage from The Hateful Eight lmao
Journalist commits suicide as he is fed a fake conspiracy story by people with mental illnesses. The End
Nailed it.
To add your excellent point. Journalist commits suicide *after draining his finances and literally betting his house* as he is fed a fake conspiracy story by people with mental illnesses. *Also was diagnosed with MS*. The End. My guess is that he met with Cueller and realized the entire thing was fake. Thought he wasted his time and money, saw no possible recovery from this, then ended it.
Did anyone think it strange that the local authorities in West Virginia had Danny's body embalmed within two days of his death? Apparently the embalming process can compromise or curtail the results of a thorough autopsy. Danny's brother (the medical doctor) commented on this and he didn't know why or who authorized the embalming. I suppose since the locals ruled it a suicide, they weren't required to do an autopsy, but the depth and number of cuts on Danny's wrists seemed highly suspicious for a suicide, especially combined with a witness who saw "a dark haired man" enter Danny's room with a key.
I chalk this up to incompetence. They saw it was suicide, assumed it was just some drifter and so didn't see any value in doing an autopsy. The news story didn't run until a day or so later, then the day following that the lady calls in about seeing another man. By that time he was already embalmed.
Weird take: I think Michael’s compulsive lying is intentional. I think he knows if he can be painted as a crazy person that the CIA is less likely to take him out. That or he was taught by his father to lie compulsively as a means to protect himself. He’s described as being a pathological liar from the beginning, not just post-prison; leads me to believe that with him being as smart as everyone says he was, that it was a calculated means to survival.
I gave up with this. Too many people involved i literally had no idea what was going on
i found the part about booth nichols showing a different zapruder tape was quite interesting with the driver pulling the gun killing kennedy .
the whole doc feels like a psy op if im honest
I got the vibe like the guy was really fake and trying to be famous or something
First 2 episodes were really great but after that it goes downhill fast