Farina was born in a leap year on February 29, 1944 in Chicago\'s Old Town neighborhood. He was the fourth son and youngest of the seven children of Joseph and Yolanda Farina. Farina\'s father, who was from Villalba, Sicily, was a Chicago-area doctor, and his mother a homemaker. The Farinas raised their children in a North Avenue home in Old Town, a working-class neighborhood with a broad ethnic mixture, with Italians and Germans being the two predominant ethnicities.\n', '

Before becoming an actor, Farina served three years in the United States Army during the Vietnam Era, followed by 18 years in the Chicago Police Department\'s burglary division from 1967 to 1985.\n', '

Farina began working for director Michael Mann as a police consultant, which led Mann to cast him in a small role in the 1981 film Thief. Farina moonlighted as an actor in Chicago-based films (like Code of Silence, a 1985 Chuck Norris film) and theater before Mann chose him for his Crime Story series, which aired on NBC from 1986 to 1988. Farina played mobster Albert Lombard in Mann\'s previous hit television show, Miami Vice. He later starred as the title character in Buddy Faro, a 1998 private-detective series on CBS.\n', '

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