Metro

Staten Island man claims ex-wife secretly divorced him

A Staten Island man married a divorce lawyer on Valentine’s Day — only to see her allegedly create a postnup behind his back and secretly file for divorce.

“I was doing great, and then I fell in love,” James A. Ruggiero lamented.

He had been a successful fashion fotog when he met Anne-Louise DePalo in 2003 over a video-dating service. He says he had been given a free dating profile when DePalo “picked me out and called me up.”

The two tied the knot on Valentine’s Day in 2004.

Ruggiero says that he let his firm, Still Moving Pictures, go dormant and that he poured money into DePalo’s law firm, their failed wedding-dress business and lavish vacations.

And he put $100,000 from a family inheritance to the purchase of a lakeside home in Grasmere.

“She never put me on the title,” he said. “I was the biggest fool around.”

All the while, the retired city correction officer said he was cash poor, with a $12,000 annual disability pension.

Ruggiero, 62, says he left the correction job with post-traumatic stress after a 1979 riot at Rikers. He said he struggled with mental illness and his parents’ death for much of the union and was at times medicated.

DePalo, 51, a painter, kids’ book author and attorney who nets $200,000 a year, began divorce proceedings in September 2007 without telling Ruggiero or serving him papers, he says in a Staten Island Supreme Court lawsuit.

Without Ruggiero in court to contest it, a Staten Island judge signed off on the divorce in 2009.

Ruggiero said he found after that DePalo had drawn up a post-nuptial agreement giving her the $1 million house, stocks, savings and other assets.

He suggested he may have signed a postnup believing it only to be a tax form.

“She would just come over to me early in the morning and nudge me and say, ‘Here, sign this. I’m late for court,’ ” he recalled.

The postnup was to give him their two cars and his belongings. He says he got one car, a Jaguar, but nothing else among the $500,000 in assets he was due.

He’s now living off his pension and a new girlfriend. He is suing to void the divorce and postnup.

DePalo, who did not return messages seeking comment, has remarried.