Interesting article about the Carone family...timhyma! I lived in Santa Barbara 5 years and looked over at the channel oil fields often from my perch on the top of the coast range which I accessed by mtn.bike often during those days. Sounds like a mobster family transplanted from manhattan.
The flip side of that story is that hadn't Retamco been defrauded by the Carones,they would have been able to develop their gas and oil leases in Colorado and Utah by themselves. Instead they took Dejour on as a partner!