Mail-Bombing Suspect a Man of Many Faces : Court: Authorities say Robert Manning is a vicious criminal with a violent past. His friends say he is devoutly religious, gentle and the victim of a long witch hunt.

To his friends, Robert Steven Manning is at heart a peaceful man, a gentle giant whose fervent devotion to his Jewish faith, and his equally fervent refusal to be pushed around because of it, has caused him to be hounded for years by federal authorities.

To his enemies--and they are many, including law enforcement agents from Los Angeles to New York--the 41-year-old Manning is a vicious criminal, a man with a two-decade history of alleged violent activities ranging from threatening the producers of a television show he didn’t like to blowing up people with bombs.

After losing a bitter two-year battle against extradition from Israel, where he has lived for much of the past 20 years, the former Jewish Defense League member was brought back to his hometown of Los Angeles in chains last month to stand trial for a 13-year-old murder--the 1980 mail-bomb death of a Manhattan Beach secretary. Manning also is a suspect in a string of bombings in 1985 that injured several people and killed two--one of them Alex Odeh, the Santa Ana-based West Coast director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“This is a witch hunt,” says Rabbi Zvi Block of North Hollywood, a Manning friend for more than 20 years. “Bob is not a violent person. He’s the sweetest, gentlest guy. This man is loved! He’s a pure mensch. “

Assistant U.S. Atty. Dean Dunlavey paints a different picture.

“Mr. Manning . . . has demonstrated violent tendencies” throughout his life, Dunlavey told a federal judge last month in a successful effort to have Manning held without bail. “This is a man who poses a severe risk of danger to the community.”

As perhaps befits someone with such wildly disparate reputations, Manning seems to be a man of mercurial disposition.

In a brief meeting with a reporter last month at which he declined to be formally interviewed, the tall, bearded, bear-like Manning, dressed in blue prison clothes and wearing a black yarmulke, would at one minute be relaxed and joking, with an almost childlike twinkle in his eyes. The next moment he would be shouting angrily, waving his arms and gesticulating wildly.

Born in 1952, Manning grew up in Los Angeles in a family of observant but not Orthodox Jews. He became a kid with problems--problems with school, problems with the law. He dropped out of Fairfax High at 17, and a year later joined the Army. Later it would become part of Manning’s mystique that he had received demolition training, but Army records indicate Manning actually was trained as a water supply technician.

Manning was discharged after less than a year for being unable to adjust to military life. Prosecutor Dunlavey said in court last month that the Army had found Manning to have mental problems, and that he had once tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window. “That’s not true. Those are all lies,” Manning muttered to his attorney, Richard Sherman.

Returning to Los Angeles, he developed a reputation as being tough and street-wise. One often-told story concerns Manning’s rescue of a young woman from some rowdy toughs who accosted her in a pool hall, prompting Manning to grab a pool cue, snap it in half and--accounts differ--either drive them away or beat some or all of them to bloody pulps.

Manning’s “don’t back down” personality attracted the attention of a new group called the Jewish Defense League, founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane. In 1971 Manning became a charter member of the West Coast chapter of the militant group that specialized in loud, confrontational and sometimes violent encounters with alleged Nazis and Arab activists.

“He was a street kid, no doubt about that,” says Irv Rubin, JDL chairman and a longtime associate of Manning. “He was a pretty strong boy in those days. I’ve seen him fight. We tangled with Nazis in the streets, Arabs in the streets. He was a real active guy.”

Rabbi Block agrees that Manning was an imposing physical presence, adding that “he’s the type of guy, if you’re going to attack him, he’s going to defend himself.” But he also says that in the early 1970s, when elderly Jewish people in the Fairfax district were being victimized by street criminals, Manning was a faithful protector, escorting elderly women home from synagogue. Manning also taught self-defense classes at the JDL headquarters on North Fairfax Avenue.

Federal authorities say he was also a bomb maker--and user. In a 1988 court document, a federal prosecutor wrote, “It became known that (Manning), while purporting to act on behalf of the Jewish cause, on several occasions placed or threw explosive devices at locations of Arab antagonists.”

In 1972 Manning allegedly called a producer of a TV sitcom titled “Bridget Loves Bernie”--about a Jewish man married to a Catholic woman--and threatened to “blow your ass off” if the show wasn’t taken off the air. It was not the only call the show got from viewers angered by the intermarriage theme, but the police took it seriously. Manning was later acquitted of misdemeanor harassment charges in the case.

Another 1972 incident turned out differently. In September a bomb exploded at a two-story apartment building in Hollywood, the home of a Palestinian named Mohammed Shaath. No one was injured. A police search of Manning’s home uncovered a rifle, a pistol and some gunpowder, as well as a book called “The Anarchist Cookbook,” which included instructions on how to make bombs.

Manning and another man were later convicted of assault likely to do great bodily harm. Manning also was convicted of illegal possession of fireworks. He was sentenced to three years probation and a $250 fine after he promised to sever his ties with the JDL.

“We didn’t see much of him after that,” Rubin said. Manning traveled to Israel, and for the next few years, apparently divided his time between that country and the United States. In the late 1970s, Rubin says, Manning had a business in the San Fernando Valley that distributed Jewish books, tapes and other religious materials.

On July 17, 1980, a package arrived in the mail at the offices of a Manhattan Beach computer company called Prowest Computer Corp. on North Sepulveda Boulevard; it was addressed to the company owner, Brenda Crouthamel. Inside was a metal box with an electric cord and typed instructions that said, “I have sent you a prototype of my new invention. . . . Just plug it in and a prerecorded tape will tell you its many functions.”

At 4:23 p.m., shortly after Crouthamel had left the building, a 32-year-old secretary and mother of two named Patricia Wilkerson plugged the electric cord into a wall outlet. The resulting explosion buckled a wall of the building and killed Wilkerson instantly. No arrests were made in the case.

Later in 1980 Manning and his wife, Rochelle, now 53, whom he had met and married during his early days with the JDL, moved back to Israel, eventually becoming Israeli citizens. The lived with their two children in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, a stronghold of militant supporters of Rabbi Kahane, who became a member of the Israeli parliament and leader of the ultranationalist Kach Party. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990.

A 1991 story in Gentlemen’s Quarterly and a book on Kahane called “False Prophet” say that while in Israel Manning set up a private investigation company that specialized in strong-arming Hasidic Jewish men into granting their wives divorces and in forcibly “deprogramming” Jewish-American youths who belonged to religious cults. But friends say Manning worked as a tour guide and as a mechanic at a gas station.

Manning reportedly continued to travel extensively between Israel and the United States. In the summer and fall of 1985, a suspected former Nazi officer in New Jersey was killed by a bomb; another bomb at the Boston headquarters of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee wounded two police bomb squad members, and a bystander was injured by a bomb at the New York home of another suspected former Nazi. Then on Oct. 11, 1985, Alex Odeh was killed at his Santa Ana office by a bomb rigged to explode when the door was opened.

Federal officials would later name Manning and three other men, all living in the Israel-occupied West Bank and all followers of Kahane, as prime suspects in the bombings. FBI documents indicated that Israeli authorities were stonewalling U.S. attempts to investigate the Kahane followers.

Federal prosecutors say that in 1988, eight years after the Manhattan Beach bombing, a fingerprint expert identified prints found under the tape on the bomb package as Manning’s, and prints on the accompanying letter as Rochelle Manning’s. The delay in identifying the prints reportedly arose from a misunderstanding as to whether the prints were fingerprints or palm prints. Defense attorneys for the Mannings, however, hint that they believe the prints may have been tampered with.

Rochelle Manning was arrested in the Manhattan Beach case in June, 1988, when she flew into Los Angeles International Airport with her two children, ages 2 and 13, for a visit. Robert Manning remained in Israel. Federal agents later arrested a Hawthorne-based real estate developer, William Ross, now 56, a former JDL contributor who had had a dispute with Brenda Crouthamel over some property. Prosecutors alleged that Ross had conspired with the Mannings to kill Crouthamel with the mail bomb in a nonpolitical revenge murder.

The trial of Rochelle Manning and Ross ended in a hung jury in 1989, and she returned to Israel.

Later the U.S. government launched extradition hearings against both Mannings, and in 1991 they were detained by Israeli authorities. According to Moshe Benzioni, a spokesman for the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, Israel does not as a rule extradite Israeli citizens, but Manning’s case differed because the crime he is charged with occurred before he became an Israeli citizen.

Although Manning delayed his extradition for a week by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, on July 18 federal agents put him on a plane in Israel--as he angrily shouted to reporters, “I didn’t do anything!”--and brought him back to Los Angeles. Rochelle Manning’s extradition is still pending. Ross’ attorney, Mitchell Egers, said he expects his client to be re-indicted in the 1980 Manhattan Beach case.

Manning pleaded innocent to the federal charge of “mailing an explosive device with intent to kill” when he was arraigned last month for the Manhattan Beach bombing. The trial is scheduled for Sept. 14.

The extradition agreement with Israel prohibits Manning from being prosecuted for any other crime, including the Odeh killing. But although prosecutor Dunlavey vigorously denies that the Manhattan Beach case is a “stalking horse” for the Odeh case, Manning’s friends say that is the real reason he is back in Los Angeles.

Arab-American activists say they hope Manning will someday be prosecuted for the Odeh killing.

“We have been assured by the FBI that he will be questioned” about the Odeh case, says Nazih Bayda, Odeh’s successor as West Coast head of the anti-discrimination committee. “We hope they will find some way to get around the legal problem. We are hoping justice will prevail.”