The mother of Vito Fossella's love child knows all about cheating hearts.
Both of Laura Fay's failed marriages were plagued by adultery - with the first one ending after she had an affair, and her second husband leaving her after trysts by both sides, sources said.
Fossella admitted yesterday that he and Fay have a 3-year-old daughter named Natalie. Whether she has taken her father's surname remains unclear.
Sources said the congressman began dating the retired Air Force officer as far back as 2001, three years before her second divorce.
Her first husband, whom she married in 1984, was Dale Zeller, a now-retired Air Force lieutenant colonel.
Friends said she liked a good party and often attended officers' functions.
The marriage crumbled in 1989 after she had an affair, which a source said Zeller learned about from a letter she'd written to her boyfriend.
Under military law, adultery is a crime, but is usually only prosecuted when it gets in the way of the functioning of a unit, or disrupts morale.
Zeller apparently didn't press the issue.
Laura, whose father is a highly decorated pilot, was soon transferred to Hawaii. There, court records show, she met her second husband, Guy Shoaf, an Air Force urologist.
The two wed in Honolulu in December 1995. The childless marriage ended eight years later.
One of Fay's relatives said Shoaf was unfaithful, an assertion denied by Shoaf's current wife, Barrie. Other sources said Fay's relationship with Fossella was 2 years old when they broke up. "Knowing Laura, I'm willing to bet that she probably only told a few close friends, probably not even most of her family, who the father was," said the one-time friend.
"I think she probably met this guy, and was enamored of him, and when she got pregnant, decided to keep the baby. She's older now, and she might have decided this was her chance to be a mother."
