What Happened in Apartment 4C: Murder, Cover-Up, and Convictions

Joey Comunale was murdered inside Apartment 4C at the Grand Sutton, a luxury high-rise at 418 East 59th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in the early morning hours of November 13, 2016. The 26-year-old from Stamford, Connecticut, was beaten and stabbed 15 times after an after-party in the fourth-floor unit, and the two men responsible — James Rackover, the surrogate son of a celebrity jeweler, and Lawrence “Larry” Dilione — dismembered attempts and all, drove his body to New Jersey, burned it, and buried it in a shallow grave behind a florist shop. Both are now serving long prison sentences.

Who Joey Comunale Was

Comunale grew up in Stamford, graduated from Westhill High School, and earned a degree in legal studies in business from Hofstra University.¹ He played hockey, was active in his community, and worked as a sales associate at his father’s former security firm. Friends and family described him as social and unusually close to his father, Pat Comunale.²

How Joey Ended Up in Apartment 4C

On the night of Saturday, November 12, 2016, Comunale went out in Manhattan and ended up at the Gilded Lily, a nightclub in the Meatpacking District. There he met Dilione and a man named Max Gemma, who invited him to an after-party at a friend’s apartment. That friend was James Rackover, and the apartment was 4C at the Grand Sutton, paid for by his surrogate father, the celebrity jeweler Jeffrey Rackover.³⁴

Surveillance footage from the club captured Comunale leaving around 3:30 a.m. Sunday with Dilione, Rackover, and several women. The group went to 4C. After the women left in an Uber before dawn, building cameras recorded Comunale and Dilione returning to the apartment at approximately 6:44 a.m.⁵ Comunale was never seen leaving the building again.

What Happened Inside the Apartment

According to Dilione’s account to police, an argument broke out, and Dilione knocked Comunale to the ground. Rackover then stabbed him repeatedly with a knife.² Rackover told a different story: that he had gone upstairs to Jeffrey Rackover’s 32nd-floor unit looking for cocaine and only became involved in what came after.⁶ Prosecutors argued both men acted together.

An autopsy determined Comunale had been stabbed 15 times in the chest, with nine wounds on the right side and six on the left, and ruled the death a homicide.⁷ Prosecutors said medical evidence indicated he had been beaten by two people and stabbed from both sides.⁸

The Cover-Up

Rackover and Dilione tried to dismember the body in the bathtub with a kitchen knife, then scrubbed the apartment with bleach.⁹ They wrapped Comunale in plastic and a comforter, threw the body from the fourth-floor window to the sidewalk, and loaded it into the trunk of a 2015 Mercedes-Benz registered to Jeffrey Rackover. They drove roughly 60 miles to Oceanport, New Jersey, where, behind a florist shop on Monmouth Boulevard, they doused the body with gasoline, set it on fire, and buried it in a shallow grave.¹⁰

License plate readers later tracked the Mercedes leaving the Upper East Side through the Holland Tunnel at 9:45 p.m. Sunday, November 13, and returning at 3:00 a.m. Monday.¹¹

How the Crime Was Uncovered

When Pat Comunale could not reach his son on Sunday, he grew alarmed. He tracked down Dilione’s number and called him directly. Dilione claimed Joey had left the party. Pat did not believe him and contacted the NYPD’s 17th Precinct.⁵

Joey’s friends turned to social media. One used Instagram’s location-tagging feature at the Gilded Lily to pull up photos from that night and identified a woman who had gone to the after-party. Others found Dilione’s Facebook profile and cross-checked the conflicting stories partygoers were telling.²

Police pulled the Grand Sutton’s surveillance footage, which confirmed Comunale had gone back inside with Dilione and never come out. At Pat’s urging, investigators held the building’s garbage before it could be collected. Inside they found a plastic bag with Joey’s bloody clothing, his driver’s license, and a gold chain his father had given him.² A cadaver dog alerted to human remains in both the Mercedes trunk and inside Apartment 4C, where detectives found blood spatter throughout the unit.¹¹

On Tuesday, November 15, Dilione confessed. “We took Joey’s body to Oceanport, New Jersey and we buried it in a vacant lot,” he told detectives, and drew a map of the burial site. The next day, November 16, investigators recovered the burned remains behind the florist shop.⁷

Who James Rackover Was

James Rackover was born James Beaudoin II in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in March 1991. By his early twenties he had been arrested at least eight times in Florida on charges including burglary, strong-armed robbery, drug possession, trespassing, and cutting off an ankle monitor. He was convicted of felony burglary in 2007, violated probation, and served about a year and a half in a Florida prison before his release in July 2013.¹²

After that release, Beaudoin met Jeffrey Rackover, a prominent Manhattan diamond dealer whose clients have included Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, and Jennifer Lopez.⁴ Jeffrey provided the younger man with an apartment, cars, a job, trips to the Hamptons, and what a later civil lawsuit described as a $10,000 monthly allowance, and introduced him as his son. In March 2015, Beaudoin legally changed his name to James Rackover with Jeffrey’s consent.¹³ Whether the two were biologically related became a point of confusion: Jeffrey at one point claimed a DNA test confirmed a familial link, while James’s own lawyer later said they were not related and had simply met at an Upper East Side sports club.¹⁴

Convictions and Sentences

James Rackover

Rackover was arrested on November 15, 2016, and indicted on second-degree murder, first-degree hindering prosecution, and two counts of concealment of a human corpse. His trial took place in Manhattan Supreme Court before Justice James Burke.¹³

Pat Comunale testified first, recounting his search for his son and the moment he identified Joey on the Grand Sutton’s surveillance footage.¹⁵ NYPD Detective Daniel Smith testified about finding blood on the floor, walls, couch, coffee table, and even a Dallas Cowboys football inside the apartment, along with latent blood detected by reagent testing in the bathroom.¹⁶ Rackover’s attorney, Maurice Sercarz, argued that Dilione bore primary responsibility for the killing and that Rackover had been upstairs at the time; prosecutors countered that the wound pattern was inconsistent with a single attacker.

In November 2018, the jury found Rackover guilty on all counts. On December 5, 2018, Justice Burke imposed 25 years to life for the murder, plus consecutive terms of two and a third to seven years for hindering prosecution and additional time for concealment of a corpse, an aggregate sentence of 28 and two-thirds years to life. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. called it “the maximum permitted by state law.”¹³⁸

Rackover has been held at Attica Correctional Facility since April 2019.³ On June 5, 2025, the Appellate Division, First Department, unanimously affirmed both his conviction and the denial of his motion to vacate the judgment, rejecting a claim that his trial counsel had been ineffective for not requesting a jury charge on first-degree manslaughter.¹⁷

Lawrence Dilione

Dilione was tried separately. On January 8, 2019, in a surprise move, he pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree manslaughter.¹⁸ On February 6, 2019, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison.¹⁹

Max Gemma

Gemma was at the apartment that night but was not charged with the killing. He was accused of disposing of clothing he had worn that evening and failing to report what had happened.²⁰ He pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution and tampering with physical evidence, and on April 12, 2019, he was sentenced to six months in jail and apologized to the Comunale family.²¹

The Civil Cases and Jeffrey Rackover

Jeffrey Rackover was never criminally charged in connection with Joey Comunale’s death.¹⁴ He did face civil litigation. In 2017, Pat Comunale sued him, alleging he assisted the cover-up by providing cleaning supplies and allowing James to use the Mercedes to transport the body. The suit sought damages for wrongful death, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and violation of the right of sepulcher, the family’s right to claim their loved one’s remains.⁴ After the murder, Jeffrey stopped paying rent on Apartment 4C and distanced himself from James.

Pat Comunale also sued Rackover, Dilione, and Gemma jointly in New York County Supreme Court in November 2017, alleging conscious pain and suffering, wrongful death, violation of the right of sepulcher, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Gemma was dismissed from that action after filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in August 2019 and receiving a discharge.²² A separate federal suit against the parents of Gemma and Dilione was dismissed in February 2020, with the court finding it lacked personal jurisdiction and that New Jersey law does not recognize the common-law right of sepulcher.²³ In November 2019, Pat Comunale filed a further suit against the Grand Sutton building, its owner, the unit owner, and two real estate companies, alleging negligence in subleasing the apartment to someone with Rackover’s criminal history and failure by staff to act on suspicious behavior that morning.²⁴

1
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2
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3
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4
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12
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15
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16
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17
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18
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19
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20
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21
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22
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23
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24
New York Post. Dad of Jeweler to the Stars Murder Victim Sues Luxury Apartment Building