The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Cheri Seymour.md

title	aliases	created	updated	category	tags	summary	location	relations
Cheri Seymour	Cheri Seymour Cheri Seymour (author) Seymour, Cheri	2026-05-17	2026-10-05	Authors & Journalists	Person Journalist Author Casolaro Inslaw PROMIS Octopus ChristianIdentity Mariposa	Mariposa, California newspaper reporter who wrote Committee of the States (1991) on William Potter Gale's Identity movement and The Last Circle (2010), a 599-page account of Danny Casolaro's Octopus investigation.	Mariposa, California	type with start role fn employed_by Mariposa Gazette and Miner 1986 reporter covering the October 1986 arrests of Committee of the States members 1 type with start end role fn investigated The Octopus 1991 2010 researched and interviewed sources on the Casolaro investigation, the Inslaw/PROMIS dispute and the Octopus 3

Cheri Seymour is an author who was a reporter on the Mariposa Gazette and Miner in Mariposa, California, in the 1980s. She wrote Committee of the States: Inside the Radical Right (Camden Place Communications, Mariposa, 1991), a study of the Christian Identity movement built on the case of Colonel William Potter Gale, and The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal (TrineDay, 2010), a 599-page account of the death of Danny Casolaro and of the network he called The Octopus. An interviewer on Radio Free Kansas introduced her in 2010 as a former private investigator and non-fiction journalist whose book took 18 years to complete.¹²³⁴

Committee of the States, 1991

Seymour's first book carries the copyright of Seymour and the imprint of Camden Place Communications, Inc., 4859 Morningstar Lane, Mariposa (ISBN 0-9628772-0-4, Library of Congress card number 90-92264), with editing and production by Rapp Publishing and Typographic Services; the acknowledgments thank reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle, the Arizona Republic, the Fargo Forum and the Davis Enterprise, and the Mariposa Gazette and Miner, the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Los Angeles Times, and reprint material from the Sacramento Bee, California Magazine, James Corcoran's Bitter Harvest, the Anti-Defamation League's The Arizona Patriots and the Washington Post.¹

The foreword says she attended a "Soldiers Ransom" ritual in the Aryan Nations compound, a midnight Ku Klux Klan cross burning and a Skinhead rally in Napa Valley, and a three-week Committee of the States trial in Las Vegas, and accumulated "an entire file cabinet of court transcripts and discovery material" from a two-year federal investigation called Operation Clean-Sweep, which ended in a Fort Smith, Arkansas courtroom where thirteen leaders from several states were acquitted of sedition.¹

The book opens with the arrests of October 23, 1986. Seymour writes that she was awakened at 10 p.m. on October 22 by the executive editor of the Gazette, who had been told by the district attorney's office that Gale and Fortunato "Slim" Parrino would be arrested at their homes the next morning, and that Commander Rod Sinclair of the Mariposa County Sheriff's Department told her to stay out of the area. On the 23rd federal agents seized Gale, still in pajamas, on his porch in Mariposa County and took him to a detention hearing in Fresno; Parrino was arrested at Bootjack and five other members of the Committee of the States in Arizona and Nevada, on a ten-count indictment from a Las Vegas grand jury charging threats to kill four Internal Revenue Service agents and a Nevada judge by "Constructive Notices." She describes the Committee's compact, filed in Mariposa County on July 13, 1984 after a signing at the Manasseh Ranch, and writes that the case grew out of two years of undercover work by the IRS and five years of earlier FBI investigation, and that the federal government had "declared war on the radical right."¹

The Casolaro investigation

The Last Circle is organized as Seymour's own account of research that began after Casolaro was found dead on August 10, 1991 in a hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia. It states that she interviewed Robert Booth Nichols at his home on February 13, 1992 and the U.S. Customs agent Scott Lawrence on February 5, 1993, and she places the murders of Neal Abernathy on February 19, 1997 among events of her investigation. Chapter 17, "The Inslaw Affair," summarizes House Judiciary Committee Report 102-857 (released September 10, 1992), the committee's three-year investigation of the Justice Department's treatment of the Hamiltons' Inslaw and its PROMIS software, with the investigators James E. Lewin and John D. Cohen, and adds Bill Hamilton's account. In the same chapter she reproduces what she describes as a packet from a confidential source in Washington containing Judiciary Committee memoranda by Cohen, including the committee's contacts with the FBI agent Thomas Gates, the prosecutors Marvin Rudnick and Richard Stavin, and Casolaro's brother Dr. Anthony Casolaro.³⁵

According to that chapter, the memoranda record Gates telling Cohen that "the FBI feels Danny Casolaro's death was an ITAR murder" (Interstate Travel in Aid of Racketeering) and that Casolaro told him three days before his death that Nichols had visited Casolaro in Martinsburg. Seymour writes that Stavin told her by e-mail: "I never believed for a moment that Danny Casolaro committed suicide. I spoke to him for about 45 minutes the week before and this was not a despondent man," and that Stavin said Casolaro first asked whether he had to be concerned for his safety because he was going to meet Nichols. She records Stavin's opinion that the MCA prosecution of three suspects "never went forward because no one at the DOJ in Washington D.C. wanted all the wiretap affidavits in the case to be released," and that Dan Moldea was copied on her e-mail exchanges with Stavin and Rudnick.⁵

Chapter 22, "The Octopus Exposed," reports a four and a half hour meeting on February 14, 2001 at the home of Peter Zokosky and his wife Regina, with the journalist Kelly O'Meara of Insight magazine. Seymour attributes to Zokosky the statements that Nichols did contract work for the NSA and NSC, that the Lebanese company FIDCO was an NSA front whose directors included Robert Maheu and Glenn Shockley, and that Nichols was in Vietnam working for Ross Perot. She records that Zokosky said he believed Casolaro committed suicide, while Regina Zokosky "frowned and said she thought her husband had said otherwise at previous times." Zokosky let the two visitors read a manuscript by Nichols dated November 22, 1991, "Danny Casolaro's Octopus," and gave them a three-page FBI Los Angeles report dated December 2, 1982, which Seymour quotes: a confidential source alleged on March 16, 1978 that Nichols was "an international money launderer of money derived from both narcotics and organized crime activities," and the report concluded that Nichols "should be considered armed and dangerous."⁶

The Cabazon killings and the final chapter

Chapter 25, "Rachel's Resolution," follows Rachel Begley, daughter of Ralph Boger, who was shot with Fred Alvarez, vice-chairman of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians tribal council, and Patricia Castro in Rancho Mirage, California on June 29, 1981. Seymour records the autopsy finding of a single .38 caliber bullet to each head, Alvarez's prior statements to a reporter that they were marked for death, and the 2007 assignment of the cold case to Detective John Powers of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department. She reports the arrest of James "Jimmy" Hughes at Miami airport on September 26, 2009 on a California fugitive warrant for three counts of murder, and the stalling of his extradition by his Miami lawyer as of December 1, 2009. She reprints a translated La Prensa (Honduras) article of October 5, 2009 by Jessica Figueroa headed "Jimmy Hughes - From CIA operative and mafia hitman to evangelical pastor," and closes the chapter with Begley's statement to the court, delivered on the day Seymour records Hughes as being released, asking that he remain in custody "at least until another DOJ prosecutor who is less timid can be assigned," and that the case go to another jurisdiction or a special prosecutor.⁷

Publication

TrineDay published The Last Circle in September 2010 (ISBN 978-1-936296-00-2; a second ISBN, 978-1-936296-38-5, appears in library records). Chapters 17, 22 and 25 were posted on the internet with Seymour's permission from the site ark-roundtable.com. Radio Free Kansas broadcast an interview with her on October 20, 2010, whose notes say the book follows "a story that took 18 years to develop" with a "surprise conclusion that even she did not anticipate" and that the title refers to the last circle of Dante's Inferno, reserved for traitors.³⁴⁵

Footnotes

---

1. Seymour, Cheri. Committee of the States: Inside the Radical Right. Camden Place Communications, Mariposa, California, 1991, copyright page, acknowledgments, foreword and chapter "The Arrests." https://archive.org/details/seymour-cheri-committee-of-the-states ↩︎

2. Radio Free Kansas, interview "Cheri Seymour 'The Last Circle,'" October 20, 2010, program notes. https://archive.org/details/CheriSeymourtheLastCircle ↩︎

3. Seymour, Cheri. The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal. TrineDay, 2010; Open Library records 1936296004 and 9781936296002 (599 pages). https://openlibrary.org/search?q=last+circle+seymour+casolaro ↩︎

4. Same as note 2. ↩︎

5. Seymour, The Last Circle, chapter 17, "The Inslaw Affair," pp. 247 ff. https://archive.org/details/TheInslawAffair. Sole source for the passages so cited (Gates, Stavin and Rudnick statements as she records them). ↩︎

6. Seymour, The Last Circle, chapter 22, "The Octopus Exposed," pp. 337 ff. https://archive.org/details/TheOctopusExposed. Sole source for the Zokosky meeting. ↩︎

7. Seymour, The Last Circle, chapter 25, "Rachel's Resolution," pp. 393 ff. https://archive.org/details/RachelsResolution ↩︎