Trial Opens in Fatal 1980 Mail Bombing : Courts: Prosecutor says Robert Manning, who was extradited from Israel, left his fingerprints on the explosive.

A federal prosecutor said Wednesday that onetime Jewish activist Robert Manning built a letter bomb that killed the secretary of a Manhattan Beach computer company 13 years ago and that the strongest evidence connecting him to the crime is his fingerprints on the bomb.

But Manning’s attorney said, “There is no motive, the evidence is flimsy . . . this is not a real case.”

Manning, 41, a demolitions expert, had been named as the prime suspect in the 1985 bombing death in Santa Ana of Alex Odeh, head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s western office. Manning, who was never charged with that bombing, is also a suspect in several other bombings linked to the death of Rabbi Meir Kahane, a militant Jewish leader assassinated in New York in 1990, federal officials say.

Manning is being tried on a charge of “mailing of an explosive with intent to kill” in connection with the 1980 Manhattan Beach bombing. Also charged in the attack are Manning’s wife, Rochelle, who is fighting extradition from Israel, and former Hawthorne real estate broker William Ross, who is a fugitive.

In his opening statement Wednesday in federal court, Assistant U.S. Atty. Dean Dunlavey told jurors that the package secretary Patricia Wilkerson opened was intended for her boss, Brenda Crouthamel Adams, who ran ProWest, a computer firm, with her husband. Adams and Ross, he said, were involved in a nasty, three-year legal battle over the sale of a house.

Three weeks before the bombing, Dunlavey said, Adams and Ross were involved in an obscenity-laced shouting match while trying to settle the lawsuit. Prosecutors have contended that Ross hired the Mannings, former associates from the Jewish Defense League, to mail the bomb.

Adams was too busy to open a cardboard box addressed to her so she left it on Wilkerson’s chair, Dunlavey said. When Wilkerson, 32, unwrapped it later that day, she found a metal box with a cord attached, and a note with instructions to plug the box into an electrical outlet to hear a recorded message about its value to computer firms.

Wilkerson plugged in the device, Dunlavey said, triggering a blast that killed her and destroyed the offices of ProWest.

Dunlavey walked toward the defense table and jabbed a finger at Manning, who was dressed in a blue suit and was wearing a black yarmulke. “The fingerprints of this man, Robert Manning, were found on the cardboard box,” he said. “The fingerprints of Rochelle Manning were found on the letter.”

The prosecutor said it took eight years to identify the prints as Manning’s because a U.S. Postal Service analyst had first classified them as a palm print.

Richard Sherman, who represents Manning, countered that the government has no evidence of a motive for Manning, and that Adams had told investigators she had “a lot of beefs with a lot of people.”

The only evidence implicating Manning is the fingerprints--”and the fingerprints can be easily explained,” Sherman said. Manning owned a business that wrapped and shipped religious materials, he said.

“A lot of people, people in the Jewish Defense League, had access to his office and the boxes and tapes in the office,” Sherman said. “There are a lot of suspects in this case.”

The only other evidence the prosecution has, Sherman said, comes from a “psychologically unbalanced malcontent” who was suing Manning and who would testify that the defendant confessed to the bombing.

Manning and his wife moved to Israel several months after the death of Odeh, an Arab activist. Rochelle Manning returned to the United States in June, 1988, and a few months later, she and her husband, who was still in Israel, were charged in the death of Wilkerson.

Manning and Ross went on trial in the Wilkerson case in 1989. After the jury said it could not reach a verdict, both were released and Rochelle Manning returned to Israel.

The Mannings were arrested in Israel in March, 1991, after the United States requested their extradition for another trial in the Wilkerson case.