Yes, James Rackover tried to saw off Joseph Comunale’s arm with a bread knife.
And yes, he cleaned up the crime scene, then scarfed down a burger and fries while the body lay in his bathtub.
And, fine, he dumped the body in a shallow grave, doused it in gasoline and lit it ablaze.
All that’s true, says Rackover’s attorney, but he ain’t no killer!
That’s what Maurice Sercarz argued in summations Thursday at Manhattan Supreme Court, insisting Rackover, 27, wasn’t even there when his co-defendant Lawrence Dilione allegedly slaughtered the Connecticut man inside a posh Upper East Side apartment Nov. 13, 2016.
“My client is a terribly flawed young man who made a horrible criminal decision,” but did nothing more than cover up the crime scene and dispose of the body, Sercarz said.
Rackover and Dilione, who will be tried separately, had just met 26-year-old Comunale after a night of drug and booze-fueled partying.
The men had run out of cocaine and surveillance video showed that Rackover had popped upstairs to the apartment of his alleged lover and adoptive father, Jeffrey Rackover, 58, to search for more.
During the four minutes it took for Rackover to return, Sercarz argued that Dilione viciously beat and stabbed Comunale 15 times, as the young man tried desperately to dodge the blade.
The motive in the grisly murder isn’t clear, but Sercarz said the fight was likely over “nothing or next to nothing.”
Sercarz described how Rackover and Dilione, 30, tried to dismember Comunale in his bathtub, bleached the crime scene then wolfed down takeout from Bareburger.
They later dropped Comunale’s mangled corpse from the 4th-floor window to avoid surveillance cameras, put it in the trunk of Rackover’s Mercedes, and buried it behind a florist’s shop in Oceanport, NJ.
Sercarz conceded that Rackover lied to the victim’s family, friends and police.
In fact, Assistant District Attorney Antoinette Carter said that Comunale’s uncle, a Bedford detective, called Rackover looking for his nephew. Rackover, who was en route to New Jersey with the body, claimed he’d never seen the kid.
Carter countered in his summation that there was no way Dilione could have inflicted the injuries Comunale suffered in just four minutes.
The autopsy photos were so gruesome that when prosecutors displayed them on the courtroom monitor, Comunale’s parents burst into tears and the gallery gasped.
Carter added that if Rackover were innocent, he wouldn’t have gone to such extreme lengths to hide the crime.
Referring to a “smoking device” found near the victim’s charred remains, Carter said, “You have to wonder if he [Rackover] sat there smoking his e-cigarette as he watched Comunale burn.”
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