People and Events

A couple of Santa Monica men didn’t much care for the three-foot rosy-tailed boa constrictor that emerged from a hole in their apartment wall twice in recent months, so when it made another appearance, they herded it into a plastic trash bag and called the cops.

“They were just sitting there and it kind of slithered across their floor,” said Santa Monica Police Lt. Roy McGinnis. He did not identify the men, who live in a second-floor apartment in the 1300 block of 11th Street.

The boa was turned over to the police humane division. Officer John Sanchez, in charge of the animal shelter, said Tuesday that no one had yet claimed the snake. He guessed it was a stray looking for a warm spot on cold nights.

It’s just a kid, Sanchez said. It will be a lot bigger one of these days and may have been looking for a new apartment. That’s not easy in Santa Monica.

On a vaguely related matter, Santa Monica City Atty. Robert Myers was not on hand a couple of days ago when a federal judge was hearing arguments on a lawsuit aimed at overturning the city’s tough rent control law.

Myers was off getting himself arrested.

As he has done on previous occasions, the city prosecutor was in Nevada, taking part in a protest against nuclear testing. With other protesters at the test site, he was detained, processed and released.

That’s how he was spending his vacation.

Former bank robber Edward Bunker went back to federal prison the other night for the first time in 10 years--this time to talk to the inmate writing class taught by Robert Dellinger, another former prisoner. Both are now successful authors.

Bunker, once Dellinger’s star pupil at Terminal Island, subsequently wrote the novel “No Beast So Fierce,” which he helped turn into the Dustin Hoffman movie “Straight Time.” He has published two other novels and was co-writer of the film “Runaway Train.” He is now working on the CBS miniseries “San Quentin.”

Dellinger, a former CIA agent and defense industry PR man, did his own time for trying to extort $800,000 from four airlines by threatening to blow up their planes. Among his students at Terminal Island has been Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy, now published.

When Bunker showed up the other night, said Dellinger, two of the class members reminded him that they spent time with him before--one at Los Angeles County Jail in 1949 and the other at Folsom Prison.

After Bunker described his life in Hollywood, complete with anecdotes about parties where he has rubbed elbows with the likes of TV newsman Mike Wallace, author William Styron and Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a prisoner who is within two years of finishing his 25-year bank robbery term mused:

“I think I’m going to call my old lady and tell her I’ve done my last job. Besides, the feds are passing out time for bank robbery like cough drops these days. Now you’re getting 20 years for spitting on the floor of a bank.”

A prospective male juror showed up at the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse Tuesday wearing one brown shoe and one that was gray and black.

That caught the eye of Assistant U.S. Atty. Gordon Greenberg, prosecuting a Marina del Rey businessman charged with laundering nearly $500,000 in narcotics money. Out of the panel’s hearing, Greenberg told U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew that he thought the man should be excused.

Defense attorney Jay Lichtman wanted to know why.

For one thing, said Greenberg, the man obviously was elderly and might have trouble hearing secretly recorded conversations, key in the government’s evidence. For another, he said, anyone with mismatched shoes “could be a nonconformist who might not comply with the court’s orders.”

The man was excused.