Disgraced Rep. Vito Fossella is hiding out in a tiny apartment above a garage at his sister’s Staten Island house, the Daily News has learned.

“He’s staying there,” a neighbor said Monday, pointing to the home of Lori Ceciliani, one of the Republican lawmaker’s five sisters.

The neighbor said Fossella has been coming and going from his secret hideaway in recent days, ever since admitting he fathered a love child with retired Air Force Col. Laura Fay.

The revelation, which floored his wife and mother of his three other children, came days after Fossella was busted for drunken driving in a Virginia suburb of Washington.

Fossella has tried to lie low at the beige-colored home with a semicircular driveway.

The lights were on at the apartment, which has a separate white staircase. Ceciliani ordered reporters to leave when they tried to knock.

Seconds later, a man with duct tape covering his license plate drove up and threatened to “rip your eyes out” if reporters did not leave the street.

The commander of the 123rd Precinct arrived minutes later to urge reporters not to photograph Fossella relatives.

A spokeswoman for Fossella didn’t return calls last night.

Just a couple of miles away, Fossella’s wife, Mary Pat, chatted with neighbors and shooed reporters away from the family’s neo-Tudor style home on Grandview Terrace.

Several friends dropped by with groceries. The Fossellas’ three kids arrived home in the afternoon from school.

Mary Pat Fossella jumped into a neighbor’s SUV to run errands, but said nothing.

Virginia prosecutors are playing hardball with Fossella, and set a June 27 trial date at a court hearing yesterday for his drunken-driving bust.

Fossella’s double life was exposed after the May 1 bust – in which he had a blood-alcohol level of 0.17, more than twice the legal limit – when he called Fay to bail him out.

If convicted of drunken driving, Fossella faces a mandatory minimum of five days in jail and a $250 fine. The maximum is a year in jail.

Virginia Commonwealth Attorney Randolph Sengel has said he is not going to cut a deal.

“As a general rule, our policy is not to do that,” Sengel has said.

Fossella also faces a probe by his fellow House members in Congress who suspect he secretly took Fay along on a 2003 junket to France.

Read more about Vito Fossella, Mary Pat and Laura Fay here

Source: NY Daily News