Gamble Opens Doors for Convicts : A Judge’s Trust Inspires Scripts for Two New Lives

The federal judge had gambled on the two ex-cons when others would have played it safe and kept them both in prison.

They proved his judgment right, and now they are among the most successful writers in Hollywood.

In his 20 years on the bench, Chief U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real of Los Angeles has built a reputation for toughness, based on sending criminals to prison, not letting them out.

But there is another side to the 62-year-old judge seldom revealed in the courtroom. He believes some criminals can change their lives with the proper help, and he believes it is his job to give them an occasional break.

The two ex-cons were among the first to be helped by Real, and they have made a ritual of lunching with him every year to celebrate his early gambles and the others that followed.

Robert Dellinger is one of the men who joined Real last week for their annual burrito lunch at the judge’s favorite Mexican restaurant.

Dellinger was a former CIA operative and a public relations man for defense industry contractors who had tried to extort $800,000 from four major airlines by threatening to blow up their planes. The extortion scheme was a flop that ended in a shoot-out with the FBI and a 30-year prison sentence handed down by Real in 1972.

But while serving his time at Terminal Island Federal Prison, Dellinger became the editor of the prison newspaper and started a writing class for other convicts. These changes convinced Real that Dellinger had the potential to become a productive citizen.

After only 20 months in prison, Real placed Dellinger on five years probation so that he could make sure he wasn’t wrong in judging the convict’s ability to stay out of trouble.

Accomplishment Noted

“He wasn’t the criminal type in the first place,” Real explained last week. “The crime called for a lengthy sentence, but Dellinger used the sentence to really accomplish something for himself and others.”

Dellinger’s release came before Real had formalized his method of helping prisoners with some potential for change by personally supervising them during their probation periods--functioning as adviser and friend as well as judge.

He is the only federal judge in Los Angeles who meets regularly with criminals who have passed through his courtroom, and his early experience with Dellinger helped inspire him to continue his personalized approach to rehabilitation for a decade.

“Nobody’s made a study of it,” Real said last week. “All I know is there are people who have completely changed their lives and there have been failures. But the failures are a lot less and much less serious than they were before we made the effort.”

Freed from prison in 1973, Dellinger pursued his new career first as a free-lance writer, authoring some editorial page articles on prison reform that were published in The Times and several magazines.

Writers in Prison

He also continued to run his writing class at Terminal Island for eight more years, polishing the skills of an unusual group of students that included Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy and career criminal Edward Bunker.

Dellinger, now 56, also expanded his work to television, writing more than 50 episodes in recent years for such shows as “Starsky and Hutch” and “Serpico.” At the moment, he is writing and producing two television movies for CBS and writing another for NBC.

“The writing class got me the break,” Dellinger said. “The judge had to go to the head of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to get me out, but he did it. And when I was out, we stayed in close touch. He helped me just by being my friend.

“There’s no other judge like him,” Dellinger added. “He’s not afraid to bite the bullet. The judicial system is famous for the fence straddlers and the guys who are always covering themselves, but Real marches to the beat of his own drum.

“Deep down he’s a romantic. He’s a hard-assed romantic if there is such a thing,” Dellinger continued. “Basically he believes there is some good in everybody. He thinks all sentences should be in two parts--one part punishment and a second part that focuses on reintegration into society.”

Help for a Student

In his periodic meetings with Real in the years after his own release, Dellinger spoke up for other convicts who needed help. One request was in 1976 on behalf of Bunker, the star student of his prison writing class who had already written a successful prison book titled “No Beast So Fierce.”

Bunker was a habitual criminal who had spent virtually his entire life in reform schools and various state and federal prisons. But his book was about to be made into a movie called “Straight Time,” starring Dustin Hoffman, and Bunker had a chance to help write the screenplay.

The problem was that he had six months left on his latest sentence, imposed by another federal judge for a Beverly Hills bank holdup during one of the occasional periods when Bunker was not behind bars.

Bunker got the break he needed from Real, and he was also at last week’s reunion with the judge.

But releasing Bunker six months early was a more difficult decision for Real than chopping more than 28 years off Dellinger’s sentence.

Youngest Inmate

Until he turned to writing, Bunker’s chief distinction in life had been that he was once the youngest inmate in the history of San Quentin State Prison. He was put there at the age of 17 for stabbing a reform school guard.

Bunker spent five years in San Quentin, then was freed for a three-year period, until he was caught for forging payroll checks and sentenced to seven years at Folsom State Prison. After that, he was released for a few more years until he ended up at Terminal Island Federal Prison on the bank robbery conviction.

In the view of prison officials, Bunker was a classic habitual criminal, too likely to return to crime if granted an early release from prison even for the rare opportunity of writing a movie that would star Dustin Hoffman.

But Real listened to Dellinger’s arguments and decided Bunker was worth the gamble. He went to U.S. District Judge Jesse Curtis, who had sentenced Bunker for the bank holdup, and won Curtis’ agreement to knock off the convict’s remaining prison time.

“Dellinger’s argument was that Bunker had never really had a chance at anything. He was in foster homes when he was 4, and he had been institutionalized for most of his life. But he showed some promise in writing,” Real said. “I thought he should get a break.”

His Trust Repaid

Bunker, now 50, repaid Real’s trust by avoiding any more bank robberies. Instead, he co-authored the screenplay for his first prison novel, then went on to write two more novels, “The Animal Factory” and “Little Boy Blue.”

He also co-wrote the script for “Runaway Train,” a movie starring Jon Voight and started an acting career as one of the convicts in the film. He now has five other acting jobs lined up and is working on another movie project.

At lunch last week, Bunker said he is not sure what would have happened if he had been denied the chance to go straight from prison to a key creative writing job on a major Hollywood film, but added that it helped make his adjustment to society an easy one.

Bunker said Real was one of the few federal judges who would have been willing to take any kind of gamble on him.

“That was the only bank robbery when I got caught, but I’d been robbing banks off and on for a long time,” Bunker said. “I think most people would have played it real safe in my case. Conventional wisdom would have been to do nothing. What if I had robbed another bank in the next six or seven months?

“That’s what impressed me about Real,” Bunker added. “He deals with each person as an individual. In my case, I think he saw the wish to create. I aspired to be more than just a criminal. If he hadn’t spotted that, he wouldn’t have taken a chance with me.”