What Happened in Apartment 4C?

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0:37Joey's missing. He's somewhere. It's gotta be somewhere. Hey, where's Joey? Have you heard from Joey? This isn't like him to not call me back. There's something really wrong.

0:57Let's go back to November 12, 2016. A bunch of people were going out to New York City. Joey would go into Manhattan a good amount. He would meet all of our friends there. He had hundreds of friends. Hundreds of friends. Joey always had this positive outlook on life. When you were with him, you felt like you could fly. He was an athlete, loved sports. Bright future, smart kid. That night, we went to the Gilded Lily. The Gilded Lily is in the Meatpacking District. It's a lounge. It has club-type music. It's kind of high-end. Everyone dresses up. Were you drinking? We were drinking. How would you describe Joey?

1:56He looked fine. He didn't look like he was even buzzed. 3.30 or so, the night was ending, so everyone exits. I remember Joey on my left, and these girls were looking at him a certain way, and he was looking back at me and just smiling like, you know, that he was interested. I get approached on my right side by two guys, and they try to start some conversation with me. Joey's on my left, and they kind of form a group on that side. He jumped in a cab and went off with these two guys. Why do you think he did? Do you know? I just don't know, but I guarantee they're saying that they have a penthouse apartment, there's girls, this guy's dad's a jeweler.

2:43And that jeweler was the jeweler to the stars. You're talking about Oprah Winfrey, you're talking about Jennifer Lopez. He sold an engagement ring to Melania and Donald Trump. Saturday night came and went. I can't get in touch with him. Has your son ever gone a whole day without texting or calling you? No. I started getting phone calls from a bunch of our friends. Have you heard from Joey? Have you spoke to Joey? Joey's with you, right? They thought he was at my house. What happened? So I went on Instagram. I went on Facebook. I called everyone on my phone. We go and we just start looking for them.

3:24Sunday. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Everyone was still trying to get a clear-cut answer as to what was going on. Sources say 26-year-old Joseph Camminale came to this building early Sunday morning with friends. Why? Why were you there? Why did you meet them? Why'd you go out that night? If you were invited to go to Sutton Place, you would want to go there. It's like its own private enclave that only money can penetrate. Kaminali's father reported him missing when he never came home. What's now going through your mind? The worst, the worst. Yeah. What do you think happened in apartment 4C? Something went terribly, terribly wrong.

4:14I met Joey freshman year of college. We've been best friends ever since. Yes. Joey was one of my best friends. My best friend. Best friend. Everybody called him their best friend. But I was his best friend. Joey Cominale's father, Pat, knew his 26-year-old son well. And at first, he wasn't worried when he couldn't reach him the morning after Joey went out with some friends on Saturday night, November 12, 2016. I know it sounds crazy, but in New York, things don't really start until late. It's not unheard of for kids to come home at 6 in the morning. and I figured he's sleeping. He was sick earlier in the day.

4:53Looking back, Joey's friends like Steven Nasso will tell you that Joey never even intended to go out that Saturday night. I think he took a nap for like three hours. But then Joey's college buddy, Pritham Devakabarabu, a part-time promoter, texted and offered Joey VIP treatment at the Gilded Lily, a club then located in the chic meatpacking district in downtown Manhattan. I was working, so I'd be able to take care of everyone that came in. Did you ever worry about him? I worried about Joey because I loved him, but I knew that he always surrounded himself with good people. Elisa Labretto dated Joey Cominelli on and off, but mostly on, for five years.

5:39First at Hofstra University, And later, when Joey became a sales associate at his father's security company, and Elisa became a teacher. He is like the rest of us. He wants to have fun, doesn't want any problems. But that particular Saturday, she and Joey, like a lot of longtime couples, were taking a break. We had a little bit of, like, a disagreement. And I was like, you know what, I just need a little bit of space. Like, I'll talk to him in the morning. So Joey headed into Manhattan from Stamford, Connecticut. We hop on the Merritt Parkway, shoot down in New York City. Joey was with Steven Nasso, and they met up with a group of friends.

6:20It was always a good time to meet people, and that's why Joey and them came out to Gilda that night.

6:29As the club was closing, you could see Joey and his friends exiting on surveillance video. It was early Sunday morning, and the crowd emptied onto the street. That's when Joey began talking to three women standing outside the club. Then, out of the blue, two men joined them. The men did not know the women, and they didn't know Joey and his friends either. There's six or seven million people in New York City, and they crossed paths with us. At that point, Stephen borrowed Joey's phone and stepped away from the group. When Stephen turned back, Joey and the group were gone. And this new group that he had met, somebody said, hey, you want to go to a friend's apartment in Sutton Place and continue having some fun?

7:17Veteran New York crime reporter Murray Weiss covered the Joey Cominelli story when it first broke and is now working for 48 hours. So Joey went along, leaving his phone behind with his friend, thinking, I'll get it tomorrow, no big deal. They just jumped in a couple of cabs, and off they went.

7:38Stephen got word that Joey had gone to a party uptown at someone's apartment, so he headed home with Joey's phone. Hours later on Sunday afternoon, back in Stephen's apartment, Joey's phone began ringing. It was his father. He said, hey, where's Joey? And I said, he stayed in the city. and he was like, all right, well, something happened. Find him for me. So then I went to Joey's place, and he wasn't there. Did you talk to him every day? Yeah, every day. Talked about the Yankees and the Rangers.

8:12I'm so sorry, Pat. Steven got in touch with Preetham, who tracked down the phone number of a guy named Larry who had been at the party. Larry told us that he doesn't know where Joey went. That's when the vast network of Joey's friends got to work, homing through social media searching for any scrap of information. Friend Mike Mullins says they plugged Larry's phone number into Google and got a last name. And actually his Facebook popped up, Lawrence DeLeon. Is this the kid? Yeah, that's the kid we were with last night. Max was the one who really put everything in motion. Max Branchinelli was perhaps Joey's closest friend.

9:02He manages a restaurant, but when he heard Joey was missing, he turned himself into an online detective. Did you ever try to track down or retrace somebody's steps before using social media? No. You're in a panic and you're trying to find your friend. So show me where you started. So I went on Instagram here. And why Instagram? Why would you start there? Instagram, you can click on the location of the place, and it will show people that posted a picture there from that place. Here's what Max did. He began using Instagram's locator function for the Gilded Lily, looking for users who had posted the previous night and that morning.

9:45He kept his eye out for Joey. As I was scrolling, I landed on this picture. And why did this catch your eye? This caught my eye because I happened to know him in the middle. By total coincidence, Max spotted a friend, Alvin. But that's not the only reason he stopped at this photo. I know the type of girls Joey chases, their dark features, and I just had a punch. I screenshotted the picture and I sent it to the group of the guys that were out at the club with him the night before. And what'd they say? They're like, yeah, it's that girl right there on the right. and I was like, wow. That woman had also gone to the Sutton Place party that night.

10:25Max called his friend Alvin, who had her phone number. So I then hit her up. Do you remember being with Joey last night? Like, we can't find him, he's missing. And she told me, like, yeah, we were with him last night. She told him that when the party ended early that Sunday morning, Larry DeLeon and Joey walked her and her friends to an Uber. She told me they waved and he looked like he was going back inside with Larry. But when Max called Larry DeLeon, he said Joey did not go back inside the building. And he's like, he left with the girls. He left in the Uber with the girls. Those were two very different stories.

11:08At this point, I'm not sure who's lying to me.

11:26How does a 26-year-old man simply disappear? Joey Cominelli was part of a close-knit, loving family with a younger sister, Alexa, and parents, Pat and Lisa. He loved going to the city. He did it all the time. He loved it. You know, he'd go to Ranger games. He'd go to the Yankee games. he'd go to the Giant Games. Pat Cominale lives in a tony part of Connecticut, but he's a Bronx kid at heart. He moved here, met his future wife, Lisa, and founded a successful security firm that he later sold for more than$400 million. But that meant nothing now that his only son was missing. How important is family to you, Pat?

12:20Yeah, family's important. That's...

12:26That's everything. Tell me about his relationship with his dad. I have never seen a person admire their father so much. I've never seen a father admire their son so much. They were inseparable. By Sunday evening, with Joey now missing about 10 hours, Pat phoned Larry DeLeon. who had been at the Sutton Place apartment with Joey. Larry says they walked the girls out to the car, and that's the last they saw them. But then, DeLeon provided one small additional detail about Joey that, to Pat, seemed off. He said the last I heard of him, he said he was going to get cigarettes. Did that make sense? It didn't make any sense, because if you talk to his friends, they'll tell you that he never bought a pack of cigarettes in his life.

13:15Joey smoked cigarettes from time to time, but he never bought them. And that's why it doesn't make any sense. Pat thought so, too. He decided to file a missing persons report. So I said, all right, let me go to Stanford PD. By then, Pat had Larry DeLeon's phone number. The on-duty sergeant called DeLeon, who denied knowing where Joey was. But he did provide the names and numbers of two friends at the party, James Rackover and Max Gemma. De Leon also provided the address, 418 East 59th Street in Manhattan, a building that calls itself the Grand Sutton. The Grand Sutton is a luxury condo in one of the wealthiest sections of New York City.

14:06An apartment 4C was home to 25-year-old James Rackover. You're not expecting an issue in Sutton Place. A sudden place is a beautiful place to live. No one would disagree. Over the years, the neighborhood's been home to a parade of celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, and rock star Freddie Mercury. What could go wrong on the Upper East Side? Do you know anything about Larry DeLeon or James Rackover or Max Gemma at that point? You know nothing about them. But as the days passed, the police would find out a lot more about the three young men, all in their 20s, who partied that morning with Joey.

14:53The three young men in this story are young men of privilege. Larry DeLeon worked in real estate and came from a well-off New Jersey family that owned thoroughbred horses. Max Gemma was a computer software salesman whose father was once the mayor of Oceanport, New Jersey, and have been in business with Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law. But no one appeared to live a more charmed life than James Rackover, who was living in Sutton Place. His father, Jeffrey, who had a much larger apartment in the same building on the 32nd floor, specialized in getting one-of-a-kind pieces of jewelry for the world's rich and beautiful.

15:39I grew up in the same town with Jeffrey Rackover. We grew up a block apart, and while we weren't close, our families knew each other. He not only cultivated becoming a jeweler to the stars, he wanted to be among them. He was friends with Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. He came to know Oprah. His apartment has photographs of himself with all these personalities. James enjoyed the good life. He was an aspiring model working in the insurance business, loved boxing, and even had a boxer named Gloves, of course. I think Joey had an opportunity to go to a fancy part of New York City, into a fancy apartment, and he went along.

16:25And there were those three young ladies along for the ride, Jenna Stissi, Katie Conroy, and Samantha Guardiola. But all that mattered to Pat was finding his son. He had already filed a missing persons report with the Stanford Police, but also wanted to alert the New York City cops. So at 9 a.m. Monday morning, some 25 hours since anyone reported seeing Joey, Pat was at the 17th Police Precinct, where he told NYPD Detective Yeoman Castro everything he knew. Detective Castro, I still remember saying, let's go to the building. And we jumped in the police car. When they arrived at the Grand Sutton, Detective Castro asked to view the building's surveillance video.

17:16And then he starts reviewing video. They asked me a couple times to come in to identify if that was my son.

17:32So we did. at some point you see your son.

17:40Sorry, Pat.

17:44Pat was overcome when he spotted son Joey and Larry DeLeon walking the three women out to the curb. But then what do you see? We see him come back into the building. So you see Larry DeLeon and your son walking back in the building. And what did that say to you? They're lying. There's a problem here. Remember, Larry DeLeon had said Joey did not go back inside the building. It was all too much for Pat. Detective Castro asked him to wait at the 17th Police Precinct. So as I went outside to make phone calls, the porter started to bring garbage out.

18:31And I ran back inside, and I said to the police, don't let the garbage go. Make sure you search all the bags. I just kind of had that sense that if these guys were lying, there could be something in the garbage. And sadly, he was right. Inside those bags, police discovered Joey's bloody pants, his shirt, and his driver's license, Also tossed in the trash, a special chain Joey always wore, given to him by his father. I said to myself, I don't think he walked out of the building alive.

19:2814 hours after Joey Cominale and Larry DeLeon were seen on video walking those women to their Uber, surveillance cameras caught James Rackover taking his father's Mercedes-Benz for a drive. With the help of NYPD's network of cameras, detectives were able to track some of his movements. They quickly put in Rackover's Mercedes-Benz license plate, and bing, bing, bing, it started showing up going down the FDR drive. The car went south around southern Manhattan. It then made a turn into the Holland Tunnel, but led out to New Jersey. But detectives could not pinpoint precisely where the car eventually stopped.

20:16They needed a break, and they soon got it from Larry DeLeon. He agreed to meet with them, and they sensed that there was something that he wanted to say. And so the detective said to him, you know, what do you want to tell us? We have a missing boy here. His family, you know, wants to know what happened to him. On Tuesday, DeLeon began talking. The party at the apartment in the wee early hours of Sunday morning had been lively, he said. One of the women videotaped some of it on her phone. There was cocaine and plenty of drinking. DeLeon and Rackover even competed to see who could give the best lap dance.

20:58But by 6.45 a.m., the women left in that Uber. And that's when cameras captured DeLeon and Joey walking back into the building and up to apartment 4C, where DeLeon says a fatal argument erupted. Larry DeLeon tells the police he has an exchange of words with Joey Communality that Joey says something like, James got the cocaine, you know, I got the cigarettes, what have you brought to the table? He kind of pounded his hand on a table. And Larry DeLeon admitted to the police that he just flew into a rage and slammed Joey, knocked him down and hit him a few times. DeLeon says that when he began punching Joey, his friend Max Gemma was asleep on the couch.

21:48Then, DeLeon says, Rackover, a boxing fan who took pride in his chiseled physique, jumped right in. And according to Larry, James starts also beating the crap out of Joey, who's now defenseless and gurgling because he can't hardly breathe. Communality lawyer Bob Abrams has heard DeLeon's confession. He claims that after he had beaten a defenseless Joey and almost killed him, Max woke up. They got so very nervous because Rackover was now beating the crap out of Joey that they would do anything Rackover said. And this is really difficult for me to talk about because what they did and how they did it is just so horrific.

22:35DeLeon says he told Gemma to leave the room, and that's when DeLeon says Rackover began stabbing Joey. The stabbing ended Joey's life. DeLeon says Gemma left the apartment and had no involvement in the murder. He says Rackover then dragged Joey's lifeless body into the bathroom. He tries to dismember him with a serrated knife. Dismembering somebody is not an easy thing to do. And Rackover was not able to do it. While they plotted their next move, they began a frenzied cleanup of the apartment, mopping up Joey's blood with bleach and paper towels, all the while fielding calls from Joey's friends and his father.

23:28You're talking to Larry DeLeon, and your son's still in the apartment. And they act like there's nothing wrong. Yeah. Incredibly, evidence shows that Rackover and DeLeon took time out to eat, placing a delivery order. Then, as shown on building surveillance cameras, they explored the basement, looking police say for a way to get Joey's body out of the Grand Sutton without being seen. Then, they had another idea. What they do next is totally insane. As darkness settled on the city, DeLeon claimed he moved Joey's body, now wrapped in a comforter, to the ledge of Rackover's fourth floor window, while Rackover moved the Mercedes-Benz into position on East 59th Street.

24:22When Rakova gave him the Claire sign, De Leon pushed the body out of the window, four floors. And nobody saw it? We're talking about an upscale apartment, midtown Manhattan, and nobody saw it? The Grand Sutton faces the Queensborough Bridge in Manhattan, and it was dark. It fell into an area where there may have been some bushes and concrete. And then when nobody was looking, after De Leon came back down, they stuffed the body into the trunk of the car, and then they drove off.

25:07Larry had told them that they had driven the body down to Oceanport, New Jersey, and that they had deposited him in a wooded area behind a florist shop. It was an area that DeLeon was very familiar with. He grew up in Oceanport, a Jersey shore town some 60 miles from Manhattan. He admits to helping take the body and to participate in digging. I don't want to call it a grave because it's not a grave, a hole, and then dumping Joey's body in a hole. But right before they were going to cover up the hole, Rackover took gasoline and started to pour it over Joey's body and, in fact, did light Joey's body on fire.

25:54it. After DeLeon's confession, police raced out to Oceanport and discovered Joey's burned body in a field behind the florist shop, exactly where DeLeon had said it would be. Two hours later, Sergeant Yoma and Castro arrived at Pat Cominelli's home in Stanford. heard. You heard a car door close? I popped up and I saw Detective Castro.