Bank of America executive James Mahoney dies from injuries sustained in 2019 bike accident

James Mahoney outside Newton North High School in 2000.Globe Staff Photo/Barry Chin/The Boston Globe

James E. Mahoney, a senior Bank of America executive whose extensive career spanned the worlds of business, government, and politics, died Saturday, the result of complications from injuries he sustained in a bicycle accident last year. He was 67.

Mahoney, an experienced cyclist, suffered a head injury after falling from his bike while riding with a friend in Weston in early July 2019.

“His wife, Peggy, his seven brothers and sisters, and three children will miss the sunshine that Jim brought into all of our lives,” said his brother John Mahoney.

Mahoney, who went by Jim, spent the past 25 years at Bank of America and its predecessor, FleetBoston Financial, most recently as executive vice president and global corporate strategy and public policy executive. During his tenure at the bank, the second-largest in the United States, he worked closely with vice chairman Anne Finucane and chief executive Brian Moynihan.

All three executives came from FleetBoston, which was acquired by North Carolina-based Bank of America in 2004, and they continued to live and primarily work in the Boston area even as the bank’s headquarters remained in Charlotte.

Mahoney was an influential behind-the-scenes player in the areas of public policy, strategy, and communications. Most recently he was an instrumental force behind the bank’s $300 billion program to finance clean-energy projects.

“Jim was one of those people who just made us better than we otherwise would be; he had a sense of the outside in, reading a situation as few could and ushering us through big opportunities as well as difficult times with wisdom, humor and great thinking. He led by standing with you,” Moynihan said in a statement.

Before entering the private sector, Mahoney served four years as chief spokesman for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston under president Richard Syron.

Prior to the Boston Fed he worked in politics, volunteering for the unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign of Jerry Brown, who was then governor of California, and then taking a job in Brown’s state office of appropriate technology, where he focused on environmental issues.

“He was an early volunteer, and he and his wife drove us all around New Hampshire and Wisconsin,” Brown said.

Mahoney later worked as an aide and spokesman for US Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II of Massachusetts.