Irv Rubin, national chairman of the Jewish Defense League, has been arrested by Los Angles police on charges of conspiracy to commit murder for hire.
While working for a credit and collection agency, Rubin allegedly hired an associate to terrorize an unidentified debtor living in San Pedro, a port city south of Los Angeles.
Police say the associate, also unidentified, admitted firing bullets through the debtor’s windows, threatening to kill him and hitting him on the head. Authorities claim that had they not arrested Rubin on Friday evening, the San Pedro man might have been murdered.
Rubin, 46, took over as national head of the militant Jewish Defense League in 1985, after the organization’s founder, the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, moved to Israel, where he founded the anti-Arab Kach Party.
Steven Goldberg, Rubin’s lawyer, visited the JDL leader at the San Pedro jail on Sunday and reported that Rubin is “shocked, angry and vehemently denies any knowledge of what the (police) claims are all about.”
Earl Krugel, head of the JDL’s Los Angeles chapter and a longtime friend, said in a telephone interview that he was with Rubin during the Friday evening arrest.
“There were five uniformed policemen with shotguns and two detectives, and they came on like some TV gangbusters,” said Krugel, who also uses the Hebrew name of Yitzhak Ben-Moshe.
The present case, Krugel said, started when the young man whose allegations led to Rubin’s arrest phoned the JDL leader from Sacramento. He asked for help against a group of Skinheads who were terrorizing his girlfriend. Rubin and Krugel traveled to Sacramento and later the young man, who is not Jewish, moved to Los Angeles to work with the JDL leaders.
But two weeks ago, police say, the young man turned himself in and implicated Rubin in the alleged terrorism against the San Pedro debtor.
Since joining the JDL in 1971, Rubin, a Montreal native, has been arrested dozens of times for his militant street-fighting tactics, usually targeting Nazi and Arab sympathizers, but occasionally also Jews he considered “soft” on Israel’s enemies.
He has been held on suspicion of attempted murder in a case involving three shots fired at an American Nazi, but Rubin has never been convicted on a serious charge, Goldberg said.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
