steve rocco

California's strangest elected official [No, even stranger than him]
Chapman University's campus police (Orange, Calif.) detained Steve Rocco for allegedly trying to swipe a bottle of ketchup from the school cafeteria under his coat. Rocco is a trustee of the school district board in Orange, and his election in 2004 was highlighted in News of the Weird [NOTW 877, 11-28-2004]

Perhaps the strangest election result this year was in Orange County, Calif., where a school board seat went not to the favored establishment candidate but to an unknown, Steve Rocco, who never campaigned or even appeared in public. (He did tell a friend after the election that he would appear at the board meeting on December 9.) Among the little information known about him: His candidate registration included one page of [according to the Los Angeles Times] “densely typed text cut and pasted together, and filled with rambling prose,” and several years ago, he hosted a 17-episode interview series on public-access TV while wearing dark glasses.

Rocco still wears dark glasses, and this fall is running for the city council in Santa Ana, where his platform includes taking on "the Mexican Mafia, their Caucasian Puppetmasters and Judicial Miscreants" and pursuing other quixoticisms. Los Angeles Times