Only a few months into his seven terms as a US representative, William Delahunt was already establishing what he would consider one of his greatest accomplishments — the kind of bipartisanship that even drew warm praise in the late 1990s from no less a conservative icon than Representative Henry Hyde, a Judiciary Committee colleague.
“My politics are loud and clear,” Mr. Delahunt told The Boston Globe days before leaving Congress in 2011, nearly 14 years after Hyde had lauded his common sense, seriousness, and good humor.
And while he unequivocally considered himself “a liberal Democrat,” Mr. Delahunt added that “every significant piece of legislation that I got on a president’s desk was a result of my relationships with key Republicans.”
A former longtime Norfolk district attorney who in the late 1970s created what was considered the nation’s first prosecutorial domestic violence unit, Mr. Delahunt was 82 when he died Saturday.
A family spokesman, George K. Regan Jr., chairman of Regan Communications Group, said Mr. Delahunt died in his Quincy home with his family by his side.
“I don’t think anyone really appreciated how important he was. He was one of the very few people who could go across the aisle and do business with the Republicans,” said Francis X. Bellotti, a former Massachusetts attorney general who was a longtime friend and Mr. Delahunt’s running partner when they were younger.
“More than anyone I know in the business, Bill was able to go across the aisle,” Bellotti said in a November interview for this obituary. “If we had more Bill Delahunts, we wouldn’t be having the problems we’re having today.”
A seasoned prosecutor when he arrived in Washington, D.C., Mr. Delahunt traveled a greater distance, metaphorically, than the miles that separated his Quincy home and the nation’s capital during nearly 40 years in elective office.
Though he was a reliable abortion rights vote in Congress, Mr. Delahunt started out as an anti-abortion Democrat. As a state representative in the mid-1970s, he cosponsored or backed bills to require the consent of both parents for minors seeking an abortion, and to restrict fetal tissue research.
By the early 1990s, when he first sought a US House seat — only to drop out of the primary — he told The Patriot Ledger in Quincy that he now supported abortion rights, a change brought about mainly by conversations with his daughters.
In Congress, meanwhile, his more than two decades as a district attorney provided a shield against some usual conservative criticisms.
“He makes it impossible for them to say Democrats are soft on crime,” then-Representative Barney Frank told the Globe in 1997, when he served on the Judiciary Committee with Mr. Delahunt. “Billy has locked up more people than everyone else on the committee put together.”
Chief among his accomplishments as a prosecutor were creating a civil rights unit and a domestic violence unit in the Norfolk district attorney’s office. The latter was prompted in part by a horrific domestic violence attack in 1978, when a Cohasset man killed his wife, wounded their three children, and killed himself.
Little more than a decade later, Mr. Delahunt used civil rights laws to prosecute Operation Rescue leaders, who had brought hundreds of anti-abortion protesters to Brookline clinics.
“We maintain that a woman has the legal right to have an abortion and that she is not to be intimidated, threatened, or coerced into not having an abortion,” Mr. Delahunt said in 1989. “It’s a civil right, and we will not allow it to be interfered with.”
In a different criminal case, he had Black and white investigators pose as homebuyers in an effort to curtail housing discrimination.
Once elected to Congress, he served on the Judiciary Committee during President Clinton’s impeachment.
Legislation Mr. Delahunt championed during his seven terms included being principal author of the Child Citizen Act of 2000, which conferred US citizenship on children adopted from outside of the country. Mr. Delahunt and his former wife had adopted one of their daughters from Vietnam.
Active in Latin American affairs as a US representative, Mr. Delahunt also helped broker a 2005 deal to bring in less-expensive heating oil from Venezuela, which assisted low-income Massachusetts residents.
Conservative opponents sniped that he was getting too cozy with Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s then-president. Though critical of Chavez’s harsh, anti-American rhetoric, Mr. Delahunt focused on those benefiting from the lower-cost heating oil.
“The choice between being criticized by some or having brokered that agreement — that’s an easy choice,” he told the Globe.
During his years as a district attorney and congressman, Mr. Delahunt was no stranger to criticism.
In the mid-1990s, he was the focus of Globe reporting into his use of thousands of dollars of campaign funds over 20 years for meals and entertainment — including at fancy restaurants, some out of state. The state Office of Campaign and Political Finance later cleared the expenditures as legitimate.
Political opponents who criticized his lifestyle as lavish failed to persuade voters, who sent him to Congress seven times.
Indeed, the candidate and elected official with a taste for expensive restaurants took up residence in a decidedly unpretentious Washington row house with three other Democratic lawmakers — US Senators Richard Durbin of Illinois and Charles Schumer of New York, and Representative George Miller of California.
The roomies shared the kind of living arrangement many college students are relieved to leave behind: an overturned rat trap behind the stove, wicker chairs with broken seats replaced with ceiling tiles, a ready supply of Cheez-Its. Such cheerful squalor drew cheeky coverage (The New York Times said it was “notorious as one of the capital’s least-appealing crash pads”) and inspired comedian Al Franken to pitch a fictional sitcom.
“Ben Affleck could play me,” mused Mr. Delahunt, who predicted that a TV version would never be popular.
“Four guys sitting around in their boxers watching TV and eating fast food,” he said in 2001. “The wild lifestyle of the rich and famous.”
Born on July 18, 1941, William David Delahunt grew up in Quincy, the son of Ruth and William H. Delahunt. His father was a sales manager, his mother a homemaker.
Mr. Delahunt graduated from Thayer Academy, Middlebury College in Vermont, and Boston College Law School.
After first being elected as a ward councilor in Quincy, he served as a state representative until then-governor Michael S. Dukakis appointed him in 1975 to fill an unexpired term as Norfolk County’s top prosecutor.
Mr. Delahunt leaves his fiancée, Julie Pagano; his daughters, Kirstin of Dorchester and Kara Delahunt Bobrov of Milton; and two grandchildren.
“While we mourn the loss of such a tremendous person, we also celebrate his remarkable life and his legacy of dedication, service, and inspiration,” his family said in a statement Saturday.
“We could always turn to him for wisdom, solace, and a laugh, and his absence leaves a gaping hole in our family and our hearts,” Mr. Delahunt’s family said.
Mr. Delahunt’s marriage to Kati Delahunt ended in divorce. She also survives him.
A wake for Mr. Delahunt will be held from 2 to 7 p.m. Friday in United First Parish Church in Quincy. A funeral Mass will be said at 11 a.m. Saturday April 6 in Saint Gregory Parish in Dorchester.
“Today I lost the older brother I never had,” Regan said Saturday.
Along with creating pioneering units for domestic violence and civil rights as district attorney, Mr. Delahunt designated prosecutors to focus on sexual assault, child abuse, and white-collar crime. He also created a juvenile diversion program.
In recognition of that legacy, the Norfolk County Superior Court building was renamed in his honor in October 2022.
After finishing his last congressional term in January 2011 ― Democrat William Keating succeeded him ― Mr. Delahunt formed The Delahunt Group, a consulting and lobbying firm.
Clients and his ventures in other business dealings included the City of Quincy, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, and the medical marijuana field.
Though Mr. Delahunt’s work remained within legally allowed lobbying for former members of Congress and former state employees, the amount of money he earned drew scrutiny from the Globe and elsewhere, as did the number of projects, some of which aligned closely with his elective office past — raising questions of perception and propriety.
“It’s about staying engaged in policies that I had been involved in when I was in Congress and as district attorney,” he said of his lobbying and consulting in a 2014 Globe interview, adding that he felt “very good about the things that I’m doing, because I believe in the causes.”
Mr. Delahunt owed his first congressional victory in part to a phenomenon that anticipated the Florida ballot recounts in the 2000 presidential election.
Initially the leader in polls, he lost by a slender margin in the September 1996 Democratic primary to Philip Johnston in a three-way race. Johnston remained ahead after an initial recount, until Mr. Delahunt challenged the results in Weymouth, where there were hundreds of irregular punch-card ballots with dimpled or hanging chads — a phrase immortalized four years later in Florida.
A subsequent recount, upheld eventually by the state Supreme Judicial Court, handed the victory to Mr. Delahunt, who went on to win the general election, too.
He rose from the metaphorical political graveyard in that race, but in 2016, Mr. Delahunt returned from the brink of a near-fatal health scare.
Placed in an induced coma during a challenging bout with pneumonia, he rejoined the land of the speaking with humor intact.
“I have a new name, ‘Lazarus,’ ” he quipped.
And though he knew he had struggled to stay alive, he wasn’t fearful.
“I have had a very good life,” he told the Globe. “I am just glad I got a second chance.”
This report has been updated to include details about Mr. Delahunt’s wake and funeral Mass.
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.