He had an appetite for brutality.
TV anchor Rosanna Scotto’s son testified Monday that his ex-pal confessed to slicing the throat of a Connecticut man after a drug-fueled house party — then gobbled down pancakes like nothing ever happened.
“I slit his throat and I stabbed him and we wrapped the body up in a comforter and threw it out the window so the cameras wouldn’t see,” Louis Ruggiero, 24, recalled James Rackover saying.
Ruggiero, the son of the popular Fox 5 “Good Day NY” host, said Rackover made the heinous admission inside an Equinox gym locker room a day after the murder.
The shocking testimony elicited gasps from the gallery.
Victim Joseph Comunale’s father, Pat Comunale, who has attended every day of the trial and was the case’s first witness, burst into sobs and yelled at the lawyer for Rackover’s co-defendant, Larry Dilione, 30, who will be tried separately for the Nov. 13, 2016, murder.
“Do you want to hear the sickest part of it all?” Rackover allegedly asked Ruggiero.
“I came home and ordered pancakes from a diner and ate it like nothing ever happened,” the accused killer told him.
Ruggiero was lifting weights at the East 61 Street gym, just a few blocks from the crime scene inside 418 E. 59th St. when Rackover called and said he had to see him immediately and rushed over.
“James looks at me and says, ‘I did something really bad,’” Ruggiero recounted for alternately rapt and revolted jurors in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Rackover, 27, allegedly told him that he and Dilione “got into a fight with this kid at the apartment and after he (Dilione) knocked him out, I gave him a few lickings as well.”
The fight was likely over cocaine, according to prosecutors.
Rackover told Ruggiero not to worry about the grisly killing “because we cleaned the whole apartment and bleached everything, and they’re not going to find anything.”
Jurors had just finished days of testimony from a DNA expert and detectives about traces of blood and cleaning fluids left throughout the apartment, and mounds of bloody evidence the men ditched in garbage bags in the building’s basement.
Rackover also allegedly admitted to his friend that he and Dilione buried the body in a shallow grave in Oceanport, NJ.
Ruggiero said he initially didn’t believe Rackover’s gory tale.
“I said, ‘James, you’re a good little Jew boy from Manhattan. You’re not in ‘Goodfellas,’ and he grabbed me and shook me and said, ‘I’m serious.’”
The next day, Ruggiero said he passed by Rackover’s apartment building and saw the crime scene unit vans and cadaver dogs and “that’s when I knew this was real.”
He first called his mom, Scotto, and then his lawyer, he said — but not police.
Ruggiero, in fact, had to be subpoenaed by the FBI several months later before meeting with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
Rackover kept his face buried in a pile of documents during most of Ruggiero’s damning testimony.
Rackover lived in a posh Upper East Side apartment paid for by his alleged lover, celebrity jeweler Jeffrey Rackover, who he claimed was his father. Ruggiero, who now lives in Los Angeles, recounted his own checkered past, which included a severe cocaine and prescription pill addiction that got him booted from George Washington University.
Scotto was once close friends with Jeffrey Rackover and met his son through the gem salesman.
Ruggiero described how the elder Rackover showered his young companion with “whatever he wanted,” including clothes, jewelry and a Mercedes.
Assistant DA Antoinette Carter showed jurors pictures of the former pals posing shirtless at a Hamptons home that the elder Rackover rented in 2015.
He admitted to stealing a Chanel purse in 2015 from a nightclub, for which he was arrested, and pilfering money from his suffering parents to fuel his habit.
After a stint in rehab, Ruggiero said he is now clean.
His father, Louis Ruggiero, is a real estate lawyer. His grandfather, Anthony Scotto, was a reputed boss in the Gambino crime family.
A third defendant, Max Gemma, who was present during the slaying but is not accused of murder, is expected to be tried last.