Incident as Youth Led Man Into Jewish Activism

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.”

The incident more than 17 years ago, oddly enough, marked Manning’s beginnings in Jewish activism. Several members of the Jewish Defense League, which would soon be starting its West Coast chapter, said that act attracted their attention. The burly youth, a dropout who had attended Fairfax High School, had shown just the kind of c hutzpah 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.

Items Seized in Investigation

In their investigation of the case, 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, Manning faces a far more serious allegation. The 36-year-old, self-styled demolitions expert, who lives on Israel’s West Bank, was indicted earlier this month 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, a promoter of Arab causes, and is among several suspects identified by 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.

Reportedly, Manning remains a militant follower of American expatriate Kahane although several of his early associates claim that Manning fulfilled his pledge to the court and remained outside the JDL.

Associates in the Los Angeles area, where Manning grew up and married before immigrating and becoming an Israeli citizen, remember him as a dedicated friend of the Jewish state.

“Manning has been a dedicated Jew from the day I met him,” said Irv Rubin, who has headed the West Coast JDL chapter for 17 years. He said Manning drifted from the JDL when he followed Kahane’s call and moved to Israel sometime in the late 1970s.

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

Manning’s wife, Rochelle, was arrested last month at Los Angeles International Airport and also has been charged in the 1980 Manhattan Beach death.

Last week, Assistant U.S. Atty. Nancy Wieben Stock said she will seek to extradite Manning to face trial for the murder of Patricia Wilkerson. If convicted, Manning could be sentenced to life in prison.

A secretary at a Manhattan Beach computer marketing firm, the 35-year-old Wilkerson 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 stated that the device, when plugged into an electrical outlet, would open “a new age of computer sales and advertising.”

Killed Instantly

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 said they are convinced that the bomb was intended for Brenda Adams. The mystery of the case to date is motive. U.S. postal inspectors consistently have said the killing had no political overtones.

Several friends of the Adamses, who declined requests for interviews, said they were shocked to hear that a suspected terrorist had been charged in the case.

Al Scura, a division director with Data General in Boston, worked with Adams and Wilkerson at the firm’s facility in El Segundo. “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 has been identified as a suspect involved pro-Arab activists or suspected Nazis.

Odeh, 41, was head of the West Coast chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He was killed when he entered the group’s offices in Santa Ana, triggering a bomb that was rigged to go off when the office door was opened. No charges have ever been filed in the case.

Known to colleagues as one willing to act while others debated, Manning was a 20-year-old with less than one year of Army service when he taught self-defense at the JDL’s offices on North Fairfax Avenue. He also was active in the group’s neighborhood patrols.

‘Not Very Well Educated’

One JDL associate said Manning had a reputation as a “not very well educated” man. The story is told of a friend reading aloud several quotations from Martin Luther that had anti-Semitic overtones. Manning got the point, so the story goes, too well.

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

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 Inc.’s 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.

Several people who knew him said they understood Manning had been a competitive boxer during his stint in the Army and was trained in explosives by the military--a belief with no basis in his military record. 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 wife, Rochelle Ida, 48, a legal secretary, at JDL meetings. Now being held without bail, she is remembered as a quiet but dedicated JDL member who helped put out the newsletter.

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.

Gone Into Seclusion

He lives in Kiryat Arba, known as perhaps the most militant of more than 100 Jewish settlements on the West Bank. After briefly proclaiming his innocence, Manning has gone into seclusion, declining all requests for interviews.

His former colleagues in Los Angeles said he is a follower of the Kach Party, the militantly anti-Arab party of JDL founder-turned-Israeli Knesset (Parliament) member Meir 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 that there are no political overtones to the Manhattan Beach killing, 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.

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 continuous surveillance during a visit to the United States in 1986.

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.

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

Militant Connection Doubted

Like the victim’s friends, 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.

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

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