Young Man Killers to The Uninitiated~~ A Murder Story in Manhattan Upper East Side
Joseph Comunale, 26 from Conn. allegedly killed and dismembered by James Rackover
in 2016, 59 st Manhattan.
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| Left: Lawrence Dilione sitting in a courtroom; center: Joseph Comunale (victim) Right, James Rockover (alleged killer and lover of |
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| Alleged killers and lovers. (L) Dillone and (R). Rockover (real last name Beaudoin) |
{Introduction} by 🦊Adam Gonzalez:
This is a story I have been following for a year. Last Friday the number one defendant, James Rockover, accused of being the one who went for the head to kill Joseph Comunale was found guilty in court. Hereafter this introduction I have pasted the newspaper reports of how the story evolved and is almost finished. I am giving an introduction to ease you into the story that way the newspaper reports will make sense to you.
The Victim here Joseph was from Connecticut. A young guy commensurate in age with the ages of the lovers Lawrence and James Rockover (mid and upper 20's).
What happened in this apartment in the swanky Sutton place in Manhattan it's happened before maybe not with the uncalled violence of this particular one but it's happened before and it will happen again if not there somewhere in Manhattan. I grew up in Manhattan as a gay man and the dangers we face when there was recognition we were a decent community. I wonder how I made it alive? Through punches, sticks settling on my head and gunshots I made it thru my youth alive but with scars only I know where they are. We had to take awful chances to be with people like us and maybe meet a friend. Now is just natural but guys straight and gay keep making stupid decisions and we keep finding time in the Hudson River or buried somewhere in Long Island or jersey. There has always been an element from other states coming here to do what they can do where they are from because is not big like NYC. As you read this murder story we can clearly see the lessons. If you don't know what they are I'll be happy to tell you.
For those 21-28 who come to Manhattan from the neighboring States like NJ, Connecticut who sometimes decide to make a particular weekend extra special by coming to New York City, they must understand that they are potential victims if they are alone and meet very friendly people they never met before. You will be on the losing end unless you have traveled a lot but if you are like this young man Joseph Comunale, you will have a sign on your head. Cute, single and visitor. The cuteness will work against you because you will have more people looking at you and probably more invitations to go to "this other bar which is hot and much better than this dump we are in". This is what happened to Joseph. Cute, in his twenties where you are a man full of testosterone but in most cases able to control it and already talk like a man and the conversation tends to be interesting. The problem with Joseph as he was alone and he had no experience dealing with the scum of Larence and James. With James, he even had taken the last name of a rich old guy, a jeweler who set him up in a multi-million apartment in Uptown in the very rich East 59 Street on Sutton Place. He met him at a Sauna uptown where people like these two went not to get muscles but to meet the people they were lucky to have met.
So in practicality James had no apartment of his own, prone to violence and loving the drugs. He had a boyfriend who was the follower or the Curly or Larry to Moe in the three stooges. This was Lawrence and ex-con from Florida, These guys were cheap to make hookers, drugs and sex was the glue that kept them together.
I don't know what this two scums of the earth offered Joseph but there was sex from two very friendly guys, not bad looking and there were drugs. Whatever attracted him to stay with these two strangers, he had to know they were different than him. They were not educated like him but street people living well.
Originally there were three girls and two other men in the group. No problem. Joseph was invited to come to uptown to Sutton place. There are dugs and plenty of beer and vodka there. Joseph and the entourage including the girls took a cab to go there. They partied, they drank until early morning. The girls left with the other two guys and Joseph stayed (the worse mistake he will ever make and the last one).
This is a story I have been following for a year. Last Friday the number one defendant, James Rockover, accused of being the one who went for the head to kill Joseph Comunale was found guilty in court. Hereafter this introduction I have pasted the newspaper reports of how the story evolved and is almost finished. I am giving an introduction to ease you into the story that way the newspaper reports will make sense to you.
The Victim here Joseph was from Connecticut. A young guy commensurate in age with the ages of the lovers Lawrence and James Rockover (mid and upper 20's).
What happened in this apartment in the swanky Sutton place in Manhattan it's happened before maybe not with the uncalled violence of this particular one but it's happened before and it will happen again if not there somewhere in Manhattan. I grew up in Manhattan as a gay man and the dangers we face when there was recognition we were a decent community. I wonder how I made it alive? Through punches, sticks settling on my head and gunshots I made it thru my youth alive but with scars only I know where they are. We had to take awful chances to be with people like us and maybe meet a friend. Now is just natural but guys straight and gay keep making stupid decisions and we keep finding time in the Hudson River or buried somewhere in Long Island or jersey. There has always been an element from other states coming here to do what they can do where they are from because is not big like NYC. As you read this murder story we can clearly see the lessons. If you don't know what they are I'll be happy to tell you.
For those 21-28 who come to Manhattan from the neighboring States like NJ, Connecticut who sometimes decide to make a particular weekend extra special by coming to New York City, they must understand that they are potential victims if they are alone and meet very friendly people they never met before. You will be on the losing end unless you have traveled a lot but if you are like this young man Joseph Comunale, you will have a sign on your head. Cute, single and visitor. The cuteness will work against you because you will have more people looking at you and probably more invitations to go to "this other bar which is hot and much better than this dump we are in". This is what happened to Joseph. Cute, in his twenties where you are a man full of testosterone but in most cases able to control it and already talk like a man and the conversation tends to be interesting. The problem with Joseph as he was alone and he had no experience dealing with the scum of Larence and James. With James, he even had taken the last name of a rich old guy, a jeweler who set him up in a multi-million apartment in Uptown in the very rich East 59 Street on Sutton Place. He met him at a Sauna uptown where people like these two went not to get muscles but to meet the people they were lucky to have met.
So in practicality James had no apartment of his own, prone to violence and loving the drugs. He had a boyfriend who was the follower or the Curly or Larry to Moe in the three stooges. This was Lawrence and ex-con from Florida, These guys were cheap to make hookers, drugs and sex was the glue that kept them together.
I don't know what this two scums of the earth offered Joseph but there was sex from two very friendly guys, not bad looking and there were drugs. Whatever attracted him to stay with these two strangers, he had to know they were different than him. They were not educated like him but street people living well.
Originally there were three girls and two other men in the group. No problem. Joseph was invited to come to uptown to Sutton place. There are dugs and plenty of beer and vodka there. Joseph and the entourage including the girls took a cab to go there. They partied, they drank until early morning. The girls left with the other two guys and Joseph stayed (the worse mistake he will ever make and the last one).
During a subsequent fight over cigarettes, Dilione knocked out Comunale, leading James to pummel him further — then strangle him and stab him in the head, and attempt to dismember him with a serrated knife, according to a confession Dilione allegedly made to cops.
The new lawsuit says surveillance video shows Jeffrey — who lives on the 32nd floor — visiting James later that day in his fourth-floor apartment, which cops said was splattered with blood and which court papers say “smelled from cleaning chemicals and the stench of death” from Comunale’s “decomposing body.”
In addition, Jeffrey — whose A-list clients have included Oprah Winfrey, Diana Ross and President Trump — allegedly let James use his black 2015 Mercedes-Benz to haul Comunale’s corpse to Oceanport, NJ, where authorities say James and Dilione burned it and buried the remains in a shallow ditch.
The suit, filed Sunday by Comunale’s father, Pat, alleges the elder Rackover was involved in an “intimate relationship” with James, who legally changed his last name from Beaudoin to Rackover in March 2015 after claiming to have learned Jeffrey was “my real father.”
Pat Comunale said he sued Jeffery Rackover to “get justice for my son” and “hold everybody involved accountable for this horrific crime.”
“These guys need to go away for a long time. All of them — and whoever else,” he told The Post.
Comunale’s lawyer, Bob Abrams of Abrams Fensterman, said he was “very confident that once we’re done prosecuting this civil action,” there will be “sufficient evidence” to bring criminal charges against Jeffrey.
The Manhattan Supreme Court filing says Jeffrey Rackover gave James, an ex-con from Florida, “drugs, money and other benefits” in exchange for “sexual pleasure” while they lived together in Jeffrey’s high-rise for about two years.
The jet-setting jeweler later rented apartment 4C for James, court papers say.
The suit demands unspecified damages on grounds of “violation of the right of sepulcher,” or preventing the dead man’s kin from taking immediate possession of his body for preservation and burial.
The same legal claim is being pressed against killer real estate heir Robert Durst in the unsolved 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathie Durst, whose family is represented by Abrams.
Pat Comunale’s suit also accuses Jeffrey Rackover of “intentional infliction of emotional distress,” claiming his alleged role in covering up Joey’s slaying caused his family “mental and physical anguish” over the three days before his body was found.
Reached Sunday at the Grand Sutton, Jeffrey Rackover declined to comment on the suit.
Pat Comunale, who remains president and CEO of a nationwide security products distributorship that he and other investors sold for $420 million in 2014, noted that the suit “is clearly not about the money.”
“I don’t need the money — anything that comes from this goes to charity,” he said.
“But these people should rot in hell.”
Joey Comunale, a Hofstra grad who worked as a salesman for his dad’s company, was repeatedly stabbed inside James Rackover’s apartment following an all-night party there, authorities allege.
Jeffrey had been paying for the place — where the rent was listed at $3,600 a month in February 2016 — in addition to a $10,000 monthly “allowance” he gave James, the suit alleges.
According to a criminal complaint, surveillance video shows Joey and several others arriving at the Grand Sutton in the early morning hours of Nov. 13.
Joey then briefly left with Dilione and three women before returning at 6:50 a.m. with just Dilione, the complaint says.
the video also shows Joey and Dilione riding an elevator back to James’ apartment, marking the last time Joey was seen alive, according to the complaint.
The suit notes that celebrity private eye Bo Dietl, who has served as Jeffrey Rackover’s spokesman, has said Jeffrey went to James’ apartment to walk his dog the morning of Nov. 13 — but didn’t notice anything awry.
Dietl made the claim, the suit says, “notwithstanding the fact that Joey’s decomposing body was in the apartment at that time.”
Dietl, a New York City mayoral candidate, did not return a call seeking comment.
Jeffrey allegedly authorized his garage in the building next door to release his Mercedes to James, whose driver’s license was suspended at the time. James called the building staff for a luggage cart sometime after 6 p.m.
A video shows James later wheeling four duffel bags and a backpack out of the building, with cops have said they suspect he and Dilione dumped Joey’s body out a window in James’ apartment.
“I’ve been involved in some really vicious, heinous cases,” Abrams said. “This is the worst.”
Sometime in the late evening, a police informant saw James “place a large duffel bag into the trunk of a black vehicle with tinted windows which was parked outside of the building,” the criminal complaint says.
An NYPD investigation revealed the car — allegedly carrying James, Dilione and Comunale’s body — traveled through the Holland Tunnel at 9:45 p.m. that night.
It returned to the city at 3 a.m. the next day, with a video showing James dropping it off at Jeffrey’s garage 15 minutes later, according to the complaint.
The suit also alleges that Jeffrey and James “further discussed the coverup as they watched the Dallas Cowboys football game inside of [Jeffrey’s] 32nd-floor apartment . . . just hours after [James] and Dilione killed Joey.”
James Rackover’s lawyers, Maurice Sercarz and Robert Caliendo, declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Joe Marino
MORE
The murder trial of a man accused of stabbing a friend and dropping his body from a window after a night of cocaine-fueled partying began Monday in New York City.
James Rackover is accused of beating, stabbing, and choking 26-year-old Joseph Comunale to death on November 13, 2016, then throwing his corpse out of a fourth-floor window, stuffing it into the trunk of a car, and burying the remains in a shallow grave in New Jersey, according to the New York Daily News.
James, 27, is considered to be the “surrogate son” of Jeffrey Rackover, 58, a jeweler whose A-list clientele includes Jennifer Lopez, Oprah Winfrey, and Melania Trump, the Daily News reports. The elder Rackover announced years ago that he had a long-lost son turn up and was embracing him as his own, according to DNAInfo.
However, the younger Rackover's lawyer, Maurice Sercasz, would later confirm that James was not Jeffrey's biological son after all, even though Jeffrey treated him as such. Instead, they actually met at an Upper East Side sports club, where Jeffrey decided to help the younger man, whose born surname is Beaudoin, "straighten his life out." However, the relationship may have been more than just "father and son" — James and Jeffrey were also allegedly lovers, according to a lawsuit brought by Comunale’s father.
“Jeffrey was in the whole hog for James,” an anonymous friend of the elder Rackover told DNAInfo. "He gave him his name, the best things life could afford," the friend said, "and he now feels betrayed."
“Everything about the kid went bad,” he added. “He feels taken for a ride, emotionally and financially.”
Lawrence Dilione, 30, a friend of Rackover’s, is also charged with killing Comunale, but a judge ruled he should be tried separately because both blame each other for the murder.
A third man, Max Gemma, 30, was also allegedly in the apartment when Comunale was murdered but did not take part in the killing. He is, however, accused of helping the two dispose of Comunale’s remains, and will also be tried separately.
Court transcripts show that Dilione testified in an April 2018 hearing for the case that the four were drinking and snorting cocaine at the Sutton Place apartment the elder Rackover rented for his son when Comunale accused Dilione of mooching cigarettes off him, causing Dilione to feel “disrespected."
“I got up and I hit him,” Dilione testified. “I hit him again two times, three max. I picked him up and I slammed him to the ground, which rendered him unconscious.”
That’s when Rackover — who has a lengthy criminal record from Florida, where he served time in jail — stepped in, Dilione said, “kicking, punching, slamming his head into the ground.”
Rackover was concerned they’d “go to jail for a long time for what we just did,” Dilione testified. “I’ve got to get rid of him. I’ve got to kill him,” Rackover allegedly said, according to Dilione.
Dilione said that after beating Comunale, Rackover told him to take off his jeans, and Rackover used them to strangle Comunale to death.
“My pair of jeans was used in strangling Joseph Comunale … I turned around and then I saw a knife being pulled out of Joey’s head,” Dilione testified.
At that point, Dilione said, he told Gemma to leave. Rackover then tried to dismember Comunale in the bathtub, but failed to get the blade through his shoulder, Dilione testified.
“That’s when he got angry and stabbed him in the body multiple times,” Dilione said.
But Dilione admitted that he helped Rackover conceal evidence of the crime and bury Comunale’s remains. He said they wrapped Comunale’s body in sheets, then dropped the corpse out of a window from the fourth-floor apartment.
“I pushed the body out the window,” Dilione testified.
On the street below, they bundled Comunale’s corpse into the elder Rackover’s 2015 Mercedes and drove it to Oceanport, New Jersey where, Dilione testified, they buried the remains in a shallow grave behind a flower shop.
Rackover denied the charges in a 2017 interview with the New York Daily News.
Dilione "threw me under the bus to save his own ass," Rackover said.
"What motive would I have?" Rackover argued. "What trouble would I be in? Does it make sense to you?"
But prosecutors painted a portrait of Rackover that looks not so much a like a long-lost son reuniting with his father, but that of a grifter.
Among his many alleged misdeeds, Rackover stole $50,000 in cash and a $30,000 watch from the elder Rackover to pay off a drug debt, prosecutors said at a pre-trial hearing in the case. According to the New York Post.
The man accused in a deadly stabbing in an Upper East Side apartment was found guilty of all charges Friday, following a trial during which the victim's family was in the courtroom watching and crying through some of the testimony.
James Rackover was convicted of second-degree murder, concealing a human corpse and tampering with evidence, and he is the first to be convicted in the murder of 26-year-old Joey Comunale.
Rackover and Lawrence Dilione were accused of killing the Hofstra graduate in 2016, before burying him in a shallow grave in New Jersey.
Authorities say Comunale attended a party at Rackover's apartment on November 13, where police said he was stabbed 15 times in the chest during an argument.
Rackover and Dilione allegedly attempted to dismember Comunale and then threw his body out a window.
His father reported him missing the next day, and his body was found in a wooded area down the Jersey Shore in Oceanport two days later.
"I want to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, who we supported 100 percent from the very first day," said dad Patrick Comunale, as he and his wife fought back tears outside court. "I couldn't be more proud of the NYPD and what they did. I couldn't be more happy for...all of Joey's friends and everybody else who supported us over the last two years."
As testimony got underway, authorities revealed pictures of the shallow grave. Several of Comunale's relatives, including his parents, sobbed through the testimony given by investigators with the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office, each picture revealing more of the body.
Rackover's defense attorney said in his opening statement that it was not his client but Dilone who was responsible for the murder. But prosecutors said Rackover showed a "monstrous indifference for human life."
Witnesses described a hard-partying night that included alcohol and cocaine. The most serious charge is second-degree murder, which means Rackover would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Rackover is the surrogate son of celebrity jeweler Jeffrey Rackover, whose clients include Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Lopez.
Dilone will be tried early next year. A third man is also charged with helping in the cleanup effort but not the actual killing.
James Rackover was convicted of second-degree murder, concealing a human corpse and tampering with evidence, and he is the first to be convicted in the murder of 26-year-old Joey Comunale.
Rackover and Lawrence Dilione were accused of killing the Hofstra graduate in 2016, before burying him in a shallow grave in New Jersey.
Authorities say Comunale attended a party at Rackover's apartment on November 13, where police said he was stabbed 15 times in the chest during an argument.
Rackover and Dilione allegedly attempted to dismember Comunale and then threw his body out a window.
His father reported him missing the next day, and his body was found in a wooded area down the Jersey Shore in Oceanport two days later.
"I want to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, who we supported 100 percent from the very first day," said dad Patrick Comunale, as he and his wife fought back tears outside court. "I couldn't be more proud of the NYPD and what they did. I couldn't be more happy for...all of Joey's friends and everybody else who supported us over the last two years."
As testimony got underway, authorities revealed pictures of the shallow grave. Several of Comunale's relatives, including his parents, sobbed through the testimony given by investigators with the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office, each picture revealing more of the body.
Rackover's defense attorney said in his opening statement that it was not his client but Dilone who was responsible for the murder. But prosecutors said Rackover showed a "monstrous indifference for human life."
Witnesses described a hard-partying night that included alcohol and cocaine. The most serious charge is second-degree murder, which means Rackover would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Rackover is the surrogate son of celebrity jeweler Jeffrey Rackover, whose clients include Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Lopez.
Dilone will be tried early next year. A third man is also charged with helping in the cleanup effort but not the actual killing.
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| 418 E. 59th St. was rented for James Rackover by Jeffrey, who has been accused of engaging in a drug-fueled “intimate relationship’’ with the younger man. Two murders have been committed there. Its for rent right now! |
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