hoodlum

He agreed to make two pictures a year if given time off to act on Broadway, and he bought out his contract to produce “The Hoodlum Priest” independently.

Shakima Tozay was 37 years old and six months pregnant when a nurse, checking the fetal heart rate of the baby boy she was carrying, referred to him as “a hoodlum.”

“I was half a hoodlum,” he said.

“But, what else was I going to do? I started out being a hoodlum, but could I survive that life? I had to make this work. Before I was doing the rap s—, I was on acid, laid out in the middle of the street. Being a junkie, having no life. Anything I’ve ever had, I took it, you know? So I decided to take this.”

Johnson had been mythologized in numerous movies, including “Hoodlum,” starring Laurence Fishburne, and “American Gangster,” featuring Denzel Washington as the gangster’s successor.