Preface to Wrestling Hillary Clinton: A Memoir
But then came the killing shot that was to nail me to the cross.
Edward Grady Partin.
And Life magazine once again was Robert Kenedy’s tool. He figured that, at long last, he was going to dust my ass and he wanted to set the public up to see what a great man he was in getting Hoffa.
Life quoted Walter Sheridan, head of the Get-Hoffa Squad, that Partin was virtually the all-American boy even though he had been in jail “because of a minor domestic problem.”
– Jimmy Hoffa in “Hoffa: The Real Story,” 19751
As of 31 December 2024, this is mostly true.
I’m Jason Ian Partin. Forty years ago, Hillary Clinton pinned me in the second round of the 145 pound finals match of the Baton Rouge city high school wrestling tournament. I almost won in the first round, but Hillary escaped my cradle – the first time anyone had done that all year – by kicking his leg so hard that he broke my left ring finger, right below the middle knuckle. The joke about Hillary was that he was like Johnny Cash’s song A Boy Named Sue, about a kid who grew up tough because of his name, and he “kicked like a mule, and bit like a crocodile.” Hillary had never bit anyone, but he sure could kick hard. I held on for a few more kicks, hearing him grunt and strain for the first time in the seven times we had wrestled that season.
I felt my weakened grip and the victory slipping away more than I felt pain. Hillary broke free, stood up for the point, and turned to face me with the speed I had grown to respect. We were face to face again. I had never seen him angry before, and I only had the smallest fraction of a second to realize that before the buzzer sounded. The referee pointed us to our corners. I had lost my chance. When someone’s angry, they make mistakes.
Jeremy, our 142 pounder and co-captain of the Belaire Bengals, handed me a fresh hand towel to dry my hands. Coach asked, and I said I was fine. I wanted us to face off while Hillary was still riled. I was the first person to take him down all weekend. I watched his coach – a spherical mountain of an African American man who had never wrestled, but was coach of the fierce Capital High Lions and a man to be respected – calmly telling him to calm down. Hillary nodded. Another Lion whose name I don’t recall used a full-sized towel to dry Hillary’s arms as he wiggled and danced to stay alert.
A few seconds later, I walked back to the center. Hillary had chosen neutral, and we each put one foot forward and faced off. I focused on Hillary’s hips. Coach only gave five pieces of advice in the three years I had known him, and one was to watch an opponents hips, not their eyes or hands, because where their hips went they went. That was advice from his coach on the olympic team, at a time in history when Russians were dominating the sport because they focused on taking an opponent off their feet with bear-hug throws, like Hercules defeating Antaeus.
“But to do that,” Coach told us, “they need to get their hips close to yours. Get you to overreach, so they can step in close. If you break a man’s stance, you can do what you want to him.” Armed with that knowledge, I focused on Hillary’s hips. From my periphery, I watched the referee’s chest and face for telltale signs of inhaling or tensing to exhale; his hand was poised above his head.
Another piece of advice was to just wrestle. No matter what had happened the first round or that morning or the weekend before, just wrestle. With everything you have left in you, just wrestle. It was related to advice he received from a gold-medal olympian, the most celebrated of a generation, who pinned all four opponents in the olympics but had barely beaten Coach 4:3 in trials. Before Coach’s next match for third, that guy walked over and told him, “Someone will win. It might as well be you.” Just wrestle. Someone will win. For the next two minutes, it doesn’t mater who. Wrestle.
The ref blew his whistle and dropped his hand and we wrestled. Hillary didn’t shoot again – he had learned his lesson – but he knew he was stronger and faster and he reached out to grab my head. “Don’t be a headhunter,” was another piece of advice from Coach, repeated to me after Hillary had thrown me a few times in 1989. I ignored Hillary’s hand reaching for my head, and took a high single shot below his relatively motionless hips. I took him off his stance and to the mat; but, he wrestled faster than I did, and he stood up and faced me so quickly that no points were scored for either a takedown or an escape.
Off guard, I instantly found myself in Hillary’s bear hug. He caught it on my exhale, and I was already out of breath, because I had given everything I had to that high single. Hillary threw me in a beautiful, perfect throw that would have earned him the full five points in freestyle. I watched the ceiling appear in my view, and in slow motion I watched my big feet arc through the air and temporarily block out the basketball scoreboard with our names in lights. The timer said we had 1:25 to go. I watched my feet pass the faces of a few hundred fans who paid to see finals; whether true or not, I recall seeing the looks on their faces. They were in awe. A few were cringing at the inevitable. It really was a beautiful throw.
Hillary brought my shoulders to the mat with an authoritative thud; had I wind in me, it would have been forced out. I bridged with everything in me, and Hillary tightened his hold. I stared at the clock, unable to inhale. Other coaches and a few wrestlers from last year’s freestyle camp were grouped near the mat, all wearing white t-shirts with simple black lettering that Clodi’s dad, a minister, had found for us that was so perfect is rose above religious opinions and we all wore it: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Later, Pat, Baton Rouge High’s coach, would joke and say Hillary held me so tightly that the only things I could wiggle were my eyeballs, and I couldn’t argue with that. I fought with whatever I had inside of me. But Hillary was a beast. The ref slid beside us, blew his whistle, and slapped the mat. We stood up, and he raised Hillary’s hand.
I walked to Belaire’s corner. Coach stuck out his right hand and shook mine. His other stubby but ridiculously strong hand clasped my left tricep, he looked up into my eyes, and he said, “Good job, Magik.” He had said some version of that phrase, no matter what happened, to me 278 times in three years. Jeremy, a man of few words, stood up and offered me the captain’s chair next to Coach. I sat down, and he handed me a fresh hand towel. Coach and I remained. Another Belaire wrestler was on deck, and I had a job to do. I wiped the sweat off my face and arms, wrapped the soaked rag around my the fingers of my left hand, and reached down with my right hand to pick up a fresh towel. I had a job to do, and nothing else mattered for the next six minutes. Later, I’d overhear other coaches asking Coach what happened, that I had been so focused all spring but seemed lackluster that day, and I seemed to let Hillary up when I had almost pinned him; Coach simply replied that I had a lot on my mind, because my grandfather had been sick. Other coaches nodded; they had probably read the news.
Hillary was a beast, but I almost defeated him. Forty years later, I’m still proud of that. To a 17 year old kid and high school senior, almost defeating Hillary Clinton in the first round was bigger news than when my grandfather died a few weeks later.
I attended my grandfather’s funeral on 16 March 1990 wearing a blue and orange letterman jacket with a chest full of gold safety pins – one for every pin that year, grouped in clusters of five for easy counting – and with my left ring finger buddy-taped to the middle finger. I applied two thin strips of cloth tape that morning, bright white and not frayed like they became at the end of each day, just for the occasion. My face shone from lingering pride at media coverage and a small award from Coach and the team, and I was unimpressed by the crowds that choked traffic around Green Oaks funeral home.
The former Baton Rouge mayor was there, and so was the entire Baton Rouge police department, reporters from every major newspaper, a lineup from the 1954 LSU football national champion team (Heismann trophy winner Billy Pappas was one of the pallbearers), a hell of a lot of huge Teamsters, a gaggle of FBI agents, and Walter Sheridan, former director of the FBI’s Get Hoffa task force and a respected NBC news correspondent in the 1980’s. No one commented on my chest full of gold pins or the silver medal from city finals, probably because none of them knew Hillary Clinton back then. Reporters simply listed me as one of five surviving grandchildren, and only Walter asked about my buddy-taped fingers (he noticed details, and was good at his job).
Most people were focused on my grandfather and his final words. He was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader famous for testifying against International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa and sending him to prison.2 He was nationally famous, having been portrayed by the rugged and classically handsome actor Brian Dennehy in 1983’s Blood Feud, the one where Robert Blake won an academy award for “channeling Hoffa’s rage,” and some daytime soap opera heartthrob portrayed Bobby Kennedy without winning anything for it.
We called my grandfather Big Daddy, and all of Baton Rouge looked up to him; half of the city attended his funeral, and it was front-page news at home, especially because it was front-page news in the NY Times. Big Daddy was weekly front-page news in Louisiana for almost twenty years, and lots of people wanted to know what he talked about on his deathbed. After the funeral, when most people got up and flocked around Billy and the LSU players, I leaned over and told Walter that Edward Partin’s final words were: “No one will ever know my part in history.”
He agreed that it sounded funny when said out loud, and that Big Daddy was probably right. But I tried to learn what happened. For the next thirty years, whenever I had spare time, I investigated the meaning behind Big Daddy’s final words.
This is his story, according to what I know so far.
In 1924, Big Daddy was born in Woodville, Mississippi, to Grady and Bessie Partin. Great-grandpa Grady was a lush who ran out on them during the Great Depression, and my eventual grandfather began providing for Grandma Foster (Bessie later remarried) and his two little brothers, Doug and Joe, men I’d eventually know to be as big as Big Daddy. In 1943, a 17 year old Ed Partin and a 12 year old Doug stole all of the guns in Woodville, and them to crime bosses in New Orleans, two hours downriver from Woodville. They bought motorcycles and had what Doug says were the best few weeks of his childhood, but were arrested by the Woodville sheriff later that summer.
Doug was set free because he was a minor, but the judge gave Ed a choice: join the marines or go to jail. He joined, punched his commanding officer in the face, and became a dishonorably discharged marine within two weeks of the judge’s decision. He returned to Woodville a free man, turned 18, and with all young men away in the war and his brute size, he easily took over the Woodville sawmill union. Soon he also ran the teamsters who drove horse wagons to and from the sawmill. After the war, when trucks and gas were in supply again, he also ran the trucker’s union in and out of southern Mississippi. He was ruthless and effective, and in the 1950’s, he and his young wife, my Mamma Jean, moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Big Daddy began to run Teamsters Local #5 under International Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, who admired his style and told everyone to trust him.
By the early 1960’s, after President Kennedy’s embargo had all-but strangled trade with Cuba, Big Daddy was meeting with Fidel Castro and shipping arms and boats from New Orleans to Cuba; allegedly, before Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs Invasion Big Daddy also trained Castro’s generals and a handful of what would have been their special ops soldiers. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover became interested, and his records show that in 1962 Edward Grady Partin and Jimmy Hoffa plotted to kill the president’s little brother, Harvard graduate and U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, by either tossing plastic explosives Big Daddy could get from either Castro or New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello into Bobby’s family home, killing him and potentially his wife and children; alternatively, because Big Daddy was adverse to killing kids, Hoffa said they could recruit a sniper with a high powered rifle outfitted with a scope to shoot Bobby as he rode through a southern town in one of the convertibles “that spoiled snot-nosed brat Booby” likes to ride around in and show off (Hoffa had been calling Bobby “Booby” and “spoiled snot-nosed brat” in public for many years). If they used a sniper, Hoffa said, they’d have to ensure he couldn’t be traced to the Teamsters.
A few months later, Big Daddy helped 23 year old Baton Rouge Teamster Sydney Simpson kidnap his two young children. (Though he was averse to killing kids, my grandfather seemed okay with kidnapping them; that was the “minor domestic problem” Jimmy Hoffa quipped about for the next ten years.) Billy and Big Daddy were arrested and put in a Baton Rogue jail. Coincidentally, later that day, Big Daddy was also charged with manslaughter in Mississippi, saving Mississippi police from searching for him. Word got out, other charges began to roll in, and Big Daddy faced life in prison.
He told Sydney, “I know a way to get out of here. They want Hoffa more than they want me,” and when Sydney asked what if he knew enough to help the FBI get Hoffa, Big Daddy replied, “It doesn’t make any difference. If I don’t know it, I can fix it up,” and said, “I’m thinking about myself. Aren’t you thinking about yourself? I don’t give a damn about Hoffa. . . .'” Big Daddy made a phone call, and a few days later Bobby Kennedy had him sprung from jail. (Poor Sydney remained and went to prison, but his words were recorded by attorneys for posterity to ponder.3) Through Walter, Bobby offered Big Daddy immunity if he would infiltrate Hoffa’s inner circle, and find “something” or “anything” to remove Hoffa from power.
Bobby acted out of desperation. He and J. Edgar Hoover had spent untold taxpayer money supporting 500 agents on their Get Hoffa task force for almost ten years. Journalists called their Blood Feud the longest, most expensive, and fruitless pursuit of one man in any government’s history, and Bobby had a black eye in the face of his big brother. He probably would do anything to get Hoffa, including freeing to a person like my grandfather. Big Daddy obliged, called Hoffa to set up a meeting, and he began reporting what he gleamed to Walter, who wanted to get Hoffa almost as badly as Bobby did.
As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, Edward Partin became the equivalent of a walking bugging device, reporting everything he heard or saw to the FBI. He was, from a legal perspective, the same as modern monitoring devices rather than as a witness to something that already happened. From that point forward, the Get Hoffa Task Force revolved around Big Daddy and what he reported from Hoffa’s camp.
On 22 November 1963, a few months after Big Daddy was sprung from jail, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by at least one gunman as he rode through downtown Dallas in his open convertible with the Texas governor and his wife. Less than an hour later, New Orleans native and Castro sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine who trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force under the alias Harvey Lee, was arrested for shooting and killing Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit with a .38 revolver outside of a movie theater a few blocks from where Kennedy was shot. Oswald was arrested, and police immediately charged him with killing both Tippit and President Kennedy. Oswald’s words, spoken before being read his Miranda Rights, were: “I am only a patsy!” He was escorted to jail, and FBI and Dallas police looked where he worked, the 6th floor of a downtown book repository overlooking where Kennedy was shot, and they found Oswald’s 6.5mm Italian army surplus carbine, modified by a Dallas gunsmith to include a high-powered scope.
Hoffa, upon hearing the news of Kennedy’s death and Oswald’s arrest, told his entourage in Florida, “Bobby’s just another lawyer now.” He ordered all Teamster halls to keep American flags at full mast.
Officer Tippet’s murder was overshadowed by President Kennedy’s, but Dallas knew that they lost Tippet, too. He was a respected officer, a WWII soldier who won the bronze star and had a family at home. Police had to protect Oswald from vengeance, and he was heavily guarded while he awaited trial. But two days after being arrested, Oswald escorted out of the Dallas police station in handcuffs and on international live television, and Jack Ruby – a Dallas nightclub owner, air force veteran, low level mafia runner, and associate of Hoffa and my grandfather – walked through the police station, past a few dozen armed police officers, and shot Oswald in the stomach with a Colt .38 “detective’s special” handgun that he carried in his trenchcoat pocket.
A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist photo of the shot showed Oswald doubled over in pain, and Ruby’s middle finger on the trigger, a mafia technique for close-up kills (in theory, when shooting from the hip with a stubby gun, you’re more accurate if you point your trigger finger along the barrel and pull the trigger with your middle finger, and killers joke that it’s the ultimate Fuck You). A few hours later, Oswald was pronounced dead in the same hospital that had held President Kennedy’s body, and the wounded Texas governor; and where police had found another 6.5mm round, like the ones in Oswald’s room of the repository, inexplicably lying on the floor beside the Texas governor. America suspected a conspiracy.
Vice President Lyndon Johnson became president, and asked Chief Justice Earl Warren to oversee a committee digging into possibly conspiracies to kill President Kennedy. Ten months later, the hastily assembled 1964 Warren Report was released. It mistakenly concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald. A second, longer study was planned behind the scenes; it would become the 1979 JFK Assassination Report, but for some reason it was kept classified, and the government’s official verdict for a man who never stood trial adhered to the 1964 Warren Report.
Around the same time the Warren Report was released to public scorn – few believed one man could do so much damage, especially one with abysmal military marksmanship records – Jimmy Hoffa’s jury tampering trial was being overseen by Bobby and a team of federal agents reporting to Hoover. It was the Test Fleet case, a charge of jury tampering in 1962, soon after Big Daddy was sprung from jail. When my grandfather stood up as the surprise witness, Hoffa’s otherwise stoic and calculating face went pale. He exclaimed “Oh God! It’s Partin!” in front of the jury, probably sealing his fate before Big Daddy gave his testimony. Big Daddy smiled and, in a calm southern drawl, told the jury that Hoffa suggested he bribe a juror by tapping his back pocket and implying that $20,000 “should do it.” There was no other evidence. A few days later, the jurors deliberated less than four hours and found Jimmy Hoffa guilty of jury tampering. The judge sentenced Hoffa to eight years in federal prison based solely on Big Daddy’s word.4
At Hoffa’s trial, Hoover announced that he’d assign extra federal marshals to protect the Partin family from inevitable retribution. He then released parts of FBI records to Life magazine, and told media that Big Daddy thwarted a plot by Hoffa to bomb Bobby’s home using plastic explosives. Edward Grady Partin was dubbed an all-American hero, and Big Daddy and Mamma Jean’s five children, my dad (Edward Grady Partin Junior), Janice, Keith, Cynthia, and Theresa were showcased alongside the Johnson family, by then known as the first-family of America’s new president. To America, the star witness against Jimmy Hoffa was a trustworthy family man who risked the lives of his children to steer America in the right direction by standing up to corrupt unions and the newly recognized organized crime syndicate. Big Daddy returned to running Local #5 with federal immunity and a small army of federal marshals following my family wherever they went.
Over the next two years, Hoffa’s army of attorney’s attacked Ed Partin’s credibility in national media, claiming he was a Castro sympathizer, rapist, murderer, dope fiend, and thief; but no one could find records of all his crimes. It wasn’t a lack of resources: Hoffa had $1.1 Billion in untraceable cash from monthly dues of 2.7 million Teamsters – a ridiculous sum in 1950’s money – that he had skimmed to lend money to mafia families so they could to build casinos and hotels if they hired Teamster truckers to haul building materials, guns, and a slew of things; and to Hollywood producers so they could make films that used Teamster trucks to haul equipment and trailers to house actors. Hoffa had relatively unlimited money, almost 3 million fiercely loyal Teamsters motivated to keep him in power, and the best lawyers money could buy. Frank Ragano, now known as a “lawyer for the mob,” had only had two clients other than Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Santos Trafficante Junior, men known for their ruthless tactics and debts to Hoffa (Marcello alone owned $21 Million from money he borrowed to build New Orleans hotels), and Hoffa used his lawyer’s contacts and everything in his power to discredit Big Daddy or intimidate him into recanting his testimony; men like Ragano and Teamsters with mafia ties, like Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, began to spread word that all mafia debt – around $121 Million – would be forgiven if “someone” could do “something” to get Edward Grady Partin to change his testimony, or prove that Bobby Kennedy had broken the law with his prosecution methods, which would cause Hoffa’s case to be thrown out of court.
They failed, and in 1966 Hoffa lost his final appeal in the U.S. supreme court in a landmark case that challenged the fourth amendment against unlawful search and seizure, Hoffa vs. The United States, overseen by Chief Justice Earl Warren. The fourth amendment was hand-written by our forefathers in 1791 in the constitution’s Bill of Rights, and the single sentence unambiguously said that Americans have the right to privacy, that any search and seizure must be from probably cause, with a warrant, and particularly specifying what is to be searched and seized; but Walter Sheridan and Bobby Kennedy sent Big Daddy into Hoffa’s camp to find “something” or “anything” that would remove Hoffa from power. Warren was the only one of nine justices to dissent, so Big Daddy’s testimony was upheld, and Hoffa vs The United States forever weakened American freedom because of the word of one “all-American hero.” From 1966 forward, prosecuting teams would point to Hoffa vs The United States, and lower courts would uphold the fourth amendment’s new interpretation.
Coincidentally, Jack Ruby died in prison around this time; of the many things people say Jack Ruby said during his two years in prison, what sticks in my mind is: “No one will ever know my part in history.”
Hoffa began his prison sentence in 1966 – up to eleven years by then – and spent six days a week for six years pounding prison mattresses in his prison work detail, pondering things and writing his memoirs. He was pardoned by President Nixon in October of 1971, and Jimmy Hoffa was a free man until he famously vanished from a Detroit parking lot on 30 July 1975.
In 1979, the U.S. congressional committee on assassinations completed the JFK and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report, but President Carter kept it classified, and so did Presidents Bush Sr. and Reagan. President Bill Clinton released the first part in 1992, but only after 10 million people saw Oliver Stone’s film, JFK – based on New Orleans district attorney’s memoir, “On the Trail of Assassins” – and demanded that the report be made public. It reversed The Warren Report, and said that, though they didn’t have proof and therefore it’s inconclusive, the three leading suspects with the means and motivation to kill President Kennedy were Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Santos Trafficante Junior.
A deluge of books and films flowed following the1992 partial release of the JFK Assassination Report, and more trickled out every time a new president – Bush Jr., Obama, and Trump (and then Biden and Trump again). Most were crap, written by partially informed people who may have hoped for a lucrative movie deal and inadvertently clouded the pool of facts with speculation and hyperbole. The drip continued for thirty years without closure.
In the summer of 2019, film producing legend Martin Scorcese had spent around $257 Million to make and market his opus about Hoffa’s demise, “The Irishman,” based on a 2004 memoir by Teamster leader and mafia hitman Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, “I Heard You Paint Houses.” Frank claimed to have painted the wall of a Detroit suburb home red with Hoffa’s splattered blood. He knew Big Daddy well, and mentions him throughout the book; for that, and because Hoffa’s prison sentence had to be mentioned, if only briefly to move the plot along, my grandfather had a small part in The Irishmen.
The burly actor Craig Vincent’s portrayal of “Big Eddie Partin” lasted five minutes, less time than the jury took to convict Hoffa. Craig spoke with our family to research his role (Keith Partin is the current Teamster Local #5 president after Doug retired twenty years before, and Janice runs a website for Partin geneology). When he asked me what the traits were that led Big Daddy to being so easily trusted, I couldn’t answer concisely. We chatted a few times, and I was lost for an answer other than to say you had to know him, and there are few of us left alive. I admitted that most people have long forgotten even who he was; though of my generation, had Craig not been researching his role, he wouldn’t have remembered Edward Partin. He sparked my thought: why was the case still open?
Despite the success of Scorcese’s film, the cases on Hoffa and Kennedy remained open. No trial was held for Oswald, and no conspiracists confirmed. Hoffa’s body hasn’t been found; and though the FBI pronounced him dead in 1985, the case is still open, despite all of the books, television specials, and films claiming insider information on what happened, football fields unearthed looking for Hoffa’s remains, and a Wikipedia-esque task force of thousands of amateur investigators digging through all of facts and opinions for more than sixty years. Scorcese’s film opened in theaters with critical acclaim and box office success, but Covid shuttered theaters and Netflix picked up rights to The Irishman, which set global streaming records, but shifted priorities away from solving old crimes.
Covid was a remarkable two years in humanity that we have yet to understand and simplify; given that we’re still trying to understand Kennedy’s death sixty years later, I probably won’t live to see the long-term effects of Covid. Like billions of people, I sheltered in place and worked on a project. I begin coaxing memories from the nooks of my brain. As I distilled the mountain of information into a manageable mound, I realized that wanted to share the bigger picture with a larger audience. This website is that Covid project, aged a few years.
I’m Jason I. Partin, former co-captain of the Belaire Bengal Wrestling team; like James R. Hoffa, I sign legal documents using my middle initial, but I pronounce my name Jason Ian Partin, and answer to any one of my nicknames, Magik, JP, Jase, or J. The internet has a gaggle of Jason Partin’s, including my cousin, Jason Partin, a Baton Rouge physical therapist Joe Partin’s grandson (he played football at Zachary while I wrestled at Belaire). But, as far as I know, there’s only one jasonpartin.com (another url of mine, LSUmagic.com redirects there). There are likely 10,000 blogs with opinions about Hoffa, Kennedy, and my grandfather, and I assume all are tainted with what was written after 1992. The only social media I use is Linkedin, and it says I’m some sort of engineer or professor or something like that.
I can’t provide facts any more useful to you than I already have, but I can write a memoir about my perspective of a man whose footprint continues to shape our world. The story isn’t just about killing President Kennedy, it’s about freedom and what it means to be an American citizen. When Bobby Kennedy bent the fourth amendment to get Hoffa, it lost the power to protect people from unlawful search and seizure, a single-sentence unambiguous statement that our founding fathers penned by hand, that said search and seizure must be with probable cause, with a court warrant, and specifying what was to be searched or seized; but, by the American justice system, a supreme court ruling becomes the new interpretation of what is and what isn’t lawful, and by upholding my grandfather’s word after he spied on Hoffa to find “something” or “anything,” our freedoms changed, and cases in lower courts that would cite Hoffa vs The United states and that would be the end of it. Then lower courts stopped arguing, and prosecutors had freedom to decide probable cause and search for something or anything to achieve a desired result.
President George W. Bush Jr’s legal team, when building the 2001 Patriot Act (The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism – USA PATRIOT – Act of 2001), used the Hoffa vs The United States a cornerstone. In light of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they brilliantly named the Patriot Act justified monitoring hundreds of millions of Americans’s cell phones without a warrant, and for many aspects of Guantanamo Bay prisoners held for what has now been decades without a lawyer or trial.
The Patriot Act continues to creep into daily lives of Americans and listen to what we’re saying without us realizing it. My grandfather’s word is a part in the Patriot Act, if only because he helped Bobby Kennedy bend the second amendment, and every day that passes we loose a bit more of the freedom granted by our forefathers. I don’t know what would happen if it turns out that Big Daddy lied, or that the supreme court was wrong. Would Jimmy Hoffa get those years of his life back? Could the government un-hear what it monitored after Hoffa vs The United States? I’m not sure if it still matters to people, but I’m believe the concept applies to other court cases and any policy built on a faulty foundation; when do you repair the foundation, and at what cost? I wonder what Earl Warren would say if he saw his warnings about using my grandfather’s word to convict Hoffa played out fifty years later, when Warren himself is only a footnote in history.
A memoir is based on memory, therefore anything I write is inherently flawed. A lot has happened in half a century, and my memory isn’t what it used to be. And to prevent writing how most of us talk in daily chatter, full things like “um,” “hmm,” “what’s for dinner,” and “Dude,” I compress conversations into dialogue, “so that what’s said moves the story along.” But I cite quotes in media whenever I can, and I try to weave a story that’s as true as possible given our ignorance of what happens behind the scenes of public documents. And sometimes, to keep the voices at a reasonable volume, I blend a few childhood friends and old army buddies into single characters; otherwise, sharing the story would be offering a sip of water from a fire hydrant. The JFK Assassination Report is a massive document that fills a medium sized government library, downloadable with 2001-era technology in about an hour and a half.
In my online research, I often found that a foundation of my beliefs were mistaken. One that surprised me most, was that the Louisiana High School Athletic Association, LHSAA, had dug up hand-written wrestling results from the 1980’s, and posted them on LHSAA.org. New evidence, to me at least, proved that Hillary Clinton didn’t break my finger: Hillary Moore did.
You’d think that after being beaten senseless by him all year, I’d recall Hillary’s name. But wrestling isn’t like that. We shook hands before every match, and in front of a few fans and parents as representatives of each other’s teams at the Belaire-Capitol dual meet, but we had never spoken. I can’t tell you what he sounded like. To me, he wasn’t any more than A Boy Named Sue and the three-time undefeated state champion I had set my sights on, the Shoot in my Vision Quest, the thing lurking in Yoda’s cave I needed to face so that I could learn anything I brought to the center of a mat would only hinder me. Just wrestle.
Maybe I remembered Hillary as Hillary Clinton because earlier that day I defeated the wrestler from Clinton high school to make my way to finals, and his name and school had been under Hillary’s for the next round (Hillary thrashed him, but semi-finals weren’t recorded). And, I used to drive to and from Clinton high school to deliver supplies with Coach, so it was on my mind during summer freestyle season. Coach left LSU after 1979’s Title VI law led to the demise of around 100 wrestling programs around the country, leading Coach to start a program at Belaire High School in the early 80’s. He’s credited with staring Louisiana Wrestling, and for getting the sport to what it was in 1990.5 To help grow the sport, he started a small sporting goods company so he could afford to buy headgear, mops, and buckets of anti-fungal mat cleaner and uniforms in bulk; he drove around all summer giving them away to fledgling rural programs, like Clinton, and poorer inner-city schools, like Capital. I don’t recall Clinton’s mascot, and that’s probably where my mistake began: I was too focused on wrestling Hillary to think of much else, and that’s also probably why I recall Big Daddy’s funeral more from my perspective than his remarkable role in history.
Two years later, newly elected president Bill Clinton led to the world finally caring about Hillary Clinton, and the name stuck in my mind. Today, my memory of wrestling Hillary Clinton is indistinguishable from a real memory, strengthened every time I made a joke about Hillary’s name and showed my poorly-healed finger, still bent at an angle just below the middle knuckle (my hand always looks like the split finger salute of Star Trek’s Dr. Spock, wishing us to live long and prosper). All other aspects are true. I can still see the other wrestlers in my mind, people I knew from freestyle like Colothian Tate, captain of the Baton Rouge High Bulldogs, who won AT 136 and was voted most outstanding wrestler, and would go on to win state; my co-captain of the Belaire Bengals, Jeremy Gann, won first at 142 and would win second in state; of course Hillary, captain of the Capitol Lions, who would win state at 145. And I’d eventually be Coach’s assistant, and I’d know him until he passed away in 2014. After all of that, I’m still probably more shocked than you are to learn that Hillary Clinton didn’t break my finger, Hillary Moore did. But in fairness to storytelling, Hillary was a beast, and a beast by any other name would have thrown me just as savagely. In a memoir, sometimes words mean less than conveying how a moment impacted you.
History’s full of faulty assumptions. The deluge of partially-information about President Kennedy’s assassination is why I think Edward Partin’s part in history hasn’t changed how see things yet. That, and like any story drawn from court records, talking about Big Daddy doesn’t convey emotions that define human experiences. As I told Craig when he was researching Big Eddie Partin, you had to know my grandfather to understand how he deceived people.
These are memories of a high school kid, a flawed person with other things on his mind, told by a person with a flawed memory and a remarkable experience in history, trying to make sense of why it matters now.
Given those disclaimers, this story is true.
Go to the Table of Contents
- From “Hoffa: The Real Story,” his second autobiography. The first was a flop penned in prison, “Hoffa on Hoffa.” The second polished with the help of a cowriter and editor: “Hoffa: The Real Story” was penned by James R. Hoffa and Oscar Fraley (Editor), and was first published on 01 January 1971, then re-published by Stein and Day on 01 October 1971; as of now, there are ten editions, and I quote from my grandmother’s first edition.
↩︎ - I copied the blurb about Big daddy from Wikipedia on 27 December 2024; it was:
Edward Partin
Edward Grady Partin Sr. (February 27, 1924 – March 11, 1990), was an American business agent for the Teamsters Union, and is best known for his 1964 testimony against Jimmy Hoffa, which helped Robert F. Kennedy convict Hoffa of jury tampering in 1964.[1]
Teamster Union and mob activities
Partin was the business manager of the five local IBTbranches in Baton Rouge for 30 years. In 1961, he was charged by the union with embezzlement as union money was stolen from a safe. Two key witnesses in the grand jury died. He was indicted on June 27, 1962, for 26 counts of embezzlement and falsification and released on bail.
On August 14, 1962, Partin was sued for his role in a traffic accident injuring two passengers and killing a third. He was also indicted for first-degree manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident. He also surrendered himself for aggravated kidnapping.
He was finally convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice through witness tampering and perjury in March 1979.[2] Partin pled no contest to numerous other corruption charges in the union, including embezzlement, and was released in 1986.[3]
Testimony against Hoffa
In 1963, Jimmy Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters, was arrested for attempted jury tampering in attempted bribery of a grand juror of a previous 1962 case involving payments from a trucking company. Partin testified that he was offered $20,000 to rig the jury in Hoffa’s favor. The testimony was the primary evidence of the Justice Department that led to Hoffa being sentenced to eight years in prison.[4] The entire case rested on his testimony and he was considered the lone witness.
Partin denied under oath that he was compensated by the Justice Department, but it was revealed that his ex-wife had her alimony payments given to her by the department. He originally denied that he would receive immunity or retroactive immunity for his testimony but it was later altered when he was under oath at a grand jury trial.[citation needed]
See also
J. Minos Simon, a Partin attorney
Blood Feud (1983 film)
References
“Edward Partin, 66; Union Aide Became Anti-Hoffa Witness”. The New York Times, March 12, 1990. March 13, 1990. Retrieved May 5, 2010.
Ap (1990-03-13). “Edward Partin, 66; Union Aide Became Anti-Hoffa Witness”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-12-19.
“Reading Eagle – Google News Archive Search”. news.google.com. Retrieved 2019-12-19.
“Reading Eagle – Google News Archive Search”. news.google.com. Retrieved 2019-12-19.
↩︎ - See Hoffa vs The United States, 1966 US Supreme court records. ↩︎
- That’s my opinion, and I’m not a lawyer. But it’s similar to what’s written in Hoffa vs. The United States by Chief Justice Earl Warren, and he was a lawyer and only one of nine justices who dissented against using my grandfather’s testimony to convict Jimmy Hoffa. (Two abstained.) In his three-screen missive explaining why he dissented, permanently attached to the court records and in the U.S. National Archives since 1966, Warren referenced Big Daddy 147 times; to this day, it’s still taught in most American law schools and where the 4th amendment was bent. Here’s an excerpt:
“This type of informer and the uses to which he was put in this case evidence a serious potential for undermining the integrity of the truthfinding process in the federal courts. Given the incentives and background of Partin, no conviction should be allowed to stand when based heavily on his testimony. And that is exactly the quicksand upon which these convictions rest, because, without Partin, who was the principal government witness, there would probably have been no convictions here. Thus, although petitioners make their main arguments on constitutional grounds and raise serious Fourth and Sixth Amendment questions, it should not even be necessary for the Court to reach those questions. For the affront to the quality and fairness of federal law enforcement which this case presents is sufficient to require an exercise of our supervisory powers.
From the United States Library of Congress “Hoffa vs. The United States”
Title: U.S. Reports: Hoffa v. United States, 385 U.S. 293 (1966)
Names: Stewart, Potter (Judge); Supreme Court of the United States (Author)
Created / Published: 1966:
↩︎ - Coach passed away in 2014. When I began writing this, his oldest son, Craig, was head coach at St. Paul’s School in Covington, Louisiana, and on the board of the LLHSA. When I asked Craig if I could use Coach’s name in a memoir I was writing, he asked Mrs. K and Penny, and they all gave me their blessing. What they wrote about him was, like Coach, concise, humble, and truthful.
Dale “Coach” Glenn Ketelson Obituary: 2014
Dale Glenn Ketelsen, 78, Retired Teacher and Coach, passed away March 22, 2014 at Ollie Steele Burden Manor with his wife by his side. A Memorial service will be held Saturday, March 29 at University United Methodist Church, 3350 Dalrymple Drive. Visitation will begin at 10 am with a service to follow at 12 pm conducted by Rev. Larry Miller. Dale is survived by his wife of 52 years, Pat Ballard Ketelsen, 2 sons: Craig (Emily) Ketelsen of Covington, La; Erik (Bonnie) Ketelsen, Atlanta, Ga and one daughter, Penny (Lee) Kelly, Nashville, TN; 5 grandchildren: Katie, Abby, Brian and Michael Ketelsen and Graham Kelly; a Sister-in-Law, Karen Ketelsen of Osage, Iowa, and numerous neices and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, 2 sisters and a brother. Dale was born in Osage, Iowa where he attended High School, lettering in 4 sports. Upon graduation, he attended Iowa State University as a member of the wrestling team where he was a 2 time All American and won 2nd and 3rd in the NCAA finals in Wrestling. He was a finalist in the Olympic Trials for the 1960 Olympics. After graduation, he joined the US Marine Reserves and returned to ISU as an Asst. Wrestling Coach. In 1961, he took a job as Teacher/Coach at Riverside-Brookfield High School in Suburban Chicago, Ill. While there, he also earned a Masters Degree from Northern Illinois University. In 1968, he was hired to start a Wrestling program at LSU in Baton Rouge, La. He was on the Executive Board of the National Wrestling Coaches Association and a founding member of USA Wrestling. He was the wrestling host for the National Sports Festival in 1985, He was instrumental in promoting wrestling in the High Schools in Louisiana. He was head Wrestling Coach at Belaire High School for 20 years and Assistant Wrestling coach at The St. Paul’s School in Covington, La. He was devoted to Faith, Family, Farm and the sport of Wrestling. Among his many honors were induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and being named Master of Wrestling (Man of the Year) for Wrestling USA magazine. He was a long time member and Usher of University United Methodist Church. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Alzheimer’s Services, 3772 North Blvd., Baton Rouge, La. 70806.
Published by The Advocate from Mar. 26 to Mar. 29, 2014.
As a young man, he wrestled at 126 pounds; at the weakest point in life, Coach was still stronger than my grandfather ever was.
↩︎