JDL’s Rubin, Held in Murder Plot, Is Freed : Arrest: District attorney’s office says police had insufficient evidence to hold him. He blames LAPD for an ‘ongoing vendetta.’

Jewish Defense League Chairman Irv Rubin, who was arrested Friday on suspicion of conspiring to commit murder, was set free Tuesday after the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office determined that police had insufficient evidence to hold him.

“We reviewed the police case and found that, at this point, there’s just not enough evidence to warrant filing any criminal charges,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Frank Sundstedt. “I believe police felt they had probable cause and sufficient evidence at the time. But I as a prosecutor want more before I file on Mr. Rubin.”

He stressed that the police investigation was “ongoing and active.”

Police have alleged that Rubin hired a 25-year-old JDL sympathizer to terrorize a San Pedro man who supposedly owed money to one of Rubin’s clients. They say the sympathizer admitted firing bullets through the San Pedro man’s windows and hitting him on the head.

The case was not related to the JDL, police said, but to Rubin’s free-lance detective work, in which he allegedly applied his “strong-arm” political tactics to collect money for creditors.

Hours after being released from custody Tuesday afternoon, Rubin and his attorney held a news conference to lambaste police and proclaim his innocence. Police are required to charge suspects within 48 working hours or release them.

“I categorically deny the insanity, the lies,” said the controversial 46-year-old militant. “Never in 20 years of activism did I ever engage in such activity. . . . This is an unforgivable error.”

The Los Angeles Police Department, he said, has an “ongoing vendetta” against him. “They heard some wild crazy story,” he said. “And they yell, ‘Let’s go get Irv Rubin.’ ”

Rubin refused to discuss his private business affairs except to deny knowing the purported victim and having as a client a still-unnamed businessman police claim was behind the scheme.

Speaking at the hastily called news conference at Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills, Rubin’s attorney, Steve Goldberg, said Rubin’s release amounted to a vindication of his client. “Initially it was conspiracy to commit murder,” Goldberg said. “Now it’s nothing.”

Goldberg dismissed police statements that the case is ongoing as “public relations backpedaling. . . . They don’t have the integrity to admit their mistake.”

Responded Sundstedt, who heads the district attorney’s organized crime and anti-terrorist unit: “This is certainly no vindication of Mr. Rubin.” The police, he added, “are not done.”

Pressed as to whether police had acted hastily in arresting Rubin, Police Department spokesman Lt. John Dunkin replied: “This is clearly a difference of opinion as to what is needed to file a case--it happens all the time.”

During Rubin’s news conference, he said the police informant was a Sacramento man, who had called the JDL for help last year when his girlfriend was being harassed by skinheads.

Reached by telephone before the news conference, the informant said he was fearful that police might now press charges against him while Rubin goes free. Still, he said he did not regret talking to police.

“It’s entirely possible I will wind up in jail over this,” said the informant, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “But I have to deal with the consequences of my actions. . . . So does Irv.”

The informant, though not Jewish, said he became “gung-ho” about the JDL because he shared its hatred of Nazis. After getting to know Rubin, he said, he asked him about a job and Rubin had “subcontracted (him) out” to a wealthy Los Angeles businessman for $10,000.

“They told me, ‘Go do this guy,’ ” he said. “In the beginning, I just had to beat up the guy.” By the end, he said, what he was being asked by the businessman to do “would have hurt him severely.”

He said he had turned himself in after he became “reckless,” started drinking heavily and got into an automobile accident. While in the emergency ward, he said, he did some soul-searching and came to the conclusion that “I had become no better than a Nazi, a common terrorist.”

As for Rubin, he said, “I’m not saying he’s a good person or a bad person; I’m just saying he did something wrong.”

He refused to identify the businessman who had allegedly hired him and Rubin, or to discuss further details of the alleged scheme for fear of jeopardizing the case, he said.

However, The Times has learned that the businessman is a wealthy Beverly Hills resident who became engaged in a dispute with the San Pedro man last year over a South Bay bar the businessman owns.

In April, the businessman fired the bar’s manager and accused him of embezzling receipts from liquor and pool tables. He subsequently sued the former manager for fraud, civil harassment and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Sued jointly with the manager is an acquaintance of his--the San Pedro man who is the alleged victim in the Rubin case.

In the suit, the businessman accuses the ex-manager of threatening to kill him in revenge for the firing. As for the San Pedro man, the lawsuit charges that he knew of the manager’s death threat and showed him where the businessman lived.

Police had previously said that the San Pedro man also owed the businessman money.

The lawsuit has yet to come to trial.

Rubin said the entire episode has unfairly harmed the JDL, a militant Jewish group that has alienated many mainstream Jewish organizations by its confrontational, occasionally violent, tactics.

Rubin joined the JDL in 1972, He took the reins from its founder, Zionist Rabbi Meir Kahane, in 1985. When an Egyptian-born defendant accused of murdering Kahane was acquitted of murder charges last year, Rubin called for “somebody out there” to avenge his death.