CUT UP MY POOR SON
Anguished dad tells court of hours before tragic party
Tears ran down devastated dad Patsy Comunale’s face as the loss and pain filled his heart — again.
The father of mutilated murder victim Joey Comunale, in heartbreaking testimony Thursday, recalled the moments when he last saw his son alive — one day before the young man was stabbed, set afire, butchered and buried in a shallow New Jersey grave.
“It would have been at my house,” said the elder Comunale, pausing repeatedly to sob during his Manhattan Supreme Court appearance in the murder trial of James Rackover.
“I knew (Joey) was going out on Saturday,” he continued. “He wasn’t feeling well. He went out anyway.”
Comunale never returned home, with Rackover accused of savagely executing the Connecticut man inside his luxury E. 59th St. apartment after a cocaine-fueled argument, authorities said. The victim’s battered body was stuffed in the trunk of a Mercedes-Benz by Rackover and co-defendant Lawrence Dilione as the Comunale clan looked for the 26-year-old Hofstra graduate.
“As the Comunale family frantically searched for their missing son, the defendant lied to everyone who asked about what had happened to Joseph,” said Assistant District Attorney Peter Casolaro in his opening statement.
Patsy Comunale turned particularly emotional when asked to identify photos of his smiling son with other relatives. The father avoided looking at Rackover, 27, described by Casolaro as a stone-cold killer afflicted with “a monstrous indifference for human life.”
The callous Rackover, dressed in a perfectly tailored three-piece gray suit with a pocket square and soft pink tie, showed no emotion during the father’s testimony. He remained equally stoic as Patsy and wife Lisa fought to retain their composure when ghoulish evidence photos were introduced showing their naked son’s charred, mud-caked body after the remains were dug up in Oceanport, N.J.
Lisa Comunale, with her husband’s arm wrapped around her, wept into her hands while Patsy Comunale quietly fought back tears.
Defense attorney Maurice Sercarz declined to cross-examine Comunale. "I have no questions,” he said. “I only have condolences."
Rackover, the “surrogate son” of celebrity jeweler Jeffrey Rackover, faces life in prison if convicted of murdering Comunale on Nov. 13, 2016, before amateurishly trying to cover up the gruesome killing. Alleged accomplice and former best buddy Lawrence (Larry) Dilione, 30, is set to stand trial for the murder this coming January.
Sercarz steered the jury toward Dilione as the real killer, insisting the knife used to stab Comunale belonged to the co-defendant rather than his client.
“Larry never met a bar fight he could pass up, but this was no ordinary bar fight,” said Sercarz.
Casolaro, speaking to a captivated jury, spun a counter-narrative where both suspects “together mutilated, desecrated and discarded (the) body in a shallow grave.”
The prosecutor described how the two assailants allegedly beat him mercilessly before killing him with a kitchen knife and trying to dismember the body in a bathtub.
“It is James Rackover’s monstrous indifference for human life that has brought us here today,” Casolaro said.
A third man, 30-year-old Max Gemma, was allegedly present in Rackover’s fourthfloor apartment at the time of the slaying and is charged with assisting in the cleanup effort but not in the killing.