James “Jimmy” Beaudoin II was born the first time in March 1991 in Fort Lauderdale, the eldest son of a hardscrabble single mother. Then, in his early 20s and hoping to escape the dead end of his past, he was reborn in New York City. In March 2015, not three years after landing in the city with little more than the shirt on his back, Jimmy Beaudoin legally changed his last name to Rackover. For the court petition, he obtained the consent of a wealthy older Manhattanite named Jeffrey Rackover, a diamond dealer dubbed “jeweler to the stars” who had become a surrogate father to him. While it wasn’t a formal adoption, it proved a symbolic one, the shedding of a former self in order to don the fineries that New York sometimes bestows upon its most ambitious and adaptable newcomers. The two men didn’t look much alike—Jimmy is muscular and tall with the square, wide face of a brooding 1950s matinee idol; Jeffrey is none of those things. Nevertheless, for the sake of convenience and to ward off any implications of a sexual relationship, Jimmy was introduced around town as Jeffrey’s long-lost biological son. Much was given to Jimmy Rackover, and much was expected in return. He wore tailored Savile Row suits, had his shirts made by Anto in Beverly Hills, and spent his summers poolside in East Hampton. He took the subway “like two or three times when I first got to New York, and that’s it,” preferring Ubers and taxis. He used his Equinox gym membership twice a day, brought women on first dates to the Upper East Side Italian mainstay Campagnola, and hit nightspots like Tao, the PHD lounge, and Happy Ending. He had a full-time job as an insurance broker specializing in jewelry and fine art at Willis Towers Watson. By any estimation, his was a rapid ascent into the tight, often impermeable social weft of the city. “I always felt like I was meant to be something bigger,” Jimmy tells me about his desire to make it in New York.

For a long time, the princely reinvention seemed complete. Then came a Saturday night in November 2016, when Jimmy hosted a small after-hours party in his posh Sutton Place apartment that ended in a vicious murder. A little after dawn on that Sunday morning, as the other guests made their way home, four men remained inside the apartment: Jimmy, his best friend Larry Dilione, Larry’s childhood friend and roommate Max Gemma, and an affable Connecticut native named Joey Comunale, who had been a stranger to the others until that night. One or more of these men is a murderer. Inside the apartment, Joey was violently beaten and stabbed 15 times in the chest—nine on the right side and six on the left. The questions why, how, and by whom still linger. The murder itself was largely overshadowed by the brutality of the cover-up. After an attempted dismemberment in the bathtub using a kitchen knife, Joey’s body was wrapped in plastic and a bed comforter, tossed from Jimmy’s fourth-floor window onto a busy Manhattan sidewalk, packed into the trunk of a Mercedes Benz, and driven to a secluded spot in Oceanport, New Jersey, where he was set on fire and buried in a shallow grave. It would take three days before police found the body.

“I didn’t see any of this coming,” Jimmy tells me, sitting in a tiny cinder block room in the visiting area at Attica. Since April 2019, he has been incarcerated in the maximum-security prison in the northwest corner of New York State, serving a sentence of 28 years to life for murder in the second degree. “I thought I’d just be coming back from the Hamptons right now, like a regular cycle of my life.”

There are no guards or listening devices in the room, yet Jimmy is reluctant to talk. Since his arrest on November 15, 2016, he has not once been out of police custody, and in that time he has never spoken to investigators. He didn’t take the stand at his trial and he didn’t speak at his sentencing. From the very start, he was cast as the poster boy ringleader of a sadistic, partying-too-hard murder. Footage of him being led out of Manhattan’s 13th Precinct wearing a midnight-blue Prada suit over a white V-neck T-shirt, his wrists in handcuffs, became instant tabloid fodder. Yet he has remained overwhelmingly silent. Silence can save you, especially in the criminal-justice system, but it also allows you to fit neatly into anyone’s preferred version of events.

Today, against his better instincts, he’s agreed to talk, and when he does he’s composed and articulate. He wears a prison-issue magenta T-shirt, green drawstring pants, and black lace-up sneakers. His face is lightly freckled, and his hair is combed back in his signature pompadour. His left arm is tattooed in a sleeve of Japanese waves. The magenta shirt hides other tattoos: “Only Time Will Tell” calligraphied around his collarbone, and on his right hip, perhaps as an ode to his surrogate father, in tiny black cursive, “Diamonds Are Forever.” Jimmy has a habit of pursing and chewing at his lips, a gesture that can be read as coy or calculating, as a sign of sincerity or deviousness. In fact, the difficulty of getting an accurate read on James Rackover—or rather, the eerie liberty his face invites to project any characteristic onto him—became a key plank in his defense. His lawyer Maurice Sercarz accused the prosecution of doing just that at trial: In creating a profile of their prime suspect, investigators “began to see what they wanted to see.” Today, most people see a cold-blooded killer. Jimmy maintains his innocence of the murder, claiming he only participated in the gruesome aftermath. “I had people over all the time,” he tells me. “Nothing like this ever happened. I don’t get into fights. I don’t beat people up. I’m very well known in the city, and I had a lot to lose.”

The autopsy report for Joey Comunale lists his date of death as Sunday, November 13, 2016, but for everyone involved it must have still felt like Saturday night. The city on that Saturday had been unusually charged with aggression. Demonstrators flocked to Trump Tower to protest the results of the presidential election, then only four days old. Mixed martial arts champ Conor McGregor headlined Madison Square Garden, taking on Eddie Alvarez for the UFC lightweight belt. Around 3:30 a.m. that night, the popular Meatpacking nightspot the Gilded Lily started to shut down. A fight broke out at the entrance, and patrons gathered across the street to have a last cigarette, call cars, or wait for friends. It was here that 26-year-old Joey and a friend began to chat up three young women from New Jersey who had been inside the club as well. Two other strangers joined the conversation: Larry, then 28, and Max, then 29, friends since elementary school in Oceanport, who were roommates in an apartment in Jersey City. Lingering on the sidewalk, these chance acquaintances talked and joked, not quite ready to call it a night. That’s when Larry spontaneously invited them to an after-party. “Why don’t you guys come to my friend’s penthouse apartment?” one of the women remembered Larry asking. “His dad is like some famous jeweler in the city and he is having a party.”

Max would later tell me that “Larry was typically very shy” in social situations “unless he had a drink or two.” Larry had consumed several drinks by that point, as well as a few bumps of cocaine. Most of the others had too. During the cab ride to the party, one of the women, realizing she was heading into the wilds of the city with a total stranger, improvised a quick safety measure. She took a photo of Larry and sent it to friends along with his name and the last four digits of his Social Security number, “just in case u need to find us.” The murky photo shows Larry in the front seat glancing back with a playful, flirtatious smile. Even though the message served as a precaution, it was primarily done in jest. None of the women felt threatened, and one described Larry’s manner as “light, happy.” It was Saturday night.

Two taxis snaked through the Midtown grid toward East 59th Street. Their destination: a smoked-glass luxury high-rise off Sutton Place that spirals upward from the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. The Grand Sutton, like so many residential towers built in the 1980s, adds very little charm to the skyline but exploits stunning city and river views. Larry’s much-hyped after-party wasn’t in the penthouse. Nor was it in the apartment of Jimmy’s surrogate father on the 32nd floor. Instead, Larry directed everyone to apartment 4C, a midsize one-bedroom with windows facing the street, peering out onto the Queensboro’s cantilevered arm as it begins its ascent over the East River.

The host answered the door in a pair of jeans and no shirt. He introduced himself as James Rackover. Throughout the party, Jimmy repeatedly found ways to mention his wealthy father—showing off a framed photo of the two together and remarking that his father could clean a ring that one of the women was wearing. “At that point,” one guest later told the jury, “I was like, ‘We get it. Your dad’s a jeweler.’ ” Among the promises that New York City makes is that, by sheer determination, you can turn fiction into fact and become the person you dream of being.

Eight scowling mug shots from 2007 to 2011 show James Beaudoin progressing from a 16-year-old Fort Lauderdale high schooler to a 20-year-old boatyard worker fresh from a yearlong stint in prison. Lined up, the mug shots read like the inverse of yearbook photographs documenting a more optimistic march toward maturity. After Jimmy’s arrest for Joey’s murder, his lengthy criminal record was invoked to demonstrate the inherently rotten character lurking underneath the masquerade of a well-dressed, well-connected Manhattanite. Jimmy’s Florida rap sheet includes trespassing, burglary, strong-armed robbery, drug possession, and cutting off his ankle monitor to spend a month on the lam. Nevertheless, Jimmy bristles at being called a career criminal. “I was 16, 17,” he says, “I did some stupid shit with my friends. This was years ago!”

“Jimmy is the opposite of what he’s portrayed as being,” his mother, Erin Boyd, assures me. “He was, throughout his life, a rescuer. We still have the last dog he rescued.” One glaring problem in Jimmy’s childhood was his lack of a stable father figure. “I was a single mom,” Boyd says. “It was very sporadic that the biological dad would show up.” Jimmy tells me he never met his real father, a discrepancy perhaps explained by the fact that he always suspected he had a different father from his younger siblings. “I just grew up figuring the world out on my own,” he says. “It’s no shot at my mom or my upbringing. I did amazing up until a few years ago, when this all happened. I mean, it worked. I made it.”

Jimmy’s making it hinged on his decision, at age 21, to start fresh in New York. Memories of the city’s endless possibilities still bring out a smile. “I feel like New York made me,” he says. “It turned me into the person I am. It gives you that edge. I feel more like a New Yorker than I do like a kid from Florida.”

In the wake of Joey’s murder—and particularly in light of Jimmy’s unorthodox relationship with Jeffrey Rackover—there was unending speculation as to how Jimmy made money in New York. In the press, he was labeled a kept boy and Jeffrey’s “lover,” the notion of surrogate father swapped out for sugar daddy. The media became fixated on Jimmy’s sexuality—or, rather, its flexibility for the right amount of cash. The Daily Mail dredged up an ex-girlfriend in Florida who, while swearing Jimmy was 100 percent straight, postulated that it was possible he “turned tricks with older gay men.” In lieu of any hard evidence, she referenced his sudden obsession with money and designer clothes (or, in other words, he was starting to act more like a New Yorker than like a kid from Florida). The murder victim’s father, Pat Comunale, would eventually file a series of civil suits—against Jeffrey and the Grand Sutton, among others—that also traded in this gay-for-pay narrative, accusing Jimmy of exchanging sexual favors with affluent men in return for “profit, social status, and illegal substances.” Allegations in a civil suit summons do not need to meet a burden of proof, which means there may or may not be evidence of hustler activity in Jimmy’s past. As salacious as gay prostitution was to the interested public, it had serious implications at Jimmy’s trial. Time and again, prosecutors would seize upon the unearned privilege that Jimmy had enjoyed thanks to his special relationship with “Daddy,” in a sense following the familiar morality trope—so often used against homosexuality and sex work—that one act of degeneracy begets another. The question remains: Even if Jimmy had worked as an escort, would that make him more likely to be a murderer?

In reality, Jimmy’s employment record is not atypical of most 20-somethings in their first years in the city. He bartended, DJ’d, and worked as a shop clerk at Ralph Lauren. He even tried modeling, posing for erotic photographer Rick Day (a standard go-to lensman for tear sheets). Nevertheless, his fortunes improved drastically once he befriended New York’s jeweler to the stars. Then in his mid-50s, Jeffrey, a well-tanned Long Island native and lifelong bachelor, had served as vice president of the illustrious British jewelry house Graff. In 2004, Jeffrey famously helped his friend Donald Trump select an emerald-cut diamond engagement ring for Melania (Trump reportedly received a 50 percent discount in exchange for the publicity). Jeffrey brought his celebrity client list—which included Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Lopez—to his own venture, Jeffrey Rackover Diamonds, with its private showroom on Fifth Avenue. Days after Joey’s murder, Bo Dietl, the retired police detective, Fox News contributor, and mayoral candidate, served as Jeffrey’s spokesman in announcing that his “devastated” client had taken Jimmy in as a son after meeting him at a health club. Jimmy tells a different story of their first encounter: that they met over dinner in 2013 through a mutual friend. “We all went out, and Jeffrey just took a liking to me,” Jimmy recounts. “He is the greatest guy I’ve ever met.” Their bond was immediate, a relationship that many acquainted with them described not as sexual but genuinely paternal. In Jeffrey, Jimmy found the guidance and support he’d long been searching for: “Jeffrey treated me like a son. He never had kids. And I looked at him like a father. I still do. He put me on the fast track, the right track, and he brought a lot of balance to my life, a lot of, I guess you could say, discipline.” In 2013, Jimmy was sharing an apartment uptown with a friend who had fallen into heavy drug use. It seemed likely that he’d have to move back to Florida. Jeffrey came to the rescue, offering a spare bedroom in his Grand Sutton apartment. It was the first stable home of Jimmy’s adult life.

Certainly, Jeffrey’s friendship came with big material benefits. Through his contacts, Jimmy enrolled in two semesters at the Fashion Institute of Technology and secured the lucrative job as an insurance broker. But there was also another kind of education on offer, learning the customs and codes of a jet set lifestyle. Jimmy patterned his tastes on his mentor. His drink of choice became Johnnie Walker Blue, which is Jeffrey’s drink of choice. He traveled to London, Ibiza, and St. Barts, and to Las Vegas for the annual jewelry show. Through Jeffrey’s close friendship with Fox’s Good Day New York anchor Rosanna Scotto (daughter of Gambino crime-family mobster Anthony Scotto), Jimmy became best friends with Rosanna’s son, Louis “L.J.” Ruggiero. “He was like a little brother to me,” Jimmy says of Louis, demonstrating his tic of conflating friends with family members.

On the New York social circuit, Jimmy and Jeffrey first posed as friends. When that designation carried a whiff of the carnal, they invented a fictional tryst in Florida between Jeffrey and Jimmy’s mother, a surprise knock on the door some 20 years later, a tearful reunion, and presto, father and son. It is unclear whether anyone in their orbit believed the long-lost-son story, but there is little doubt that both Jeffrey and Jimmy wanted it to be true. “There are all these stories about him and I, and all this gay-lover shit,” Jimmy scoffs. “All I did was go out and chase girls.” One motive in taking Jeffrey’s name was to shut down those insinuations. But once their ruse was uncovered, it only encouraged the speculation. According to Jimmy, the name change was Jeffrey’s idea. “It was a complete honor.”

In late 2015, Jeffrey helped Jimmy secure his own apartment in the Grand Sutton. Jimmy covered the walls in chocolate-brown suede, accented the décor with Louis Vuitton trunks and cashmere throws, and hung Art Deco French liqueur posters. Jimmy swears he wasn’t simply living on Jeffrey’s largesse, insisting that he paid his own bills, including rent. “If you listen to the media, I partied seven nights a week, twice on Sundays. I’m at work Monday to Friday. I have a great career. I’m in the gym nonstop. So, if I go out one night on the weekends, I’m a bad guy now? So does everybody else in New York City. I felt a lot of this trial was based on my lifestyle, not on what actually happened.”

Not everyone was seduced by Jimmy’s arriviste lifestyle. Max, Larry’s friend and roommate, was not a fan. Max is no stranger to privilege. His father, Gordon Gemma, a real estate attorney, served as the mayor of Oceanport before becoming the director of property development in New Jersey for Trump’s in-laws, the Kushners; he now works as a consultant for billion-dollar real estate developer Panepinto Properties in Jersey City. “I always thought Jimmy was really strange,” Max tells me. “Something seemed off. Also he was super flashy. He loved showing off his Gucci belt or whatever the hell he was wearing.” And yet Larry, who also comes from a wealthy Oceanport family that works in construction and owns racehorses, found in Jimmy a kindred spirit. When I ask what Larry saw in Jimmy, Max answers candidly. “I’m assuming the attraction for Larry was that he liked some of the flashy stuff too.”

Jimmy and Larry met in March 2016, eight months before the murder. They became each other’s wingman, both interested in sports and fitness, and both with plenty of spending money. It is also alleged, by Larry, that they both took steroids. While Jimmy describes himself as “docile,” Larry was known to have a volatile temper. He’d racked up a rap sheet of disorderly-persons charges for bar fights along the Jersey shore. According to Max, Larry “wasn’t a bully, but he had his own version of honor and making sure that it was kept.” Jimmy recalls witnessing Larry’s short fuse firsthand. “He got into a bunch of fights. He liked to fight. I was like, ‘Dude, you can’t do that. We’ve got too much to lose. If we hit a kid, and, God forbid, he falls, he hits his head on the bar, he dies or something…. Anything could happen. For what? Because he’s looking at us? We’re good-looking guys. People are going to look at us, man.’ ”

On the evening of the party, Jimmy had gone to a Friendsgiving and returned to his apartment by 9:30. He wasn’t alone. A woman he was seeing came over to hook up and fell asleep in his bedroom. Jimmy watched the McGregor fight and planned to go to sleep when Larry texted from outside the Gilded Lily. “It was late, they wanted somewhere to go, have a few drinks, party a little more,” Jimmy recalls. He took pride in his generosity. “I’m a very good host. Jeffrey taught me really well. My home was always open to my friends.”

In the late-night hours, Jimmy’s guests drank, snorted cocaine, and talked politics. They played games and listened to music. By all accounts, the mood was lighthearted. No one could recall any hostility—specifically none directed at Joey, who was perched on the windowsill for most of the party. Jimmy and Larry joked about which one of them was “the alpha male,” according to one guest, bragging about who could lift more weights. According to another guest, they were “very lovey with each other…like they were bros…complimenting each other on their body physique, challenging each other for push-up competitions.” That competitive spirit spilled into a spontaneous lap dance contest that involved Jimmy and Larry taking turns practicing their stripper moves on one of the young women while Ginuwine’s “Pony” (the song Channing Tatum dances to in Magic Mike) played in the background. The only presentiment of the violence ahead was Larry’s pocket-knife, which he continually wielded throughout the party, opening beers with it and offering bumps of cocaine from the blade tip.

As sunrise began to creep through the windows, Jimmy’s sleepover guest slipped out of the bedroom and departed, followed soon after by Joey’s friend. Then, at 6:44 a.m., a Grand Sutton surveillance camera captured Joey and Larry walking outside to see the three women off in an Uber. The footage shows the two men returning to rejoin Max and Jimmy, the only ones left in the apartment. At some point in the next hour—and possibly within minutes—Joey was beaten unconscious and stabbed more than a dozen times.

The events grow disturbingly murky. Max’s and Larry’s versions hold together remarkably well—whether because they are telling the truth, or, as skeptics have argued, because the two roommates had plenty of time to get their stories straight in the days after the murder. Max contended that he fell asleep on the living room couch under a blanket and only awoke after Larry struck Joey multiple times, knocking him unconscious on the hardwood floor. Both Jimmy and Larry later stated that Max had nothing to do with the murder. (When I bring him up, Jimmy asks me outright, “What the hell did he do?”)

The reason for this fight—the motive for the murder—has never been resolved. It remained so elusive in the days and weeks after Joey’s death that detectives, prosecutors, and the media were left to their own imaginations. Fueled by the unconventional relationship between Jimmy and Jeffrey, the press initially latched on to the notion that Joey had rebuffed a sexual advance. The idea that Jimmy and Larry had made a pass seems dubious, not least of all because Max was still in the room. Nevertheless, the allegation that Jimmy and Larry were clandestine lovers would haunt the investigation and trial, so much so that the prosecutors would unsubtly paint the pair as a contemporary rendition of the sociopathic Brandon and Phillip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, so psychotically enamored with each other that they were driven to kill for sport. (Submitted into evidence was a text exchange between Larry and Jimmy where they told each other “I love you.”)

The gay-sex motive was eventually abandoned for a fight over a dwindling cocaine supply. Jimmy did try to secure more cocaine that morning. A few minutes after Joey and Larry returned to the apartment, elevator cameras caught Jimmy journeying up to the 32nd floor. Jeffrey also had surveillance cameras in his apartment, presumably as a safeguard for the jewelry he kept at home. The footage from the master bedroom shows Jimmy rummaging through a wall safe while Jeffrey lies asleep in bed. The trip up and back took roughly four minutes, a critical sliver of time, during which Larry did or did not start the fight that led to Joey’s death. Jimmy contends that he was out of the apartment on this drug run when the murder occurred. “I wasn’t even there,” he tells me. “I never laid my hands on Joey. I didn’t get into a fight with him, or nothing.” The lead prosecutor at Jimmy’s trial, assistant district attorney Antoinette Carter, asserted that the fight and stabbing could not have realistically transpired within those four minutes. Jimmy counters that hypothesis. “Have you ever seen a fight happen?” he asks me. “It happens like this…” and snaps his fingers.

In her summation, Carter improvised a scenario where Jimmy returned empty-handed from upstairs only to grow outraged at the stranger in his apartment demanding more cocaine while drinking his Johnnie Walker Blue. Jimmy denies this allegation. “There were never any cross words between Joey and I,” he swears. “I just told him to go home. I wasn’t even paying attention to Joey most of the time.”

At trial, Carter emphasized that the state didn’t need to establish a motive for Joey’s murder. “Sometimes people commit crimes with no motive at all,” she conceded before inventing the argument over cocaine. Carter understood that the jury would be more inclined to convict if they were fed any rational story line that ended in Jimmy’s stabbing the victim. The likely truth is that there was no rational motive. “The fight was over a bunch of nothing,” Jimmy tells me. “Joey and Larry argued about who should go out and get cigarettes. Larry said, ‘Joey punked me.’ Whatever that means.” But the jury would never hear about a fight over “a bunch of nothing” because Jimmy didn’t testify. Nor did Larry, whose own murder trial was set to begin right after Jimmy’s, and who would have almost certainly pleaded the Fifth had he been called as a witness.

Crucially, the jury would also never hear Larry’s detailed account of the fight and murder, which he told at a pretrial hearing in March 2018. Larry alleged that after returning to the apartment from downstairs, he and Joey had another drink at the living room table. There, Joey’s demeanor changed. He began to provoke Larry, shouting “James is getting cocaine, I’m getting cigarettes, what the fuck do you bring to the table?” After Joey repeated this question two more times, slamming his hands on the table, Larry, with his notorious short fuse, “got up and I hit him, I hit him again two times, and three the max. I picked him up and slammed him to the ground, which rendered him unconscious.” According to Larry, after he knocked Joey out, Jimmy (not upstairs searching for cocaine) started taunting the victim, saying, “ ‘This is what you get for fucking with my boy,’ just showing me he had my back in a sense and started hitting him on the ground.” Larry claimed he told Jimmy to stop, and Jimmy did so temporarily. Then, moments later, Jimmy returned for a more vicious assault, “slamming his head into the ground, which caused problems for Joey, he was having trouble breathing.” Hearing gurgling noises and noticing blood pooling on the floor, Larry repeated his appeal for Jimmy to stop. Max, now awake on the couch, observed a “bloody mess.” Max said that Jimmy started to panic about being sent back to prison for assault. That, Larry alleged, is when Jimmy decided that the only option was to kill. “He said, ‘I got to get rid of him, I got to kill him.’ ” Larry maintained that he offered to call the cops and take all the blame for the fight, but Jimmy refused to be deterred and “began to strangle” Joey.

Larry and Max both claimed that Jimmy demanded they strip off their clothes to prevent any blood evidence leaving the scene. Whether Joey was dead or alive at this point, stabbed or not, is unclear. Larry testified that after he corralled Max into the bedroom, he turned around and saw “a knife being pulled out of Joey’s head” (the autopsy did not find a knife wound to the head). According to Larry, Joey was dead by the time he was dragged to the bathtub, but he later said that the stab wounds on Joey’s body were inflicted by Jimmy in frustration over not being able to dismember it—which contradicts the state’s allegation that Joey was killed by 15 knife wounds to the chest. After borrowing clean clothes, Max was told to leave. The last thing Max reported seeing was Jimmy standing over Joey’s limp body in the bathtub, glaring at Max as he walked out the door.

Max tells me he was in shock, confused, and afraid. In one light, Max is a victim of circumstance, waking up in the wrong place and time, guilty at most of a misplaced sense of loyalty. However, Max walked right past the Grand Sutton’s front desk and said nothing to the doorman. He did not dial 911 once he reached the safety of the street. Instead, he took the PATH train to Jersey City, where he called his close childhood friend, Kyle Jarmon, to pick him up. For the next two days, Max would lie repeatedly to police while the Comunale family was searching for Joey. Was Joey dead or alive when Max left the apartment? That question hangs over the case—and presumably over Max’s conscience—to this day.

Jimmy vehemently denies Larry’s version of events. He maintains Joey was dead before his participation began. That denial can’t simply be written off as the convenient equivocations of a murderer. The fact is, there is no clear physical evidence establishing who stabbed Joey, where in the apartment he died, and whether it was even stab wounds to the chest alone that killed him. Prosecutors were so insistent that Jimmy and Larry were in it together from the start—Carter even going so far as evoking an imagined orgiastic scenario that involved the two friends stabbing Joey simultaneously in the bathtub—because they couldn’t pin the death on either defendant with absolute certainty. Carter told the jury that it didn’t matter who dealt the fatal blow; the perpetrators were “acting in concert,” in a “community of purpose” and therefore equally culpable. But that is true only if both men had the intent to kill and took action premortem. Thus, Jimmy’s defense team directed the jury’s attention to a sizable dent in the signet horse ring that Larry had been wearing that night, a dent that was not evident in a photo taken earlier that evening at a nightclub; this ring might have been a lethal weapon should the dent have resulted from punching someone repeatedly in the face. The defense also homed in on Larry’s pocketknife. Could it have been used to inflict the stab wounds? In Larry’s version of events, Jimmy vetoed his pleas to stop the attack and took murder into his own hands. In Jimmy’s version, Larry alone killed Joey, by beating and/or stabbing him, leaving Jimmy to deal with the aftermath.

That aftermath, the macabre cleanup and disposal of Joey’s corpse, would be hard to square with either Larry or Jimmy’s account. It’s fair to ask—and Carter did—why someone would go to such excessive lengths to hide someone else’s crime. The defense had an answer: Jimmy’s fear of losing his cushy life. If Carter used Jimmy’s “unmerited” lifestyle to help convict him, his defense team would use it as a pretext for his innocence. Jimmy’s lawyer told the jury that, should a dead body turn up in his apartment, Jimmy knew that effectively “his relationship with Jeffrey Rackover was over.”

Jimmy has never denied his complicity in the cover-up. The overwhelming evidence left him little choice. Daylight was now streaming into the apartment, neither Larry nor Jimmy had slept, and the irreversible horror of the situation must have been stealing into their consciousness. Larry alleges Jimmy took a kitchen knife and tried to dismember Joey’s body in the tub. That was plan A. After Jimmy’s failed attempt to cut through Joey’s upper arm, he and Larry had to improvise another method of secreting the body out of the building. During that Sunday morning and afternoon, they wrapped Joey in Saran wrap and a comforter. They scrubbed and bleached the apartment. They dumped their clothes into the building’s garbage collection, along with bloody towels, sheets, and the victim’s possessions (his wallet, clothes, and a broken gold neck chain). They canvassed the Grand Sutton’s hallways, searching for an exit that wasn’t monitored by cameras. The two men also ordered a delivery from Bareburger—Carter read the order aloud in court, all $76.64 worth of ingredients like “add beef on a brioche bun, medium rare with country bacon,” as if the extra toppings added to their guilt.

That Joey was a stranger and had no direct connection to either of them must have felt like a temporary buffer—if they could get rid of the body before anyone started looking, they might keep the police at bay. As dusk fell, however, calls and texts began to erupt on their phones, from Joey’s friends and family as well as from the Stamford police. The search was on. Heartbreakingly, in the late afternoon, Joey’s father, Pat, phoned Larry only to be told that Joey had left the party to buy cigarettes and hadn’t returned; in truth, at that moment, Larry was in the apartment with Joey’s body.

Finally, under the cover of darkness, Jimmy borrowed Jeffrey’s black 2015 Mercedes-Benz AMG S 63. He pulled up to the curb and waited until the sidewalk was relatively empty to give the signal. Larry then shoved Joey’s wrapped body out the window. They quickly packed it in the trunk and drove off, down the FDR, around the southern tip of Manhattan, and through the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey. Larry knew a secluded spot from his childhood, a marshy, overgrown lot behind a florist shop. The pings from cell-reception towers followed their path the 60 miles to Oceanport. There, they dug a shallow grave and, finding a can of gasoline in an abandoned truck, set Joey’s body on fire.

Every Sunday, Pat Comunale and his son would meet at the family home in Stamford to pick their fantasy football teams. Then they’d spend the afternoon watching the games. When Pat hadn’t heard from Joey by noon that Sunday, he knew something was wrong.

If Jeffrey and Jimmy came to represent all that was illegitimate and illicit in a father-son relationship, the exceptionally close bond between Pat and Joey would embody all that was virtuous. “Best friends” is the term most often used to describe them. Pat, a child of the blue-collar Bronx, made a career building successful security companies, the last of which, the largest private security distributor in the country, sold publicly in 2014 for hundreds of millions. Like Larry and Max, Joey grew up in privilege and enjoyed sports, travel, cars, hip-hop, and nights out in Manhattan. But, according to Pat, that’s where any similarities end. “My son was never in trouble,” Pat says. “He was never aggressive. He was just an unbelievable kid.” When I meet Pat in a Midtown restaurant nearly three years after his son’s death, his grief hasn’t eased. His swollen eyes seem perpetually on the cusp of tears, and it isn’t long into our conversation before he chokes, goes quiet for a second, and sobs. I ask how often he visits Joey’s grave. “Every day,” he tells me. “We talked every day. So I go talk to him every day.”

As Sunday afternoon wore on and his son failed to make contact, Pat began reaching out to Joey’s friends. Eventually, he was able track down Larry’s phone number. When Larry claimed that Joey had left at the end of the party, Pat went to the Stamford police. As they had no jurisdiction in New York, early the next morning, Pat appeared at Manhattan’s 17th Precinct to report his son missing. Homicide detective Yeoman Castro called Larry only to be told that Joey had left at dawn when the three women caught their Uber home. Castro decided that he and Pat might as well stop by the Grand Sutton to see if they could get answers in person.

It wouldn’t take long for the first clues to emerge. As Castro scrolled through the security footage, he found the 6:44 a.m. clip of Larry and Joey exiting the lobby with the female guests. Pat identified his son on the monitor. They expected to watch Joey disappear down the sidewalk. Instead he and Larry walked back into the building—a damning contradiction to Larry’s account.

Castro called Larry back to confront him with the discrepancy. According to Castro’s testimony, Larry grew “flustered and starts talking really fast, like, ‘There was a lot of drugs and alcohol, it was a crazy night,’ ” and then hung up. Castro dialed Max and Jimmy, and both stuck to the same false story. Pat, feeling the strain of his son’s unknown fate, stepped outside to use his phone. He noticed a porter carting the building’s garbage out for collection. Pat ran inside and told Castro that they had to hold the garbage back, just in case. That quick thinking resulted in hundreds of pieces of physical evidence. In retrospect, had Pat not pleaded for help at the Manhattan precinct that Monday morning, the police might not have recovered the surveillance footage or the blood-soaked evidence from the trash. “If this was an individual from California who only spoke to his parents once a week,” Pat postulates, “a week goes by, these guys get away with it. Video is gone, garbage is gone.”

The Grand Sutton was quickly turning into a crime scene. The police performed a “vertical canvass” of the building, searching from the basement to the rooftop water tower. Pat was asked by investigators to retrieve Joey’s bed pillow. “He had just washed his bedsheets,” Pat recalls of that solemn visit to his son’s apartment. “His pillow was in the washing machine. So I got his underwear, pants, and shirts from the laundry bin.” The clothing was used by a police dog to track Joey’s last movements through the Grand Sutton. The bloodhound followed Joey’s scent through the lobby to the elevator. On the fourth floor, the dog led detectives directly to 4C.

That afternoon, as surveillance footage was still being gathered, Jimmy returned home from work. According to Castro, Jimmy walked by and said tauntingly, “Good luck getting the video.” He returned a half hour later to announce, “Good thing I spoke to my girlfriend last night. She said I was in the apartment all night.” Meanwhile, in Jersey City, Larry was also getting spooked. He met up at a bar with Kyle Jarmon, the childhood friend who had picked up Max from the PATH station. Larry asked Kyle if he knew of a good lawyer.

Around 6 p.m. the following Tuesday, Jimmy was arrested and taken to the 13th Precinct. He was held on driving without a valid license, a placeholder charge while police continued their search for Joey. Jimmy, who had invoked his right to counsel, was placed in a holding cell with an undercover officer. Over the next 10 hours, he was reported to have made a series of incriminating statements, including admitting to suffering bouts of “roid rage,” and that there would be “no bail for murder.” (Jimmy denies making these admissions, as well as the earlier taunts to Castro.)

A different tactic was used on Larry, who agreed to meet with detectives that same evening. He was picked up near his sister’s Midtown apartment and brought into the station’s interrogation room. Detectives worked to break his stonewalling, sculpting a narrative in which Jimmy was the ringleader and Larry the unwilling accomplice. The decision as to which suspect was more guilty already appeared to be fossilizing. Detective Ray Reuther is purported to have told Larry’s lawyer, “Larry should do the right thing. He’s a good kid. He shouldn’t go down for something he hasn’t done. He can really help himself out if you let him speak with us and cooperate with us.” According to Larry’s father, Reuther later told him, “Your son is not a murderer.” The detectives had identified the weakest link, hoping it would snap. Late that Tuesday night, Larry admitted to punching Joey but alleged that it was Jimmy who killed him. Crying, he supplied the location of a shallow grave.

“Of course it’s a betrayal,” Jimmy says of Larry’s confession that pinned the murder on him. “How could it not be?”

In the middle of the night, officers from two states converged on the Oceanport marshland, 50 yards off the main road. A cadaver dog was sent into the weeds and barked to indicate an active alert. Castro stepped forward, and at roughly 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday, November 16, he saw a hand sticking from the mud.

For six months after Joey’s death, no one was charged with his murder. Jimmy and Larry were both arrested on hindering prosecution, concealment of a corpse, and tampering with evidence. Max was taken into custody on lesser charges a few weeks later. Larry and Max were released on bail, but Jimmy, increasingly cut off from the golden umbilical cord of his surrogate father, couldn’t front the bail money and languished in the Tombs, Manhattan’s jail complex. The fact that no one was charged with murder as weeks turned into months proved an emotional flash point—particularly for Pat, who was doing all he could to keep pressure on the investigation. The prosecution’s predicament is understandable: They had two prime suspects each pointing the finger at the other and no clear answer as to which one actually committed the murder. The death occurred in Jimmy’s apartment, but the forensic evidence revealed considerably more blood on Larry’s clothing.

Many would argue that the district attorney showed restraint in refusing to rush to judgment, instead building an ironclad case. But for Pat, the delay was interminable, and even for a wealthy white man from Connecticut, it smacked of unfair privilege. The attendant specter here is Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance’s watery record on prosecuting the rich and powerful, most controversially his refusal to pursue an early sex-crime case against Harvey Weinstein and a fraud case against Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. The D.A.’s office denies that influence played any part. But the fact that the father of one of the three defendants was a former mayor, a major player in local real estate deals with close ties to the Kushners, does not seem negligible in evaluating its handling of the case. There were four men in a room when one was savagely murdered. Blood was found on all of their clothes. Did privilege play a role in the outcome? For some, it’s simple math.

If the D.A.’s office was waiting for irrefutable evidence to fall into its lap, it would take federal investigators to supply it. In early 2017, the FBI began to shake the bushes on Larry and Jimmy’s drug activities. The strategy worked. A highly convenient witness materialized who would seal Jimmy’s fate. Louis Ruggiero, Jimmy’s former best friend, was subpoenaed to meet with a federal prosecutor in February 2017. He began cooperating with the Manhattan D.A. shortly thereafter. Louis claimed that on the Monday afternoon after the murder, when the police were still scouring the surveillance footage at the Grand Sutton, Jimmy called him, needing to talk. In the locker room of the Equinox near Jimmy’s apartment, Louis alleged, Jimmy confessed to his direct involvement in the murder: “Larry got into a fight with this kid in the apartment and Larry knocked him out unconscious,” Louis claimed that Jimmy said. “I gave him a few lickings as well, and I didn’t want a dead body in my living room so I slit his throat and I stabbed him and then we wrapped the body up in comforters.”

Louis claimed that, at first, he didn’t believe him. “James, you’re a good little Jew boy from Manhattan,” he replied. “You’re not from Goodfellas.” But Jimmy swore he was serious, and moments later muttered these ominous words: “You want to hear the sickest part about it all…. I ordered pancakes from a diner and ate it like nothing ever happened.” Louis claimed he still didn’t believe Jimmy’s story, not until the next afternoon, when he happened to be walking from his therapist’s office to the gym and noticed police activity outside Jimmy’s building. His immediate reaction was not to call the police. He called his mother and his attorney.

Louis’s account of Jimmy’s step-by-step confession, complete with its cinematic dose of Goodfellas dialogue, was the stuff of the D.A.’s dreams. Prior to Louis stepping forward, it would have been conceivable to cast doubt on Max’s and Larry’s stories as a concerted effort by two lifelong friends to pin the blame on the shady, recidivistic Jimmy. Now the D.A. had a star witness who put the knife directly in Jimmy’s hands. Louis’s lurid testimony in front of the grand jury in April 2017 led to both suspects’ long-awaited indictment for murder in the second degree.

Louis, however, had serious credibility issues. Having been born into a prominent New York mafia family and the son of a beloved local newscaster, he had cultivated a crippling drug problem. Around the time of the supposed locker room confession, Louis admitted to having a $1,200-per-day drug habit ($200 on cocaine, $900 on Oxycontin, the rest split between Xanax and marijuana). Louis’s brushes with the law included a grand larceny charge in March 2015 for stealing a Chanel purse from Chelsea’s Marquee nightclub. It was revealed during Jimmy’s trial that Louis might also have been supplying Oxycontin to his fraternity house at George Washington University in 2014 when his frat brother, a junior named William Gwathmey, died of an overdose. The FBI investigated Louis’s possible involvement in Gwathmey’s death, but no charges were filed. Of course, it was the same FBI, two years later, that helped obtain Louis’s testimony against Jimmy. That said, there was no formal deal given to Louis in return for his cooperation.

There was, however, already bad blood between the two former best friends. In early 2016, Louis and Jimmy had bought into an illegal sports-betting book together and lost nearly $40,000. Louis blamed Jimmy for the debacle when he asked his parents to cover the balance. As Jeffrey Rackover and Rosanna Scotto were close friends, Jimmy found himself in hot water with “Pops” and threatened Louis into copping to his part in the deal. The nature of Jimmy’s threat goes back to the security cameras in Jeffrey’s bedroom. Jimmy had footage of Louis having sex with prostitutes on Jeffrey’s bed, which he threatened to show to his girlfriend. Understandably, this imbroglio caused a rupture in the friendship.

In light of these soap-operatic betrayals, it seems peculiar that Jimmy would seek Louis out to confess his hand in a murder. “We used to have a great relationship,” Jimmy says, “but I wouldn’t trust him with the code to my gym locker.”

Nevertheless, Louis made for a compelling witness at trial. There were audible gasps when he delivered Jimmy’s purported line, “I slit his throat, and I stabbed him.” Yet his testimony was rife with troubling inconsistencies. Case in point: Joey’s throat wasn’t slit. In fact, Louis originally told the D.A. in February 2017 that Joey’s neck had been broken. In front of the grand jury in April 2017, he said that Jimmy had confessed to slitting the victim’s throat. Only at Jimmy’s trial was stabbing introduced. Intentional or not, Louis’s testimony seemed to be evolving to fit the facts. He admitted on the stand that he often lied to friends and family for short-term gains. It’s worth noting that witnesses in a grand jury proceeding are granted immunity in exchange for their testimony, so Louis could not be prosecuted for any criminal activity he was specifically asked about. Or maybe Louis was simply stepping up, telling the truth, and exposing a horrible wrong. Between the time of the alleged confession and his being interviewed by law enforcement, he checked himself into a drug-treatment program in Arizona. Louis’s lawyer says that ultimately his client’s interest “was in doing the right thing. He had important information, and he felt it was important to share it.”

There is one constant in Louis’s story that has never altered. On that Tuesday afternoon when he saw police activity outside the Grand Sutton and realized that he knew the explicit details of a murder, his first reaction was to call his mother. Neither party would comment on the specifics of that panicked phone call. But one wonders what must have been going through Rosanna Scotto’s mind the following Friday morning, when on Fox 5’s Good Day New York, she and her coanchor, Greg Kelly, reported on the arrest of two “well-connected young men seemingly with big futures” who were tied to a “gruesome murder” over the purported rebuffing of a sexual advance. “Antwan Lewis joins us outside the murder scene on the East Side,” Scotto says as she stares into the camera. “Antwan, what’s going on?”

Jimmy’s murder trial began on October 15, 2018. By that point, he had been in custody for nearly two years. If Jimmy had been preparing for the fight of his life, it was a markedly stoic one. He sat behind the defense desk with orders from his lawyers not to show emotion. “I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t get angry. I just had to sit there and stonewall…. It wasn’t me being cold or unsympathetic. I just had to be strong for myself.” From the start, the emotional weather inside the courtroom was charged in the victim’s favor. Not only was the Comunale family present every day, but Joey’s many friends packed the gallery. There were very few supporters there for Jimmy. Most noticeably absent was Jeffrey, whom Jimmy’s lawyer described as a man in deep emotional pain, “cleaved in two” over the loss of his son, while friends repeatedly advised him to distance himself. After paying the retainer for Jimmy’s defense, Jeffrey shut off the money valve.

Due to the tremendous show of support for the victim, Jimmy proved an unpopular figure in the courtroom, and Carter, the assistant district attorney, smartly went after his character at every turn. Louis’s testimony proved devastating in a case that otherwise leaned on circumstantial evidence. But perhaps the most damning evidence was the autopsy photographs, so graphic that it was one of the few moments where Pat had to leave the courtroom. The images showed the extent of the horror: Joey’s charred body, the gashes of stab wounds across his chest, a hack in his arm from the attempted dismemberment.

When the jury began deliberations on November 1, 2018, Jimmy and his team were hopeful. “We felt that we established reasonable doubt and the prosecution hadn’t met their burden,” defense co-counsel Robert Caliendo says. Jimmy tells me that he too thought he’d be vindicated, and that the jury wouldn’t believe Louis’s story. In the end, though, the jury needed only five hours to reach a verdict. The next day, Jimmy was found guilty on all counts.

Sobs and cheers broke out among Joey’s family and friends. Pat didn’t hold back tears. Before reporters, he announced his eagerness to see the other two “sons of bitches”—Larry and Max—face justice. Ultimately, the Comunales would be spared those trials. A month later, Larry pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of first-degree manslaughter in exchange for a prison sentence of 23 years; at his sentencing, he tried to walk back his guilty plea, but the judge denied his request. It galls Pat that Larry got a reduced sentence for pleading guilty, and yet his last words in court were “I am innocent of all crimes.” Max, never charged with murder, took six months in jail for pleading to one count of hindering prosecution. Max tells me that before he was sent to Rikers Island, a therapist diagnosed him with PTSD from the strain of the investigation. He served four months and was released in August 2019.

There is a second death in this story, one that never received any media coverage. Kyle Jarmon grew up alongside Larry and Max in Oceanport. His home life wasn’t nearly as affluent or stable, with an alcoholic mother and a father often traveling to make ends meet. In his youth, he spent a lot of time at the Gemmas’. Max says that his family had a Christmas stocking for Kyle, and there’s still a baby photo of him somewhere in the house. Kyle was intelligent, athletic, and ambitious. He majored in business at Fordham University and took a finance job at a firm in Philadelphia before returning to New York City to work as an assistant V.P. at Deutsche Bank. He had dreams, his father, Jack Jarmon, tells me, of working for the CIA. He lived in an apartment with two roommates in Jersey City, not far from Max and Larry.

Kyle was the friend who picked Max up at the PATH station on the morning of Joey’s murder. Kyle was the friend Larry met for a drink to ask about a defense lawyer. Police and prosecutors never interviewed Kyle directly about the case.

On November 2, 2018, around 2:30 p.m., James Rackover was found guilty of murder in the second degree. The conviction became national news, and Kyle was likely at his desk on Wall Street when he learned of the verdict. That evening, his two roommates discovered him passed out in his bedroom. He appeared to be sleeping with his back on the floor and his legs on the mattress. Unable to wake him, they put him in bed. Sometime after midnight, one roommate went in to turn off Kyle’s light and heard extremely loud snoring. The following day, at 3:30 p.m., the roommates entered Kyle’s bedroom and found him unresponsive and foaming from the mouth and nose. Near his body, police discovered 11 glassine baggies of heroin and two empty ones. Kyle was declared dead at the scene at 4:23 p.m., although one of his roommates believes he probably died hours earlier. The cause of death was listed as “acute intoxication by heroin and fentanyl.” Kyle’s phone records for November 2, the day he took the lethal dose, list a series of answered calls from Bryan Gemma, Max’s younger brother, and from Gordon Gemma, Max’s father. (The only other call to Kyle’s phone that day was from his father, which went to voicemail.) This call log might be unexceptional, as the Gemmas were, according to Max, like family. “Kyle was someone I would talk to every day,” Max says.

When I ask Max whether he knew of Kyle’s using heroin, he shakes his head. “It was a total surprise.” Kyle’s father couldn’t find anyone close to his son who even suspected him of taking the drug. Friends I spoke with, some his closest for decades, said it was inconceivable that Kyle would ever do heroin. Nevertheless, no investigation into Kyle’s death was opened by the police. He became a casualty of a drug epidemic ravaging the nation’s young. Dead at 30 of an opioid overdose.

The disturbing fact remains that Kyle overdosed the same day Jimmy was found guilty. That verdict spelled very bad news for Larry’s and Max’s chances at their impending trials, and it surely helped incentivize their guilty pleas. It’s a stark coincidence that the one individual who was in direct contact with both Larry and Max in the days after Joey’s murder would take an accidental overdose on the very day of Jimmy’s guilty verdict.

Robert Abrams, a lawyer who specializes in defending the families of murder victims and who represents the Comunales, recalled the shock at hearing of Kyle’s death. “This was apparently the first and only time he took these drugs,” Abrams says. “It appears it was either a bizarre coincidence or that Kyle was the victim of foul play.”

Did Kyle worry that he might be called to testify against his childhood friends? Did he know more about Joey’s murder than he had let on? (No Louis-like prosecutorial savior emerged with the story of a confession by either Larry or Max, but Kyle would have been an obvious candidate.) A few of Kyle’s friends recall him as being unusually anxious, feeling as if he had been unwittingly dragged into a murder investigation; others say he was his typical happy “goofball” self. Was Kyle a secret user? Was it a night of experimentation gone wrong? Could his death have been in any way suspicious?

Nevertheless, the Manhattan district attorney’s office didn’t press the Jersey City police for a deeper investigation into Kyle’s death, even though it had lost a potentially valuable witness in two upcoming trials. But as Jimmy says about the entire circus, “It’s all just me, me, me…they’re all just pointing the finger at me…. You would think I’m the only one involved in the case.” The D.A. had already landed one guilty verdict on the strength of its case. Perhaps new complications only would have muddied the water.

Jimmy has been reading a lot lately, everything from Julius Caesar to Machiavelli. He’s also been taking paralegal correspondence classes and finds those lessons helpful in preparing for his upcoming appeal. (Larry, currently housed in Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, is also appealing his verdict and wouldn’t speak for this article.) A successful appeal is a long shot, but Jimmy remains optimistic. Optimism might be a survival tactic in Attica, a way to keep going day after day, for there is a strong chance Jimmy will be incarcerated for the rest of his life. “I’m still fighting,” Jimmy says. “This isn’t over.”

Others have already moved on. Jimmy tells me he is still in touch with Jeffrey and continues to think of him as his father. Jeffrey’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, had a different take on the status of their relationship: “The truth is that Jeff treated James as his son and accordingly was gravely disappointed by the drug-fueled, violent, and senseless behavior that James was convicted of. Their relationship is over. Period.”

Jimmy tries to imagine where he might go if he’s ever released from prison. South Beach? Scottsdale? In the end, it would be too hard to turn his back on the city. “I don’t know if I ever want to leave New York,” he says. “I owe a lot of my personality and kind of what I am to the city.”

Privilege might be measured by the number of second chances a person is given in a lifetime. Some possess an unlimited supply. Louis Ruggiero, at the time of his testimony, had moved to Los Angeles to become an “entertainment concierge.” Max Gemma spent his months in jail taking a course on prison reform. He’s currently earning an MBA and hopes to go into real estate like his father. Jeffrey Rackover moved out of the Grand Sutton in 2018 but still lives and works as a diamond dealer in Manhattan. James Beaudoin got his second chance when he moved to New York. It is unlikely he will get a third.