Danny Casolaro - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Casolaro was born into a Roman Catholic family in McLean, Virginia, the son of an obstetrician, and the second of six children. One of his siblings fell ill and died shortly after birth. A younger sister, Lisa, died of a drug overdose in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s. Casolaro attended Providence College until 1968. He married Terrill Pace, a former Miss Virginia. The couple had a son, Trey, and divorced after ten years, with Casolaro granted legal custody of his son.

Casolaro's interests included amateur boxing, writing poems and short stories, and raising thoroughbred Arabian horses. He also dabbled in journalism, looking into issues such as the Soviet naval presence in Cuba, the Castro intelligence network, and Chinese communist smuggling of opium into the U.S. according to his own curriculum vitae (though it remains unclear how much he had had published). At the time of his death, he had written and published one novel, The Ice King, with Vanity Press.

Towards the end of the 1970s, he dropped his interest in journalism and acquired a series of computer-industry trade publications, which he began selling towards the end of the 1980s. In early 1990, he decided to take up journalism again and, soon after, took an interest in the Inslaw case, of which his IT contacts had made him aware.