Garby Leon
Hollywood development executive at Joel Silver Productions and Columbia who wrote to Janet Reno in July 1993 demanding an inquiry into Paul Wilcher's death as a parallel to Casolaro's, and who prompted and assisted Cheri Seymour's investigation of the Octopus.
Garby Leon, born in New York City, took a degree at Marlboro College and a doctorate at Harvard University, was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and active in the antiwar movement, and went into the film business. He was director of development at Joel Silver Productions at Warner Brothers in Burbank, where he oversaw more than seventy projects, and by July 1993 was at Columbia Pictures in the Thalberg Building at Culver City. He was a frequent telephone and mail correspondent of Paul Wilcher, the Washington lawyer who in May 1993 hand-delivered a hundred-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno alleging cover-ups by the Department of Justice and who was found dead in his apartment in June.1
The Letter to Reno
On July 14, 1993, Leon wrote to Reno that Wilcher's case "deserves your most serious attention." He drew the parallels with Danny Casolaro, found dead in a Martinsburg hotel in August 1991 while investigating the PROMIS affair and what he called The Octopus: both men had been investigating illegal government activity, both had said they feared for their lives, both were found dead in strange circumstances with records missing and their bodies altered. He questioned the reported presence of FBI and CIA personnel at the death scene, objected that Wilcher's body had been cremated "without fingerprint or dental x-ray matching," and wrote: "I don't believe he died of natural causes." Of Wilcher he said he was "not a perfect person" but "a man of unusual energy and altruism," a former seminarian who had considered the priesthood before the law. Sarah McClendon wrote to Reno in the same terms.12
The Last Circle
Leon spent the following year pressing the California journalist Cheri Seymour to write up her investigation of Casolaro's death and the Octopus, and worked with her on it; she thanked him, "formerly Director of Development at Joel Silver Productions," for prompting a first draft in 1994 and for "countless tasks" during their joint investigation, and he appears as a subject in her book.3
Sources
- Leon, Garby. Letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, July 14, 1993, with the biographical note attached, reproduced at http://www.pinknoiz.com/covert/wilcher.html ↩
- See Paul Wilcher and Janet Reno and the sources cited there. ↩
- Seymour, Cheri. The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal, TrineDay, 2010, acknowledgments (as described in later accounts; the text was not examined). ↩
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