LOS ANGELES — Victor Rocha, the 41-year-old pony-tailed guru of Indian gaming e-news, appears as comfortable behind the wheel of his new black BMW SUV as he does strolling through the eclectic crowds of his beloved Venice Beach.

On his powerful personal computer in his home 10 minutes away, he’s as passionate about mining and disseminating Indian gaming news as he is while wailing away on one of his many guitars hung lovingly on the walls of the next room.

Rocha, a member of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, is a something of a fulcrum for native American tribal gaming and the increasing number of people around the nation who are interested in it.

He’s a familiar figure to tribal leaders, gaming executives, analysts, anti-gaming activists and the media.

His Web site, Pechanga.net, averages 44,000 hits per day at last count. His daily e-mails, which have links to every story on Indian gaming he can find from more than 100 newspapers and other Web sites, go out free of charge to more than 1,000 subscribers seven days a week.

The links are not just to tribal gaming stories. He also tracks commercial casino news, and tags each article with the city or state of its origin. And he links to reports on problem gambling, online wagering, lotteries, new gaming initiatives, horse racing and such general Indian matters as water issues.

“There are days when I get up and it’s like ‘Groundhog Day,’ ” Rocha said. “I feel like I was just here. But then I’ll find something that makes me excited or mad, and I’m off to the races.”

Lately, he’s also been posting articles about the California recall election. Tribal gaming in the Golden State is estimated to be a $5 billion enterprise, and Indians — perhaps for the first time in state history — are considered a genuine constituency with lobbyists.

“It’s a real exciting time,” he said. “The whole purpose is to help people understand these really complicated and fluid situations. There’s usually more than meets the eye, and it’s hard to get it all from one newspaper.”

On the alert

Rocha’s personality is like the Web itself — large, inclusive and always on. On a recent visit to his small, but comfortable home, not five minutes had gone by before he was showing off his new favorite axe, a gleaming silver Trussart, and performing a nearly flawless excerpt from Jimi Hendrix’ “Voodoo Child.”

As a member of the Pechanga tribe, he is a beneficiary of one of the state’s largest casino-resorts. But even without that undisclosed income, Rocha said his Web site is profitable to the tune of “well into the six figures.”

Advertising is currently minimal, but there could be more in the future as the site gets more and more popular. The site is being redesigned to include an extensive archive.

The site was started in 1998, just as Proposition 5 passed muster with California voters and big-time Indian gaming got rolling. For the first 18 months, Rocha said the site didn’t make a dime. But he persevered thanks to the support of wife Patricia, who works for a large Los Angeles printing company.

“I just took to it — the Internet was still the Wild West, and no one had a real guidebook to where this stuff was,” he recalled. “When we won the election in November, people said, ‘You can stop sending me tons of e-mail now,’ and I was like, ‘What are you talking about? This is just starting.’ ”

Rocha is not above a little editorializing, mostly contained to the “MORON ALERT” tag he bestows on certain articles or opinion pieces.

A recent example came on Aug. 25, when he linked to an editorial in the New York Post by National Review magazine columnist Rich Lowry. The headline: “The Indian Scam.”

“American Indians have always occupied an outsized place in our imagination, usually as a noble people at one with a pristine North American continent,” Lowry began. “It’s time to upgrade the image.

“Forget buffalo, eagle feathers and tribal dances. Think slots, Harrah’s and dirty politics.”

In a few sentences, the author managed to stereotype Indians, falsely claim that their image traditionally has been a positive one, and then accuse them of unsavory money grubbing.

But Rocha linked to it anyway, lest his subscribers be spared even one article on Indian gaming that is out there in the world.

“It’s important for the Indians to see what is being said,” he said. “You could be walking into a minefield out there.

“Some of these guys are just a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth conservative attack dogs. They appeal to a certain segment of America, but it’s just as important that you watch them, too.

“Fox News, for example, is to news what pro-wrestling is to sports. Regardless, people watch pro-wrestling.”

‘Important tribal link’

Rocha said that a former assistant secretary of the interior under President Clinton, Kevin Gover, told him that looking at Pechanga.net was like watching a dozen different daily soap operas.

“He’s been a very important link not just to the Indian gaming community, but to tribal communities all over North America,” said Jacob Coin, executive director of the California Nations Indian Gaming Association. “It’s an invaluable resource.”

Coin knows Rocha well, playing guitar and singing alongside him in their rock band, In-Kompliant. Rocha’s cousin, Pechanga Tribal Chairman Mark Macarro, is the band’s bassist. The tribe’s head counsel, John Macarro (Mark’s brother), is lead vocalist.

“That’s the word we hear very often — ‘Are you in compliance?’” Rocha said. “So it’s a joke — we say we’re the most regulated band in Indian country.”

Rocha, the second of seven children (he has described his family as “dysfunctional”) got a job at a record store in San Bernardino after high school, where he got a fledgling music career under way.

He made a living as a “starving artist” musician for a few years in the late 1980s, when he gigged with bands in New Jersey and Philadelphia, occasionally opening for acts that had some drawing power, such as the Smithereens.

In the early ’90s, he returned to his native San Bernardino to go to college, but he drifted back into music and some set building for minor films.

Later in the decade, Rocha speaks freely of his year and a half long “lost weekend” period, after his father, with whom he was close, died of cancer in 1994. The following year, his 28-year-old brother, a father of three children, was gunned down in a San Bernardino drive-by shooting.

“When my father died, the safety net was just pulled out from under me,” Rocha reflected. “And my brother’s death was a real wake-up call. I was aimless and wandering and all of a sudden you realize you’re not 20 anymore. I was just looking for a gig.”

But it also was during the mid-’90s that he got in touch with his tribe and became more involved and more interested in politics and, eventually, the politics of interconnectivity known as the Internet.

Still, Rocha said that it was music that “absolutely saved my life.”

It’s why he keeps those well-tuned guitars so close at hand.