HARD T IME

‘Mayans MC’ co-creator spent a year in prison

T HE life story of Elgin James, co-creator/co-executive producer of FX motorcycle drama “Mayans MC,” gives new meaning to the term “prison break.” Hollywood — in the form of stars like Robert Redford and Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer — came to James’ rescue while he was serving a sentence for extortion.

James, 48, was arrested by the FBI on July 14, 2009 on a criminal complaint of federal extortion stemming from an incident in 2005 when he sanctioned an attack on an individual who had ties to NeoNazi politics.

“I made a neoNazi skinhead give five thousand dollars to an anti-racist charity,” James, 48, tells The Post. The “charity” was known as F.S.U., which stands for Friends Stand United (or F--k S--t Up, in the vernacular), a bloody brotherhood with chapters across the US. “I was completely guilty of what I was arrested for.”

He was sentenced to a year and a day by U.S. District Judge Suzanne B. Conlon in Chicago on March 8, 2011. Prosecutors had sought up to four years in prison for James, noting the extreme violence in which he had engaged against Neo-Nazi skinheads. “There was violence involved with [the victim] having to give the money to charity. Violence that showed it was in his better interest to give it,” James says.

James, who grew up in Connecticut, is covered with tattoos. One arm bears a quotation from Steinbeck’s “East of Eden”: “What warm is there. What bird song.” He had been affiliated with gang life for 15 years, mostly when he lived in Boston. “My friends and I started a gang to fight against Neo-Nazi skin-heads and drug dealers back in the early ’90s,” he says. “Remember, the neo-Nazi thing was huge. The [Columbine] bombing. We were just a bunch of dirty punk rock kids.”

He abandoned the gang life in 2006, shortly after his adoptive mother became ill, and moved to California with his girlfriend (and now wife) Liz. After a sensational story about his gang affiliation appeared in Rolling Stone in 2007, James was contacted about having his life story turned into a movie, with Nick Cassavetes attached to direct and Justin Timberlake to star. Fortunately, that scenario never took place, but James became interested in making his own films.

A series of connections eventually led him to the Sundance Labs where he met Redford. “He called me on my own s--t,” James says. “He said, ‘You have a choice about what you do with the damage and the pain and the rage. You can continue with that or turn it into art.’ ”

The day he was arrested, Grazer hired James to write a screenplay called “Low Riders.” “He signed a deal for me so that my wife would have money while I was gone,” James says.

While he was prison, Redford and other stars including Ed Harris submitted letters of support. In Redford’s letter to the judge he wrote, “I believe that Elgin has the potential to make a difference. He has an important message for people of all ages and the possibility of change (and) the power of nonviolence.” “Mayans,” the sequel to “Sons

of Anarchy,” premiered to solid viewership Sept. 4 with star J.D. Pardo. Set in a drug-dealing motorcycle club on the California-Mexico border, it gives James the chance to dramatize gang culture from the inside-out. “I know from being inside that, from seeing what it’s done to my friends … I know what it comes to when you feel hopeless and diminished by the world,” he says. “I don’t write stories for society. I don’t make art for society. I make art for the people that society rejects.”