Bill Hamilton

William A. Hamilton was born around 1940 and grew up in Laude, Indiana, where he was one of seven brothers. He graduated from Notre Dame with an English degree in 1962 and married Nancy Hamilton in 1963.¹

Hamilton worked as an analyst and Vietnamese linguist for the NSA for seven years. In 1969, he left federal service and became a management consultant at Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. He won a contract through a competitive bid to develop what would become PROMIS, working under the direction of Joan E. Jacoby and Charles R. Work with Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funding routed through the Office of Crime Analysis of the District of Columbia. The resulting software, the Prosecutor's Management Information System, debuted on January 1, 1971, in the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office.¹

In 1973, Hamilton and his wife Nancy founded INSLAW (the Institute for Law and Social Research), a non-profit organization that took over stewardship of PROMIS. INSLAW received additional LEAA funding to enhance PROMIS into a transferable system adoptable by other jurisdictions and oversaw its spread to prosecutors' offices around the country. In January 1981, Hamilton reorganized INSLAW as a for-profit entity and acquired the predecessor organization's assets.¹

The DOJ Contract and Bankruptcy

In March 1982, INSLAW signed a $10 million, three-year contract with the DOJ's Executive Office for United States Attorneys to install PROMIS in 20 large U.S. Attorneys' offices and word-processor systems in 74 smaller ones. From the contract's earliest days, Hamilton and C. Madison Brewer, the DOJ's project manager, were in conflict: Hamilton alleged Brewer obstructed INSLAW's proprietary rights claims and engineered advance payment disputes to force the company into financial distress. When INSLAW ran out of funds to sustain litigation against the DOJ while fighting to protect its software rights, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 1985.²

Hamilton and Nancy Hamilton sued the DOJ for non-payment on a version of PROMIS called Modification 12 and for the alleged unauthorized distribution of the enhanced software beyond the contract's authorized sites. In September 1987, Bankruptcy Judge George F. Bason ruled in their favor, finding DOJ had "taken, converted, stole, INSLAW's enhanced PROMIS by trickery, fraud, and deceit" and awarding approximately $6.8 million in damages. The ruling was affirmed by the district court but reversed on jurisdictional grounds by the Court of Appeals in May 1991.²

Representation by Elliot Richardson

Hamilton retained former Attorney General Elliot Richardson as lead counsel for INSLAW's civil claims. Richardson, who had served as Nixon's Attorney General before his resignation during the Saturday Night Massacre, provided INSLAW with significant public credibility. Richardson told the press and congressional investigators that the affair presented "circumstantial evidence of a sinister conspiracy" that was "at its outer reaches...far more sinister than anything revealed in Watergate." He submitted testimony, sworn statements, and affidavits linking high-level DOJ officials to a conspiracy to steal PROMIS and secretly transfer it.³

The 1985 Intelligence Letter

In November 2004, Hamilton received a document from a source described as a reliable U.S. intelligence contact. Dated May 16, 1985, the letter indicated that PROMIS software was being provided to an Arab sheik for resale and distribution, brokered by Manucher Ghorbanifar, Adnan Khashoggi, and Richard Armitage. The document had been signed by William Bradford Reynolds, who authenticated it when shown the letter. Hamilton considered this letter significant, as all copies were said to have been ordered destroyed. The letter corroborated INSLAW's longstanding claim that PROMIS had been distributed internationally through channels that included Middle Eastern arms brokers with Iran-Contra connections.⁴

The Octopus Investigation

In 1990, Hamilton contacted freelance journalist Danny Casolaro, whose subsequent investigation would attempt to connect the PROMIS theft to the October Surprise, the Iran-Contra Affair, and the collapse of BCCI under the unified theory he called "The Octopus." Hamilton was in daily contact with Casolaro until approximately a week before Casolaro's death on August 10, 1991.⁴

In March 1991, Hamilton received a notarized affidavit from Michael Riconosciuto claiming that Riconosciuto had modified PROMIS at the Cabazon-Wackenhut joint venture. When Riconosciuto later approached Hamilton with a lead about former DOJ official Michael Abbell's connections to the Cali Drug Cartel, Hamilton, pressed for time, passed the lead to Casolaro — a handoff that Riconosciuto subsequently alleged led directly to Casolaro's death.⁴

Hamilton also described to investigators his belief that the main purpose of the Wackenhut-Cabazon joint venture was to provide a platform for government-sanctioned drug trafficking and money laundering by organized crime groups including the Gambino Crime Family and the Contras, and that Riconosciuto's role was to use NSA's bank-surveillance version of PROMIS to launder drug proceeds with a portion channeled to unauthorized covert operations.⁴

Congressional Testimony and Final Legal Proceedings

Hamilton and INSLAW participated in all major investigations of the affair, including the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations inquiry (1989), the House Judiciary Committee investigation led by Representative Jack Brooks (1989-1992), and the Special Counsel investigation conducted by Nicholas J. Bua (1991-1993). In 1995, the U.S. Senate referred INSLAW's remaining claims to the Court of Federal Claims; the court ruled in 1997-1998 that all versions of PROMIS were in the public domain and that the government had always been free to use the software. INSLAW received no compensation.²

Hamilton continued to assert that PROMIS was fraudulently stolen and distributed internationally. He maintained a public website documenting INSLAW's claims long after the formal legal proceedings concluded.