Richard Foronjy, who spent more than eight years in prison before he turned to acting and appeared in such films as , , and , died Sunday, his family . He was 86. Foronjy said he was arrested more than 20 times for “forgery, bank robbery, credit card rip-offs, assorted crimes and skullduggery .
.. [guilty of] almost everything except drugs and homicide,” he said in a 1987 interview with UPI’s Vernon Scott.
The Brooklyn native was convicted only once, but that got him an 81⁄2-year stretch in the New York prisons Sing Sing and Attica before he was released when he was 32. In Hollywood, not surprisingly, Foronjy specialized in portraying cops and crooks. He was a cop killer in his screen debut, (1973), and cops in (1986) and (1981), all for Sidney Lumet.
“I was especially good at playing cops, no doubt because I got to know them so well when they were busting me every other week,” he said. He portrayed the mobsters Tony Darvo and Peter Amadesso in Martin Brest’s (1988) and Brian De Palma’s (1993), respectively, and had it both ways as a corrupt cop in Sergio Leone’s (1984). Richard Edward Salerno was born on Aug.
3, 1937. “I grew up as an angry kid in Brooklyn. I didn’t care about anything,” he said.
He never went to high school, got married and had four children. “It was in the days before computers, and I thought I could make an easy living forging checks and collecting credit cards. Then, I began robbing candy stores,” he said.
“It seemed to me it.
