Mother Stands By Accused Son : Trial: Biker lawyer allegedly masterminded the slayings of three people in a 1980 motorcycle-gang plot involving drugs.

Grace Maniscalco writes to her son every day, sometimes twice. She sends him the National Enquirer, legal magazines and newspapers, anything to make his time in jail more pleasant.

And she says she’ll never believe that her son is a killer.

“I’ve known him all his life and I know he is innocent--I know he could never do anything like that,” said the 72-year-old homemaker. “People might think, ‘She’s just saying that because she’s his mother,’ but I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.”

Her son is Thomas Maniscalco, 48, the biker lawyer on trial in Santa Ana for the second time for the 1980 murder of three people in Westminster. He has been in Orange County Jail since his arrest in 1984--longer than any other inmate.

Grace Maniscalco is barred from the trial in Orange County Superior Court because she may be called to testify. But she said she will never drop her mission to someday have her son at her side.

“It’s what I live for,” she said.

She doesn’t see her son often because she cannot navigate the freeways and must rely on friends willing to make the three-hour-plus round trip. But Grace Maniscalco says she does not let a day pass without praying to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

“I feel like I have to be here for him, because, really, there is no one else,” Grace Maniscalco said during a recent interview at her Woodland Hills apartment. “He needs to feel like he has someone out here waiting for him, or else he’ll just give up.”

Thomas Maniscalco is not your typical murder defendant: He is the son of a New York Police Department sergeant and co-founder of a biker group called the Hessians. He and his father, John, graduated from Glendale University College of Law in June, 1973. They had begun a practice in Orange County dedicated to representing “counterculture people” when Thomas Maniscalco was arrested on murder charges.

Maniscalco is accused of masterminding the slayings of Richard (Rabbit) Rizzone, 36; Rizzone’s bodyguard, Thomas Monahan, 28; and Rizzone’s girlfriend, Rena Miley, 19, on Memorial Day of 1980. Miley also was raped.

Prosecutors allege that Maniscalco ordered the murders because he believed Rizzone was skimming money from the Hessians’ drug and counterfeiting operations.

Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard King declined to comment, saying it would be improper to discuss an ongoing case.

Defense attorneys contend that their client is being framed by a prosecution witness who was present during the killings and has been granted immunity in exchange for his testimony against Maniscalco. A suspected gunman in the slayings died in a 1981 shoot-out with police in Oklahoma.

“There is absolutely, positively no way Tom was involved in this,” said attorney Joanne Harrold, one of Thomas Maniscalco’s former law school professors and current co-counsel. “This has all obviously been very difficult on him, and having someone who cares, like Grace, is critical.”

The case against Maniscalco has been delayed by a separate trial for a co-defendant, appeals, changes in judges and attorneys, and other proceedings. Additionally, a mistrial was declared in November, 1990, after a jury deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of convicting Maniscalco.

The retrial, which is now in the middle of the prosecution’s case, is expected to conclude early next year.

Adding to Grace Maniscalco’s pain is her belief that her son’s arrest hastened the lung-cancer death of her husband in August, 1984. She has dedicated herself to his defense.

She has written to politicians, civil liberties organizations and even an East Coast minister who has gained a reputation for freeing wrongly convicted defendants--all without results. She now says federal authorities should investigate the case, which she claims is riddled by biases and errors.

In the end, however, Grace Maniscalco admits she cannot prove her son’s innocence and must place her confidence in 12 jurors--even though she says she also has doubts about the fairness of the legal system.

“I just want a jury to be unbiased and to really look at the facts carefully,” Grace Maniscalco says. “At this point, it’s all I can really hope for.”

Grace Maniscalco is a wiry, energetic woman whose bright blue eyes fill with tears as she glances at dozens of family photographs and cards. “He used to be a clothes model,” she says as she points out a portfolio shot of a towheaded boy with a wide grin. “Here he is with his first fishing pole--he just loves to fish,” she adds, looking at another photo.

In a Christmas card sent to his mother after his first year in jail, Thomas Maniscalco joked that he was spared the shopping-season madness but still got a cherished gift