Dennis Farina, the Chicago cop who launched into a multi-decade acting career—including a starring role in Law and Order—from a consulting gig with director Michael Mann has died following a blod clot in his lung. He was 69.

Farina, a first-generation Sicilian-American who spent some 18 years on Chicago PD's burglary desk, got his start in the movies in 1980, when Michael Mann arrived in Chicago to shoot his first movie, Thief. Farina, still a working cop, had been recommended as a guide and consultant by a former coworker who'd moved to Los Angeles. Mann liked him so much he cast him in the film—as a mob enforcer.

Farina, at that point in his 30s, wasn't looking to leave police work. But he enjoyed acting, and spent the next few years picking up odd gigs in Chicago's theater scene, plus a few episodes of Mann's Miami Vice. In 1986, Mann, casting a new police show, Crime Story, offered a lead role to his Chicago cop friend; Farina took the part, and left CPD behind.

Crime Story a great, deep cops-and-mobsters show that presaged The Wire and The Sopranos, was cancelled after only two seasons. But it set Farina up for the best role of his career: Jimmy Serrano, the put-upon mob boss in Midnight Run. As a rule, Farina made a better criminal than cop, and as Serrano, he found himself free to do the things that made him such a special actor—curse freely, react with exasperation, wear loud and well-tailored clothing. He was hilarious and magnetic, and better than either Robert DeNiro or Charles Grodin,

From then on, he rarely wanted for work. Farina, who had a genius for swearing, had a particular gift for comedy, and through the 1990s, he parlayed his gruff charisma and excellent mustache into a series of roles as stubborn, brusque father figures—George in Little Big League and Marshall Sisco in Out of Sight, in particular.

In 2004, he went back to playing a cop, taking the thankless job of replacing Jerry Orbach on Law and Order. His character, the flashy, slightly seedy detective Joe Fontana, was little-liked and Farina left the show quickly, but his short run with Michael Imperioli as his partner was among the series' best.

Farina's last big role, as it happened, was another Michael Mann TV series—Luck, HBO's ill-fated horse-racing show. But his talents were even better used in another, more popular show: Fox's New Girl, where he played Nick's con-man father, stealing scenes from the four young stars.