Kept Boy of Famous Jeweler Got The Maximum for Punching and Dismembering Body of a Young Man From Conn.
Follow up
You come from nothing but because of your looks you get a rich man on your work out at the gym to pay attention to you and to make you his son. He gives you everything most young guys can dream of but will never get. But He brows it away through drugs and killing an innocent man visiting NYC which made the deadly mistakento go for this guys' looks and his boy friend's and follow them after drinking and drugging all night to the luxury condo. Comes morning and the time in which Phychopaths awake without anything to control them becausse the booze and drugs are spent. Someone's head was the way he and his boyfriend would get their rocks off on that early morning before even knowing wether they were dreaming or just having a good time.
He will now have the other inmates make friends with him, most of his life if not all. Even if he gets out he will be an old man with no more rich guys paying attention to him, that is if he gets out after 28 years which is doubful when a parole board see the the kind of murder he commited.
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| Center is the victim Joseph Comunale, a 26-year-old Hofstra graduate from Stamford, Conn. Grisly murdered on a day visit to Manhattan. On the right side and left are accused murderers and lovers. Now one convicted of killing Joseph and getting max. |
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| James Rackover in Manhattan Criminal Court |
Pat Comunale stood at the podium before a packed courtroom across from James Rackover, the man convicted last month in the brutal murder of his son. He dabbed his eyes with a tissue and choked out his words.
“We wake up everyday with the horror of what happened to him,” he said. “There are no more holidays, no more birthdays, just days that go by.”
Mr. Comunale recounted his son Joseph’s final moments: He was beaten and stabbed to death after a night of partying in Manhattan. His body was pushed from the fourth floor window of an East Side apartment building. Later it was burned and buried in a shallow grave on the Jersey Shore. For that, Mr. Comunale told a judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rackover deserved the maximum sentence permitted under the law.
Justice James Burke agreed. He sentenced Mr. Rackover, 27, on Wednesday to a minimum of 28 and 2/3 years in prison and a maximum of life for the murder of Mr. Comunale and related charges.
“There remains no truly understandable reason that Joey Comunale is dead today,” Judge Burke said. “In a normal course of events, people drink and do drugs and party all night long all the time, and without being savagely murdered.”
Prosecutors maintain that Mr. Rackover did not act alone. They say the evidence shows another man, Lawrence Dilione, 30, beat Mr. Comunale, 26, until he was unconscious, and then he and Mr. Rackover stabbed him 15 times. A third man, Max Gemma, is accused of hindering prosecution and tampering with evidence. Mr. Gemma and Mr. Dilione are scheduled to be tried next year.
Two years ago, Mr. Comunale traveled from his home in Stamford, Conn., to Manhattan for a night out with friends. He met Mr. Dilione and Mr. Gemma at a nightclub.
Their night of partying continued at Mr. Rackover’s apartment at the luxurious Grand Sutton on East 59th Street, where a group of men and women drank alcohol and snorted cocaine.
What exactly happened inside of his apartment is a bit of a mystery. Prosecutors did not have any eyewitnesses who could describe what transpired before Mr. Comunale was murdered early on Nov. 13, 2016.
But the police found evidence that prosecutors said showed Mr. Rackover and Mr. Dilione had stabbed Mr. Comunale and then tried to clean up the scene. Mr. Comunale’s blood, for example, was found throughout the apartment and his wallet was in the building. The police also tracked Mr. Rackover’s car with cellphone data and license plate readers to a wooded area in Oceanport, N.J., where the body was buried.
During the trial, Mr. Rackover’s lawyer, Maurice H. Sercarz, argued that it was not his client who killed Mr. Comunale, but rather Mr. Dilione. He said Mr. Rackover was drunk and high at the time and only helped in moving Mr. Comunale’s body out of his apartment because he worried his rich lifestyle was in jeopardy.
Before his client was sentenced, Mr. Sercarz asked the judge for leniency, pointing to Mr. Rackover’s troubled childhood in Florida, where he was born to a young mother and an abusive father. “He left Florida to put behind him his childhood and the hardship he suffered,” Mr. Sercarz told the judge. He added that his client has been “hungry for family” and that was why he helped Mr. Dilione get rid of Mr. Comunale’s body.
Mr. Rackover, who was born James Beaudoin II, changed his last name in 2015 to that of his intimate partner, Jeffrey Rackover, who legally adopted him, court papers said. Jeffrey Rackover is a jeweler whose clients include Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Lopez and first lady Melania Trump.
The lead prosecutor, Antoinette Carter, described Mr. Rackover as a liar who had stolen from Jeffrey Rackover to pay off drug debts. Ms. Carter noted that Mr. Rackover had done a stint in prison for gun possession, but it “did nothing to rehabilitate him.”
“He lived a life of unmerited privilege, the likes of which most New Yorkers can only dream of,” Ms. Carter said. “He chose to throw all of that away.”
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