[dramatic music]
A beloved son goes missing
after a night out with friends.
I kept calling him and calling him
and calling. No answer.
[line trills]
Not typical, you know, not to hear from him.
♪
We were having a great time.
A ton of friends smiling, laughing.
That is what I remember from that night.
Joey gives me the phone.
That's how we end up getting separated.
It ends in an after-party with strangers.
They were drinking hard.
They said Joey was very out of it.
One of whom has a secret identity
and a dark past.
And it was a surprise to find out this one person,
he wasn't who he was posing to be.
He was somebody completely different.
♪
When I retired as chief detective in 2018,
it gave me a chance to reflect on the thousands of cases
I worked on in my career.
Some you can't get out of your head.
This is one of those, senseless and hard to believe.
♪
A tragic case of a young man
being in the wrong place with the wrong people.
This investigation is special
for the way our detectives use technology
and old-fashioned instincts to pull it all together,
but they didn't do it alone.
In this case, we got a little help
from Joey's friends.
[soft dramatic music]
[sirens blare distantly]
Manhattan's night life is a magnet for people
all over the city and beyond.
Every weekend, young men and women
from Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut
stream in by train, bus, and cars to have fun,
but amidst the throbbing music and bright lights,
there is a darkness where danger lurks.
♪
It's a quiet Sunday afternoon in Stamford, Connecticut,
and Pat Comunale is expecting
his 26 years old son Joey for their weekly family meal.
He had a townhouse
about two or three miles from us.
He always came home for his mother's cooking.
So, yeah, he was a big eater,
so he didn't have to worry about him going too far.
Typical Italian family, we're just close.
We were just very close.
Sunday was big because he helped me
fill out my fantasy football team.
When the meal time passes and Joey doesn't show up,
Pat calls his cell phone.
I kept calling him and calling him
and calling. No answer.
[phone rumbles]
Finally someone picks up, but it isn't Joey.
It's one of his best friends, Stephen Naso.
And he said he had Joey's phone.
They had gone out in the city, and he hadn't heard from him.
♪
So I ran over to Joey's condo, and he wasn't there either.
So we started getting nervous.
♪
I went back to Steve's.
I got his phone because not typical,
you know, not to hear from him.
Joey Comunale's friends
also knew that this was unusual.
♪
Every weekend, no matter what,
Joey went home.
He was working for his father,
and his father was, you know,
showing him the ropes to his business.
He was an inside salesperson selling security equipment.
Always a reliable kid, never in trouble,
just a really good kid.
Every parent, you know, always speaks highly of their kids,
but I think what impressed me
the most was really the amount of friends that he has.
I don't think anybody
ever said a bad word about him,
just an incredible trait to have.
Joey's absence at the Sunday meal
has Pat worried.
He asked Stephen to tell him
what happened the night before.
♪
Stephen says that he and Joey
drove down from Stamford to Manhattan.
They were meeting friends at a night club
in the city's Meatpacking District.
We met up with I'd say about 20 people.
We were all in this section of the night club,
the Gilded Lily,
a very, like, upscale night spot.
We were having a great time,
a ton of friends smiling, laughing.
Like, that is what I remember from that night.
At 4:00 a.m., the club closed,
and Joey and his friends went out into the night.
♪
At that time of night in the Meatpacking District,
it's madness.
There were literally hundreds if not thousands
of people milling about,
and that usually creates a bit of stir.
♪
Everyone's exiting. Joey's on my left.
There's a group of girls to my left.
They're looking over. He's looking over.
Like, some attention is definitely,
you know, sparking.
And then Stephen Naso's girlfriend
walked off to get the car they all came in.
She took Stephen's phone
because she hadn't brought hers.
A few minutes later, she called Joey's phone.
She's having trouble finding the car they came it.
Joey gives me the phone,
and that's when I go to locate them,
so that's how I end up with his phone,
and that's how we end up getting separated.
By the time I actually did get to them,
I get a phone call from Joey from his friend's phone
and said that they're going to an after-party,
and they'll just pick up the phone tomorrow.
I knew that he was with a ton of people,
so I didn't think anything of it.
We went home. I just went to bed.
♪
A few hours later,
Naso woke up to a flurry of calls.
♪
Joey's phone kept going off.
One of them was from Pat Comunale
looking for Joey.
♪
Joey's friend Max Branchinelli
had not gone into the city the night before.
He also woke up Sunday morning to his phone blowing up.
When I picked up and they were like,
"Is Joey with you?"
and I was like, "No, like, he was out
with you guys last night."
That's when I started collecting everybody's calls
all asking me, and I was like, "Oh sh--,
like, something's off here."
♪
And that's when we, like, went into search mode.
[phone chimes]
So the group chat started.
I was just asking basic questions like,
"Who was there? Where were you guys?"
That's where it, like, all started.
That's when I went on Instagram
and started looking at the club that they were at.
I came across this picture,
and I, like, knew one of the guys in it.
He was with these three girls in the picture,
and I just, like, had a hunch.
Like, I know the type of girls that Joey likes,
and I just--I don't know.
I just had a hunch, so I took a screenshot of it,
and I sent it to the group chat,
and I was like, "Are these one of the girls?"
And somebody was like, "Yeah, that's them."
I messaged the kid I know in the picture,
and I started asking him questions.
He gave me the girls' numbers.
So I got in contact with them, and I was like,
"Hey, were you with Joey last night?"
♪
And they were like, "Yeah, we were there."
She told Max that she and her friends
took a taxi with Joey and two other guys
from the club they just met, Larry Dilione and Max Gemma.
They had all been invited
to an after-party in Sutton Place,
a ritzy neighborhood on the East Side of Manhattan.
♪
She said the party went on for a few hours,
and then Joey and Larry walked her and her friends
down to the sidewalk to catch a car.
And they were like, "We left,
"and him and Larry walked us out
and, like, put us in an Uber and then went back inside."
And I was like, "Okay,
can you give me Larry's number?"
She's like, "Sure."
Gave me his number, so I called Larry,
and he picks up and I'm like,
"I'm Joey's friend.
"we're just, like, trying to find him right now.
Do you know where he is?"
And he was like, "Uh"-- he's like, "Honestly"--
he's like, "I have no clue.
I'm pretty sure he went in the Uber with the girls."
He's telling me he's in the Uber.
I was like, "Somebody's lying to me."
♪
Joey's friend Max told Pat everything he found out.
Didn't know if he was in a hospital somewhere.
We didn't know.
[sirens blare]
On Monday morning,
24 hours after Joey was last seen,
Pat drives from Stamford
to Manhattan's 17th precinct stationhouse.
He was anxious.
He explained that he hadn't heard from his son, Joey,
and he came to us to see
if we could assist him in locating him.
I could hear he was a little worried.
He hadn't heard from him. It was very unusual.
Pat tells the detectives
what Joey's friends had uncovered.
He did a very good job with the social media.
They all knew each other.
That's what helped get a lot of the information out
as far as who he was with and where they were going.
They were probably hanging out.
They either passed out drunk or, you know,
maybe they were partying a little too hard.
We'll see which way he went, we'll ease Pat's fears,
and we'll just--we'll find him.
That'll be the best we could do.
We had a missing person case,
and it's something we do every day in New York City.
But as detectives dig into the case,
they realize that Pat's fears may be valid.
Once my guys started looking into this,
they started getting uneasy about it
when they started getting answers back
that weren't matching up to the facts they were getting.
[dramatic music]
Coming up...
I keep on reviewing the video,
and we just started, you know, fast forwarding.
We see Joey and Larry
in the elevator, come out the elevator,
they're walking out of the building.
We see them go out towards the curb.
I just looked at the garbage, and I said, "You know what?
We got to get that garbage in."
Everything stopped.
There was no more touching the bags.
Something happened.
♪
[soft dramatic music]
♪
26 year-old Joey Comunale
has been missing for almost two days.
I had a really bad feeling just 'cause I know him so well,
and he's not the type to, like, go off the map
or, like, anything like that.
♪
I don't think we got too much sleep.
He lived in Stamford, Connecticut,
only five minutes from his parent's home.
We used to go to a lot of sporting events.
you know, that would be our time together.
A lot of Ranger games, Giant games,
Yankee games,
that was pretty much our together time.
You know, for sure, he was my best friend...
But if you spoke to his friends,
they all said the same thing.
One word I would use to describe him
would be magnetic.
For some reason,
you were almost drawn in to him.
Joey was, like, a silent killer,
like, super funny, but, like, shy
if you didn't know him at first.
You know what I mean?
But he was just, like, always down
for whatever, super easygoing, mad fun.
♪
While detectives have started
their investigation, Joey's friends and family
continue to gather any information they can.
So I, with my friends, we spent the whole entire day,
from morning until it got dark
just looking all throughout New York City
thinking that he got injured, maybe he hit his head,
maybe something happened to him.
The timeline, I mean, it's very important
'cause the timeline will actually lead you
to the last location where Joey is.
Joey's friends and family have tracked down the girls
who went with him to the after-party
early Sunday morning.
Detectives call one of them
and press her for the details about the night.
She tells detectives what she told Max,
that she and her friends met Joey
for the first time outside the Gilded Lily
and that they all went with Larry Dilione
and Max Gemma to an after-party
in Sutton Place.
That girl was able to tell us, you know,
the actually address and apartment number
that they went to and the facts--
what happened in the party.
The Grand Sutton
is a luxurious apartment building.
It's located on 59th street.
Kid from Connecticut's
out with other people from Sutton Place.
You know, it's an affluent neighborhood.
You're not expecting anything to happen
at Sutton Place, you know?
It's one of the nicest parts of New York City.
They arrived to the Grand Sutton
over on East 59th street, and they went upstairs.
They went inside, and James was there--
James Rackover, the owner of the apartment.
You know, he was laid out on the couch without a shirt,
you know, and jeans, just nonchalant,
and he introduced himself. Everything was fine.
They were hanging out.
you know, they were drinking a little bit.
While they were there,
they did partake in a couple of controlled substances.
New York City, it's a city that doesn't sleep.
It is going 24 hours a day.
These kids, they go clubbing.
The clubs close 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.
They're looking for the next party.
So it's not out of the ordinary at all
for kids to just keep on going all night.
They were drinking hard. Guys were pretty intox.
You know, the girls were interested in partying.
They said Joey was very out of it.
♪
I'm thinking he could have, you know, left that apartment,
got lost in the building somewhere
and just, you know, went sleeping it off.
♪
The biggest thing of the night
was how they were not really paying attention to the girls.
Larry and James were, like, just talking about
who can do more push-ups than the other,
and that's when they say, "You know what?
It was getting a little daylight out."
They were getting a little bored,
so she had just said to Larry,
"You know what? It's getting a little late."
So he got them the Uber.
And Larry, Joey, and the three girls
went downstairs, and that was it,
and they went on their way.
♪
One of the young women tells detectives
the same thing she told Joey's friends.
She saw Joey go back into the building
with Larry Dilione.
So I, um--I called Larry,
and I explained to him that I was looking for Joey
who was at a party with him at the Grand Sutton
and if he would happen to know his whereabouts.
And he's says, "No, I don't know where he is
"because I really didn't know him.
"We were hanging out.
We walked these girls downstairs to a taxi."
He goes, "I don't remember if he left with the girls
"or he went to go buy cigarettes,
"but then I went back inside
and that was it, and I went to sleep."
♪
The girls also tell detectives
about the other person who was at the party
when they left, Max Gemma.
I interviewed Max Gemma over the phone
and his statement to me was just,
"I met Joey outside of Gilded Lily.
"Went to the party. I was drunk.
"I passed out on the couch. I was tired.
"When I woke up, there was nobody there.
It was dark. I left, and that was it."
Detectives recall how drunk Joey appeared
according to the girls.
We're thinking worst-case scenario,
maybe something happened
where it was an accidental overdose
or alcohol poisoning. That's what I'm thinking.
You knew something happened. I want to know what happened.
We did a normal check.
You know, we called the morgue,
we ran Joey's name through the NYPD system
to see if maybe he was arrested.
You know, we called hospitals.
Finding nothing on Joey in the system,
detectives head over to the Grand Sutton
to review the building's security camera footage.
As detectives methodically scan
through the video from the weekend,
a young man walks into the lobby.
One of the building's employees
identifies him as James Rackover.
It was his apartment that hosted the after-party
early Sunday morning.
He walks in, smiles at me,
and tells me, "Good luck getting the video,"
and keeps walking past the desk.
♪
And I'm like, "What?"
I look at my partner, Detective Chen,
and I'm like, "That was weird."
Maybe he feels entitled
and, you know, he thinks it's a game
and is not taking the idea
that there's a parent who's looking for their kid.
He just doesn't care.
♪
So I keep on reviewing the video,
and we just started, you know, fast forwarding
to try to find them coming down to walk out with the girls.
And sure enough, I came to a point
where they're walking out of the building,
we see them go out towards the curb.
A few moments pass, and we see Joey and Larry
walking back into the building.
And that's when, kind of, the bells started going off.
This contrasts with what Larry told us.
We were hoping for the best,
but that's a game changer right there.
He's lying to us.
As Detective Castro continues to review
the security footage,
his boss, Lieutenant Moroney, has a moment of intuition.
It's just a feeling I had.
I just knew there was something wrong here,
and I just looked at the garbage, and I said,
"You know what? We got to get that garbage in."
You'd be surprised how many times
we've solved cases with clues found in trash bags.
We were gonna go through it bag by bag,
and he had opened up a bag,
and in this bag was a plastic case comforter,
and there was a-- the tag was still on it
where it was shipped to, and it said "James Rackover,
- Apartment 4 - C, New York, New York."
♪
And in that same plastic bag
there were towels that were soaked
with what appeared to be blood.
♪
So now we were like, "All right,
something happened."
As detectives dig further into the bag,
they spot something that makes them pause.
They recovered Joseph Comunale's ID...
and credit card.
It's sort of jackpot, but it also leads to,
"Where is Joseph Comunale?"
There was no more touching the bags.
There was no more going through the garbage bag.
They left it there, and crime scene was called.
♪
[soft dramatic music]
♪
In the disappearance of Joey Comunale,
New York City detectives have descended
on the Grand Sutton where Joey was last seen.
I don't think we got too much sleep,
but by this time we knew something was really bad.
And it's there they find Joey's ID and credit card
in a trash bag outside of the building.
♪
So now I want bloodhounds. I want crime scene.
I want more detectives.
I want the homicide squad there.
I want everybody moving forward in the same direction.
♪
New York City's legendary CSI arrives to investigate.
If you discard garbage, it's garbage.
You don't need a search warrant to retrieve that garbage.
Something happened. Someone's hurt.
That's what I was thinking. Somebody got hurt.
Joey's probably injured somewhere.
Well, where's Joey?
I mean, we couldn't figure out where he was.
I mean, I've been looking at this video,
and I don't see him leaving the building.
What's going on? Now we really wanted answers.
Now, it's almost like a time crunch.
We need to find him.
They asked me if I could get some of his clothes
so that they could give it to the rescue dog
so they could try and put a trace on him.
Maybe he hit his head on something,
and he's injured, and he can't get help,
and he's in a place where no one can see him.
We bring in a K-9 unit
to look for Joey in the building.
The bloodhound places his nose down on the ground,
and he's smelling, and he's smelling.
He's going left, he's going right,
and then he comes to the front of the building
and he immediately makes a left
and starts heading into the building.
♪
He goes into the vestibule. He makes a right.
He goes, and he goes right to the foot of the elevator,
and he stops.
So we take the elevator up to the fourth floor.
He starts smelling, and he gives an active alert
right to apartment 4C.
So then that's when we knew the last live scent we had
was that Joey was in that apartment.
- - 4 - C is James Rackover's apartment,
the site of Saturday night's after-party.
James Rackover has become
the number one person of interest.
So we run his name through the system.
You know, trying to find out what information
do we have on him? Who is he?
Does he have a criminal record in the NYPD?
We found out that he was driving on a suspended license.
Our squad heads back to Rackover's apartment
armed with a search warrant and an arrest warrant
for James Rackover.
I headed upstairs, knocked on the door.
I apprehended him, and then short time thereafter,
a search warrant was conducted of the apartment.
♪
So when crime scene responded to the location,
there was a strong smell of bleach chemicals
in the atmosphere.
So that would be a red flag in your mind that would go,
"Maybe there was a cleanup here."
♪
CSI begins a thorough sweep of the apartment
using luminol, a blood detecting chemical.
They sprayed luminol inside of the bathroom,
and when they did,
the fluorescence inside that bathroom was horrible.
♪
You could tell that inside of this bathroom,
that there was a horrendous crime
that happened,
and someone was bleeding a lot.
There was blood in the tub,
on the sink, on the toilet...
on the shower curtain as well.
Some severe, horrendous crime happened.
While James is in custody,
detectives question the other two young men
at the after-party, Larry Dilione and Max Gemma.
They kept on tripping themselves up.
Everything they said to us didn't match with the video,
you know, the girls' statements.
And then detectives discover a new surveillance video
with a clear view of James Rackover's car
late Sunday night,
the day after Joey was last seen.
In the video, you'll see James come out.
You see him load some stuff in the trunk.
And then Larry comes down.
They're there pacing back and forth.
There's a large object.
I'm like, "That might be, could be."
But I wasn't positive because we didn't want to speculate.
It was just, "this might have been something
that was used to move Joey."
Now we got to find out what happened to that car.
Luckily, the New York City Police Department
has excellent resources.
You really can't come into Manhattan
or leave Manhattan without your vehicle
being captured on a plate reader.
So we get the plate of the car at that point,
and we plot it going down the FDR.
We see it go through the Holland Tunnel,
and we see it go into New Jersey...
Where, unfortunately, it disappears.
The system was down, or they weren't able
to locate it anymore.
It was deflating once you're like, "Oh,
now where did he go?"
You know, you're trying to figure that out, and it was.
It was definitely a little difficult.
Detectives then take a closer look
at James Rackover.
We just wanted some information
to find out who he was.
And they discover he is hiding a secret.
He had another name and alias down in Florida.
He had changed it when he came up here.
It was a surprise to find out this one person
who was living the high life, when in reality,
he wasn't who he was posing to be.
He was somebody completely different.
♪
Coming up...
When you see his past and you see what's happened.
He had cut off an ankle bracelet in Florida,
and he had taken off to New York.
Emergency service had placed large spotlights up.
They told us, "We have something."
♪
[soft dramatic music]
♪
Two days into the investigation
of the disappearance of Joey Comunale...
Detectives discover that someone is not
who they say they are.
Using the FBI's National Crime Information Center,
we looked into James Rackover. We saw his history.
We saw that his real name was James Beaudoin
and that he was from Florida.
We found a substantial arrest record--
robberies and burglaries-- all done in his early 20s
and maybe even in his teens down in Florida.
♪
Less than three years before, the former James Beaudoin
had been taken under the wing
of a successful jeweler named Jeffrey Rackover.
The elder Rackover boasted clients
such as Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Lopez.
James was given a car,
an apartment, expensive clothes,
and most importantly, Rackover's name.
He had met Jeffrey Rackover at a gym.
You know, they became friendly, and, I guess,
Jeffrey wanted to help him out and gave him his name,
you know, so that, you know, change his life.
But Rackover, in custody
under suspended license, isn't answering any questions,
and Joey's trail has disappeared
into New Jersey.
They took him somewhere, and it's,
"Shhh, don't say nothing.
Keep it hush. It's going to be okay."
Now it's all adrenalin. Now you need to find him.
Where is he, and how can we figure this out?
♪
Larry Dilione is questioned about the video that shows him
and Rackover loading a suspicious object
into Rackover's car.
♪
Detectives know he's hiding something
about where Joey is.
We're looking for Joey, and, I mean, you know,
something occurred, and just think of the family.
Think of the family if it was your own family.
Larry, he says, "Listen, I'll let you know where he is,
"but I'm not gonna tell you anything
as to what happened to him."
And he gave us the location
in Ocean Point, New Jersey by his parent's home.
He gave the address, and we headed out
to New Jersey immediately with the hopes
that we were gonna find Joey, you know, injured.
And at that moment, it was just, you know,
keeping our fingers crossed
that, you know, we're going to find him alive.
♪
Emergency service had placed large spotlights up.
It was wet. It was damp.
And, uh, you know, I'm out with county,
had their K-9 dogs.
They told us, "We have something."
They began moving some of the dirt.
It wasn't too far down that the first thing
we were able to see was Joey's hand sticking out.
♪
It was just, "All right, we found him,
you know, now we got to tell the family."
♪
We drove from the location
straight to Connecticut to Mr. Comunale's home.
That was, I have to say,
one of the hardest things I've ever done.
♪
I heard a car. We live on a dead-end street.
[melancholic music]
I was up, so...
♪
And that was--that was it. Wednesday morning.
Detective Castro and his boss
and Detective Chen, the three of them came.
You know there's no good outcome coming.
I knew that.
It was difficult to knock on that door
at 5:00 in the morning and see those lights turn on
and Pat coming down that staircase
and for him to open that door and, you know,
he greets you, but he's knows what's coming.
And you know, we had to notify him
that we had found Joey in a shallow grave.
So it was tough,
definitely not easy, not easy at all.
♪
You can hear someone scream in a haunted house,
but when you notify someone that their loved one
has been found dead,
there's a scream that comes from the bottom of the stomach
that will never leave you, never ever.
I don't care how seasoned you are,
that pain and that yell, it never leaves you.
It stays with you.
Every parent's worst nightmare, yep.
I dropped to my knees, and I shut down.
I was just...
In, like, agony.
We all went to Joey's father's house
and it was just--like, didn't make any sense to us.
So it definitely took some time for it
to settle in and be real.
[soft dramatic music]
Joey's body is now in the hands
of the medical examiner.
The autopsy will be critical for us to learn how Joey died.
I remember looking at it, and I called Detective Castro.
I was like, "Wow." Like, I was just shocked.
♪
[soft dramatic music]
♪
After three days
of around-the-clock investigation,
detectives have finally found Joey Comunale
in a shallow grave in rural New Jersey.
♪
But finding Joey's body was only the first step.
♪
An autopsy, at this point, becomes very important.
We need to know how this person died
and if there's any type of DNA
can be recovered from off of this individual.
What the autopsy finds is worse
than anyone had feared.
The autopsy tells the picture of what happened...
and it lays it out.
He was stabbed 14 times. He has contusions to his head.
He has a knife wound to his arm
like they tried to dismember him at some point,
and it shows the desperation that they had
because they were trying to get rid of this body.
♪
So they was trying to cut him up
after he was already dead
and try to move him someplace else.
And the autopsy also revealed clues
as to how Joey's killers got the body
out of the building without being seen.
There was, you know, broken bones in his body.
It was because, after he was killed,
they had thrown him out the window in a black bag.
And it made sense that where that dolly went,
where James had walked it back,
it was right underneath his window--
his bedroom window,
and then he had rolled it over to the back of his vehicle.
♪
A lot of bad individuals out there.
♪
I wouldn't treat an animal--
I couldn't even imagine trying to--you know,
what goes through somebody's head.
It just seemed like a nightmare.
It was like, "We need to wake up from this nightmare
that we're having right now. Like, this can't be real."
♪
I think the NYPD, sometimes it gets a bad rap.
I don't know what you would do without 'em.
That's just the way I feel,
and I think until you're a victim of crime,
you don't really understand what an incredible job they do.
♪
The NYPD is a very large department
with a lot of units, right?
And sometimes it feels like things can get lost
and units don't speak to each other or whatnot.
I mean, we're talking about homicide unit,
my detective squad, the 17th guys,
I mean, they all came out, and it was working tirelessly.
It was amazing the way everything came together,
and without all those units and that assistance,
we never would have got the outcome that we got.
In my 15 years, I've never seen it.
You know, it was very impressive
the way everything came together.
♪
We knew we had the right people.
it's just a matter of tying it all up.
Larry Dilione told detectives
where to find the body.
Larry lied about seeing Joey leave the building,
and Larry and James Rackover we're caught on camera
loading a suspicious object into Rackover's car.
Rackover is in custody on the suspended license,
but he's not talking,
so detectives go back to Larry
who has been held since he told detectives
where to find Joey's body.
We had caught him out on a lie.
With the evidence against him mounting,
Larry tells his version of what happened that night.
♪
Larry, he says they were heavy drinking.
They were doing drugs.
Drugs and alcohol were key.
According to Larry, the after-party had devolved
into three drunk young men-- Joey, James, and Larry--
arguing over who had provided what goodies to the party.
A fight broke out.
♪
Larry says, "Then I punched Joey.
When I laid him out, he was out cold."
♪
And then he said that, you know,
Rackover just flipped and lost it.
Larry claims that Rackover stabbed Joey over and over
until he was sure he was dead.
♪
For a stranger to kill another stranger
just, you know, out of the blue,
not knowing anybody, just so senseless.
According to Larry,
Max Gemma had been asleep on the couch,
but the violence woke him up.
Larry just told Gemma, you know, "Get dressed
and get the hell out of here." And he left.
And as far as I'm concerned,
I think Max Gemma was kind of lucky
that Larry had gotten him out of there
because Rackover started questioning Max Gemma.
Like, "I don't know this guy. Can we trust him?"
God only knows what would have happened to Max Gemma
if he had stayed in that apartment with Rackover.
♪
After loading Joey's body into the car,
Larry and James drove to the New Jersey woods,
dug a shallow grave, and dumped him in.
♪
Knowing everything that happened,
unfortunately my son was at the wrong place
at the wrong time.
James Rackover and Larry Dilione
are both charged with second-degree murder.
The other person in the room, Max Gemma, is arrested
and charged with hindering a prosecution.
Authorities believe he saw Joey's body
before he left the apartment Sunday morning,
and he told police that he didn't.
We had statements from Larry,
and we had a tremendous amount of physical evidence
to go forward.
This, in my mind, was an open-and-shut case,
as much evidence that they had and put everything together.
But there's no guarantee of a conviction,
and after opening up to detectives,
Larry Dilione had stopped talking
and James Rackover never even started.
♪
Max Gemma still claims he was asleep
when everything happened,
and they are the only people alive
who really know what happened in apartment 4C.
♪
Who actually did the stabbing? Who actually killed Joey?
And then right before the first
of three individual trials
for Rackover, Dilione, and Gemma,
a surprise witness emerges.
Having somebody corroborate another person's story is--
it's key.
♪
[soft dramatic music]
♪
Almost two years
after the brutal killing of Joey Comunale,
James Rackover's trial is ready to begin.
The physical evidence is overwhelming...
but Dilione's statement to detectives
is ruled inadmissible.
It's up to the prosecutors to convince the jury
that Rackover was the primary culprit.
♪
But right before Rackover's trial,
a surprise witness emerges.
Louis Ruggiero, the son of a New York City newscaster,
Ruggiero testified that he ran into Rackover
at the gym the day after Joey's murder.
And James Rackover he says,
"I got to tell you something."
And basically says, you know, he killed a guy.
He just murdered a guy.
Ruggiero thought that, you know,
James was just trying to impress him.
At that point, Ruggiero, you know, leaves,
and he's walking by the building
and he sees, you know, all the crime scene,
and he says, "Oh, he's telling the truth."
♪
But Joey's family and friends
are worried it won't be enough.
You know, look, when you go to trial,
anything's possible.
I say, it's overwhelming evidence
that all three of them should have been charged with murder.
That was very frustrating.
And then Rackover,
who has plead the fifth since his arrest
and has no plans to testify in his own defense,
is caught on tape bragging to a friend
about killing Joey.
Yeah, dude.
The more evidence the better, there's no question about it.
And that recording
just might make a difference to a jury.
Rackover's lawyers try to throw
the full blame back on Larry Dilione.
They claim that a dented signet ring
belonging to Larry that was found
at the scene of the crime
proves that Larry struck the fatal blow.
The truth about what happened - in apartment 4 - C
may never be known.
When everything was over, and I sat down
and thought about it, I was like,
"Wow, what did I just go through?"
I believe these kids had nothing in their past.
Rackover was the only person who had, you know,
that dark past, and you know, he was a dark person.
♪
After all the work that we did,
it all comes down to a jury, and all you can do
is wait and hope for the best.
♪
On November 2nd, 2018,
the jury found James Rackover guilty
of second-degree murder.
He was sentenced to 28 years to life in prison.
♪
Two months later, Larry Dilione plead guilty
to manslaughter, and received a sentence
of 23 years.
Max Gemma received a six month sentence
for hindering the prosecution.
Am I satisfied?
They have to live with themselves.
Their parents have to live with themselves.
And you know what?
So there's some satisfaction knowing that they're
probably just as miserable as I am,
that they've got to live with themselves.
That's all I can say.
I mean, we still don't have every answer to every question,
in my opinion, at all. It doesn't make sense.
There's no motive, no reason.
I feel like everybody who knows him remembers him
in a good light
'cause he was just, like, the best,
and there's not a bad thing you could say about him.
Of all the things that happened,
the chance that he would meet these guys outside the bar--
the series of events that had to happen for this to happen,
you got a better chance of hitting the lottery.
I actually was the one who said that just seven
to eight million people in New York City,
they're on the side of the street,
and they happen to cross paths with us.
What are the odds?
It's definitely really affected me.
Joey used to be my guy, you know what I mean?
I'd speak to him.
We would do the same things together
and like, you know, even just, like,
you hear a song, and I used to be like,
"Oh, this is"-- like, I'd send it to him.
I can't send it to him anymore, you know what I mean?
So it still affects me day-to-day, 100%.
It's just every day.
Not a day goes by--
I guess when we meet again...
[melancholic music]
♪
That's when we'll have our chat.