Robert Torricelli was born in 1951 in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of a school librarian and a lawyer, and earned the nickname The Torch for his aggressive campaigning at New York’s Storm King School. He graduated from Rutgers and Rutgers Law School, earned a master’s at Harvard’s Kennedy School by 1980, worked for Governor Brendan Byrne, served as associate counsel to Vice President Walter Mondale, managed the Carter-Mondale Illinois primary, and directed the rules committee at the 1980 Democratic convention. In 1982 he unseated Republican Harold Hollenbeck in New Jersey’s 9th District and spent 14 years in the House, delivering the Democratic closing speech in the 1991 Gulf War authorization debate.

After a 1988 trip to Cuba in which he said the island lacked the homelessness and hunger seen elsewhere in Latin America, he sponsored the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, saying it would wreak havoc on the island, while receiving contributions from the Cuban American National Foundation. He won Bill Bradley’s Senate seat in 1996 over Dick Zimmer and, as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, recruited Hillary Clinton and helped his party take the majority. Illegal donations tied to David Chang led to a 2002 Senate Ethics Committee admonishment, even though federal prosecutors had dropped their probe. On September 30, 2002, with ballots printed, he quit the race, and the New Jersey Supreme Court allowed Frank Lautenberg to replace him.

• David Chang pleaded guilty to election law violations tied to the 1996 campaign.
• The allegations included cash, suits, a Rolex watch and a big screen television.
• On the Finance Committee he won the first partial tax deduction for college tuition.
• In 2003 a federal court named him special master over the Honeywell cleanup of a chemical site in Jersey City.
• In 2007 he moved his leftover campaign funds into his Rosemont Foundation, which gave to animal welfare charities.