NEW YORK — Fioravante Perrotta, who as a young lawyer in New York in the 1960s moved seamlessly between influential jobs with Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor John Lindsay, died July 20 in Manhattan. He was 80.

The cause was complications of oral cancer, said Michael Killorin, his partner of 49 years.

Lindsay called 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 Rockefeller from 1959 to 1962, 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 Lindsay from 1968 to 1970, 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 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 Rockefeller’s re-election campaign in New York City. He shrugged off 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,” Perrotta said in a 1970 interview with The New York Times. He went on to praise his new boss, saying that working for Lindsay had taught him how generous Rockefeller had been to the city.

Perrotta managed several Republican campaigns in New York City, including former President Richard Nixon’s for re-election in 1972. He focused on blue-collar neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. Though Sen. George McGovern won the city’s vote, Perrotta’s strategy helped narrow Nixon’s margin of defeat from four years earlier.

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. Lindsay had the Liberal Party nomination, for instance, while Sanford Garelik, Lindsay’s candidate for City Council president, was a registered Democrat. After he lost, Perrotta said he had run mainly to help Lindsay balance his ticket.

After a long legal career that included serving on the boards of several insurance companies, Perrotta retired in 1996 and moved to Naples, Fla., where he lived until his death.