As noted on the first page of Newsletter No. 31, when freelance journalist Danny Casolaro phoned me in 1991, shortly before he was killed, “he sounds very much like a person on the edge of something big.”

But I did not question him about his future plans.

Shortly after Casolaro’s death, however, I also received phone calls from a couple of his sources. Both told me the same thing. Danny’s next investigative target was an apparent CIA asset named John Philip Nichols, heavily involved as well in the agency’s black market sale of Asian gold.

From what I then learned on my own, as a front for his covert activity, Nichols had assumed a management role in the small Cabezon Indian Reservation near Palm Springs, California.

Back in 1981, a Cabezon Indian named Alfredo “Fred” Alvarez and two of his tribal buddies, unhappy with Nichols, broke into his tribal office and “liberated” some of his files. Nichols quickly dispatched his security staff to track down and recover the stolen material. In the process, Alvarez and his friends were murdered as well. Nichols himself and his security staff eventually became “persons of interest” in a nominal investigation at best but never were prosecuted. And he reportedly died in 2001.

For some time after Danny Casolaro was killed in 1991, I assumed that Nichols indeed had received all the records taken by Alvarez et al. a decade earlier. But I was wrong. A large envelope from someone unknown and no return address arrived at my Phoenix post office box containing copies of some of those documents.

Those documents revealed that Nichols, like Charles Morgan in Tucson, often used Western Union telegrams to convey offers of black market gold sales. And in them, billions of dollars in payments were directed to be made to a Boston bank and banker with conspicuous CIA connections.

In follow-up research that I did, among others engaged in that covert gold sales network was a female head of a Los Angeles law firm whose office reportedly was visited by Charles Morgan on occasion. She later would become a murder victim as well. And a fellow named Robert Nichols also turned up. While he and John Philip Nichols were known to be in touch, I never learned whether they were related or shared a common last name.

More to follow.

Don Devereux
Yountville, California
November 4, 2026

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