Long Island Lolita
Amy Fisher, 25 years later
SHE was a petite 16-year-old wild child with long brown hair, a thick “Lawn-Guy
land” accent and an unquenchable thirst for older men.
He was a 35-year-old, married father of two with a wandering eye and a powerboat named “Double Trouble.”
When they met at his auto-body shop, sparks flew — and set in motion a chain of events that would end up captivating the nation with dozens of sensational headlines, a series of books and not one, but three, network-TV movies.
Following a sleazy affair she said involved “expensive restaurants and cheap motels,” Amy Fisher showed up on the doorstep of Joey Buttafuoco’s home on May 19, 1992, packing a .25-caliber pistol.
When she left, Joey’s wife, Mary Jo, was lying unconscious with a bullet hole in her face and the slug lodged in her neck, too close to her spine to ever be removed.
Now, 25 years after the love-triangle shooting that made her a household name, Amy Fisher is back on Long Island, chased out of Florida by her sordid past.
The Post recently found the infamous “Long Island Lolita” in a new home less than an hour’s drive from the scene of her crime, desperate for a new life with the three kids from her failed, postprison marriage to a former NYPD cop.
“My kids were ostracized in Florida. They had no friends. All the mothers thought their kids would get the Amy Fisher gene if they hung out with them,” Fisher said.
“Things got so bad for my [eldest] son, the school psychologist even suggested he drop out and get his GED.”
Fisher, now 42, said she promised her kids — ages 8, 12, and 16 — “a fresh start” after several years in the Sunshine State that were also marked by a stalker jumping the fence surrounding their gated community to harass her.
“I was really scared,” she said. “I want me and my children to be safe. I don’t want any lunatics coming after me.”
She said her mom, Roseann Fisher, paid for her family’s fourbedroom, two-bathroom ranch house hidden behind trees and shrubbery on a quiet suburban block, and would be spending the summers with them.
Asked why she didn’t decide to start over somewhere the neighbors would be less likely to recognize her, Fisher — who legally changed her name last year — said family ties drew her home to Long Island.
“My aunt was telling me to come back. I was isolated in Florida, away from the people we love. Here I have a big Italian family and they all accept me.
“We enjoy our pasta and meatballs,” she said. “My children have cousins they can play with.”
And despite getting offers to appear on TV in connection with Friday’s 25th anniversary of the crime, Fisher — who has worked as both a stripper and a porn actress since she got out of prison in 1999 — said she rejected them all before The Post tracked her down.
“It’s just not worth it,” she said. “I want a private life. My life has already been ruined.”
IT was around noon on a sunny Tuesday when Fisher, then 17, rang the doorbell at the Buttafuocos’ Massapequa home.
“I remember the smell of the air, the temperature, I remember the conversation that Amy and I had on the porch,” Mary Jo told Time magazine while promoting her memoir in 2009.
“There was absolutely no indication in my mind, nor has there ever been in all these years, that she was there to try to kill me. I never got that vibe at all.”
After listening to Fisher claim that Joey was having an affair with her younger sister, Mary Jo said she was going to call her husband and turned to go back inside.
“Within that second, she pulled a gun out, aimed it at my head and pulled the trigger. The next thing I knew, it was three days later,” recalled Mary Jo, who was left disfigured and deaf in her right ear.
The night before Fisher’s arraignment, the case took an even more salacious turn when a secretly made video emerged, showing her getting paid $100 for sex with an escort-service client.
Prosecutor Fred Klein said Fisher “was so shrewd, brazen and manipulative that she even tried to cut out the escort service so she could be contacted directly,” and plotted her attack on Mary Jo for months.
Klein also said Fisher tried to get an accomplice to assassinate Mary Jo, with a 21-year-old waiter named “William” claiming he was the would-be hit man, paid by Fisher with money and sex.
But when Fisher pleaded guilty to assault in a deal to avoid conviction for attempted murder, she denied intentionally opening fire on her lover’s wife.
“I went up to her doorstep with a loaded gun in my pocket. I hit her on the back of the head and the gun went off. She fell on top of me on the ground. I tried to get her off of me. I hit her and I left. I ran away,” she said.
Fisher didn’t explain her motive, but she had previously told cops she confronted Mary Jo as revenge against Joey for trying to break up her relationship with new boyfriend Paul Makely, then 30.
“I was thinking about how Joey was trying to mess things up between me and Paulie,” she said.
“I thought about how I could
get back at him [Buttafuoco] and decided to go tell Joey’s wife that he was having an affair. I wanted to put a lot of tension in his marriage.”
She also admitted that she had started seeing Joey again behind Makely’s back, explaining: “We have great sex together, mostly at his shop upstairs.”
Fisher refused to discuss the shooting with The Post, saying only that Mary Jo “really is a wonderful lady and I was just a stupid kid.”
The nearly deadly love triangle was just made for television — and ABC, CBS and NBC all aired competing TV movies offering different takes on the scandal around New Year’s Day 1993. The ABC and CBS versions went head to head on Sunday night, Jan. 3.
Amy was portrayed variously by Drew Barrymore, Alyssa Milano and Noelle Parker; Joey by Tony Denison, Jack Scalia and Ed Marinaro.
Joey, meanwhile, finally had to admit the affair with Fisher after investigators found his $45.36 receipt from a motel from July 2, 1991 — the day Fisher said they first had sex, when she was 16 — and he served four months in the slammer for statutory rape.
Fisher later tried to withdraw her guilty plea by claiming she got bad advice from her defense lawyer because they were having sex, after which Mary Jo publicly forgave the teen temptress and joined in a motion that led to a reduction in her sentence and her 1999 parole.
Fisher served six-plus years in a state prison.
FOLLOWING her release, Fisher went online and met a man even older than Joey — ex-cop-turned-wedding videographer Lou Bellera, 24 years her senior.
The relationship and subsequent marriage also led to Fisher’s career in porn, with reports saying Bellera sold a video of them having sex during a 2007 split marked by a heavily hyped reunion “date” between Fisher and Buttafuoco.
Endowed with a pair of D-cup breast implants, Fisher later appeared at strip clubs up and down the East Coast and amassed a filmography that includes “Deep Inside Amy Fisher,” as well as the 2011 season of cable TV’s “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.”
Fisher and Bellera divorced in 2015 and she now blames him for her work in the sex industry, saying: “I was never happy doing it, and he would just sit there and watch, even while I cried.”
“He likes money and he likes attention,” she said.
“Him and Joey were the same that way . . . They say you always pick the same person — scumbags.”
Bellera, 66, called Fisher’s remarks “absolutely mind-boggling.”
He said Fisher and her agent “orchestrated” the release of their sex tape, and the subsequent stripping and porn were “all her idea.”
Fisher also denied any connection to a Web site that offers “live sex” performances from a woman billing herself as a 33-year-old “Amy Fisher.”
Breaking up with Bellera, she said, helped her finally get over her thing for older men.
“I just don’t find them attractive. I only want to date people my own age,” she said.
“When I met Lou he was in his 40s and looked great, but he’s 70 now and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, it’s like geriatric.’ I was like 15 or 16 when I met Joey, he was 32 and a person that age is still in great shape.”
But she said trying to find a new boyfriend “is a nightmare.”
“As soon as they find out who I am, it’s the kiss of death or they have a million questions. Nobody wants to date me,” she lamented.
“My longest relationship lasted like six weeks.”
IN one of the strangest twists to the case, Mary Jo stayed with Joey — even after he pleaded “no contest” to soliciting oral sex from an undercover Los Angeles cop in 1995 — and moved with him to California before they finally separated in 2000 and divorced three years later.
He got busted twice more — serving time for in an insurancefraud scheme and for illegally possessing ammunition — and in 2005 married Croatian-born Evanka Franjko after meeting her at his auto-body shop.
In 2006, Joey, Mary Jo and Fisher got paid to hold a TV reunion that featured Joey screaming and swearing at his former mistress before she and his exwife embraced on camera.
Joey didn’t respond to a message left with his son, a third-generation auto-body shop owner who doesn’t use his family name, unlike sister Jessie Buttafuoco, who co-hosts a podcast and appeared in a series of YouTube advice videos titled “Live Your Life Kween!”
But in a 2015 interview with the syndicated TV show “Crime Watch Daily,” Joey lamented the “bravado” that led to his affair with Fisher and its “horrific” results.
“If Amy Fisher did not shoot Mary Jo, would I be together with Mary Jo right now? I don’t know. I just don’t know,” he said.
Mary Jo, meanwhile, married Stuart Tendler, who owns a print shop in Las Vegas, in 2012 after they met at a party. Their marriage lasted only about two years, but they remain friends and speak about once a week, Tendler told The Post.
Earlier this year, she cut a deal for an “unscripted documentary” tied to the anniversary, but the project didn’t get green-lighted, according to her manager, who passed along a request for comment that wasn’t returned.