1/ In May 1976 Rolling Stone ran a 20,000-word story arguing that the Mafia, the CIA and the White House worked together for 30 years, from World War II to Watergate. Howard Kohn's "Strange Bedfellows: The Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection." I'm going through it page by page, focusing on one thing: the mob's ties to government. 🧵

Seven months before 9/11, Michael Riconosciuto tried to warn Colin Powell that terrorists were about to enter the country. They did NOTHING! His lawyer, Louis Buffardi, wrote Powell on February 19, 2001 and copied John Ashcroft. Riconosciuto had substantial information on terrorists planning to come into the U.S. "in the very near future." He wanted to give it to Powell because he trusted him. "DO NOT SEND THIS LETTER TO THE FBI. If he learns that the FBI is aware of this letter, he may refuse to cooperate." Interesting he didn't trust them then either. Next morning Buffardi writes the U.S. Attorney in Chicago because nobody called and marks it time is of the essence. This is the same Michael Riconosciuto tied to the Octopus files. The Inslaw/PROMIS Danny Casolaro was digging into when he turned up dead in that Martinsburg hotel room in 1991. A decade later he's trying to hand Powell a terrorist warning, and they sit on it.

BCCI was shut down on July 5, 1991. Danny Casolaro was found dead in Martinsburg on August 10. Robert Maxwell went off his yacht on November 5. Same year. Same network. The Safari Club was formed in 1976 by the intelligence services of France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, and pre-revolution Iran. It existed to run covert operations the CIA could not openly run after Watergate. Saudi money funded it. BCCI was the bank. Agha Hasan Abedi built it in 1972, and by the mid-1970s it was moving oil cash, arms cash, and intelligence cash through branches in New York, Miami, and Washington. The Kerry Committee later put CIA accounts at BCCI on the record, along with the secret takeover of First American Bank through Clark Clifford and Robert Altman. That is the tentacle Casolaro told his brother he was about to prove. PROMIS. Iran-Contra. October Surprise. BCCI as the till. Maxwell sits on the same till. His Mirror Group pension hole was about 440 million pounds, with BCCI loans in the mix, and he dies three months after Casolaro. The allegation Casolaro was already chasing, and that later reporting has kept alive, is that Maxwell was moving the backdoored PROMIS software for Israeli intelligence. Ghislaine meets Epstein in late 1991, as her father's network collapses. Epstein's own door into this world was earlier. Arms broker Douglas Leese, tied to the Al-Yamamah Saudi deal, placed him with Steven Hoffenberg at Towers Financial in 1987. Hoffenberg called him the architect of a 200 million dollar Ponzi. By the year BCCI and Maxwell fall, Epstein is handling Leslie Wexner's money. Casolaro was not chasing a rumor. He was chasing the bank that paid for the off-books alliance, in the same season the bank, the journalist, and the man accused of selling the bugged software all went down.

Whitney Webb is explaining how Palantir was built. It is the same story Danny Casolaro died chasing, and Israel and Robert Maxwell are in the middle of it. Casolaro was found dead in a Martinsburg hotel bathtub on August 10, 1991. Wrists slashed a dozen times. Ruled a suicide. He had told his brother that if he turned up dead, it would not be an accident. The files for the book he called The Octopus were gone. What he was tracking was not one scandal. It was a network. The Inslaw/PROMIS theft. Iran-Contra. BCCI. The October Surprise allegations. Arms and intel cutouts like Cabazon-Wackenhut. A bankruptcy judge had already found the Justice Department obtained Inslaw's enhanced PROMIS by "trickery, fraud and deceit." That ruling was later tossed on jurisdiction, not on the facts. The allegation that stuck was that the software was backdoored and sold or given to foreign governments so intelligence services could read the databases it sat on. Israel was at the front of that list. Webb's Palantir history is that pattern, a decade later, with some of the same people. John Poindexter was the highest-ranking Reagan official indicted over Iran-Contra. After 9/11 he was put in charge of DARPA's Total Information Awareness, a dragnet built to fuse commercial and government data and predict crime and terror before they happened. Congress defunded it in 2003 after the backlash. The same year Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. Richard Perle introduced Thiel and Alex Karp to Poindexter. Perle had already been caught in the 1970s passing classified material to the Israeli embassy, and he later had deep ties to Netanyahu's first government. Karp has said the CIA was the intended client from the start. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, was an early backer. Palantir engineers were at Langley every other week in the early years. PROMIS was the 1980s case-management system allegedly turned into a spy tool. The claim Casolaro was chasing, and that Webb has documented, is that Robert Maxwell helped move the bugged version. A trapdoor was planted so Israeli intelligence could read any database the software touched, and Maxwell was the salesman who carried it to governments and institutions abroad. Palantir Gotham is the 2000s version of the same job. Stitch the databases. Surface the hidden links. Sell pre-crime as predictive policing. Same function. Private letterhead. So the constitutional fight Congress already won does not have to be refought. The part most people miss is at the end of the clip. Webb says CIA CIO Alan Wade, who helped shape the early Palantir product and had been inside the TIA world, teamed with Christine Maxwell on a homeland-security program called Chiliad. Christine is Robert Maxwell's daughter. The Maxwell family did not stop at Ghislaine. Robert Maxwell was tied to the PROMIS distribution story. His daughter shows up later on pre-crime software with a CIA official out of the same surveillance program Palantir was built to replace. So the chain runs like this. Stolen DOJ software in the 1980s. Robert Maxwell and Israeli intelligence on the backdoored version. Iran-Contra figures. Then the same Iran-Contra figure running TIA. Then a Maxwell daughter and a TIA-linked CIA official on pre-crime software. Then Palantir as the scaled private version, introduced by a man already tied to Israeli intelligence channels. Casolaro was trying to map the first half. He never got to the second half. Palantir did not exist yet. His files disappeared. The architecture did not. The Octopus was a thesis about a standing network that builds surveillance software, routes it through private cutouts, and uses Iran-Contra-era operators and Israeli intelligence partners to keep it off the books. PROMIS was tentacle one. Robert Maxwell was the courier. TIA was the failed government version. Palantir is tentacle two. The software Casolaro died investigating, after it learned to survive a congressional ban by becoming a company.

These are the checks. And if you've never heard this story, this is why they matter. In 1985, the US had an arms embargo on Iran. Iran was holding American hostages in Lebanon. Publicly, Washington said it would never trade weapons for hostages. Secretly, it did. The scandal became known as Iran-Contra. The profits were later funneled to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, which Congress had banned. Israel was the first link in the chain. In August 1985, with secret US approval, Israel shipped 96 American TOW anti-tank missiles to Iran. In September it shipped 408 more. Someone had to front the money. That was Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms dealer and at the time one of the richest men in the world. The go-between with Iran was Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms broker. Khashoggi paid up front, and Ghorbanifar paid him back. Now look at the paper: August 17, 1985: a $1,000,000 check, Ghorbanifar to Khashoggi. September 10, 1985: Khashoggi signs a letter moving a $4,000,000 check into his Monte Carlo bank account. April 1986: Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Monte Carlo branch, certifies on its own letterhead that Ghorbanifar's $3,000,000 checks were paid out. Why BCCI matters: it was a global bank founded in 1972 that moved money for arms dealers, drug cartels, dictators, and intelligence agencies. A US Senate investigation led by John Kerry later documented CIA accounts at BCCI. Regulators shut it down worldwide in July 1991 in one of the biggest banking frauds in history. Who ran the Israeli side? David Kimche, a top Foreign Ministry official and former Mossad deputy chief. Arms dealers Al Schwimmer and Yaacov Nimrodi. Later, counterterrorism adviser Amiram Nir. All named in the official Iran-Contra record. Now the journalist. Danny Casolaro was a freelance writer investigating what he called "the Octopus": one network he believed tied together Iran-Contra, BCCI, and a stolen government software program called PROMIS. PROMIS was a case-tracking database, and the allegation is it was secretly modified with a backdoor and sold to foreign governments so US intelligence could spy on them. Researcher Peter Osborne says copies of these checks were in Casolaro's files. Former Senate BCCI investigator Jack Blum says they never reached the Kerry inquiry, even though the police, the FBI, and the DOJ all had those files. The Israeli thread runs through the rest. Robert Maxwell was a British media billionaire who owned the Daily Mirror. The allegation Casolaro was chasing is that Maxwell was selling backdoored PROMIS for Israeli intelligence. When Maxwell died, he got what amounted to a state funeral on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, attended by Israel's prime minister. Now 1991. July 5: BCCI is shut down. August 10: Casolaro is found dead in a hotel bathtub in Martinsburg, West Virginia, wrists slashed. It was ruled a suicide. His briefcase full of documents was never found. November 5: Maxwell goes off his yacht near the Canary Islands. His empire collapses, revealing hundreds of millions of pounds missing from his employees' pensions. The bank, the journalist, and the man accused of selling the bugged software all went down in the same four months. And that's the season Jeffrey Epstein walked in, with Maxwell's daughter, Ghislaine, at his side.