The Story Chaser Meets the Storyteller
Orlando, like many members of the Casolaro’s extended family, knew about Danny’s investigative work. And when his family informed him that Danny was dead, all they needed to say was, "they got Danny," and he knew his cousin was dead.

By his own hand or another, Danny could be silenced, but his story could not be squelched. One year after his death, Orlando began sifting through the growing body of newspaper accounts and the list of past sources related to the Casolaro case. In doing so, he felt compelled to bring Danny’s story to the stage.

"Part of it is to tell Danny’s story and to redeem it," Orlando says. "Part of it is to rehabilitate him."

On one level, his play attempts to shed light on the dark corridors of democracy, to wake the audience up to the way our government deals with the world. On another level, his play tries to revisit the hero’s quest in the modern world.

"Most of the secrets aren’t kept from other governments; they are kept from us," Orlando says.

The secrets that Casolaro uncovered pointed to a small group of individuals who participate in clandestine operations as middlemen or fixers, with profit as their main motive.

"It’s a network, like anything in the temp business or journalism. People work with people that they know and whom they can rely on," Orlando says. You cannot put out an ad in the paper requesting resumes for a covert operation, he adds.

So what was Danny out to prove? Orlando says that he was out to document these connections, the obviousness of these connections and the lack of material to nail it down.

"Of course he wanted to be famous, so the case became a holy grail of sorts. He had to prove it. Kill the dragon. The biggest irony of his death is that he did become famous. He has become an ongoing character in conspiracy mythology."

In a book on the top 75 conspiracies, Danny, "The Man Who Knew Too Much," ranks as No. 14. His investigations and death also were the subject of a book titled "The Octopus."

In addition to dreaming of fame and pursuing truth, Danny was perceived by some to be naïve, a point raised in several newspaper accounts of his work.

To that Orlando says, "things that we call foolish and reckless were at one time heroic traits."

Which may be one reason why Orlando approaches Danny’s story as a hero’s quest, because modern heroes are often as misunderstood as they are undocumented.

"The hero goes into the real world where [things] are vague," Orlando explains. "It’s not: Here’s the dragon; I have to slay this dragon. Here is the girl; I have to save the girl."

In the real world, things don’t always conclude in storybook ending. Kill the dragon. Save the girl. Everybody cheers. Hero triumphs and the world is a better place for it. In the real world, Orlando says "usually the good guy ends up in a bathroom with his wrists slit."

Twenty-Seven Tentacles
In an outline of his manuscript, Casolaro described his findings to William Hamilton, one of his chief sources, as "an octopus, created in the 1950s and operating today with impunity because it is intertwined with domestic and foreign intelligence agencies(5)."

Danny believed this network of spooks was behind everything from the theft of sophisticated snooping software (PROMIS) to the BCCI scandal to the Iran-contra affair to the alleged October Surprise. Each scandal represented a tentacle on Danny’s octopus.

In "Superman is Dead," Orlando uses twenty-seven characters (played by eight actors) moving back and forth among nine different locations in close to thirty scenes to convey the moving parts of this octopus. By doubling and tripling the actors’ roles, he helps muddy the waters of the spooks’ world for Danny and the audience. His goal is not to provide conclusions. The tentacles surface only in shadow, remaining out of reach and out of full view. He invites audience members to decide Danny’s fate for themselves.

Of course, he presents several central characters that sustained Danny as sources.

Danny had pieced together his portrait of the "Octopus" through conversations with a cast of shady characters, but three in particular managed to further his work greatly.

• William Hamilton – founder of Inslaw (Institute for Law and Social Research), a software company that made the PROMIS program coveted by and eventually "stolen" by members of the Reagan/Bush administration(6);
• Michael Riconosciuto – a boy-genius linked to the infamous security firm (read: arms dealer) Wackenhut Corporation; and
• Robert Booth Nichols – head of a joint venture between Cabazon Indian tribe, Wackenhut and Meridian Arms, and a dangerous man with reported links to the American mafia and Japanese Yakuza.

The obstacle that Orlando encountered was knowing these characters and making them three-dimensional.

"When you write a play, you know what the characters want, but not the events. In this play, I knew what took place, but I did not know the motivations," Orlando says.

Endgame
Danny did not entirely trust his sources, but they often led him to additional evidence and new questions. He had chased leads provided by them for months, relying on government documents and newspaper clippings to help buttress his argument. After almost a year on the trail, his research had run dry for several weeks, until he unearthed new evidence and a new source that juiced him. He had to go to Martinsburg, W.V. to learn more. He told several family members and friends that he had discovered something significant, though he did not detail what it was that he had found. Whatever it was, it was perhaps significant enough for him to begin receiving death threats. One threat came from his own contact, Nichols, who urged him to drop the investigation for his own good.

Before heading to Martinsburg to meet with his new source, Danny prophetically told his brother-If I die, don’t believe the circumstances.

A number of sources contributed to this account, including numerous newspaper clippings.