Vindicated Inmate Sought in Rape : Warrant: Benjamin Powell won $3.5 million for false conviction. His lawyer says he isn’t fleeing.

Celebrated ex-convict Benjamin Powell, who went from prison inmate to millionaire after he was cleared last year in the 1973 shooting death of a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, was being sought Friday on suspicion of rape and sexual assault.

The man known as “Cool Breeze,” who won a $3.5-million settlement from the city of Los Angeles earlier this year for 17 years of wrongful imprisonment, is wanted for an alleged attack in the rural town of Beaumont, near Palm Springs, authorities said.

Powell, 45, faces 21 felony counts of rape, forced oral copulation and related charges resulting from the alleged May 31 assault, according to a Beaumont Police Department spokeswoman.

About a dozen officers in Scottsdale, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb where Powell has been living in a two-story home with a pool, served warrants early Wednesday but still have not found him, Sgt. Mike Keeley said.

Although Powell, a charismatic former musician, was well aware that he was being investigated, it is unlikely that he is fleeing from the law, his attorney, Cary Medill, said in Los Angeles late Friday.

A travel buff, Powell has lectured widely on his troubled past and wrongful conviction, taking his tough-talking message as far as Harvard Law School.

“He may be in Massachusetts or somewhere and not know anything about (the arrest warrant),” Medill said, noting that he had last spoken to Powell before authorities decided to file the charges. During that recent conversation, Powell “categorically denied any wrongdoing” in the case, Medill added.

“He said, ‘I’ve been wrongfully accused in the past,’ ” the attorney said. “He wasn’t that shocked that he (is being) wrongfully accused again. He’s very confident that he’ll be vindicated, as he was in the other case.”

For Powell, the accusations are a sour twist to what had been a fairy tale. He and a friend, Clarence Chance, 43, endured the worst of prison life at San Quentin before they walked out into a national spotlight early last year.

Their case had earlier come to the attention of Jim McCloskey, a New Jersey private investigator who runs an organization devoted to winning the release of wrongly convicted inmates. As he probed the shooting death of Deputy David Andrews, who was slain in a gas station restroom in South Los Angeles, McCloskey turned up startling evidence of their innocence.

Three women admitted giving false testimony against the suspects out of fear of the police. Another woman said detectives offered her young sons a bicycle and reward money in exchange for their testimony--although the youths never took the stand. In addition, fingerprints at the murder scene matched neither Powell nor Chance, and neither man could be linked to the gun or the getaway car.

A year after their release, Powell and Chance each won a record $3.5-million settlement from the city, then settled down to ponder a spate of proposed movie deals, real estate offers and requests for aid that poured their way.

Soon after winning the settlement, Powell said, “Nothing can worry me any more. Way I see it, my life is in the Divine Master’s hands. And up until now, the Divine Master has taken pretty good care of me.”

Medill, the attorney who helped Powell get the settlement, declined to comment on whether Powell knew the alleged victim in the Beaumont case.