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.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO