Testimony of James V. La Duca before the McClellan Committee, 1958 (Part 32)
James V. La Duca of Lewiston, N.Y., declined on Fifth Amendment grounds to answer whether he attended the Apalachin meeting, while Robert F. Kennedy read the staff's information on his work for John C. Montana's taxi company, the Maggadino Funeral Home and Local 66 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees.
- Date
- 1958-06-30/1958-07-03
- Kind
- hearing
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- A work of the United States Congress, printed by the Government Printing Office. Public domain in the United States under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The page image stored here was rendered from the Internet Archive's PDF of the Boston Public Library copy; quotations follow the Archive's OCR, checked against the page image.
Part 32 of the Select Committee’s printed hearings, testimony beginning at printed page 12272. La Duca was sworn and appeared with two Buffalo lawyers, Veneard D. Neri and Joseph P. Runfola. He gave his name and his residence in Lewiston, N.Y., and declined to state his occupation “on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.” The stored image is printed page 12273.
He declined in the same words to answer whether he had been connected with Local 66 of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union and whether he had attended “the meeting at Apalachin, N. Y., in November of 1957.” Kennedy then put the committee’s information to him: that he had worked “in 1945 and 1948 as a dispatcher” for John Charles Montana’s Van Dyke Taxi Co.; that he then “went to work for the Maggadino Funeral Home,” which Kennedy said was “operated and run by Mr. Antonio Maggadino, who also attended the meeting at Apalachin”; that in 1947 he, the two Montanas and “Mr. Peter J. Maggadino, who was the brother of Antonio Maggadino,” bought the Buffalo Beverage Corp.; and that he later became secretary-treasurer of Local 66. La Duca declined to answer each question. Senator Ives asked whether “your admission of any association with Mr. Montana would tend to incriminate you,” and he declined again.
A refusal to answer under the Fifth Amendment is not evidence of the facts in the question. The statements in this testimony are committee counsel’s account of the staff’s information.
