Shivangi Sinha
Joey Comunale had decided to have a night out with his friends in Manhattan, New York, in November 2016. He had gone with a few friends but lost contact with them when he decided to attend an after-party later that night. However, when he did not show up for his family lunch the next day, and no friends could reach him, they knew something was wrong. In the days that followed, people used surveillance footage and tips to get more information and eventually found Joey’s remains. The episode, titled ‘Party Monster,’ of Netflix’s ‘Homicide: New York’ season 2, looks at the various aspects of the case and the police work that went into solving it.
Joey Comunale Went Missing After Going on a Night-Out With His Friend
Joseph “Joey” Comunale was born on March 9, 1990, to Patsy and Lisa Comunale. He grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, with his sister, Alexa Comunale, and was a young, thriving and energetic young man with big dreams for his future. He graduated from Westhill High School and had taken a keen interest in sports. He played for the State Championship baseball team and also enjoyed hockey from time to time. His passion for sports is what he shared with his father, and they would go to games, sit together to watch important ones, and bond over it.
Joey eventually enrolled at Hofstra University to study Legal Studies in Business and began a new phase of his life. Even at college, Joey kept playing hockey and basketball. He was a member of the DSP Fraternity and made many friends in the community who all loved him. After his studies, he found work as a sales associate at Tri-Ed Distribution Inc., a security products distributor. He was excited about life and wanted to make the most of it. On the evening of November 12, 2016, Joey went for a night out with his friend Stephen Naso in Manhattan, New York.
The two of them had planned to be together, but a little after midnight, Joey told him that he was going to an after-party. The next day, he was supposed to arrive for a meal with his family, but he never arrived. His father contacted his friends, but no one could reach him, and on November 14, he was reported missing. On November 16, the police found his remains in a wooded area of Oceanport. He had more than 15 stab wounds, and his remains had been set on fire with gasoline in the shallow grave where they were found.
Joey Comunale’s Killers Were at an After-Party With Him in Manhattan
In the early morning hours of November 13, 2016, when Joey Comunale was with Stephen Naso, he had his phone. But when Stephen’s girlfriend called him on it, the latter took the phone. Before he could return it, Joey came up to him and said he was going to an after-party and that he would take the phone from him the next morning. The next day, when no one could reach him, some of his friends went through the pictures taken at the club that night and saw Joey with a few girls, whom Stephen identified as the ones he had left with. They were able to get in touch with the girls, who told them they had gone to an apartment on East 59th Street that belonged to James Rackover. They also said that two other guys, Max Gemma and Lawrence “Larry” Dilione, had also gone with them.
According to the girls, they had all spent a couple of hours at the apartment, and then Joey and Dilione had walked them out to their Uber. However, when the police first spoke to Dilione, he said that he did not remember walking back into the apartment with Joey and that he might have gone out to get some cigarettes or left with the girls in the Uber. Gemma, on the other hand, claimed that he was asleep and had only woken up the next morning, and did not see Joey in the house. The police began reviewing the building’s security footage and found that Dilione had, in fact, lied. After dropping the girls off, Joey had walked back in with him.
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Joey Comunale’s Killers Blamed Each Other for Committing the Crime
The police also checked the garbage bins of the building, and in one of them, they found bedsheets and towels soaked in blood, along with Joey Comunale’s ID and credit cards. The police were also interested in James Rackover, and when they ran his name in the system, they found out that he had indeed lived in Florida, where he had an extensive rap sheet. His name used to be James Beaudoin, and he had been brought into Manhattan by Jeffrey Rackover, a wealthy jeweller, who had introduced him to people as his son, though it was not true. Police were able to arrest him on the basis of a suspended license charge, but they decided to speak to Lawrence Dilione again.
Dilione eventually told them that a fight had broken out between them and that he had punched Joey. He alleged that when Rackover saw this, he said he did not want to go behind bars if Joey pressed charges and had stabbed him multiple times. The two of them had wrapped his remains and then thrown them off a window to avoid detection and carried them in a black Mercedes‑Benz. He even gave the location in Oceanport where Joey’s remains were found on November 16, 2016.
Both Dilione and Rackover were charged with second-degree murder, but they both alleged that the other one had committed the crime. The police were able to get information from a witness named Louis Ruggiero, who was a friend of Rackover and claimed that he had boasted about the crime to him, and a taped conversation was also caught in which he was bragging to his friends about the same. After going to trial, Rackover was found guilty of second-degree murder, and Dilione pleaded guilty to manslaughter soon after. Max Gemma was charged with hindering an investigation and got a brief sentence. Joey’s family knew that they would never get him back, but were at peace knowing that his killers had been brought to justice.
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