SENTENCED. Frederick Richmond, 59, former Democratic Congressman from New York who resigned his seat in August and on the same day pleaded guilty to numerous charges, including income tax evasion and possession of marijuana; to a year and a day in federal prison and $20,000 in fines.

DIED. Elio Petri, 53, sardonic leftist Italian film director who won an Oscar in 1971 for his Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, a complex, unsettling study of a high police official who perversely becomes a killer but is unsuspected by his system-bound colleagues; of cancer; in Rome. Although he broke with the Communist Party in 1956, Petri filmed cerebral fables intertwining politics and psychosis (The Tenth Victim, Todo Modo) that he considered propaganda for the oppressed. He acknowledged, however, that he craftily "coated the pill" with swift plots, kinky surfaces and a fidgety mosaic style.

DIED. Miriam Ottenberg, 68, investigative journalist for the Washington Star (1937-75) and winner of a 1960 Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles exposing the crooked techniques of used-car salesmen; of cancer; in Washington, D.C. Ottenberg would often impersonate a typical consumer, expose a fraudulent business, and then write about the laws that were instituted or adapted as a result. Said Robert Kennedy when he was Attorney General: "I sometimes think she is the secret head of the Justice Department."

DIED. Louis Engel, 72, retired advertising vice president of Merrill Lynch, credited with being instrumental in his company's effort to "bring Wall Street to Main Street"; of undetermined causes; in New York City. Creator of a popular 1948 ad that lucidly distinguished between a stock and a bond, Engel later expanded it into an investment guidebook for laymen (How to Buy Stocks) that sold more than 4 mil lion copies and helped sell the idea of investing to a broader array of Americans.

DIED. Leonid Brezhnev, 75, General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee and President of the Soviet Union; of heart and vascular disease; near Moscow (see THE SOVIETS).

DIED. Frank Swinnerton, 98, novelist, belletrist and chronicler of English literary life for 70 years; in Cranleigh, Surrey, England. Born outside Victorian London, Swinnerton turned out 62 uneven but cheerfully unpretentious books. His intricately plotted, somewhat Victorian novels included Nocturne (1917) and Death of a Highbrow (1961), a book that he and his critics regarded as his best. The agreeable Swinnerton had a gift for making extraordinary friends (among them H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, G.B. Shaw and Aldous Huxley), whose lives he recounted in several spirited but gentlemanly memoirs.

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