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 sad*stic, 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 sh*t 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.”
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?”
