In an incident that shocked a state and still reverberates decades later, Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh was brutally murdered in public. Odeh, the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), was killed when a bomb exploded as he entered the ADC’s Santa Ana, California offices on October 11, 1985.

It is widely believed that the culprits were Robert Manning, Keith Israel Fuchs, and Baruch Ben Yosef (also known as Andy Green). The trio were members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a Jewish supremacist domestic terrorist group that had repeatedly harassed and threatened Odeh. From 1984 until his death in 2002, the group was led by the notorious militant Irv Rubin. Manning is currently serving life in prison for the murder of another individual. Fuchs and Ben Yosef, however, fled to Israel and live there freely to this day.

Law enforcement officials told me that the FBI has always considered the three men its top suspects. But despite significant evidence of the trio’s guilt, the bureau has never pressed for charges. Many have alleged high government interference. According to active agents still assigned to the case, pressing charges against Manning, Fuchs, and Ben Yosef would require testimony from a witness who heard at least one of those very men discussing their own involvement in Alex Odeh’s murder.

We now have it.

That witness is “Moshe V”. Moshe V (not his real name) is an inmate at a California penitentiary and a former longtime associate of Rubin and the JDL. V is Jewish and is currently jailed for serious crimes unrelated to either Rubin or his organization. In a series of interviews with me, he revealed that Rubin admitted to ordering the Odeh killing and credited the murder to the same three American-Israeli JDL members the FBI has long suspected. He also disclosed that Rubin presided over a portfolio of illegal activities, ranging from a profitable bordello nestled into a bourgeois San Diego suburb to a cross-country car-theft-and-resale scam.

Moshe V is willing to testify to authorities in order to finally crack the case that has hung over the Palestinian American community for over 36 years. Some details about V and his criminal record have been redacted in order to protect his identity.

Witness: Irv Rubin introduced Baruch Ben Yosef as Alex Odeh’s murderer

Moshe V claims that in February 1990, Rubin invited him for a meal with his JDL associates at a local Jewish bakery and restaurant, Katella Deli in Los Alamitos. There, Rubin introduced him to Baruch Ben Yosef, visiting California at the time, as the man who had murdered Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh five years earlier.

Ben Yosef was first identified in news reports in 1988 as one of the FBI’s top suspects in the 1985 bombing that killed Odeh. But as Moshe V had no prior knowledge of Odeh, or of the political significance of his life and death, he had to ask who he was.

Alex Odeh was an eloquent advocate for Palestinian rights and an early supporter of a two-state solution with Israel. In the months leading up to his death, he was harassed with frequent death threats attributed to members of the Jewish Defense League and other followers of its founder, Rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane was an extremist American-Israeli rabbi who preached to kill or expel from every Israeli-controlled territory all non-Jews who refused to accept their own enslavement.

While the Jewish Defense League initially denied involvement in the lethal bombing, they also smeared the victim and applauded the perpetrators. “We take no responsibility for the bombing,” said Irv Rubin insisted, but added, “the person or persons responsible for the bombing deserves our praise”. Days later, Rubin doubled down on this theme, saying that in being bombed to bits at the age of 41, Alex Odeh got “exactly what he deserves”.

A photo of Alex Odeh released to the media by his family.

Four weeks after Odeh’s assassination, the FBI announced that it was “classified as a terrorist attack and attributed to the JDL”. The attack helped make the Jewish Defense League the most active terrorist group in the United States in 1985, according to FBI’s annual terrorism report for that year.

Under increased scrutiny, Rubin pushed back against the FBI’s accusations. “I’ve given them 24 hours to make their arrest linking us to those actions,” he said. “If nothing else happens, I will seek a lawsuit against them for libel, slander and endangering the lives of Jews.”

Unable or unwilling to press charges against specific JDL members for Odeh’s murder at that time, the FBI walked back their earlier statement. “Although certain evidence leads to suspicion of elements of the JDL, final attribution to any one specific group must await further investigation,” the FBI said in a mid-1986 report.

However, Moshe V told me that at the 1990 brunch, Rubin described in detail how, at his request, Manning, Fuchs and Ben Yosef murdered Odeh, all with the approval of Rabbi Kahane himself.

The JDL leadership was formally transferred to Rubin in the months leading up to the Odeh murder. Kahane, the messianic movement’s founder, could no longer fulfill that role without U.S. citizenship, which he relinquished after being elected to the Israeli Knesset.

Word “came down from Kahane to Rubin to assemble a ‘team’ to kill Odeh,” V says. The instruction to carry out the assassination “was Kahane’s last order to Irv, so it was a big deal to [the] JDL,” V adds.

At the same bagel brunch, V says that “BBY [Baruch Ben Yosef] laughed out loud and confessed that he and Manning were responsible,” for Odeh’s murder. Even before moving to the Israeli-occupied territories, Robert Manning had been charged in the U.S. with terrorizing LA-area Palestinians, and his absence at the 1990 February meeting was remarked upon. “You’d have liked him,” V recalls Ben Yosef telling him.

Ben Yosef, for his part, categorically rejects Moshe V’s testament. “Absolute lies and defamation of character. Nothing of the above is true,” he said when approached for comment. “I have not left Israel in the last 35 years which means that the alleged meeting with Rubin could never have happened. But again why should you care since you are totally on the Arab side,” he added, before claiming I was “one sided”, “totally on the Arab side” and was trying to bait him into suing me for defamation in order to gain notoriety.

JDL leader allegedly bragged about murders, profited from gun-running

Moshe V also claims that, throughout the 1990s, he committed many crimes under the tutelage of Rubin and that the JDL’s criminal activities extended beyond attempts to assassinate Arab-American leaders. This included grand theft, gun-running, and running prostitution rackets.

Both JDL chairman Irv Rubin and his lieutenant Earl Krugel were arrested by the FBI in 2001. They were charged with plotting to bomb the Oceanside offices of Republican Congressman Darrell Issa and the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, California. Hours before his court appearance, however, Rubin slit his own throat, causing him to fall from a prison balcony. Krugel was bludgeoned to death by another prisoner three years later.

Moshe V claims that the bulk of his business dealings with Rubin consisted of weapons sales; the JDL chairman bought guns from him “at least once a month – sometimes twenty at a time, sometimes, just a handful,” he said. “He preferred the handguns, but bought bigger stuff like [German-made assault rifles] HK 91 and HK 94”.

Barry Kruger, left, holding machine gun, gives instructions to his brother, Earl Kruger, right, and Irv Rubin, center, during firearms training outside Los Angeles, June 23, 1980. Keith Allen | AP

But V also claims to have performed reconnaissance on Congressman Darrell Issa, at Rubin’s bidding. V also asserts that Rubin later asked him to assassinate California judge George Abdullah, because of his Arab ancestry. “Irv didn’t like Arabs in America ‘running shit,’” he says, adding that he rejected Rubin’s request to murder Abdullah, and angrily ended their professional and personal relationship over the incident. “Fuck you, I’m not your shooter,” he recalls telling Rubin. “Do it yourself.”

Rubin tracked down and murdered an LA man who tried to mug him, former associate says

At the 1990 February meeting, in introducing V to Ben Yosef, Rubin also claimed that he himself had killed a local African-American man who three months earlier had threatened him with a knife and attempted to steal money from him.

“Irv told them the story of how we met,” V explains. According to V, in late November 1989, while he waited in a San Fernando Valley parking lot to meet a client who regularly purchased weapons and cocaine from him, V noticed a violent altercation between two men, one of whom turned out to be Rubin. V says he was moved to intervene on Rubin’s behalf, because he was being attacked in the presence of his then-young-son, Ari. At home, V’s partner was pregnant with his own child.

“After I [knocked] this would-be robber out on the asphalt in the rain, Irv took his identification from his wallet, while he was still on the ground at gunpoint. I didn’t realize what Irv’s intentions were at the time,” V says.

Three months later, in explaining to Ben Yosef how he first met V, Rubin confessed to tracking down the would-be mugger and killing him at his house. “He told the fellas that he eventually went back and found the ‘[N-word]’ who tried to rob him,” says V. “He found this ‘[N-word]’ at home, and shot him dead.”

California felon served as “trusted envoy” between Kahanists in US and Israel

Eight years later, V says, Rubin paid him to serve as his “trusted envoy,” exchanging messages and money with Odeh murder suspects Ben Yosef and Fuchs – then both living in the West Bank settlement of Maaleh Adumim, East of Jerusalem. The illicit lines of communications maintained by V allowed Rubin to avoid the watchful eye of the FBI, who were then closely surveilling him on suspicion of running a protection racket that targeted Los Angeles rappers like the late Tupac Shakur and Eazy-E.

Between 1998 and 2000, V says, he received faxes from Fuchs and conveyed them to Rubin and Krugel, and in turn received from them envelopes filled with tens of thousands of dollars. He sent that money to the Kahane movement in Israel, via a post office box in the Jezreel Valley that Baruch Ben Yosef directed him to. V says that the envelopes he regularly mailed to the Israeli Kahanists contained between $20,000 and $30,000 in cash, sorted “into colored envelopes to designate their ultimate destinations.”

This reporter was able to corroborate the existence of the phone line and the post office box identified by V with the children of their respective owners; V says these Israelis were unwitting dupes used by the Kahanists to communicate with their overseas counterparts.

Keith Israel Fuchs is pictured in 2019 in a photo taken by this article’s author, David Sheen

V was told that the considerable amounts of cash, gathered from Kahane movement supporters on the Eastern seaboard, were used to fund various Kahanist activities, including the purchase of properties in East Jerusalem and in Hebron, adjacent to contested holy sites revered by both Jews and Muslims. V alleges that Rubin convinced him to invest $48,000 of his own money in the project. “Irv often spoke about wanting to move his family ‘back home’ and hoped that I would come along,” V says. “I routinely set aside a chunk of cash for that purpose and allowed him to ‘invest’ it.” V would not see that money again.

V claims that Rubin’s son Ari, who committed suicide in 2012, gave him the name of the Israeli real estate agent who received the funds raised from U.S. Kahanists (V’s $48,000 included), and used them to acquire Palestinian properties in the most religiously-sensitive parts of the occupied territories. That name was Pinhas Attali.

Thierry Pinhas Yair Attali is an Algerian-born ex-spy for Israel and a second-generation anti-Arab militant. He recently served as a city councilor of Kiryat Arba, the extremist Jewish settlement on the outskirts of Hebron, and was the subject of the 2019 French film “The Descendant”.

The documentary details decades of terrorist activity by the Attali family. In the 1960s, Attali’s mother transported explosives for the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a far-right French terrorist group whose bombs and plots to prevent Algerian independence killed over two thousand people. In the 1980s, using combat and arms training he received in Israel from the Mossad, Attali led clandestine groups of French Jews in violent melees with white supremacists on one hand and with local Arabs on the other. Though Attali’s partners were convicted on terrorism charges, he avoided legal consequences for his actions.

Attali did not respond to a request for comment.

JDL chairman Rubin also profited from prostitution and grand theft auto, ex-associate says

While Kahanist efforts to displace Palestinians from the country’s holiest and most sensitive sites are long-standing, well-documented and come as no surprise, their participation in prostitution and grand larceny has never even been publicly alleged – until now.

According to V – who describes himself as “a car dealer who sold guns, dope, and pussy on the side” – Rubin derived massive profits from these illegal businesses. “There was this one scenario where he figured out how to make brand new Honda Accords ‘disappear’ into thin air,” V says of a scam he ran with Rubin and other JDL associates from 1998 to 2000. V describes a complex crime web that involved forging false bills of lading and driving stolen vehicles from the East coast to the West, where they would be resold under market value, for great profit. “A brand new 1990+/- Honda Accord EX (full leather, etc) sold for over $20,000, but we’d let them go for like $12,000 – $15,000. Imagine the hustle. Everyone got paid,” he recollected.

V claims that Rubin was also a silent partner who funded a prostitution ring. V ran this endeavor from a plush Poway home with his now-deceased ex-partner and mother of his child. “At one point, [we] had like six or seven [prostitutes] working with us nearly full-time. Five days a week, four to eight hours a day, at roughly $200 an hour,” says V. “You do the math.” For his financial investment, which allegedly paid for the bordello’s fine furnishings, Rubin received a percentage of V’s profit, which V says was half of what the women charged their male clients.

But, according to V, prostitution was not the only crime that Rubin and his associates committed on the premises. “JDL members benefited from the Poway home, which also doubled as a safe house. That was part of the deal Irv and I had,” he says. According to V, some of these women “were basically sold off and never seen again – through Irv and his contacts.”

The prostitution crimes ended with V’s arrest and incarceration later that year. To thank him for staying silent about his own involvement, V alleges that, upon his release from jail in 1998, Rubin bought him a new Toyota Tacoma truck.

Ex-associate claims Rubin requested he murder a judge and an FBI informant

V claims that when he finally fell out with Rubin in the spring of 2000 over his order to assassinate California judge George Abdullah, tensions between them quickly escalated into violence. V says that on May 28, 2000, he overpowered, knocked unconscious, and hogtied in the trunk of his own blue BMW an associate of Rubin named “Manny”. Manny was allegedly an expert counterfeiter from the Caribbean island of Dominica. Rubin sent Manny to murder him for refusing to follow orders.

Within weeks, V was arrested for, and later convicted of, serious felonies (unrelated to Rubin and the JDL). He has been incarcerated ever since. The following year, in late 2001, Rubin and Krugel were jailed for plotting to bomb a Los Angeles-area mosque and the congressional offices of Darrell Issa, a Republican congressman representing San Diego county.

Irv Rubin protests against O.J. Simpson outside of his trial in Los Angeles, Sept. 29, 1995. Nick Ut | AP

V alleges that he then contacted Rubin’s lawyer Mark Werksman, threatening to tell the police details about Rubin’s criminal activities, unless Rubin re-paid him money he owed. V held Rubin responsible for the $48,000, saying Rubin convinced him to invest that sum in the Kahanist project to acquire Palestinian properties in the most religiously-sensitive parts of the occupied territories.

V claims that in a 2002 phone call, Werksman conveyed from his also-incarcerated client Irv Rubin an olive branch and a request that V kill on his behalf Daniel Gillis – a young JDL-member-turned-FBI-informant upon whose testimony rested the FBI’s case against Rubin and Krugel.

“Mark proceeds to explain that Irv is sorry for sending Manny and hopes that I’ll ‘forgive’ him, and that he will ‘make this money matter right’, but first, he has a little problem to ‘deal’ with,” V recalls. He later had Werksman relay his reply to Rubin: “I’m not doing any favors unless and until I get what’s owed to me.”

V never had any other correspondence with Rubin or his legal team. Before the year was out, Rubin died in prison; his death was officially ruled a suicide.

Werksman did not respond to a request for comment.

Felon’s testimony is consistent with JDL record, says FBI agent who tracked them

The Jewish Defense League’s long record of political violence is well-established. When Alex Odeh was murdered in 1985, U.S. law enforcement considered the JDL to be the second-largest terrorist threat in America, second only to Puerto Rican militants.

But the criminal activities that Moshe V attributes to Irv Rubin and the Jewish Defense League in the 1990s are not inconsistent with what is known of the group’s history and ideology, either, experts say. “I certainly wouldn’t be surprised,” says Kenneth Maxwell, a retired agent of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force who surveilled Ben Yosef/Green, Fuchs, and Manning in New York between 1984 and 1986.

“Green and Manning and Fuchs, they were badasses, they were into almost anything. I wouldn’t be surprised [if JDL members committed other kinds of serious crimes],” Maxwell said, “I remember the extortion in the Jewish community.” In the mid-1980s, to support their other clandestine activities, Ben Yosef and Manning earned money by threatening to beat up Orthodox Jewish men who refused to grant their wives divorces under religious law. “They had balls. They weren’t intimidated by the FBI so much, either,” Maxwell recalled.

To indict Ben Yosef, Fuchs, and Manning for the 1985 murder of Alex Odeh, the FBI would need to interview V and assess his knowledge. This author can corroborate that V knows intimate details about Irv Rubin and Meir Kahane that are known only to a tiny group of historians and to committed Kahanist devotees. Retired law enforcement officials who worked on the Odeh case believe that V’s testimony appears to be credible and that he should be interrogated by active agents.

V says that for many years, he did not reach out to authorities about the Odeh case because he feared retribution from the Kahane movement. Today, however, he is ready to make a full confession to U.S. government officials – if they are willing to ensure his safety.

“Let me send this message to Norma [Odeh, widow of Alex] and her daughters. Please tell them that even though I was not involved with JDL at the time of Alexander’s death, I am so sorry for what they have been through and that I will remain committed to doing whatever I can to bring them and the city of Santa Ana whatever closure is still available,” V said.

“I need to bring about some positive goodness, a giving sense of community after all of the bad shit I’ve done over the years. I mean it,” he adds. “This is part of my healing as well – washing my hands of this long-overdue filth and blood from my past with these assholes.”

V has communicated to the relevant U.S. authorities that he is willing to share information that could crack the 1985 unsolved murder of Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh. Years have passed since his first entreaties, and U.S. law enforcement officials have yet to respond to V’s invitation to discuss what he witnessed in February 1990: Kahanist killer Baruch Ben Yosef AKA Andy Green boasting that he was one of Alex Odeh’s assassins.

Thus, it is now in the hands of the U.S. government to decide whether to proceed. In part two of this investigation, we will explore the reasons why this is far from a foregone conclusion.

Feature photo | MintPress News

David Sheen is a freelance investigative journalist reporting from Israel*Palestine for over a decade for dozens of local, regional and international journals, earning the support of journalist unions and human rights groups at home and abroad, amongst them the Rory Peck Trust and the Front Line Defenders.

The post Alex Odeh Assassination: New Testimony Could Finally Bring Jewish Defense League to Justice appeared first on MintPress News.