# Testimony of Capt. James E. Hamilton, Los Angeles Police Department, before the McClellan Committee (Part 32)

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/items/mcclellan-part-32-hamilton-testimony-1958/

The commander of the Los Angeles police intelligence division described stopping Frank DeSimone's car in 1956 and finding "John S. LaRocca, of Pittsburgh, Pa." as a passenger, and said police knew who LaRocca was only from newspaper clippings.

Part 32, testimony beginning at printed page 12326. Hamilton identified himself as "captain of police, Los Angeles Police Department, commanding the intelligence division," and said the division was "a nonenforcement unit" whose sole responsibility was "the investigation of organized crime." The stored image is printed page 12333. His opening line on page 12326 gives a home address, which this archive does not reproduce.

Asked about Frank DeSimone, who attended the Apalachin meeting, Hamilton said that on March 14, 1956, investigators saw DeSimone's car outside a house in Sierra Madre, "so we followed it back into Los Angeles, stopped it, and the two passengers in the car with him were, one, John S. LaRocca, of Pittsburgh, Pa., and, the second, Salvatore Marino." (The OCR reads "LaEocca" at that point; the print elsewhere reads LaRocca.) He went on: "John LaRocca, who was with DeSimone that night, was classified by Senator Williams probably 5 years ago now in an investigation, at least the press quoted Senator Williams as classifying John LaRocca as the top racketeer of the Pittsburgh area. And that is how we knew who we had when we stopped John LaRocca."

Later he used LaRocca as his example of the need for a central federal source of information: "we knew who John LaRocca was, not because anybody had ever given us any information on John LaRocca, but we got it out of the newspapers." It was, he said, "out of five news clips on John LaRocca's card that we knew very well who he was." The rest of his testimony concerns figures in Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit.

The "top racketeer" phrase is a police witness repeating a press report of a senator's remark. It is hearsay at two removes and is not used on this archive's Pittsburgh chart.

## Sources

- Internet Archive, scan of the printed hearings (Boston Public Library copy): https://archive.org/details/investigationofi32unit
- Full text (OCR) on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/download/investigationofi32unit/investigationofi32unit_djvu.txt
- PDF on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/download/investigationofi32unit/investigationofi32unit.pdf