Havana 3

“[Jimmy Hoffa’s] mention of legal problems in New Orleans translated into his insistence that Carlos Marcello arrange another meeting with Partin, despite my warning that dealing with Partin was fruitless and dangerous.”

“He wanted me to get cracking on the interview with Partin. In June, Carlos sent word that a meeting with Partin was imminent and I should come to New Orleans. As [my wife] watched me pack in the bedroom of our Coral Gables home, she began crying, imploring me not to see Partin. She feared that it was a trap and that I would be murdered or arrested.”

Frank Ragano, J.D., attorney for Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, and Santos Trafacante Jr., in “Lawyer for the Mob,” 1994¹

I only peripherally glanced at the taxis as I left the Havana airport as I strolled away from the state-controlled zone and towards a row of private drivers. Finding a classic, privately-owned taxi was exactly as the Lonely Planet guide book had described.

I scanned the options and chose a convertible that was older than I was but probably in better physical condition. It was buffed to a shine, and had an almost ineffable look of care that implied love rather than labor. I don’t know which type of convertible – I’ve never been good at identifying vehicles – but the top was down and it looked like all convertibles from that time period.

I must have been smiling broadly as I scanned the car up, down, and side to side. The driver approached with a sympathetic grin. He was about my age and height, though more stout, and wore a faded black bolero with a decorative tan band. He proudly said the car had been his father’s, and that he maintained it himself and tried to keep it looking original. I don’t remember which model he said it was, but whatever type it was, it was a fine automobile by practically anyone’s standards. We agreed on a price to a downtown plaza within walking distance of several casa particulares I had circled in the Lonely Planet.

I put my bags in the back seat and sat in the front. He had installed a modern Bluetooth stereo and quality three-way door speakers, and a large digital counsel that played videos and waves of lights in sync with the music. He turned on something that sounded like The Buena Vista Social Club but wasn’t; it had modern bass riffs layered onto the congo drums, and the Bluetooth screen pulsated with bright colors to the beat. I bobbed my head to the beat, and his grin beamed brighter than the screen. He rotated the volume knob and I felt the rhythm reverberate in my chest. He pulled down the gear shift, and we took off smoothly. Soon we were out of the airport and cruising down the melecon. He rested his bolero on the seat between us, and I rotated my cap backwards to remain on my head despite the wind; I was worried that if I took it off I’d forget it, like I had forgotten my yoga mat in the airplane.

We drove with the ocean on our right and the airport fading behind us. The door speakers were clear without needing to be too loud, and the driver seemed to love the sound as much as he loved his car. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, syncing with the stereo’s congo drums. I leaded back and sank into the slick vinyl seat that stretched from door to door and was more like a living room couch than any modern car seat, a relic of the past that I hadn’t sat in for at least 40 years, and instantly, I wanted one. I briefly pondered what it would cost to restore one like to a level like the drivers, then I stopped thinking and extended my hand flat, like an airplane foil. I held it by the mirror and rotated my wrist back and forth to make my hand fly up and down like Superman flying over the wall of the melacon, just above ocean level. The Spanish fort walls guarding Havana were behind my hand, highlighted like a perfect post card, and I grinned when I read the small words on the glass, “Objects in mirror or closer than they appear,” and chuckled out loud when my mind said, “How true.”

I kept my arm outside with Superman flying beside us, and asked the driver where I could get public WiFi. I must have said it poorly, because he turned down the radio and asked me to repeat the question. I said I would like a public WiFi card and access. (I didn’t know the word for ‘access,’ but I said the English word after a pause that, in San Diego, implied a Spanglish word followed.) He told me there was a kiosk near where we were going, Playa de San Francisco de Asi. I asked if he’d drop me off there. “Claro que si!” he said, and turned the radio back up and resumed tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. I absorbed the decor he had chosen, and noticed a small photograph of what looked like him, his wife, and three young children.

We arrived and I rotated my hat and grabbed my bag. I paid him in cash, and asked him to wait while I pulled a tip out of my carry-on bag; I had a quart-sized ZipLock full of fake plastic thumbs with small red silk handkerchiefs tucked in each one. I held up a silk and showed him how to make it vanish by tucking it in my left fist with my right thumb and obviously keeping the flesh-colored tip visible when I removed my hand. In rusty Spanish, I said to keep your eyes on the left hand and ignore the thumb, and no one will notice. I gave it to him and tried to make a pun about giving him a tip. The pun fell flat, but he didn’t seem to care and tried the thumb tip on and laughed and said he’d show it to his kids. He waved and said “Buene viaje,” and drove off, leaving a trail of beats from the band that sounded like Buena Vista Social Club but wasn’t.

I looked around the small plaza where I stood. Only a few elderly men were there, sitting in benches facing the melacon and looking as relaxed as I hoped to be soon. I wanted to let a few people know I had arrived and cleared customs, then I’d turn off my phone and begin to relax for almost a month. I scoped out the plaza and saw a vendor selling WiFi cards from a kiosk that also had chargers and cases. I strolled over and bought a card with only 15 minutes, confirmed with him the best place to get WiFi, and walked a few blocks inland to the Plaza de San Francisco de Asi. I saw a handful of people were gathered around a few benches and a statue that the Lonely Planet said it was a statue of ______; they were all staring at their smart phones, and I assumed that was the spot to check messages. I set down my backpack and clipped it to a bench with a non-locking carabiner, pulled out my iPhone 8, and pressed my finger against the back print ID.

Despite having earbuds, I held my smart phone to my ear like an old flip phone. It transcribed voice mails, but I didn’t feel like rummaging for my reading glasses, so I told Siri to play voice mail. I kept the phone to my ear and moved into a modified warrior pose, with one hand on the phone and the other outstretched. I rotated my feet and squatted into the pose, trying to stretch my hamstrings and open my hips a bit until I could find a mat and do a proper job. My mind wandered to why I forgot the mat, and I was only partially listening to my phone. The first voice mail was from Wendy.

“Hey Jason, it’s Wendy. You’re probably in Jamaica or Cuba or wherever you were going by now, but I thought I’d call just in case.”

She paused almost three seconds. Twice as long as usual.

“It’s not important.”

Pause.

Something felt wrong. I stood upright and tried to listen more closely.

“I just wanted to talk with you about my will.”

Another pause. I pressed the phone tighter to my left ear, and I was so perturbed by the voice mail that I fumbled a bit for my thick sausage of a finger to fit into my narrowed cauliflower-scarred right ear canal. I breathed quietly and leaned in to what she was saying.

There was another pause, and I heard a hint of a sound, as if she had inhaled deeply and began to say, “I…” I can’t explain why, but I suddenly thought that Wendy would commit suicide and that she was calling me first; she wouldn’t, and I had no reason to suspect she would, but that’s the thought that popped into my mind. My body tensed as springs wound up inside me, and I pressed the phone and my finger more tightly. I held my breath and listened.

“It’s not big deal… You travel so much that I wanted to add Cindi as executor. We can talk about it later.” She sighed a subtle sigh, and said in what was obviously a forced cheerful tone, “Tell Cristi I said hello, and have fun scuba diving. Call me when you get back.” She hung up.

Gut instincts can be wrong, so instead of calling her back immediately I kneeled by the bench and dug through my backpack and pulled out my glasses and earbuds, and rewound her message. The VA says I arrived in the army with perfect hearing, but I left with a 15% hearing loss in each ear at different frequencies; despite stereo headphones, my head still rotated back and forth out of habit, as if trying to catch missing frequencies by whichever ear could. Anyone noticing probably thought I was moving my head to music and had jittery rhythm.

I listened to the entire message twice while reading Apple’s translation of what she said. Nothing changed from what I heard the first time. The transcription made a few mistakes translating her southern Louisiana accent, and it missed her beginning to say, “I…”, but she had definitely began to tell me something and stopped before the first word manifested. I was fixated on what she had begun to say, and wondered what had sparked my feeling that she could kill herself. I kept the phone in my hand, but mindlessly took out the earbuds; I have no explanation why, other than I think more clearly when I can listen to my surroundings while lost in thought.

Wendy was my mother, Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin. She was born in 1955 as Wendy Anne Rothdram in Tornonto, Canada. Her mother fled an abusive husband and moved to Baton Rouge to live with her sister and brother in law in 1960, and a few years later bought an 806 square foot house house under the airport flight path near Glen Oaks subdivision in northern Baton Rouge. In 1971, a petite 16 year old Wendy lost her virginity to the imposing 17 year old drug dealer of Glen Oaks High School, Edward Grady Partin Junior, son of the well-known Teamster leader Edward Grady Partin Senior, and the town’s quintessential delinquent teenager. She didn’t know anything about my dad’s family other than what was on the news – that my grandfather was an “all American hero” – and she couldn’t afford $120 for an abortion, so she accepted my dad’s marriage proposal. They dropped out of school and eloped an hour and a half away to the small town of Woodville Mississippi, where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old girl to marry and my dad still had family with a couch to crash on. They returned to Baton Rouge as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Partin, and moved into one of Big Daddy’s rural houses near where the Amite River; that’s the river Jimmy Hoffa mentioned in his first autobiography, where Teamster Local #5’s 600 pound safe was found, emptied of $450,000 in Teamster funds, and near where the bodies of two witnesses were found beaten and bloody.

I was born nine months later (gestation is ten months, not the nine many people believe, and that myth may persist because of polite discretion following weddings just like my parent’s). Wendy had at least two small nervous breakdowns, and abandoned me both times. She returned a few days later the first time, but the second time, my dad was in either Jamaica or Puerto Rico buying drugs in bulk – they never agreed on which Carribbean Island, and Wendy’s mind was prone to swapping names of islands like mine was prone to swapping models of cars – but court records show that wherever he went, my dad returned and was arrested for possession of prescription opoiods, and he was inexplicably released without prosecution. In the time both of my parents were gone, and then supported by my dad’s arrest, Judge Pugh of the East Baton Rouge Parish family court placed me in the foster system and assigned legal guardians to care for me. Wendy returned on her own, divorced my dad, and spent the next few years seeing me once a month and fighting the Partin family and Louisiana court system to regain custody of me. But she was ashamed of her age and having abandoned me, so she taught me to call her by her first name so people would assume I was her baby brother. She regained legal custody in 1976, and after a few appeals I began splitting my time between her and my dad in 1979. Old habits are hard to break, and I still called my mother Wendy.²

I sighed and stared at my phone. The sigh had no emotion behind it, but I make a tiny sound when lost in thought and exhaling, as if to remind myself that my body still needs to breathe and that thoughts could wait. I took a few breaths, glanced around the plaza to see if anyone was noticing me, and allowed myself to hear the sounds of music seeping from bars and the subtle crashing of waves against the nearby melacon. I breathed again, and let the moist air fill my lungs and rehydrate them after a long day of breathing cold, dry airplane air conditioning. I caught whiffs of scents from happy hour food cooking in the bars and restaurants surrounding the plaza; my mind was too distracted to focus on what was cooking, but the hint of sensing smells let me know that I was mostly present again.

I still had thoughts raging through my mind, but at least I could analyze them now. Everything I had read on the plane, and all of the books in my e-reader, and stories told to me when I was a kid were coalescing into a new version of my family history, and I stood up straight as I began to regain composure and think more clearly. Despite my worry about Wendy, or perhaps because of it, a piece of my family’s puzzle slid into place. Wendy never talked about what happened leading up to abandoning me, but when I read “I Heard You Paint Houses” on the flight from San Diego, something I read made me realize that it had more to do with Jimmy Hoffa than anyone had ever suspected. I had circled what he said, and starred the page to come back and ponder it, which may be why it was there for me to suddenly see a bigger picture about my childhood.

Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan explained why Hoffa didn’t have my grandfather killed by saying, “Partin was no good to them dead. They needed him alive. He had to be able to sign an affidavit. They needed him to swear that all the things he said against Jimmy at the trial were lies that he got from a script fed to him by Bobby Kennedy’s people in the Get Hoffa Squad.” In other words, if Big Daddy weren’t alive to recant or sign the affidavit to spark a mistrial, Hoffa would spend his entire sentence in prison; the only way for Hoffa to leave prison and resume power was for Big Daddy to choose to free him.

Frank said, “Jimmy told me point-blank to tell our friends back East that nothing should happen to Partin. The friends back east were the New York and Pittsburgh mafia families, and I’d later learn that similar instructions were given to mafia families all over America, with a concentrated focus on Carlos Marcello’s cartel in New Orleans.

Like a lot of the stories about Hoffa and the Kennedy’s, my version took decades to sort through and piece together, if only to omit what wasn’t relevant or what was just speculation. Even the best historians disagree on details, and I’m unquestionably biased, but this is my version of history:

In the 1950’s to 1970’s, Hoffa controlled around $1.1 Billion in unmonitored Teamster money in a pension fund, paid for with monthly cash dues six to ten dollars from $2.7 Million Teamsters over dozens of years; in today’s money, that’s around $7 Billion of untraceable cash in the hands of one man to do with as he wished. Hoffa was investing the Teamster pension fund by lending to mafia families and film producers all across America, building casinos and creating the burgeoning City of Sin, Las Vegas, and funding Hollywood films. It costs a mafia head around $40,000 just to have a conversation with Hoffa, which would be like having to pay a bank manager a quarter of a million dollars just to have a meeting, and when Hoffa lent money it was on the condition that his Teamsters haul the building materials, equipment, and whatever else the mafia families wanted. I believe that he truly was investing the pension fund, and when Teamsters were hurt on the job or when the economy slowed or a strike put Teamsters on a picket line, the pension fund was used to keep their families fed; in a way, Hoffa was doing what working class Americans wanted from their government. (That fund was one of the main reasons Senator John F. Kennedy pursued Hoffa when Kennedy was on the labor unions committee – if not the primary reasons – and was why when JFK became president he appointed his little brother, newly barred Harvard attorney Bobby Kennedy, as U.S. Attorney General with two tasks: remove Hoffa from power, and stop organized crime.) Despite the government’s witch hunt against Hoffa, the Teamsters scored lucrative contracts and that recruited more Teamsters, and their pension fund grew and grew while Hoffa was at the helm. Even Hollywood tapped into Hoffa’s funds, and throughout the 1950’s and 60’s, if you sat through the credits at the end of a film, the last credit you’d see would be a full-screen Teamsters logo with Thunder and Lightening, the two horses posing over a steering wheel; in exchange, Hoffa’s Teamsters trucked movie sets across the country, and his Teamsters brought in the trailers that housed actors during filming; and, for no reason I can pinpoint, I suspect that Hoffa was a film buff and he funded Hollywood simply because he enjoyed being behind the scenes of movie production, especially because he was level-headed and a fitness buff who didn’t drink or gamble and therefore had no vested interest in the casinos and hotels he funded for organized crime, which was almost purely for investment purposes. Collectively, the families owed Hoffa around $121 Million, almost a Billion dollars in today’s money, and Carlos Marcello himself owed around $21 Million. Not only did Hoffa offer a carrot to Marcello of forgiving debt, he also used a stick and told him that if Marcello didn’t do something about my grandfather, he’d loose all chances for future funding once Hoffa finally got out of prison.

Hoffa controlled the Teamster Pension from prison using his puppet leader, Frank Fitzsimmons, though that power was waning every year Hoffa was incarcerated, and therefore Hoffa’s influence on America was declining. He had to get out of prison fast, and the only way to do that was if my grandfather changed his testimony or signed the affidavit that Hoffa’s lawyers had written up and that Big Daddy had declined. In a 1968 series of Life magazine exposes on the newly acknowledged organized crime syndicate and its links with the Teamsters, Big Daddy is shown and so is Carlos Marcello, and investigators reported that Marcello had offered Big Daddy a $1 Million bribe to free Hoffa. Pundits immediately and ignorantly chimed in that the mafia wasn’t in the business of bribing when they could just kill someone, but like a lot of partially informed pundits they didn’t see the big picture, and most details about Hoffa and the mafia wouldn’t surface until after President Bill Clinton released a part of the JFK Assassination report in 1992, sparking a slew of books from attorneys and former hitmen associated with Hoffa and the mob; Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan was one of them, though his book wouldn’t come out until 2014. Hoffa told his attorney Frank Ragano to spread the word among mafia families he knew, and he told Frank “The Irsihman” Sheenan to do the same; in both cases, he emphasized the Big Daddy must live, and said that they could do “something” or “anything” to get Partin to change his mind, blatantly using the same words Bobby Kennedy and Walter Sheridan used when they asked Big Daddy to infiltrate Hoffa’s inner circle and find “something” or “anything” to put him in prison.

By then, most mafia knew that Big Daddy had been arrested for kidnapping little children, manslaugher, and extorion, and that he had escaped prison only because he ratted on Hoffa. They knew they could do the same to his family him and still sleep at night, if doing that type of thing bothered mafia hitmen. My dad – who would be 17 when I was born in 1972 – and his siblings grew up with shootings, kidnappings, arson, explosions, and knifings being such a normal part of life they didn’t think to mention it; until shown otherwise, kids don’t know what’s normal and what’s not. Despite the attacks, Big Daddy refused, and his reputation as a fearless leader grew while Hoffa’s declined. Hoffa continued to bark orders from prison, and though I never verified this, I suspect that the mafia and funders of Hollywood films sent him and the Teamsters a message in the 1972 Francis Ford Copula gangster epic, The Godfather, which used a slew of mafia families as consultants; in that film, one of the most famous scenes is a Hollywood producer waking up to find a severed horse head bleeding in his bed; I’ve always suspected that was an unsubtle message to a handful of people behind the scenes, given in such a powerful fashion that no one could doubt that Hoffa’s reign was over as far as organized crime was concerned.

Still fuming from inside his prison cell, Hoffa reached out to Richard Nixon. He proposed millions of dollars in re-election campaign money and the first ever Teamster endorsement of a republican, which would be bring least 2.7 million votes and enough publicity to win the election. President Nixon tried to negotiate with Big Daddy, including sending the real-life all-American hero Audie Murphy, a WWII hero who was America’s most decorated veteran and a movie star with about 42 films to his credit, to Baton Rouge with a prescient presidential pardon if Big Daddy would admit he perjured against Hoffa; in other words, Nixon promised to grant Ed Partin immunity if he freed Hoffa. Unlike The Godfather, where offers were too good to refuse, Big Daddy declined, and Audie died in a plane crash a few days later. Big Daddy was a primary suspect, which added to his mystic as a man not to be bothered.

Without Big Daddy’s support, President Nixon pardoned Jimmy Hoffa in 1971 on the condition that he abstain from Teamster work for eight more years, leaving Frank Fitzsimmons in charge. Hoffa wanted nothing more than to return to his role in the Teamsters, so he still needed Big Daddy to either recant his testimony or invalidate the 1964 trial; but if President Nixon and Audie Murphy couldn’t entice him with promises of a presidential pardon, that left intimidating him into signing an affidavit saying the FBI used illegal wiretapping to prosecute Hoffa. The mafia families were told to continue pressure on Partin. Hoffa could still forgive their debt, and would probably resume control of the Teamster pension fund if he returned to office and be able to lend more money; he threatened that if no one took care of Partin, he would stop future funding. Once, on one of my research trips to New Orleans, an aging man whose tongue was loosened by a few drinks told me, without knowing my last name, that the mafia respected Audie for having a kill count on his own higher than any family collectively, and they thought that if Edward Partin could kill him, then perhaps they should leave him alone; but, $121 Million was a lot of money back then, and Marcello was adamant that they do “something” to convince him, so they avoided confronting Big Daddy directly and sought other ways to convince him to free Hoffa.

I’m not an expert on low-level mafia hitmen, but I assume they could read names in the Baton Rouge phone book, or at least knew someone who could. I mentioned that Baton Rouge was a small capitol city of only about 100,000 people, and it’s worth noting that the Partins were from Woodville, Mississippi, and only a few had followed Big Daddy to Baton Rouge. Doug, Don, Joe, and another Douglas were the ones I remember. Big Daddy’s mother had remarried and was named Bessie Foster in the phone book, not Bessie Partin, Grandpa Grady Partin was somewhere still in Mississippi. She lived in a small house near the Baton Rouge airport down the street from Wendy’s mother, listed in the phone book as Joyce Hicks Rothdram, and my dad was living with Grandma Foster when he was 16 and 17 years old, which is how he became the drug dealer for Glen Oaks High School and met Wendy. Mamma Jean, my dad’s mother and the wife mentioned by Walter Sheridan as “a quiet, attractive woman” who inspired Big Daddy to “settle down in Baton Rouge,” and who Chief Justice Warren noted was receiving “secret payments” from the government as far back as 1964, kept the name Norma Jean Partin but was unlisted in the Houston phone book, where she lived with my dad and his younger siblings in a house Bobby Kennedy arranged for her, and was protected by a team of J. Edgar Hoover’s federal marshals; that point was emphasized in the 1964 Time article about my family, when Hoover himself made a rare public statement to say that he’d increase protection of my family after Big Daddy’s 1964 testimony against Hoffa. Big Daddy was remarried by 1972, and Mamma Jean had been estranged from Big Daddy for so long that no one thought she was worth pursuing.

As to why our family was so well known rather than being in an anonymous witness protection program, the first part is that the strength of Big Daddy’s testimony centered around his trusted word, not just the information he provided: as Warren said, “… without Partin, who was the principal government witness, there would probably have been no convictions here.” Hoffa’s lawyers tried to call him a “paid informants” and therefore invalid, which is what led my family the dubious honor of being dubbed “America’s first family of paid informants,” changing how our justice system views witnesses with ulterior motives.

The second part was Big Daddy’s personality: he bathed in the attention, and enjoyed the notoriety among mafia families wanting to use his Teamsters for shipping guns, drugs, and money; and among corporate managers whom Big Daddy strongly suggested they use Teamster union labor for all of their trucking needs. Hoffa’s power was decreasing, and Big Daddy’s was increasing, and not even the FBI saw that yet. Walter Sheridan would write in his 1972 opus, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, that in all his years of working with informants in brutal organizations, all of them were scared and wanted only one thing, to remain anonymous, but that Big Daddy was the first to not only want to be known for testifying against Hoffa, he wanted to be showcased for it; that’s also why he was willing to dismiss Carlos Marcello in the nation’s most widely read media, Time.

Big Daddy had taken up residence in Flagstaff to hunt elk while the mafia scoured Baton Rouge looking for his new family. Though no one knew where Walter had arranged for him to stay, Louisiana governor John McKeithen frequently and publicly exclaimed the need to get Big Daddy out of Louisiana in newspapers and radios the state. Over the years, newspapers quoted him as saying:

“These [Baton Rouge Teamster] hoodlums make Marcello and the Mafia look pretty good.”

“I won’t let Edward Partin and his gangster Teamsters run this state!”

“[We’re going to arrest Partin] as soon as we get the evidence against him.”

In The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, Walter summarized some of his private meetings with Governor McKeithen and quoted him as acquiescing to Big Daddy’s protection from unseen forces in the federal government, finally saying: “Walter, get him out of my state. Now listen to what I am saying to you. Just get him out of my state. I’ll help you do it and I’ll give him immunity. You write it up and I’ll sign it. Just please get him across that state line.” Walter did, but the only by offering a carrot to Big Daddy and arranging for a mountain cabin in 1.8 million acres of prime elk-hunting in Coconino national forests near of Flagstaff.

When my parents became Mr. and Mrs. Edward Partin in the spring of 1972, there were fewer than four Partins in the phone book and only one Edward Partin. When I was born on 05 October 1972, Big Daddy was away for a combination of elk hunting season and a slew of federal indictments for labor racketeering. Our home near the Amite River and neighborhood was subject to a disproportionate number of fires, explosions, and shootings. Most were attributed to gas pipe explosions, mishaps when kids played with fire, and hunting accidents from the expansive woods surrounding the home that led to the remote and rural Amite River, but for decades I’ve suspected that while my dad was away my mom had lots of visitors threatening her and trying to kidnap me, because they assumed I was either her little brother or Big Daddy’s latest kid.

I was an infant, so I don’t remember anything specific, but my body is riddle with scars from that time period. Wendy retracts inside her shell whenever I asked, so I stopped asking when I was a young man, fresh out of the war and used to people not talking about trauma, and now I know that she may not remember details as a way to cope with what happened. My childhood in Big Daddy’s house is as much of an unsolved mystery as Kennedy’s murder and Hoffa’s disappearance. Whatever happened to Wendy, it was enough to cause a nervous breakdown and lead her to abandoning me, and to suffer a lifetime of PTSD and, later in life, alcoholism; just like the combat veterans Audie Murphy and Frank Sheenan, and just like millions of traumatized people. As a combat veteran myself, I have no doubt that whatever Wendy experienced as a young teenage mother in Baton Rouge was just as brutal or even more brutal than fighting for your life in trenches or bunkers with platoons of soldiers hell-bent on killing or capturing you.

In Havana, I resisted the almost overwhelming urge to fly home. I stood in quiet reflection with thousands of memories fighting for attention in my mind. I stared at my phone and let my heart stop racing. The feeling that Wendy was planning to commit suicide was so strong that the thought dominating my mind was taking a car back to the airport, flying to Miami and then New Orleans, and renting a car to drive two hours upriver to Wendy’s home in Saint Francisville. I was so trapped by thoughts that my breath was shallow, and because I wasn’t sighing as I exhaled, I remained trapped in my head without a connection to the physical world around me.

Absent mindedly, I pulled off my LSU cap with my right hand and ran my left fingers through my thinning hair, feeling the hair bunch in the misangled middle finger bend from an old break that healed awkwardly. I traced an eight-inch curved scar across the back of my scalp, feeling the backwards letter C in times of stress, just like I had since I was a kid. As The Irishman’s words linked older stories in my mind like connecting dots slowly forms a picture, I began to see how Wendy had a couple of nervous breakdowns. Like I heard Frank’s voice in my mind on the plan, I could hear Wendy’s voice speaking words my custody records forty years before: “I was scared, very confused. I didn’t know exactly which way to turn. I felt I had no one to listen and help with the situation at hand.”

That was the biggest understatement of the 1970’s, I said in my thoughts. Like with soldiers who process the effects of combat years later, Wendy’s PTSD had grown over the previous ten years, and like Audie and Frank and countless other veterans, she began to drink for either fun or to drown memories and had slipped into alcoholism. Unlike a lot of rough and proud veterans, she also began fostering dogs to soften the demons in her memories, sometimes calling them her service animals; as the saying in many humane societies goes, “Who saved whom?” Over the years, when I’d visit Wendy and meet each new foster dog, I couldn’t imagine asking her to relive details of our time in Big Daddy’s house just to satisfy my curiosity; or, for an even worse reason, to have juicy stories to describe in a book.

My fingers followed the smooth pasty texture of my scar until it ended at the top of my neck. I felt hair again, and that woke me up. I’m just tired, I told myself. It’s the same reason I forgot the yoga mat, I said. Wendy’s probably just drunk, and one of her foster dogs was probably adopted and she’s missing it and depressed, I thought. I rationalized until my heartbeat slowed, took a few breaths, and glanced around the plaza.

But I hadn’t convinced myself. I muttered, “Fuck!” and shook my head to clear away any lingering rationality. An analysis can be as wrong as a gut feeling, and I knew I should at least call Wendy.

Despite the so-called smart phone in my hand, I rotated my left wrist and glanced at my 30 year old solar powered Seiko dive watch. Like the scar on my head, it serves as a talisman that connects me to my past and reminds me that the future can be whatever I imagine. The technology was cutting edge back then, and it hadn’t needed a battery changed or to be wound in three decades. The charge from an average day lasted six months, and the glow in the dark hands and numbers would illuminate deep below the surface, even in the pitch-blackness of wrecks, marking my time underwater and reminding me to resurface before nitrogen narcosis set in. And because it didn’t need batteries or rely on my aging eyesight to see digital numbers, it served as my talisman when modern dive computers could fail without warning; simply glancing at it brought my mind and body into alignment with time. It was still set from San Diego. I rotated the dial and set it to Havana time, which was the same as Saint Francisville, almost five in the afternoon. Happy hour was about to begin. I sighed. Wendy had probably already gone to bed midway through her third bottle of cheap Chardony, so I expected to get her voice mail.

I took few deep breaths and called. As usual, her cell phone wasn’t getting reception. I tried her land line, and her archaic answering machine picked up with a cheerful message that hadn’t changed in a decade: “Hey, this is Wendy. Leave a message!”

“Hey Wendy,” I said. “It’s Jason. I got your voice mail.”

I paused to let her acknowledge that, and said, “I just landed in Hanana.”

I chuckled to lighten the tone, and said that that the cell reception in Havana was worse than at her place, and that I’d only be able to check messages when I came back to Havana every week or two, but to text or email me if it were important. I said I’d stay in Havana longer, if necessary, so we could schedule a time to speak. If it were urgent, I said, tell Cristi and she would know how to reach me. Coincidentally, I added, chuckling again, I was calling from a public square named after Saint Francis, the patron saint of kindness to animals, and I hoped that put a smile on her face. She volunteered at the West Feliciana Parish humane society just outside of St. Francisville and had fostered dozens of dogs over the years, and the fastest way to cheer her up was to get her thinking about her dogs. I reiterated that I’d check messages when I could, and added a perfunctory “I love you.”

I sent Wendy an email with a similar message, then called Cristi and left a voice mail that I was safe and would be offline soon, and that I had received an ambiguous voice mail from Wendy, and to tell her that I received her message if, for some reason, she called my condo when Cristi was there. I finished by saying “I love you,” then glanced at unread voice mails and text messages. Nothing jumped out as important, and I didn’t feel like checking any more, especially because my WiFi minutes were almost gone.

I sighed, then called a couple of casa particulares circled in my Lonely Planet. With each one, I used my best broken Spanish to find one that had what I was looking for: at least two doors, and a window looking onto a garden courtyard. The elderly woman who answered said it would be fine for me to arrive by 10 PM, mas o menus, but no later than that because they went to bed at 11; she gave me directions I didn’t understand, but her casa was identified on a street map in my book and I was sure I’d find it. I re-checked my messages and emails for a message from Wendy, then put the phone back in my carry-on backpack.

I glanced around the plaza. It was happy hour, and young professional Cubans were getting off work and walking around in small groups, chatting and laughing and peering in bars. Music seeped from each one, and a few groups found their vibe and disappeared inside. I spotted a relatively modern bar and grill on the northeast corner that had wide open double doors facing the courtyard, with enough natural light so show a six-man band near the doorway and a stand-up bar with an open kitchen and a hand-written chalkboard with what I assumed was daily specials. I stretched my arms above my head and watched a boisterous group of young people walk past it and into another bar with louder music, and leaned in to hear what the band was playing; like the convertible driver’s car, they were clear without being too loud, and I took a deep breath and exhaled a satisfied sigh.

I pulled a new flip phone out of my bag and turned it on. A minute later, it had finally woken up and connected to cell service. I glanced at the text message screen. Nothing popped up, and I typed a message using almost forgotten muscle-memory of pressing each number once, twice, or three times to cycle through letters: “Here. Open door bar NE corner Plaza S. Francisco.”

I held the phone and stretched this way and that, still lost in thought about Wendy but slowly thinking more and more about a happy hour cocktail and whatever was on the daily special board. About three minutes later, the phone buzzed and a message said: “6pm” I replied: “Yay!” and put the phone away. I shouldered my backpack and picked up my personal item bag. I didn’t bother to clasp the hip belt, because the bar was only a phone-throw away, and I strolled towards the bar consciously trying to hid the slight limp in my aching hips and knee. The closer I got, the more the band’s beat filled my mind and flowed through my body, and with every whiff of the grill I salivated like Pavlov’s dogs but with the trigger not being food, but the freedom of starting a sabbatical with nothing set in stone to do and nowhere to be for a month. I stopped noticing my aches and didn’t focus on my worries, and began looking forward to a happy hour cocktail and catching up with an old friend at 6pm.

Go to The Table of Contents

Footnotes:

1. Frank Ragano was one of Jimmy Hoffa’s attorneys in the 1960’s and 70’s, therefore had client-attorney confidentiality. Ragano’s other two clients were Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante Junior; when President Bill Clinton released the first part of the JFK and Martin Luther King Junior assassnation report in 1992 that pointed towards Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante, Ragano and a slew of other people who knew them began writing and releasing books, possibly motivated by the success of Oliver Stone’s 1992 film, JFK, which was based on a book by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. By 1992, Hoffa had been missing for 17 years and Big Daddy dead for two, so only a few of us were left alive who could read between the lines and see what each author only saw glimpses of. It was as if we were outside observers watching three blind men feel different parts of an elephant and each claim they were touching a snake, a tree trunk, a palm leaf, a wall, and a rope; we didn’t know the whole story, but in 1992 we began to see my grandfather through the eyes of blind men. ↩︎
2. My custody records, like most of my family history, are easily downloaded by anyone with internet access who knows my name and my parents name. Or you could walk into the East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial District and ask for paper copies. Either way, Judge Pugh, a family court judge who removed me from the Partin family and alleggedly committed suicide a year later, isn’t named by name; that’s where my family’s daily talk and apocrophyl stories help me put together a few pieces of the puzzle. Pugh’s the “trial judge” referenced by Judge JJ Lottingger, the judge who stepped in and assumed my case around the time Jimmy Hoffa vanished on 30 July 1975. Here’s what Lottingger said about my family in his 26 September 1976 custody court ruling:
   
   This is a suit by Edward Partin, Jr., plaintiff, seeking a divorce from his wife, Wendy Rothdram Partin, defendant, after having lived separate and apart for more than one year following a judgment of separation from bed and board. Plaintiff also seeks custody of the minor child, Jason Ian Partin, and the defendant reconvened asking that she be granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child.
   
   The Trial Court had previously, by ex parte order, awarded the temporary care, custody and control of the minor to Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White. Following trial on the merits, plaintiff was awarded a divorce as well as the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child, with the temporary physical custody of the minor child to remain with Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White. The defendant has appealed this judgment as it regards the custody of the child.
   
   This couple was married when plaintiff was 17 and the defendant was 16 years of age. Nine months following the marriage, they gave birth to young Jason. While we are not concerned with the facts surrounding the separation and divorce, it was apparently one of incompatibility as defendant testified that at the age of 17 she found herself married to a man who did not love her and so she left. Her testimony was as follows:
   
   “As I say I was emotionally upset. I was receiving little support from Edward. I was scared, very confused. I didn’t know exactly which way to turn. I felt I had no one to listen and help with the situation at hand.”
   
   Several weeks later she returned and lived with her husband again. She found that the situation hadn’t changed, and felt she had to get away again. She heard of a man who wanted someone to share expenses on a trip to California, so she quit her job and with her last wages left with him. She testified that she had no sexual relations with this man, and plaintiff does not accuse her of such. Following this trip she returned to Baton Rouge still emotionally upset. Her husband was suing her for separation and told her he was going to take custody of Jason. She went to live with her aunt and uncle, got a full time job with Kelly Girls paying $512.00 per month.
   
   In February, 1975, the defendant’s mother was injured in an accident and she moved in with her to care for her. In September, 1975, following the recuperation of the mother she returned to live with her aunt and uncle.
   
   During these above periods of time, the minor child lived with Mr. and Mrs. White. The Whites came to regard Jason as their own and, although the separation judgment awarded custody to the plaintiff with reasonable visitation privileges to the defendant, the Whites decided the defendant-mother could only see the child two days a month and that she could never keep the child over night. The reason the defendant did not contest custody at the separation trial was because at the time she felt unable emotionally and financially to care for her son.
   
   [Judge Lottinger wrote a paragraph of legal jargon here, citing the “double burden” placed on Wendy by the deceased Judge Pugh to go above and beyond what was typically necessary to regain custody.]
   
   We note that the petition for separation was grounded on habitual intemperance, as well as abandonment of the husband and the minor child. There are no other grounds listed for the separation nor for custody. The petition for the separation and custody of the minor child was not contested by the defendant, and a default judgment was granted. Defendant testified in the instant proceedings that the reason she did not contest custody in the separation proceeding was that she was not financially or emotionally capable of caring for the minor, and that knowing the Whites were going to be caring for him, she knew he would be in good hands.
   
   Though the petition for separation had as one of its allegations “habitual intemperance”, the plaintiff in the instant proceeding testified that he had never accused his wife of drinking, nor had he ever seen her drink.
   
   [Judge Lottinger goes on to cite a few precent cases, verdicts from previous judges in higher courts used to justify his opinions, a detail that’s less important in Louisiana’s version of the Napoleonic code, but still useful to show one’s logic and suggest unbiased decisions.]
   
   The welfare of the child is the main issue that the Court is concerned with. This issue is more important than any wishes or wants the parents may have. Fulco v. Fulco, 259 La. 1122, 254 So.2d 603 (1971), rehearing denied (1971). As a general rule, and in particular where children of young age are involved, preference is given to the mother in custody cases. This preference is very simply explained, the mother is normally better able to care for the child and look after the education, rearing, and training necessary. Estes v. Estes, 261 La. 20, 258 So.2d 857 (1972), rehearing denied (1972).
   
   No argument is made that the mother is not now morally or emotionally fit to care for the child, or that the house in which she lives is not a proper place to rear a child. In fact, the Trial Judge admitted that it was a fine home.
   
   The Trial Judge has not favored us with written reasons for judgment, however, we must conclude from various statements by the Trial Judge that appear in the record that he could find no fault with the defendant, nor was there anything wrong with the house in which she lived. It thus becomes apparent to this Court that the Trial Judge applied the “double burden” rule to the defendant. We have already ruled that the “double burden” rule does not apply in this situation, and thus, under the established jurisprudential rules, we can see no reason why the defendant-mother should not be granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child with reasonable visitation privileges granted to the father.
   
   In consideration of our above opinion, there is no need to discuss the specification of error as to the ex parte granting of custody to the Whites.
   Therefore, for the above and foregoing reasons, the judgment of the Trial Court is reversed, and IT IS ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that the defendant-appellant, Wendy Rothdram Partin, be and she is hereby granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor, Jason Ian Partin, and IT IS FURTHER ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that this matter be and it is hereby remanded to the Trial Court for the purpose of fixing specific visitation privileges on behalf of plaintiff-appellee Edward Partin, Jr. All costs of the appeal are to be paid by plaintiff-appellee.
   
   Lottingger, incidentally, knew my grandfather and father well, though that’s not obvious in my custody report. He was a 30 year veteran of Louisiana legislative law, and served in the Baton Rouge state capital building down the road from Big Daddy’s Teamsters Local #5 headquarters. On behalf of three governors, he spent almost three decades and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars trying to rid Louisiana of Big Daddy, similar to how Bobby Kennedy spent fifteen years and millions of taxpayer dollars trying to prosecute Hoffa. That’s probably why he was so kind to Wendy and took such a personal interest in my well being. As for why Judge Pugh kept me attached to the Partins yet guarded by the Whites, I assume that he, like most judges, was intimidated by the Partins and was trying to balance what was best for me with what was safe for him; many people suspected that his alleged suicide was actually a warning to judges, but that’s just speculation. What’s known is that after Hoffa vanished Big Daddy lost his protection from prosecution and was under indictment for a range of charges, and Judge Lottinger took over Judge Pugh’s role, removed me from the Whites, terminated Ed Partin’s custody of me, and restored Wendy’s. The mafia relished in having $121 Million of debt erased after Jimmy Hoffa vanished on 30 July 1975. Doing “something” or “anything” to influence Edward Grady Partin no longer mattered, and Wendy and I were left alone. She began a new life as a single and uneducated mother earning $512 a month, though by then I was permanently attached to calling my mother Wendy. ↩︎