Long Island- A “psycho” Long Island man chained his wife to a staircase, kicked her face with steel-toed boots, and tortured her for hours near two pet leopards as their young son looked on, the battered woman said yesterday. “I thought I was going to die,” a sobbing Anastasia Barone, 33, said of the May 20 beating at the hands of her tattooist husband, Anthony, in the basement of their rundown house in ritzy Dix Hills.

“He chained me around my neck with really thick-gauge chain-link . . . and he had a padlock around my neck, and he had it around the base of a spiral staircase,” she said after Anthony, 36, was held on $500,000 bail for assaulting and imprisoning her.

He was also charged with endangering their four kids – ages 2 through 8 – by letting the 50-pound cats near them. He also faces possible wildlife charges and was ordered to stay away from their home.

“For five hours, I was chained up, and I was unconscious for a lot of that time because my nose was broken. My children were upstairs, but my 8-year-old was by my side trying to help me the whole time,” Anastasia, her eyes still blackened and her body still bruised, told reporters.

She said Anthony “kicked me in the face with steel-toed boots, and I had a lot of blood coming out of my nose.” The rampage took place a mere 10 feet away from the windowless, feces-strewn room where the leopards were kept behind a flimsy door that authorities said would not have held them back if they tried to crash through.

Anthony later that day drove her to his Lynbrook tattoo parlor, where he chained her in the bathroom, Suffolk cops said.

“He’s a psycho,” said Anastasia.

She said she has been trying to leave him for a year, and had been living in Florida with two of her children but returned in April after learning wild animals were living at home with her other kids.

Anthony is believed to have bought the endangered leopards as newborns from a dealer within the past six months.

Cops said that when they were called to the home Sunday, they learned not only of last week’s torture session but also that the leopards were allowed to roam the house freely.

Anthony fled before cops arrived but was tracked to nearby woods by a police dog.

Ray Gross of the SPCA said humane officers had difficulty capturing the beasts and that when they were placed into a truck, they “lunged at the glass.”

“It wouldn’t take much for a leopard to turn ferocious. If one of those kids pulled their tail or something, it could instantly kill them. These are not house cats,” Gross said.