Metro

I didn’t know I was married to a wiseguy — and now he has my kids!

She lived with a killer for almost a decade and hardly suspected a thing.

Patricia Pisciotti knew her husband, Nicholas “P.J.” Pisciotti, had his share of run-ins with the law while growing up in Little Italy, but when they moved in together, she thought he had reformed.

“He’d jump out of bed at 6 a.m. Sometimes he’d make breakfast,” Patricia recalled. “I was happy. I had babies, I had young children. My attention was totally focused on them.”

Now the mother of three is battling her ex — a Bonanno capo-turned-rat — for custody of the kids, who live with dad in central New Jersey.

The children — a boy who’s 13 and two girls, ages 11 and 8 — are in danger, according to their mother, who worries they could get caught in the crossfire whenever the inevitable vengeance against her ex is meted out.

“He refused witness protection,” she said. “He said he’s the toughest guy and nobody’s going to do anything to him. Then he had a bulletproof vest on one night when he came to meet me.”

Patricia Pisciotti lived with her kids immediately following her 2006 divorce, but Monmouth County Judge Paul Escandon awarded her ex-husband primary custody in January 2012 after she yanked her children from school in Marlboro and moved to a new home in northern Jersey without court permission.

“This is something that’s being done to estrange the children from the other party,” Escandon said before giving temporary custody to their father. “She attempted to get as far away from the defendant as she could without leaving the state.”

Patricia contends she moved because she couldn’t afford the mortgage, thanks to her ex-husband’s failure to fork over $4,200 in monthly child-support payments and $3,000 per month in alimony. At one point, her husband owed her almost $15,000, according to court documents.

She blames Escandon, who no longer hears cases in Family Court, and Judge Leslie-Ann Justus, who denied her emergency request last month to regain custody of her children. She claims her case, which was under court-ordered seal until last month, should never have been hidden from public view.

But most of all, she blames “P.J.”

“He’s just a natural liar,” she said. “He was leading this double life, and he thought he could pull it off.”

At first — when she was still a 16-year-old Greenwich Village girl and falling for her future husband — the petty crime in which he was involved seemed small-time.

“He had gotten in trouble when he was 19 — it was for selling coke,” she remembered. “It was downplayed to me. I grew up in the city. Kids did stuff.”

They dated off and on. Patricia went to college, and when she was finished, P.J. seemed like a new man. A legit guy who worked in a restaurant and had a construction job — he wanted a family.

“He was pressuring me to get married,” she said. “I didn’t know he was up to shady stuff. He convinced me he was staying out of trouble.”

But it didn’t take long for her to get a whiff of what was really going on.

“He had a fight with one of the guys from his neighborhood who was a made man,” she said. “His uncle stepped in to protect him, because he would have got killed for defending himself.

“Where I grew up, everybody had some kind of connection. But he never told me he got made.”

One of Nicholas Pisciotti’s biggest deceptions occurred in 1997, while his wife was at a wedding. He was in bar fight that left a man, Richard Guiga, dead.

“He told me the police were questioning everybody,” Patricia said. “He said, ‘I wish they would hurry up and find out who did it and leave me alone.’ ”

The Pisciottis moved to a well-heeled Jersey suburb, where Patricia lived in style — financed, she thought, by her husband’s legitimate businesses.

Their house was a white-brick, five-bedroom, 2,855-square-foot McMansion at the end of a Marlboro Township cul de sac. She drove an Acura, but toward the end of their time there, he was trading up the family car every few months.

The facade cracked in September 2005, when P.J. helped beat Joseph “Joe Clams” Caruso into a coma after an altercation over smoking in Caruso’s Little Italy bistro, Odea. P.J. admitted to the assault at the scene.

“F–k it, I did it,” he told responding cops, according to a published report.

The night before, his wife claims, he also choked her, and let go only after she bit his finger.

She filed for divorce. A year later, P.J. was charged with Guiga’s murder. He admitted to the slaying in his star turn as a mob canary in 2007. He claimed Guiga was slashing at him and another mobster, and they acted in self-defense.

“Richie wound up dropping the knife,” P.J. said. “He wound up dying.”

The prosecutor asked who actually killed Guiga, and P.J. replied, “Probably both of us.”

Pisciotti also pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy after being arrested in February 2007. He testified in July of that year that he sold pot for ex-Bonanno crime boss Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano. In November, Pisciotti began a stint in a federal facility that lasted until May 2009, according to a court transcript.

When P.J. got out, he had visitation rights with the children, until the court awarded him custody. His lawyer, Amy Sara Cores, declined to discuss her client.

Patricia Pisciotti, who is filing new court motions to get her children back, says she’s trying to protect them from the dark side of her marriage.

“My kids were exposed to many things I wish they weren’t exposed to,” she said. “He was just crazy.”