Famous Jeweler Sued For Alleged 2016 New York Murder Cover-Up

Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Renowned jeweler Jeffrey Rackover allegedly provided cleaning supplies and a car to a man brutally killed someone, a lawsuit filed Sunday by the victim’s father states.
The lawsuit alleges that James Rackover, 26, had an “intimate relationship” with Jeffrey Rackover, 57, who claimed to be his “parent,” the New York Post reported. James Rackover allegedly stabbed Joseph Comunale to death in November 2016 in his Upper East Side apartment, and that Jeffrey provided cleaning supplies to James and lent him his black Mercedes-Benz to transport Comunale’s dead body to New Jersey.
James Rackover petitioned to change his last name from Beaudoin to Rackover in 2015 because he wanted to distance himself from his past as a convicted felon and because he had learned Jeffrey Rackover was “my real father,” according to DNA Info.
Both James Rackover’s lawyers and Jeffrey Rackover declined to comment to the Post.
The Comunale family’s suit alleges that Jeffrey Rackover gave James Rackover “drugs, money and other benefits” in exchange for “sexual pleasure.”
Contact Erica Snow at [email protected] or on Twitter @ericasnoww.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
