COLUMN ONE : A Slow Shift to Fast Lane : Benny Powell and Clarence Chance spent 17 years behind bars for a murder they did not commit. They were freed a year ago; each won $3.5 million from L.A. But their lives remain unsettled.

The night Benny Powell went from ex-con to millionaire, he celebrated in a rib joint in Beverly Hills. Big sweet cocktail in one hand, cigarette in the other, black derby tilted rakishly, he looked like a movie star. People gawked. He looked right back at them.

“How do I feel?” he hooted through the expensive hickory smoke. “I feel the way I felt 18 years ago when I woke up in prison. I feel like, how am I going to get adjusted to this? I feel like, hey, what the hell is really going on?”

It’s a good question, given the year Powell and his friend, Clarence Chance, have had.

Just 12 months ago, in a case that made national headlines, Powell and Chance were released from state prison, where they served 17 years after being wrongfully convicted of murder. Weeping with gratitude--both for their lawyers and the New Jersey investigator whose pro bono detective work reopened their case--they walked out the doors of the Los Angeles County Superior Courthouse and into a virtual blockade of TV cameras and klieg lights.

Then, as if just one happy ending weren’t enough in this show-biz town, justice trumped itself two months ago. On the heels of a ruling that had given them freedom came a legal settlement that made them rich: The city of Los Angeles awarded the two men $3.5 million apiece, the largest such award in city history.

It was a miracle, the well-wishers said, a TV movie come to life. But life and movies--even in Los Angeles--are distant relatives. Their epilogue has been the mixed bag that characterizes reality: Everything has changed for Chance and Powell. And not much has changed at all.

Chance, who once dreamed of boosting his family’s soul act into the big time, is still the dutiful big brother at age 43. He still has not replaced his banged-up Buick, but within two weeks of his first settlement check, he had bought his mom a gold-trimmed Lexus, leased a house for one sister, gone in search of a beauty shop for another, and distributed envelopes of money to most of his relatives.

Powell, whose smooth talk and charisma masked the uncertainty of a troubled youth, is still talking, and still making peace with his hurtful past. Now on the lecture circuit, he preaches a gospel that is part self-empowerment, part Scared Straight. He has set up a production company, rounded up pro bono legal counsel for four prison buddies and bought his mother a “very, very plush” house. But he has also told a now-grown son that he will not see a penny unless he gets a college degree.

And the adjustment has been so stressful that his lawyer last week took him out to learn to play golf: “He has to have some sort of outlet,” the attorney said, “so we’re going to get him some Ping Zings, go out and whack a few.”

Despite their newfound fortunes, neither Chance nor Powell has moved from the hotel rooms they have called home for most of the last year. Neither has treated himself--yet--to a flashy new wardrobe or a fun-filled vacation. Not that they need the money, but neither has gotten a job. Both are hip-deep in “investment opportunities” and requests for help from those still behind bars. Both tell of jarring run-ins with police during the last year.

Neither expects to regain the trust they once felt in America’s judicial system and legal Establishment. Both are still reeling from the ravages of prison and the shock of sudden wealth.

“It’s like--why don’t you put this down, baby--I know it sounds arrogant, but it’s like I’m way out here and society is way down there,” said the soft-spoken Chance one recent morning, struggling to describe the unreality of the last few months and finally confessing that he is not sure from moment to moment how he feels.

“Like, I got to deal with my lawyer. . . . I got a lot of things to do. I didn’t get to bed till 5:30 this morning. It’s the same thing that kept somebody like Donald Trump up nights--trying to build an empire. . . . It’s a pressurized role. You feel like everybody is on the line. Everybody got a different idea about how you got to do things.”

Jim McCloskey, the private investigator who engineered their release--a Protestant lay minister from Princeton, N.J., who works on behalf of those he calls “the convicted innocent”--said their experience, unusual as it is, actually is typical in many ways of the dozen or so inmates he has helped free during the last 12 years.

“These people have been in hell for all these years. Then, when they walk out of prison, they’re in heaven,” McCloskey said. “And it takes a long time before they float down to earth and find the direction of their life.”

*

Benny Gene Powell was a 26-year-old newcomer to South-Central in 1973--the year Sheriff’s Deputy David Andrews was gunned down in a gas station restroom.

Powell, who went by the moniker “Cool Breeze,” had moved from Phoenix that year. The aspiring musician left behind an arrest record that dated back at least five years.

That is arrests, however--not convictions. Records show that although Powell was arrested eight times for crimes ranging from murder (a jury found the 1969 shooting to be accidental) to methamphetamine possession (the case was dismissed), the charges never held up in court.

He had no Los Angeles ties, but it did not take him long to make friends. One of the first was easygoing Clarence (Bunk) Chance.

Powell fell in with Chance purely by accident after an encounter with his mother in a traffic jam. Lullean (Peaches) Chance-McBride, a Size 3 blonde in a Chevy Vega, rebuffed his romantic overtures but took him home to meet her nine children.

The Chance children were fixtures in Powell’s new neighborhood. The Magnificent Chance Sisters sang soul. So young they could not leave their dressing room except to go onstage, they were regulars at the California Club and the Total Experience and other nightspots around town.

Just back from the Army, big brother Clarence coached them each night, honing everything from their choreography to their harmony on “This Is Dedicated to the One I Love.” “(Clarence) was the one you could go to with questions, the one that kept his eyes on mom, the shepherd taking care of all of us,” said Cherri Chance-McBride, who is now a mortgage loan processor in the South Bay. “You’d go to Clarence for help with your homework. He’d walk you to school. We lived to make him happy.”

Powell became one of the many neighborhood people who hung out and jammed at their house, a “nice guy” and a “big talker” who shared Clarence’s passion for music and martial arts, she said. It might have gone on forever that way.

But a block away, a deputy had been shot to death. Months were passing without an arrest, and new investigators were on the case.

Bit by bit, the detectives constructed a case that witnesses later would contend was based on police pressure and lies. After repeated visits from police, an 11-year-old girl reversed her original story and identified Chance as one of the men she had seen running from the murder site. A neighbor steered police toward Powell; later he would file an affidavit saying he had done so simply to get his own name off the suspect list.

The gas station owner said investigators repeatedly asked him to identify Chance and Powell, despite his protestations that he could not. A woman who lived across the street said detectives offered her young sons a bicycle and reward money in return for testimony against the two; the youths did not testify. Three other women gave false testimony against Powell and Chance, explaining later that they lied because they were afraid of the police.

Fingerprints found at the murder scene matched neither Chance’s nor Powell’s. The weapon and getaway car could not be traced to them. Chance had a particularly compelling alibi: He had gotten into a fistfight with his next-door neighbor and had spent most of the day of the murder in jail.

But jail documents showed only the time at which he had begun the long process of being released, and that was two hours before the murder. Besides, there was a clincher. A jailhouse informant--a man who would become notorious for his skill in concocting false confessions for police--came forward a week before the trial to claim that he had overheard Powell proclaiming his guilt in the County Jail.

On April 8, 1975, Chance and Powell were convicted by a jury. Their sentence was life imprisonment.

The ensuing years were devastating, not only for the two men but for the families they left behind.

Powell coped by “joining the mainstream of prison activity”--making friends, studying law and trying to recast his incarceration as a learning experience in “what I call the Hidden University.”

Chance sought solace in Eastern philosophy. But his mother and sisters recall that every year on the anniversary of his conviction he would become profoundly depressed, and he fared poorly at parole hearings because he refused to express remorse.

“(The jury) thought they were punishing a person, but they were punishing the whole family,” said Powell’s sister, Sylvia Evans, 39, of Phoenix. “It was like they had stripped a part of us away. Friends didn’t come around anymore. People said hurting things. We stayed away from society. Went to work, went home, waited for letters.”

Eventually, however, after years of fruitless protest, Chance read a magazine article about McCloskey’s organization, Centurion Ministries, and wrote a letter that caught McCloskey’s eye. The rest, of course, is local history.

*

In the 12 years since McCloskey founded Centurion Ministries, he has won the freedom of a dozen “convicted innocents.” Each has fared differently. One, a drug addict, is back in prison on a narcotics charge. Another, an alcoholic, has been in and out of rehab for three years. A third felt so alienated that he had to be arrested again before he decided to reclaim his life.

One married his lifelong sweetheart, became a paralegal and is coaching Little League now. One wrote a book and became an aide to a Dallas county commissioner. One was deported. One opened a storefront church. One has not been heard from since his release. One is drifting through Canada. One describes himself now as “Mister Mom.”

And then there are Chance and Powell. Where are they now? According to McCloskey, they are midway through an adjustment period that for the others took about two years.

Of course, celebrity has upped the ante. Since their release, they have been deluged with book and movie deals, and long-lost relatives have suddenly materialized, unpaid utility bills in hand. A Nashville television station has asked for start-up cash, Powell’s lawyer said. One supplicant on a call-in radio show asked for money “just because.”

Even former LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates wanted a piece of them--after their settlement, he invited them to appear on his radio show, but they respectfully declined, Powell said.

After it was reported that the two men aspired to show business careers--Chance wants to make kung fu movies and Powell wants to produce records and films--they found themselves awash in invitations to do lunch. Ironically, they have ended up across the negotiating table from each other. Powell, it turns out, wants to produce his own recording debut, with Chance’s sisters making a comeback, singing backup for him.

Meanwhile, they are flooded with letters from inmates who believe that they, too, are being punished wrongfully. One of Powell’s first acts upon receiving his settlement was to dispatch care packages to all his friends who are behind bars. He is trying to free one old friend who he believes is innocent and win parole for three others who he feels have been punished enough.

One of the three, he added, is a lifer with 23-inch biceps who interceded for him during his first year at San Quentin, when a gang of fellow Muslims wanted to kill Powell for joining a prison gospel group.

“People do try to take advantage,” Chance said, laughing. “Big real estate people have called me . . . wanting to know did I need any property and could I contact them? Saying maybe I could make an investment, perhaps? Perhaps invest all my money, who knows?”

So far, Chance said he has preferred to put others, especially his family, first. At some point, he said, he wants to buy himself a luxury car and a furnished home, but material goods cannot match the pleasure of seeing his family secure.

“A lot of (relatives) keep telling me--and they can insult me sometimes--they tell me to go do something for myself. I say, hey, don’t tell me that. They didn’t tell Jesus to go do something for himself. I’m doing for you, so digest that. . . . I’m right on time with what my family needs. I been studying them for 18 years.”

Fame also has had its upside. Chance has found romance with a 22-year-old St. Louis woman who saw him on “The Montel Williams Show” shortly after his release. “It was a spiritual thing,” said Nicole McClendon, a former flight attendant who said she was touched by the injustice he had borne.

Powell, meanwhile, has been invited to lecture nationwide, from Harvard Law School to local children’s groups. Listeners describe his message as inspirational but occasionally rough.

“He definitely has a charismatic personality and loves the public eye,” said Richard Rose, who directs the San Bernardino Alternative Learning Center, where Powell addressed a group of emotionally disturbed adolescents recently. Rose added, however, that Powell’s speech seemed overly intense, considering the audience, and he lost his temper after some in the group taunted him about sexual practices behind bars.

“He told the gang members in the class that if they are out killing people, he knew people who were going to kill them,” Rose said.

Powell explained that he was just administering a dose of reality. “The greatestpressure makes the best diamonds,” he said.

Still, Powell and Chance note, they will always be haunted by the injustice that so distorted their lives. Before they went to prison, they were just two go-along, get-along guys. Now they see the world through the eyes of ex-cons.

Powell said he was stopped several months ago in a rental car by Culver City police who searched the car for guns and drugs and then let him go. Chance said he has been pulled over by police at least five times in the last year, and cited once for speeding. The encounters have left both men numb with rage but basically unsurprised: The system, they now know, has weak links.

Even when they chose the lawyers who won their civil settlement, they followed not the advice of the people who had gotten them out of prison--the cream of the city’s legal profession--but the recommendation of an inmate who had done time with Powell.

Although other lawyers were willing to represent them for free, Chance chose Carl M. Rheuban, the former head of a defunct savings and loan, saying Rheuban clicked with him in a way other lawyers did not. Powell was equally admiring of his lawyer, Cary Medill: On the night his settlement was announced, he publicly thanked God for his lawyer’s skill.

“My man, my man,” the burly, bespectacled lawyer shyly replied.

After all, these lawyers did win that record settlement--an award that will guarantee Chance and Powell a solid income for years, even deducting the standard 30% off-the-top legal fees.

And if nothing else, the two men say, this year has shown that fate is not entirely cruel.

“I was on a plane the other night and it shuddered all the way from Phoenix to L.A.,” Powell said recently. “But I was at peace. Why? Because nothing can worry me anymore. 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.”

Times staff writer Marc Lacey contributed to this story.