Bomb Suspect Called Dedicated Activist

Robert Steven Manning demonstrated years ago that he would stand up, in dramatic ways, to support a cause.

One night at a Los Angeles pool hall, six men who had been drinking accosted a female patron. Manning took charge, wading into the crowd, grabbing a cue stick and snapping it in half. The men backed off. Like a proud knight, Manning escorted the woman from the scene with a flourish, recalled two people who were there.

“He carried her away,” said one man who happened to be present. “(It) touched everyone’s imagination.”

That incident, more than 17 years ago, marked Manning’s beginnings in Jewish activism. Several members of the Jewish Defense League, which would soon be starting its West Coast chapter, said the incident attracted their attention.

The burly youth, a dropout who had attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, had shown just the kind of chutzpah that Rabbi Meir Kahane, the extremist founder of the Jewish organization, sought to recruit.

When the JDL’s West Coast chapter opened in 1971, Manning was a charter member. One year later, there was trouble. A bomb blew up at the home of an Arab activist in Hollywood, and Manning was charged with setting it off.

Weapons Seized

In their investigation of the explosion in which no one was injured, police seized a rifle, a pistol and shotgun powder, as well as a copy of “The Anarchist Cookbook,” offering instructions on how to make bombs.

Ultimately, Manning received three years’ probation in connection with the bombing and was ordered to disavow his ties with the JDL.

Today, the 36-year-old Manning, who now lives in one of Israel’s West Bank settlements, faces a far more serious allegation. On July 7, he was indicted in a fatal 1980 mail bombing in Manhattan Beach.

Manning has also been identified as a suspect in the 1985 bombing murder in Santa Ana of Alex Odeh, an advocate of Arab causes, and is among several suspects identified by federal authorities in three other violent incidents on the East Coast three years ago. A man died in one of those incidents, and in another, two Boston policemen were injured while trying to defuse a bomb.

Patricia Wilkerson, a 35-year-old secretary at a Manhattan Beach computer marketing firm, died July 17, 1980, after she opened a package addressed to her boss. Inside was a bomb hidden in a tape recorder. A letter accompanying the package said the device, when plugged into an electrical outlet, would open “a new age of computer sales and advertising.”

Wilkerson, a mother who supported two children and a disabled husband, was killed instantly.

The package was addressed to Brenda Crouthamel, who earlier in 1980 had married William Adams, a sales executive at Data General. The couple had started their own computer marketing firm and hired Wilkerson away from Data General. Police who investigated the bombing at the time say they are convinced the bomb was intended for Brenda Adams.

Rochelle Manning was arrested last month at Los Angeles International Airport and charged in the Wilkerson killing. Two weeks later, a grand jury indictment was returned against both her and her husband, Robert Manning.

Last week, Assistant U.S. Atty. Nancy Wieben Stock said she would seek to extradite Robert Manning from Israel to face trial for the murder of Patricia Wilkerson, even though Israel has not honored an extradition request from the United States since 1967. A conviction could result in a sentence of life in prison.

Motive a Mystery

The mystery of the Wilkerson case to date is motive. U.S. postal inspectors, who quickly took over after it was established that the bomb was delivered by mail, consistently have said the killing had no political overtones.

Several friends and colleagues of the Adamses, who declined to be interviewed, said they were mystified and shocked to hear that a suspected terrorist had been charged and his wife arrested in the case.

Dottie Pike, a friend of Wilkerson who had worked with her at Data General, said she was apolitical and not particularly religious. Pike said she ate lunch with Wilkerson the day she died and remembered that her friend urged her to come back to the office and see the new furniture that had just arrived.

“She kept saying, ‘Come back. I’ve just got to open the mail, and I’ll take you right back,’ ” Pike said. Instead, Pike said, she caught a ride back with another friend.

Al Scura, a division director with Data General in Boston, worked with both Adams and Wilkerson at the firm’s facility in El Segundo.

Victim a Workaholic

“The Adamses were not especially religious and were certainly not political,” Scura said. “They were serious workaholics.”

Unlike the Wilkerson killing, each of the other four cases in which Manning is a suspect involved pro-Arab activists or suspected Nazis. Odeh was head of the West Coast chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He was killed at the group’s offices in Santa Ana when he triggered a bomb rigged to go off when an office door was opened.

Odeh, 41, had appeared on a television program the night before his death and called Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat “a man of peace.” Odeh died two hours after the explosion. Seven other people were injured.

Nearly three years later, no one has been arrested in connection with the bombing, and no charges have been filed.

The House subcommittee on criminal justice has scheduled hearings Aug. 10 on the investigation into Odeh’s death. Assistant Counsel Ron Stroman said the panel will inquire into allegations that Israel has obstructed the investigation of the bombing.

Robert Manning is remembered by current and former associates in the Los Angeles area, where he grew up and married before emigrating and becoming an Israeli citizen, as a dedicated, activist friend of the Jewish state.

Described by one JDL associate as a man who was “not very well educated,” Manning--who is over 6 feet tall and weighs about 220 pounds--is said to favor action over debate.

One story about him involves several quotations with anti-Semitic overtones from German Protestant leader Martin Luther that a friend once read aloud to him. Manning, who attended Los Angeles’ Fairfax High School before dropping out, got the point, so the story goes, too well.

“He doesn’t like Jews too much, does he?” Manning was quoted as saying. “Where can I find his ass?”

Manning was a 20-year-old with less than one year of Army service when he taught self-defense at the fledgling JDL’s offices at 581 N. Fairfax Ave. in Los Angeles. He was also active in the group’s neighborhood patrols, heading the program designed to protect neighborhoods and synagogues from harassment and graffiti.

‘Dedicated Jew’

“Manning has been a dedicated Jew from the day I met him,” said Irv Rubin, who helped found the JDL and has headed the West Coast chapter for 17 years. While emphasizing that Manning drifted from the JDL when he followed Kahane’s call and moved to Israel sometime in the late 1970s, Rubin had nothing but good things to say about Manning and expressed shock that he has been charged in the fatal Manhattan Beach bombing.

“Manning is 100% interested in the welfare of the Jewish community,” Rubin said. “He’s a solid, solid, decent, decent guy. He’s a total political activist interested in the welfare of the community and the state of Israel.”

One day in 1972, television producer Ralph Riskin was working on a segment of the “Bridget Loves Bernie” television series in his office at Screen Gems’ Burbank Studios, when the phone rang. He heard a rough voice deliver an ultimatum: “If you don’t take this show off the air right now, we’ll come over and blow your ass off.”

Riskin took it for a joke, he recalled recently. Manning identified himself and said the show’s story line--the marital trials of a Catholic wife and Jewish husband--was an affront to his organization, which, he declared, did not believe in intermarriage, according to Riskin.

The police, however, did not regard the incident as a joke. It led to the posting of armed security guards at all entrances to the studio, Riskin said, and he spent several nights in a motel at the direction of police.

Manning ultimately was acquitted of misdemeanor harassment charges.

‘Not Able to Adjust’

Several people who knew him said they understood that Manning had been a boxer during his stint in the Army and was trained in explosives by the military--a belief not supported by his military record, according to officials with the Army Reserve Personnel Center in St. Louis. He served less than one year, having been trained as a water supply technician and working as a heavy-equipment operator in West Germany. His discharge papers in March, 1970, described him as “not able to adjust” to military life.

Manning first became acquainted with his future wife, Rochelle Ida, 48, a legal secretary, at JDL meetings. Now being held without bail at the federal detention facility at Terminal Island, she is remembered as quiet but dedicated, a JDL member who contributed not through demonstrations and neighborhood patrols but by helping put out the newsletter.

Manning and Ida were married in a small synagogue on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in 1971, according to several people who attended the ceremony.

Court records show that Manning worked at a number of jobs--as a machinist, draftsman, insurance agent and salesman. He worked for a time selling tools for a firm owned by another JDL member and is remembered as an avid photographer.

It is not clear when Manning decided to emigrate to Israel. One lawyer familiar with the couple said Rochelle Manning did not leave the United States permanently until 1980, but her husband reportedly made several extended trips to Israel before then.

Robert Manning now lives in Kiryat Arba, known as perhaps the most militant of the 118 Jewish settlements on the West Bank. After briefly proclaiming his innocence, Manning has gone into seclusion, declining all requests for interviews.

Several attempts by a reporter in Israel to reach him were unsuccessful.

His one-time colleagues in Los Angeles said he is a follower of the Kach Party, the militantly anti-Arab party of JDL founder-turned-Israeli Knesset member Kahane. But Shmuel Ben-Yishai, Manning’s partner in an electrical repair business and security chief of the settlement, said he is not associated with the Kach Party.

While postal inspectors state there are no political overtones to the Wilkerson killing in Manhattan Beach, a federal grand jury investigating the case has subpoenaed two Los Angeles activists, one a JDL official, and sought photos and fingerprints from four associates.

JDL chief Rubin has said he believes Rochelle Manning’s arrest is simply a way of putting pressure on Robert Manning to force his return to the United States. In the eyes of Rubin and several colleagues, the FBI and the Department of Justice are more interested in the overtly political cases, such as the Odeh bombing, than in the Wilkerson case.

Last year, Manning complained in a letter of FBI harassment during a visit to the United States. He described himself as “orthodox” and acknowledged “past affiliations with organizations such as the Jewish Defense League.”

The letter, released by Manning’s New York lawyer, Samuel Abady, was styled “a cry for help” to the American Civil Liberties Union. Listed are Manning’s claims that he was subjected to heavy, continuous surveillance during a visit to the United States in 1986. He said his baggage was searched and unidentified federal agents accused him of crimes.

He alleged that the FBI also had harassed and questioned many of his friends and neighbors in Israel, at one point “telling people that we are not Jewish activists, that if we do anything we do it for financial compensation, that we are nothing more than common criminals.”

Abady also released a heavily edited document described as a letter from the FBI to Manning, in which he is identified as a suspect in a string of crimes, including bombings. Federal officials have declined to comment on the document.

The mystery of motive in the Manhattan Beach bombing has been particularly hard on Pamela Wilkerson, the 21-year-old daughter of the victim.

Searing Memories

The news of the arrests brought back searing memories of the day her mother died, an event that fractured the family that she held together.

Pamela Wilkerson, living in the South Bay, remembers that police investigating the bombing fingerprinted her--she was 13 at the time--and her younger brother, and required her father to take a lie-detector test.

She tried to contact William and Brenda Adams, she said. But an FBI agent called and told her that the only way she could do so was through the agency.

Like the victim’s friends and colleagues, Pamela Wilkerson said she flatly disbelieves that her mother had any connection with militants--or that Brenda Adams did.

“Don’t you have any hint” of motive? she asked a reporter. “Does she (Adams) know this Manning woman? Is she an Israeli? Is this, like, a terrorist act?”

Claiming to share the confusion and outrage of the daughter of the victim is a sister of Manning who lives in Los Angeles.

“He (Robert) is very frightened,” said the woman, who declined to identify herself by name after a recent court hearing. “You can’t blame him. If they can take an innocent woman and put her in jail. . . .”

The prosecutor in the case persuaded a judge to hold Rochelle Manning without bail by arguing that she claims Israeli citizenship, and that Israel has not honored an extradition request from the United States in more than 20 years.

A spokesman for the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles acknowledged that extradition of Israeli citizens is rare but added that Israeli law allows for a trial on Israeli soil of charges brought by other countries.

Asked if her brother will come to the United States to stand trial with his wife on the charges in the Wilkerson case, Robert Manning’s sister said no.

“If he comes here,” she said, “it’s just going to be two of them in jail.”

Times staff writers Dan Fisher in Jerusalem and Marita Hernandez in Los Angeles contributed to this article.