SLAY DAD'S TEARS
The broken father of a young man barbarically murdered in a posh Manhattan pad after a night of partying wept uncontrollably Thursday as he relived for jurors the day his son vanished.
Pat Comunale, 57, broke into sobs the moment he took the stand as the first witness at the trial of alleged slayer James Rackover.
Asked by Assistant DA Peter Casolaro when he first began to worry about his son, Joseph Comunale, the dad answered, “Sunday [Nov. 13, 2016].”
“Give me a minute,” he said through sobs and then added, “We spoke every day.”
He said he knew something was off when he couldn’t reach Joseph, 26, that day, shortly before they had planned to watch a football game together.
The father later filed a missing-person report, and an NYPD detective took him to the Grand Sutton high rise where they watched surveillance video of Joseph entering the building. It was the last time anyone besides the suspects saw him alive.
The dad did not yet know that Rackover, 27, and pal Larry Dilione, 30 — who will be tried separately — allegedly beat, strangled and stabbed Joseph in the luxury East 59th Street apartment, which was paid for by James’ “surrogate father,” jeweler-tothe-stars Jeffrey Rackover.
Authorities quickly tracked Joseph’s charred and mutilated corpse to a shallow grave in Oceanport, NJ.
After Pat Comunale’s emotional testimony, he sat with his wife, Lisa, in the second row of the courtroom gallery at Manhattan Supreme Court.
The shattered parents chose to endure the disturbing photos of their son’s decomposed body shown to jurors.
The mom and dad openly sobbed as the grisly images showed the young man’s nude corpse in a partial fetal position, his face turned upward, knees drawn toward his chest.
The ADA told jurors in opening statements that Joseph Comunale had headed to the apartment after earlier meeting James Rackover amid an evening of partying, and con- tinued to drink heavily and snort cocaine.
Comunale and Dilione got into a fight, which “appeared to be over the lack of more cocaine,” Casolaro said.
Dilione then beat Comunale unconscious before he and James Rackover decided to stab him to death, the prosecutor said.
“Joseph Comunale was alive and feebly trying to defend himself,” Casolaro told jurors.
The men tried to clean up the gruesome scene, then tossed Comunale’s body out the window of the fourth-floor apartment and put it in the trunk of Jeffrey Rackover’s Mercedes.
Prosecutors described Jeffrey as James’ “wealthy, mid- dle-aged companion” who was trying to “masquerade” as his father, and had leased the car for James.
“For reasons only known to them, they wanted to conceal the true nature of their relationship,” Casolaro said.
Defense lawyer Maurice Sercarz called the murder a tragedy but blamed it on Dilione, who Sercarz said viciously beat Joseph Comunale after the victim was rendered unconscious.
During the attack, Sercarz said, James popped up to Jeffrey’s apartment on the 32nd floor to look for cocaine.
Sercarz suggested that it was Dilione who stabbed Comunale with a folding knife that the partygoers had used to snort cocaine earlier.
James Rackover, said Sercarz, had merely “succumbed to the need to get that body out of the apartment and assisted in that endeavor.”