Return of the Rocco Files: Rocco Lives!

An article (if you can call a 10-sentence blurb, including the writer's contact information, an article) in yesterday's Orange County Register confirms that Steve Rocco, Orange County's favorite edgoo-ma-caterer, has survived the latest assassination attempt by the secret cabal that controls local politics behind the Orange curtain. Actually, assassination attempt is a bit of an exaggeration: what the Register reported is that a group of school officials and parents who have been gathering signatures to subject Rocco to a special recall election gave up their efforts because they determined it would be too “costly.”

Rocco, in case you didn't know, is the lovable Orange Unified School District trustee, former substitute teacher and full-time conspiracy theorist who won office in the heavily conservative school district three years ago because his opponent, Phil Martinez, had the misfortune of being endorsed by the teacher's union. Shortly after the election, people started wondering just who they voted for and reporters from across the country descended on Rocco's well-secured Santa Ana compound in vain attempts to interview him. Amidst that frenzy, the Weekly made history by unveiling him as the deceased performance artist Andy Kaufman and the author of the self-published book R.O.C.C.O Behind the Orange Curtain: Secret Chronicles N Public Record Accounts of Corruption, Murder N Scandal of Corporate N Political California, a half-diary/half-expose of The Partnership, an unlikely alliance between the Albertsons grocery chain, Kodak Corp. and Smokecraft Sausage.

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As the Weekly was first to report, Rocco stumbled across the Albertsons-Kodak-Smokecraft conspiracy in 1981, when he was arrested for shoplifting several rolls of Kodak film and a package of Smokecraft sausage at an Albertsons store in Santa Ana. He spent the next two decades displaying his vintage vinyl collection–some of it borrowed from the local public library–at various swap meets–and unsuccessfully running for various public offices. After finally becoming a trusty steward of the educational needs of Orange schoolchildren, Rocco fulfilled his public duties by showing up at board meetings in a black hat and sunglasses and maintaining an eerie silence, which he interrupted only to rant about the Partnership to bewildered audience members.

The failed recall election effort isn't the first time the dark forces that secretly control Orange County (and possibly Planet Earth itself) have tried to get rid of Rocco. As Rocco told the Weekly in Feb. 2005, The Partnership first tried to whack him on March 25, 1987, when he was bicycling to court and was struck by a truck. The male truck driver took him to the hospital but left with his bike. Rocco later found the bike in the back of the truck, and after a scary encounter with a man wielding a power saw, he retrieved his property.

And just a few months ago, Rocco claims someone threw an apple at him in what was obviously a murder attempt. When a Weekly reporter happened to drop by his house for a chat, Rocco appeared in his driveway with dried blood on his face, clear evidence of the crime. Rocco stated that the would-be hitmen threatened him with certain death if he didn't give up his attempts to expose The Partnership. “My ass is grass,” Rocco says they told him. “They tried to kill me.”