News

Melania Trump’s Diamond Merchant Dumping Mementoes of Troubled Adopted Son

Image by Getty Images

By Daniel J. Solomon December 16, 2016

After his adopted son was accused of helping cover up a grisly murder, diamond merchant to the stars Jeffrey Rackover is washing his hands clean of James Rackover.

Jeffrey Rackover, who counts Melania Trump and Jennifer Lopez among his clients, was said to be throwing out James Rackover’s clothing and shredding his photos of the 21-year-old, reported DNAInfo Friday.

“Everything about the kid went bad,” an unnamed friend of Jeffrey Rackover’s told the news site. “He feels taken for a ride, emotionally and financially.” He added, “Jeffrey still cries every day, but he wants to be cleansed of it all, and done.”

James Rackover and Lawrence Dilione were arraigned this week on charges of concealing a body, hindering prosecution and evidence tampering, after police discovered the corpse of Joseph Communale, said to have been stabbed to death at a party in James Rackover’s Manhattan apartment, at the bottom of a shallow grave in New Jersey. Both pled not guilty to the charges.

Never married and childless, Jeffrey Rackover claimed that James Rackover (born James Beaudoin) was his long-lost son, the child of a woman he once had slept with.

“Jeffrey was always lamenting that he was getting older, and wouldn’t have a family,” another unnamed friend of the elder Rackover told DNAInfo in an earlier report. “He was always saying, ‘Who is going to take care of me when I am old?’… He thought, maybe, the kid was the answer.”

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO