Joey Buttafuoco is in jail for having sex with Amy Fisher when she was 16 - a crime he blames on lust.
The 37-year-old auto body mechanic was sentenced to the maximum - six months in prison - for statutory rape.He was put in an 8-by-6-foot cell by himself while officials decide whether he can safely mix with the 1,700 other inmates at the Nassau County Jail.
"We have to determine whether he's going to be a hero or whether the other inmates are going to be hostile to him," sheriff's Lt. Robert Anderson said.
Judge Jack Mackston handed down the sentence Monday after Fisher came before him and portrayed herself as a young innocent in braces who was swept away by a man with money and flash. A smirking Buttafuoco, dressed in a maroon suit and lizard skin boots, was led away in handcuffs.
In an interview with the TV program "A Current Affair," Buttafuoco described a casual affair driven by "strictly lustful sex. . . . Sometimes lust takes me over. It's very painful."
"I'm not proud of it. It was a big mistake," he said in the interview a few days ago.
Fisher took their relationship much more seriously - so seriously that she is serving five to 15 years in jail for shooting Buttafuoco's wife, Mary Jo, outside her Long Island home in 1992.
In addition to six months in prison, Buttafuoco was fined $5,000 and given five years' probation.
For months, Buttafuoco denied having an affair with Fisher. He finally pleaded guilty to statutory rape rather than face a physical to test Fisher's assertions that he has a mole on his thigh and that she got herpes from him.
Asked on "A Current Affair" if she believes her husband had sex with Fisher, Mary Jo Buttafuoco said: "I choose to believe, based on the person that I know and the person that I live with and the person that I spent many, many years with and the person whose bed I share, that he did not."
Mary Jo Buttafuoco, 38, still has a bullet lodged next to her brain.
Fisher, now 19, said the affair began when she was 16. The age of consent in New York is 17.
"I know with all my heart that if Mr. Buttafuoco had permitted me to cross the bridge between adolescence and adulthood unmolested, I would not be where I am today," she told the judge as Buttafuoco glared at her.