I have just learned, apparently months after everyone else, that the area west of us known as Conejo Valley has become the newest home for leaders of organized crime in America, i.
Several of them have settled in and around the communities of Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village, where they have merged into the suburban mainstream without involving themselves in the kinds of activities likely to attract police attention. But why have they moved from the grimy Eastern cities to the rolling hills and lush valleys of Ventura County, I hear you cry. I have an answer. For those who have spent the past 20 years at a missionary outpost in the Mato Grosso, the Mafia is a syndicate of gangsters and killers who involve themselves in the worst vices known to modern society, ranging from narcotics and prostitution to national politics.
Its members are led by a boss of bosses known as the Godfather who looks very much like Marlon Brando and speaks as though he is playing Stanley Kowalski with cotton in his mouth. Also, they enjoy big family picnics. Mafia dons, you see, do not come out in the open as killers or kingpins of vice. No neon signs advertising a numbers game or people in gorilla costumes waving at the passing traffic to attract customers to their cocaine markets. Instead, they sell olive oil and lease out vending machines, activities which are quite legal, while selling dope and whores and politicians on the side, activities which are only marginally legal.
Through it all, the dons like to live well. Most of them have learned to stop eating from a bowl on the kitchen floor and instead dine with sterling silver flatware off bone china dishes in lavish suburban homes. For instance, in Conejo Valley. That must have some appeal to members of organized crime. You displace it. The displacement, he suggested, has been toward Los Angeles County, where apparently they do not let them know that they know quite as effectively as they do in Ventura County.
The president of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce, whose name is Stephen Rubenstein, told me later that Thousand Oaks itself has one of the lowest crime rates of any city in the country with populations of over 50, Also, since Mafia dons like to involve themselves in community activities, the Valley offers everything from an African Violet Club to an organization especially for mothers of twins and triplets.
