The cause was complications of oral cancer, said Michael Killorin, his partner of 49 years. Mayor Lindsay called Mr. Perrotta “one of the bright young men” in public life, a distinction he earned by running Republican campaigns in heavily Democratic New York City; working as a high-level state insurance regulator; and running unsuccessfully in 1969 as the Republican and Liberal Parties’ candidate for city controller, as the office was called then. He did all this in his 30s. As an aide to Governor Rockefeller from 1959 to 1962, Mr. Perrotta prepared legislation concerning civil rights, law enforcement, insurance and corporations. He was later the governor’s liaison with the state’s departmental heads. Working for Mayor Lindsay from 1968 to 1970, Mr. Perrotta went from executive assistant to finance administrator, responsible for tax collecting and assessing functions. He was one of 10 administrators in the mayor’s so-called supercabinet. When he resigned from the Lindsay administration to join a private law firm, doubling his salary, he took on the extracurricular task of running Governor Rockefeller’s re-election campaign in New York City. He shrugged off Mayor Lindsay’s frosty relations with the governor as simply a fight over scarce financial resources. “The job of the mayor is to get as much money as he can,” Mr. Perrotta said in a 1970 interview with The New York Times. He went on to praise his new boss, saying that working for Mr. Lindsay had taught him how generous Mr. Rockefeller had been to the city. Mr. Perrotta managed several Republican campaigns in New York City, including President Richard M. Nixon’s for re-election in 1972. He focused on blue-collar neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. Though Senator George S. McGovern won the city’s vote, Mr. Perrotta’s strategy helped narrow Nixon’s margin of defeat from four years earlier. In the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, for example — the sort of middle-class area Mr. Perrotta had singled out — Nixon increased his proportion of the vote to 30 percent from 11 percent. Fioravante Gerald Gabriel Perrotta was born on July 26, 1931, in Lynbrook, on Long Island, where his father was a builder. His first name was derived from 13th-century Italian literature. Most people called him Fred. He graduated summa cum laude from what is now St. John’s University and St. John’s University School of Law, where he was editor in chief of St. John’s Law Review. He was valedictorian at both graduations. After law school, he worked for the United States attorney in Manhattan, then for a private law firm. After working as an aide to Governor Rockefeller, he was appointed to supervisory positions in the state insurance department. He left in 1967 to become vice president and secretary of the United States Life Insurance Company. While working in the Lindsay administration he took a leave of absence to run for controller as a Republican and a Liberal on a Lindsay ticket that “fused” different parties. Mr. Lindsay had the Liberal Party nomination, for instance, while Sanford D. Garelik, Mr. Lindsay’s candidate for City Council president, was a registered Democrat. After he lost, Mr. Perrotta said he had run mainly to help Mr. Lindsay balance his ticket. After a long legal career that included serving on the boards of several insurance companies, Mr. Perrotta retired in 1996 and moved to Naples, Fla., where he lived until his death. In addition to his partner, Mr. Perrotta is survived by his sisters, Geraldine DeMilt and Rose Ferrara.
