MOVIES : So New York . . . Yet So Hollywood : It’s bar exam time: Compare and contrast the judicial side of Edwin Torres’ life with his persona of novelist to the movies. Be sure to include the Pacino Factor and colorful quotes.

Unlike author Tom Wolfe, New York State Supreme Court Justice Edwin Torres is one novelist (albeit a part-time one) who is thrilled with the translation of his books to film.

Torres has presided over many of New York’s more infamous criminal trials (New York’s Supreme Court is the equivalent of Superior Court in California), including that of the killers of Utah tourist Brian Watkins in 1990. But in his spare time, he has written three novels. “Carlito’s Way,” written in 1975, and its sequel, “After Hours,” have been made into the new movie by Brian De Palma starring Al Pacino. The judge, who is of Puerto Rican descent, claims he is happy with everything about the film, despite grumblings in some corners that a Latino actor was not cast as the lead.

“Al Pacino-- the greatest actor in the world-- deigns to do my guy. Who would not be honored?” crows Torres, a man of striking good looks who resembles an avenging judicial angel in his black robes. “I have no quarrel whatever. Brain De Palma wants to direct it and Marty Bregman--it’s awesome what he has to do--produces! It’s fabulous! The girl, Penelope (Ann Miller)? She’s beautiful!”

The star-struck tone doesn’t quite fit with Torres’ reputation as one of New York’s toughest, no-nonsense judges. And even though he has written several other books, including “Q&A;,” published in 1977 and made into a 1990 movie by Sidney Lumet, Torres, 62, is first and foremost a judicial force to be reckoned with.

In New York, Torres’ story is legend: Born into poverty on the noisy streets of Spanish Harlem to a teen-age mother and a stern but loving father who commanded him to go to law school, Torres transformed himself from gang member to the first Puerto Rican assistant D.A. in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in 1958.

While he was working as a defense lawyer from 1961 to 1977, his wife, Vickie, wearied of listening to him kvetch about how the mean streets were misrepresented in movies, dared him to do a better job. Never one to shrink from a challenge, Torres drafted his novels late at night, thinking all the while what great films they’d make.

Torres first was appointed to the bench in 1977, and ever since has been known in the courtroom for his mercurial personality and the eloquent, stiff sentences he painstakingly composes that sometimes reverberate with phrases from his books. Christened the Time Machine because he tends to impose maximum sentences, Torres once told a murderer, in a phrase now etched in New York legend, “Your parole officer ain’t been born yet.” Not surprisingly, he has become the darling of cops, court officers and prosecutors, who are often glimpsed toting his novels.

But he is a touch defensive about defense-lawyer criticism, like the outcry that surrounded a particularly harsh sentencing in 1991--and law enforcement’s very public celebration of it. Two hundred police officers had come to relish Torres’ sentencing of David Hernandez and Oswaldo Santana to prison terms of 39 years to life for killing a state trooper. Torres received a standing ovation from the cops, and although he declined the dinner invitation extended by the grateful colleagues of the slain man, defense attorneys later complained about the unseemly atmosphere to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct. To this day Torres is steamed by the complaint, which he says came to nothing. “That was bull----,” blasts Torres, protesting that he has no control over who visits his courtroom.

“You should have seen this courtroom on the Watkins case,” he continues, on a roll now, referring to the two highly publicized trials he presided over of the killers of young Brian Watkins, who died in a mid-town subway station protecting his family from a gang. “That single knife thrust,” Torres told the defendants, “was enough to sever an artery in this great city.”

After the trial, the victim’s mother asked to shake the judge’s hand. “I had to refuse,” fumes Torres. “Everything becomes a nitpicky issue for an appeal: Synthetic issues are concocted and conjured up daily in the hopes that someone will buy it on the appellate level. . . . There is no end to litigation in the state of New York.” He also rails about how some jurors reach opinions that fly in the face of evidence: “Some of them would walk Hitler.”

Such a colorful persona, believes director De Palma, makes him natural fodder for film. “He would work very well in front of a camera--he’s so articulate and funny,” De Palma says. Torres also was an invaluable source of linguistic correctness on the set of the movie, which filmed around New York earlier this year. “Al spent a lot of time patterning his cadences and speech patterns after Eddie,” De Palma says.

*

Torres has known Pacino since the late 1970s, when the two worked out together at the gym of the YMCA in Chelsea. Pacino was making “. . . And Justice for All,” and picked Torres’ brains for insights into how to play a lawyer in a corrupt legal system.

In preparing for his role as Carlito Brigante, a Puerto Rican ex-con struggling to go straight, Pacino accompanied Torres on late-night tours of Spanish Harlem salsa clubs. Torres introduced Pacino, De Palma and the rest of the crew to the “knock-around guys” in the neighborhood whom he based characters on, showing them the very sidewalks where young Edwin Torres once ran with the Puerto Rican gang the Eagles. “It was the Disney tour of the barrio: ‘So-and-so got shot here. So-and-so got shot right over there,’ ” De Palma says, laughing.

On one of Torres’ personally guided tours, casting director Bonnie Timmerman spotted a man in an uptown club she wanted to put in the movie. “No (expletive) pictures!” snarled the would-be star. “He probably had four warrants out for his arrest,” Torres said.

Unlike Tom Wolfe, with whom De Palma met only once and who later disavowed De Palma’s depiction of his novel “Bonfire of the Vanities,” “Eddie was always available for consultations any time we needed him,” says De Palma, who says he is flattered by Torres’ praise of the film. “He’s quite proud of his heritage, where he came from, and his books.”

*

In Torres’ ninth-floor courtroom downtown, it’s easy to see why the New York criminal-justice system has been mined so deeply by a Hollywood eager for great characters, vivid color and offbeat drama. Defendants bound with Riker’s Island muscle (“worth their weight in police dogs,” the judge says) face Torres with alternating postures of petulance, hostility and macho indifference while he forecloses on the futures they have squandered.

Skimming the paperwork of a repeat offender facing a charge of heroin selling, Torres erupts, “This guy made bail? I can’t believe it. He’s a real Boy Scout. So he’s in the wind, huh? Sure he is! Your client had absconded,” Torres says to the absent man’s attorney. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful defendant.”

Just then, a woman who looks like a stooped field worker from “The Grapes of Wrath”--one of Torres’ favorite movies--shuffles into court. Torres accurately guesses that the woman is the absent man’s mother. “What’s the story?” asks Torres.

“She doesn’t know. She put up the bail,” says the attorney.

“Why is she here?”

“She thought he’d be here.”

“That’s it, then. Bail is forfeited,” pronounces Torres, issuing a warrant for arrest. Sharper than a serpent’s tooth, indeed.

“I am the last stop,” he says. “When all the sociologists and all the mumbo jumbo is over, it’s me.” His pronunciation is startling: He sounds just like Carlito Brigante, Torres’ alter ego, the guy who didn’t get out.

The constant, nagging beat of show biz begins to intrude on the morning proceedings: The wife of Jellybean Benitez, the film’s music supervisor, is on the phone, wanting to know whether Torres can get her a hardcover copy of “Carlito’s Way.” The Puerto Rico Film Institute wants him to come down and be honored. (He’ll go; it’s a chance to see his mother, Ramona, and his only sister, Melba, who is Puerto Rico’s chief probation officer.)

His law assistant, Mel Paroff, fields compliments from a Hell’s Angel’s attorney who saw Paroff in a bit part in “Carlito’s Way,” before Torres cries, “Break it up--we got business here.” Attorneys preface their requests for adjournments with polite requests that Torres sign their copies of his books, which Torres happily grants.

Torres takes a phone call from Hearst publishing honcho Howard Kaminsky, who congratulates him on the movie and implores him to write another book. (“This guy means it,” says Torres, shrugging. “He’ll put some bread down on me.”) But sitting on the bench and writing novels have proved to be mutually exclusive for Torres, who says his first obligation is to the real world, not literary justice.

Just two weeks ago, in fact, Torres was reelected for a 14-year term that exceeds his retirement age. And he was on the ballot unopposed: “You couldn’t vote against me if you wanted to.”