Try the "--rules" option in John. That will mangle the words in your dictionary with some default rules in your john.conf file. There are also some very useful rule sets released by Kore Logic a few years back. You can find them here:
http://contest-2010.korelogic.com/rules.htmlI use a "for loop" to go through and use all those rules similar to this:
for rules in `grep KoreLogicRules /etc/john/john.conf | cut -f2 -d: | cut -d\] -f1`; do john --session=kore --format=<format> --wordlist=<wordlist> --rules=$rules <hashfile>; done
Obviously, you'll need to insert the proper fields into your command, but you get the idea.
Hope that helps!