A hammered Vito Fossella and a stumbling drinking buddy were asked to leave a Washington bar hours before the Staten Island congressman was busted for drunken driving, witnesses said Monday.
"I can't imagine him [Fossella] getting into a car. They were [both] incapable of driving," Josh Hahn, a waiter who was working Wednesday night at the Logan Tavern, said of Fossella and his plastered pal named "Brian."
Hahn and Andrew Howells, general manager of the Logan, said Fossella came to the trendy bar about 10 p.m., after a busy day of backslapping.
The GOP representative attended a morning ceremony for the Irish prime minister and President Bush's White House welcome for the Super Bowl champion New York Giants in the afternoon.
Hahn and Howells said several bar patrons recognized Fossella and greeted him.
Employees at the Logan Tavern said Brian, whose last name they did not know, passed out at the bar after arriving with Fossella.
Fossella roused his pal, who made it to the men's room, where he passed out again in a chair outside the bathroom door. Tavern staff woke Brian, who returned to the main room and promptly belly-flopped onto a table, Hahn said.
Oates for News
Rep. Vito Fossella stumbled into - and out of - Logan Tavern (below), witnesses say.
"The table's base was broken," Hahn said. "They offered to pay for it, but we said, 'That's all right, just leave.'"
Hahn said he helped the men to the street and flagged down a cab for them. It's unclear if the two men got into the cab or walked off, possibly to Fossella's car.
Cops busted Fossella, who is up for reelection, for drunken driving in Alexandria, Va., at 12:15 a.m. Thursday.
Initially telling officers he was on his way to visit his daughter, Fossella changed his story at a news conference the next day.
He told reporters he hosted a dinner in Washington after the Giants photo op and "was on my way to visit some friends in Virginia" when he was pulled over.
Fossella, who apologized for the arrest, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.17, twice the state's 0.08 legal limit.
Cops released Fossella to the custody of retired Lt. Col. Laura Fay seven hours after his arrest.
Fay, who has been described by aides as a "close friend," lives with her 3-year-old daughter about 3 miles from the spot where police officers stopped Fossella for running a red light.
The two met while she was the Air Force's House liaison - a position she held from July 2001 until her retirement in September 2006.
Fay is an intelligence officer by trade; her last duty assignment was as chief of the intelligence applications division at the Pentagon.
British government documents show Fossella and Fay attended an Air Force-sponsored dinner in Britain on July 27, 2003, with several other members of Congress.Fossella's wife, Mary Pat, was not in attendance, a guestlist for the event shows. The couple has three children.
Fay's then-husband, Guy Shoaf, filed for divorce in an Arlington County, Va., court five months after the Air Force-sponsored dinner, records show.
The couple, married in Honolulu in 1995, had no children when they stopped living together in 2003, the records show.
A source familiar with the proceedings said the couple had a "bad breakup" and no longer speak to each other.
Shoaf refused to talk with reporters when they knocked on his door. He still lives around the corner from his ex-wife.
'Highly inappropriate'
Susan Del Percio, who was hired to do damage control for Fossella, refused to answer when a reporter asked if the congressman fathered Fay's toddler.
"That is a demeaning and highly inappropriate question that does not deserve an answer," she said. "That's all I'm going to say."
Since his arrest, Fossella has been holed up with his family in their Staten Island home. He has missed six votes in Congress.
"He did only miss a handful of votes and he continues to be focused on working for the people of Staten Island and Brooklyn," Del Percio said.
She said Fossella was expected to be back in D.C. today.
Stephen Harrison, Fossella's challenger in 2006 who is seeking the Democratic nomination again this year, said Fossella needed to think about resignation.
"Mr. Fossella has missed multiple meetings and votes," Harrison said. "Now is the time when he needs to make a determination on whether he can still service the people of this district."
Mayor Bloomberg called the drunken driving incident "a terrible mistake in judgment" but said that Fossella had "done a lot for Staten Island and Brooklyn. ...
"He's been a supporter of mine, and I've supported him, and hopefully he'll work this out."
Fossella's arrest automatically started one investigative clock - in the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.
The ethics panel must, within 30 days of Fossella's DWI arrest, either "empanel an investigative subcommittee to review the allegations" or explain its reasons for not launching a probe, the House ethics manual says.
With Thomas M. DeFrank and Kenneth R. Bazinet in Washington and Marty Clear in Tampa
