[2] Levy first came to public attention after he was arrested in 1981 in Los Angeles on a charge of firebombing a Nigerian diplomat's car that was parked near the Soviet U.N. Mission.
A 1989 Village Voice article on Jewish militants reported: His [Levy's] uncanny ability to track down KKK members and neo-Nazis astounded federal officials.
Paul Bermanzohn, one of the survivors of the neo-Nazi attack, recalled the efforts to establish in court that the FBI had possessed advance knowledge of the plot: "Most incriminating of all was an affidavit from Mordechai Levy of the Jewish Defense Organization.
In it, the FBI reported that Levy told one of their agents, 'I have information that Harold Covington of the National Socialist Party of America is up to heavy illegal activity.
[15] A 1992 feature in the Jerusalem Report notes that "Journalists and extremist-group monitors who have followed Levy's career say the Jewish Defense Organization exists mainly in his mind, that his hardcore following is at most a few dozen Orthodox teenagers.
[17][18] An initial rally planned for the Congregation Beth Israel was canceled after the synagogue's Rabbi Gavriel Newman noted Levy's statements that the JDO would not rule out violence in its efforts against Duke.
Leonard Zeskind of the Center for Democratic Renewal, which monitors right-wing extremism, said Levy "went down there and carried on like a character out of central casting for a crazed New York Jew.
"[16] Levy and the JDO's involvement led to accusations that the group inflamed divisions at Rutgers University in 1995, where African American students had protested against comments made by then-President Francis L. Lawrence that were perceived as anti-Black.
[2] Levy claims to have done investigative work on such figures as American neo-Nazi Harold Covington and of Steven Hatfill, the one-time person of interest in the yet-unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks; on the apparently ultra orthodox, and self-proclaimed anti-Zionist Rabbi Moshe Aryeh Friedman;[23] and on the reputed Pakistani terror cult Jamaat ul-Fuqra.