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 09 January 2025, this is mostly true; I’ll come back to that at the end of two short, intertwined stories.
I’m Jason Partin. Thirty four 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 by kicking his leg so hard that he broke my left ring finger, just below the middle knuckle; it healed awkwardly, and to this day my fingers split like Dr. Spock’s “live long and prosper” salute in Star Trek. I’m a close-up magician, so for thirty years I’ve been asked about that hand, and most people laugh when I say Hillary Clinton broke it. They assume it’s part of the act.
The joke about Hillary was that he was like Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue,” about a kid who grew up tough and mean because of his name, and that Hillary, like Sue, “kicked like a mule, and bit like a crocodile.” Hillary had never bit anyone, but he sure could kick hard. And he was fast. Like Sue, faster with a knife an a gun than his dad, Hillary was faster and stronger than most 18 year olds. I was 17, lanky and relatively weak, probably because I was only half way through puberty; I had negligible underarm hair then, and my complexion was not stellar. Regardless, no wrester had broken my craddle in almost a year. I had 36 pins that season, and most were from the cradle.
It’s not a move Coach used himself, probably because he had stubby arms and couldn’t reach around an opponents head and leg at the same time. But Coach showed me how utilize my relatively large hands, spindly arms, and young biceps to have the strongest craddle in all of Baton Rouge. The trick was to clasp with my thumbs flat against my first finger, not like a handshake (“A wrestler looses 15% of his strength if he thumb if out.”), and to pin an opponent by moving my hands away like pivot points, rather than using muscles to try to squeeze harder (“An opponent’s legs are stronger than your arms”). In engineering mechanics, that’s a simple machine, like bolt cutters or any tool that magnifies forces with a lever arm system. Armed with physics and with Coach in my corner, I clawed my way from loosing all 13 matches my sophmore year at Belaire to being seeded second in the Baton Rouge city tournament finals my senior, with an impressive record of 56-12, and facing Hillary Clinton, the undefeated three time state champion. Hillary captain of the Capital High Lions; of the 12 losses my senior year, 7 were to him. And he had coincidentally broke my nose in my first match ever, at 126 pounds. I really wanted to win, at least once, before I left for the army in a few months. I gave it my all, and for a brief moment I thought that, because of locking a craddle on Hillary for the first time, I might actually win.
I took took him down late in the first round, when he was up 3-1. I was the first person to score on him all weekend, and it must have pissed him off. He kicked and he kicked again, and then he kicked some more. He grunted and growled like an animal fighting to escape coil-spring trap, even if it had to rip the leg off to escape. He kicked with the exact precision and cadence of of a MK-19 automatic grenade launcher against an approaching tank, 48 rounds a minute, but with much more kickback force and doing more damage to my hands than a MK-19 ever has.
When I felt my finger snap, I felt victory slipping away more than I felt pain, though I’m sure hurt like hell. With my kung-fu grip weakened, Hillary broke free, stood up, and turned to face me with the speed I had grown to respect. The referee awarded him an escape point received a point for escaping. I was down 4:3, not having held him long enough to score extra back points.
We were face to face again, his strongest position. Hillary was angry. 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. Almost every coach told their wrestlers that people make mistakes when angry.
Jeremy, our 142 pounder and co-captain of the Belaire Bengals, handed me a fresh hand towel. I wiped the sweat from my eyes, and dried my hands. My knuckle was swelling more with each heartbeat. Coach asked, and I said I was fine. I wanted us to face off while Hillary was still riled. Coach nodded and stepped back.
I watched Hillary’s coach telling Hillary to relax. Hillary nodded. Two teammates in maroon hoodies dried each of his arms while Hillary bounced his legs and shook his arms to stay limber. I watched his coach, a spherical mountain of an African American man, trying to decipher his hand gestures. Capital’s coach had never wrestled, and they trained in their school’s delapitated gym near the downtown state capital building and using on old 1970’s LSU mat Coach had donated to them, but somehow their team was revered. I didn’t know what the mountain was saying, but Hillary nodded after each gesture, and his bouncing slowed down. Coach and Jeremy let me be. Seconds later, I trotted back to the center of the mat.
Hillary had chosen neutral, and we each put one foot forward and faced off again. The ref stood poised, whistle in mouth, with one hand raised.
I focused on Hillary’s hips. Coach only gave a handful of nuggets of wrestling advice in the three years I had known him at that point (I’d know him until his passing with Alzheimer’s Disease in 2014), and one was to watch an opponents hips, not their eyes or hands, because where their hips went, they went. That was advice from an Iowa coach before Coach left as an alternate 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 by holding him above Mother Earth, his source of strength.
“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. The Russians realized that if you break a man’s stance, you can do what you want to him. Don’t break your stance.” He got into his stance, which he compared to holding a shovel so you could dig heavy dirt on a farm all day without fatiguing or hurting your back; legs bent and thighs strong, so that fatigue never leads you to loose your stance.
“Vince Lambarti said that fatigue will make a coward out of anyone,” Coach told us once or twice a year.
Armed with that knowledge, but without my kung-fu grip, I got into stance and focused on Hillary’s hips. He was calm. From my periphery, I watched the referee’s chest and face for telltale signs of inhaling and tensing to exhale.
Coach’s most persistent piece of advice was to just wrestle. No matter what happened the previous round or that morning or the weekend before, just wrestle. With everything you have left in you, just wrestle. He never elaborated, he only said “Just Wrestle.”
His advice had roots from words given to him by a gold-medal olympian, the most celebrated of a generation. He pinned all four opponents in the 1960 olympics, but had barely beaten Coach 4:3 in trials. Before Coach’s next match for third place, held only minutes after his loss in semi-finals and back when rounds were three minutes each, that wrestler approached Coach and said, “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. When the whistle blows, nothing else maters but wrestling the best you can. Of course rules mattered; Coach was on the national rules committee, and had advocated making the full nelson illegal after kids who. may have been angry inadvertently broke other kids necks. With that knowledge: Wrestle!
The ref blew his whistle and dropped his hand. Hillary shot a double and caught both legs high and I sprawled. I sprawled again and again. I kicked both feet into the air like a bucking bronco, and with each sprawl I thrust my chest onto Hillary’s head and back, trying to force his head to reach away from his hips, similar to how you set up a throw by yanking on someone’s head.
I sprawled, and he held on and pulled and tried to get his hips further under mine, and I sprawled again and again. Bit by bit, his head crept lower, and his arms inched further from his hips, and he was no longer in a good stance.
It was then that I crossfaced the hell out of him with the force of God. (It was fair move. Hillary had used on me two and a half years before when he broke my nose, and he pinned me then, too; that was before the Reagan administration acknowledged HIV and AIDES, but the rules had changed by 1990, so if I broke his nose it would be a stalemate, and I’d never know if I could actually pin him, like no one else had in two years.) His head turned and his grip broke, and my thumb continued out of habit to move forward and reach across his head for one half of a craddle. I began to spin to his left and catch his leg with my other arm, but he leaped backwards, towards the edge of the mat, and sprung back into his stance with that same machine gun speed.
We kept eye contact and crab-walked towards the center, a truce-of-sorts wrestlers fall into without ever discussing it. You get a point if your opponent stalls, a recent rule to make the sport more exciting for people not on the mat who assumed nothing was happening, and no one wants to fall off the mat and onto the hard gym floor. We were almost to the center when Hillary’s forearm shot to my neck like a rattlesnake snagging prey. He yanked my head forward, wanting me to plant my leading right foot.
“Don’t be a headhunter,” was another piece of advice from Coach. I leaned in to my forward momentum and swung my hips under his and shot a high single that took him to the mat. But he sprung up and faced me so quickly that no points were scored either way. For the briefest of moments, we stood face to face again, and he moved so quickly that I was surprised to be in a bear hug.
He caught it on my exhale, already out of breath, and threw me in a beautiful, perfect throw. I watched the ceiling appear in my view, and I watched my frayed size 12 Asics Tiger wrestling shoes rise above my head. Coincidentally, they were Coach’s son, Craig Ketelsen, Belaire’s second state champion, because he had left a pair in the locker room a few years before and they fit my big feet. I loved those shoes. I watched them fly through the air above my head in slow motion. They temporarily blocked the basketball scoreboard, a late 1970’s one with a timer made of dozens of small florescent lightbulbs, and that spelled out our names and the schools we represented. It was hard to miss, and my feet flew past in slow motion, if that makes sense. Our names flashed again, and my shoes began to arc back down in a perfect 360 degree circle. I saw the faces of a few hundred fans who paid to see finals and filled Baton Rouge High’s gymnasium, mostly parents and teachers. In my mind today, whether true or not, I remember seeing a look of awe on most faces, but with more than a few cringing at the inevitable landing that was about to happen. It was a beautiful throw, and I was about to hit the mat like a meteor crashing into Earth. There was nothing I could do about it but enjoy the journey, and hope for luck.
Hillary brought my shoulders to the mat with thud that shook the bleachers as if a C-130 Hercules had dropped a 15,000 pound bomb in the gymnasium. Yes, that’s exactly what it felt like. The shock wave reverberated back from the bleachers and I felt that, too. Had I wind left in me, it would have bellowed out.
I bridged. I planted the soles of my Asics flat on the rubber mat and pushed, I looked to the sky and used a year’s wroth of neck muscle training to keep my shoulders off the mat, and bridged on neck muscles strengthened from a year in the football team’s weight room after wrestling practice, a promise I had made to never be pinned again. I bridged and I bridged, and Hillary kept squeezing my chest like a boa constrictor. He was calmly suffocating his prey, one millimeter at a time, patiently, not making mistakes, and following the rules (he was a stickler for that, just like his coach). My bridge began to collapse. I stared at the timer, upside down then, but somehow right side up in my mind. I had almost a minute left.
I tried knuckle though Hillary with my right hand, but he only constricted more. My bridge bukled a bit, so I focused on it instead. Frozen in space, I stared at the clock, hoping for time to speed up. In my periphery, behind Coach and Jeremy, I saw a few guys from last summer’s all-Louisiana junior olympic team. I knew the shirt they were wearing over their different colored hoodies, the one we all wore last summer. It was a simple white t-shirt with plain black letters forming a long sentence that covered most of the front. Only Chris Forest, Baton Rouge High’s heavyweight, wasn’t wearing one, because he couldn’t fit into an XXL. Beside him was their team captain, Clodi Tate, the 136 pound city champion as of two matches ago. Clodi’s dad, a minister, had found the shirts for in a Christian supplies store under the I-110 overpass near LSU. It wasn’t about religion to most of us; the words of Ephsians 6:12 printed on our shirts said: “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.” I know that sentence by heart, and I would repeat it before my fourth groundfight in Iraq a year later; that’s what the shirts said, and I believed it then and I still do now. The words were upside down that day, but I had thought about them enough to know what they said without thinking about it again.
I tried to bring strength from those words into my body, but I was out of air. My spirit was trying, but my flesh was fatigued. I’m not a coward, but Vince Lambati’s words were meant to spark training, not a philosophy of life. A hand-written sign on infantry’s advanced training field says: “More sweat in training means less blood in combat.” Less blood, not none. I lost a lot of friends to war, and sometimes hope isn’t enough. My wrestling singlet was skin tight, and my shoulders had acney; I felt the tiny bumps of my back acne touch rubber, then I saw the ref slide beside us and put his cheek against the mat beside my straining pimpled face. He blew his whistle and slapped the mat, and it was over. We stood up, and he raised Hillary’s hand. The applause and stampeding of feet on the bleachers shook Baton Rouge High’s gymnasium more than the bomb that had gone off earlier. It really was a beautiful throw.
I walked to Belaire’s corner. Coach stuck out his right hand and held mine. His other stubby but ridiculously strong hand clasped my left tricep. He looked up into my eyes, his squat but strong stance unbroken, and said, “Good job, Magik.” I nodded. He had shook my hand the same way and said words to the same effect almost 152 times over three years, only missing a few matches at big tournaments, when multiple wresters were on deck at once. Even he couldn’t be in every corner all the time; at those times, Jeremy was, with at least one other wrestlers substituting as co-captain.
Jeremy, a man of few words, stood up and offered me the captain’s chair next to Coach. Surprised, I sat down and accepted the fresh towel. He stepped behind us, in the corner that was now empty, the guys wandering off to watch another match. Coach and I remained. Another Belaire wrestler was on deck. I had a job to do, and nothing else mattered for the next six minutes.
Later that day, I saw Pat, a former heavyweight and Baton Rouge High’s assistant coach, standing with a few other coaches, laughing. (He couldn’t fit into the XXL shirt, either.) Pat always laughed, and at the end of long days in summer camp his laughter kept us practicing longer than Vince Lambarti’s words ever could. I overheard Pat saying how Hillary held me so hard the only thing I could wiggle were my eyeballs. He demonstrated what that would look like (he could wiggle his eyeballs in opposite directions) and I wouldn’t argue with him. Pat’s smile went away. He leaned down and privately asked Coach, what happened? Magik was been focused all spring, but seemed lackluster. Is he okay?
Coach replied that I had a lot on my mind, because my grandfather was sick. Coach was a man of few words; Jeremy was loquacious compared to him. He put his reading glasses on, glanced at the clipboard he always carried, and waddled away to go help someone do something. Everyone nodded. All of Baton Rouge had seen the news.
Hillary was a beast, but I almost defeated him. Forty years later, I’m still more proud of that than anything I’ve done since. To a 17 year old kid and high school senior, almost defeating Hillary Clinton in the Baton Rouge city tournament was bigger news than when my grandfather died a few weeks later.
I rode my Honda Ascot 500 shaft drive motorcyle to my grandfather’s funeral on 16 March 1990, wearing a white helmet and blue and orange letterman jacket. Wing flapped the chest full of gold safety pins, one for every pin that year, grouped in clusters of five for easy counting, with one pin on the jacket and four dangling below it. My left ring and middle fingers were buddy taped. For the occasion, I applied two fresh strips of cloth tape, bright white and not grey and frayed, like they usually were by then end of each day. My face shone from lingering pride at media coverage, and a small award from Coach and the team that they presented in front of all 380 Belaire seniors. Most athletic. Coach’s award. And the shocker, an award from Mr. Vaughn for an almost perfect ACT score on state tests, the top 0.1% it said. (Pat would later joke that given education funding in Louisiana, top anything’s not a big deal.) It meant more to Coach than it did to me. When the team voted me co-captain, he said he would allow it only if I earned a B average in all classes, and if I did my best on the ACT. He never mentioned it again, not even at the ceremony, and Mr. Vaughn’s award surprised everyone. I cried a bit; it garnered me an invitation for prom from a lovely lady who is still a close friend. After all of that attention, I was unimpressed by the crowds that choked traffic around Green Oaks funeral home, backed up all along Arline HIghway. I approached, drove past the line of cars and near the entrance, left my helmet on Ascot, and walked inside.
Besides the Patin family, the former Baton Rouge mayor was there, and so was the entire Baton Rouge police department, reporters from every major newspaper, 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, and a surprisingly long lineup of middle aged brutes from the 1954 LSU football national champion team. Billy Pappas, our first Heismann trophy winner, former pro for the Houston Oilers, and the celebrity on the biggest float of all Spanish Town Mardi Gras parades, was one of the pallbearers. No wonder no one asked about my letterman jacket or buddy-tapped fingers, not even the reporters and television crews supposedly focusing on things like that. The New York Times simply listed me as one Ed Partin’s surviving grandchildren. Only Walter asked about my fingers. He noticed details, and was good at his job, which is probably why J. Edgar Hoover and Bobby Kennedy hand-picked him to rejoin the force with one job: get Hoffa.2
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. 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. Ed Partin had been released from prison early for declining health, and everyone suspected he knew what happened to Hoffa. His illness and impending death had been front page news for a while.
We called my grandfather Big Daddy, and all of Baton Rouge looked up to him. 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. Walter’s words stuck with me, and for the next thirty years I pondered what Big Daddy meant. 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 carried them two hours downriver to the city of New Olreans, where they found men wanting to buy lots of stolen guns. They bought motorcycles with the cash, and had what Doug says were the best few weeks of his childhood. They were arrested by the Woodville sheriff later that summer, after speeding through a town strapped for cash, hooting and hollering and showing off.
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.3 He returned to Woodville a free man. He turned 18, and with his brute size and all the young men away at war, 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. A young International Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, admired his style and told everyone to trust him. In the 1954, he and his young wife, my Mamma Jean, moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Big Daddy began to run Teamsters Local #5 under Jimmy Hoffa.
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; and before Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, Big Daddy trained Castro’s generals and a handful of what would have been their special ops soldiers. I don’t know what he trained them in, but I assume it was how to ship and receive things from the nearby port of New Orleans, or, in light of Castro’s secret service that surpassed the CIA, maybe Big Daddy taught them things no one knew he knew.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover became interested and assigned the New Orleans FBI office to follow Edward Partin. Hoover’s records in the JFK and MLK Assassination Report show that in 1962, Big Daddy met with Jimmy Hoffa in an undisclosed location, probably Teamster international headquarters, and Hoffa plotted to kill the president’s little brother, Harvard graduate and U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Hoffa wanted Big Daddy to get plastic explosives from a contact they both knew to be Carlos Marcello , the New Orleans mafia boss, who would probably get them from Castro. Hoffa wanted to toss explosives into Bobby’s home. In “The Blood Feud,” the camera zooms in on Robert Blake’s look of imagination, and his hand gently tosses explosives like a plush toy grenade, and his goes, “Boom…”
Big Daddy said he was averse to killing kids, even Bobby’s, so they shouldn’t bomb the home. Hoffa agreed. He then said they could recruit a sniper with a high powered rifle, one outfitted with a scope to shoot from afar (back then, scopes were as high-tech and expensive as night vision goggles in the first Gulf war). The sniper could 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, ridiculing his Harvard law degree without experience, and the nepotism of President Kennedy appointing his little brother to the highest legal role in America. At one point in a news conference, Hoffa lunged at Bobby to prove who was the bigger man. Bobby, in return, pulled no punches in his public pursuit of Hoffa. Journalist called it the Blood Feud for a reason. Every knew Hoffa would be suspected if anything happened to Bobby. If they used a sniper to kill that snot nosed brat, he said, they’d have to ensure he couldn’t be traced back to the Teamsters.
A few months later, back in Baton Rouge, Big Daddy helped 23 year old Baton Rouge Teamster Sydney Simpson kidnap his two young children after he lost them in divorce court. (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.) Sydney and Big Daddy were arrested and put in a Baton Rogue jail. Coincidentally and later that day, Big Daddy was also charged with manslaughter in Mississippi, saving their police from searching for him across the state line. Word got out, other charges began to roll in. A massive safe with $450,000 was missing from Local #5, the owners of a cement company were charging a truckload of armed #5 guys with with racketeering and murder. Mamma Jean saw all of this and fled with her five children, hiding them across the south in her family’s hunting camps. Big Daddy was alone and faced life in prison.
Big Daddy 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.4 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 make a deal with the devil to get Hoffa. Big Daddy accepted the offer, called Hoffa to set up a meeting, and began telling Walter everything he saw and heard behind closed doors. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, Edward Partin became the equivalent of a walking bugging device. For the next two years, the Get Hoffa Task Force revolved around Big Daddy and what he told Walter.
On 22 November 1963, a few months after Big Daddy made his deal with Bobby, 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 bulky .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. Oswald had inexplicably moved to Dallas and accepted a job in that book repository, and though there was no trial yet, police quickly told the public they had captured Kennedy’s killer.
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.
Kennedy’s death overshadowed officer Tippet’s murder, but Dallas knew that they lost a hometown hero. Tippet was a respected officer, a WWII soldier who won the bronze star, and a respected family man in his neighborhood. Oswald would be a target. Police had to protect him from vengeance so he could stand trial, so we could learn if others were involved in killing Kennedy, so he was heavily guarded while he awaited trial in a Dallas jail cell. But, two days after being arrested, Oswald was being 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. Ruby strolled past a few dozen armed police officers outside, slid a Colt .38 “detective’s special” handgun from his trenchcoat pocket, and shot Oswald in the stomach point-blank.
Live television captured the event and millions of people were shocked. It was the first time in the history of television someone died in real life. It became international news. A Pulitzer-prize winning 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; killers say 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 a gurney beside the governor. Jack Ruby was arrested and would be found guilty in a court of law, and sentenced to life in prison.
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 and MLK 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 in a small courtroom in Chatanooga, Tennesee, by Bobby and Walter 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, and in he was in Hoffa’s corner of the courtroom. When he 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.5
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. (Mamma Jean’s absence from photos and quotes wasn’t discussed, though she’s mentioned extensively in court records.) 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 squad of federal marshals following my family wherever they went: part of the deal with Big Daddy was that his kids be protected.
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, murderer, dope fiend, and thief. He had perjured. He had “raped a Negro girl,” but was let free because one juror said, “ain’t no white man should go to jail for nothing he did to a Negro girl.” (He used another word.) 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 was the Teamster pension fund when work was slow. And he lent $121 Million to mafia families so they could build casinos and hotels if they hired Teamster truckers to haul building materials, guns, and a slew of things. And he lent to Hollywood film producers, so they could hire Teamster trucks to haul equipment and trailers to house actors. If you wanted a loan from the Teamster fun, it cost around $40,000 to have a meeting with Hoffa. He had almost 3 million fiercely loyal Teamsters motivated to keep him in power, mafia bosses who wanted to keep him in control of the pension fund, and the best lawyers money could buy.
Frank Ragano, known as the “lawyer for the mob,” had only had two clients other than Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcell 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). Hoffa used his lawyer’s contacts and everything in his power to discredit Big Daddy or intimidate him into recanting his testimony. They began to spread word that all mafia debtwould be forgiven if “someone” could do “something” to get Edward Grady Partin to change his testimony, or to have Hoffa’s case thrown out because Bobby Kennedy violated the fourth amendment in his zest to get Hoffa.
They failed, despite the unambiguity of the single-sentence fourth amendment. It was hand-written by our founding fathers in 1789 to protect Americans from a police-state, and it says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” They argued that Bobby violated the second amendment by sending Big Daddy into Hoffa’s camp to find “something” or “anything” against Hoffa. It was a clear violation of the fourth amendment, and Hoffa’s lawyers spent two years preparing for that battle.
Coincidentally, Jack Ruby died in prison that year, after two years of his statements vacillating between him loving President Kennedy and wanting to protect his widow from seeing a lengthy trial, to rantings about conspiracies. Of all things I read he said, what sticks in my mind the most is: “No one will ever know my part in history.” Ruby said the FBI was poisoning him and trying to give him cancer. He died in a prison hospital from lung cancer. He was a lifelong smoker, and his first statements in 1963 were the only part of the 1964 Warren Report.
Chief Justice Earl Warren was the only one of nine justices to dissent against using Big Daddy’s testimony to convict Hoffa, so Hoffa’s conviction was upheld, and 1966’s Hoffa vs The United States is a landmark case for having bent the fourth amendment, forcing all future courts to follow the new interpretation. Hoffa penned two autobiographies detailing almost everything I’ve shared so far, and Chief Justice Warren’s notes say similar things. It wasn’t a secret. No one understood why Hoffa was in prison based on the word of Edward Grady Partin and nothing else.Jimmy Hoffa began his prison sentence, and spent six years pounding mattresses eight hours a day, six days a week, for his prison detail, iterating his memoirs and plotting how to regain control of the Teamsters.
Hoffa was pardoned by President Nixon in October of 1971, under the stipulation he remain away from the Teamsters. Coincidentally, my parents met then, and I was conceived soon after, and I was born in Baton Rouge General Hospital on 05 October 1972. Unrelated, Hoffa vanished from a Detroit Parking lot on 30 July 1975, creating one of the FBI’s most famous unsolved mysteries. I never met him, but I’ve read both of his autobiographies and learned a lot from what he had to say.
In 1979, behind closed doors, the U.S. congressional committee on assassinations completed the JFK and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report. For reasons I don’t know, 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 and MLK Assassination Report, and that beheamtih filled in the blanks of Hoffa’s autobiographies and Chief Justice Warren’s missive in Hoffa vs. The United States. A slew of books and television specials began to accumulate. 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, and truth was clouded by noisy speculation and Hollywood simplification. The list is too long to bother with.
Coincidentally, after President Clinton’s inauguration, I was a 19 year old paratrooper and veteran of the first Gulf war of 1990-1991, with a chest full of medals that would have blown my 17 year old mind if I were to see me two years later, full of shiny parachutes with wings and helicopers with wings and a maroon beret with a flaming gold sword across a blue shield, spit shined jump boots, and baggy pants (our logo from when Germans first called American paratroopers “those devil’s in baggy pants” was, ver batum, Those Devils in Baggy Pants.) I was an odd combination of sniper, recon scout, and communications laison that I’ll explain in another story, bu I was President Clinton’s quick-reaction team and authorized to kill unarmed civilians in their own countries. I was the 82nd Airborne, a phrase used by a famous photo of one of America’s first paratroopers hungry, tired, and frozen, carrying a measly bazooka and about to dig in against Hitler’s largest Panzer tank force. He allegedly said: “I’m The 82nd Airborne, and this is as far as the bastards are going. Ironically called the 82nd Infantry was formed soon after the first world war, surprisingly not long after the civil war (but still segregated), and it was the first time in history that America had soldiers from all states. Before then, regional militias dominated by local media led to civil war, so in an act of brilliant labeling, the 82nd was dubbed the All Americans, and our patch was simply an Airborne AA. I had two, one on each shoulder, and a combat infantry badge (and EIB, of which, like wrestling Hillary Clinton, I’m much more proud; I was ordered to wear my CIB). Even today, I have no idea what all the pins and ribbons mean.
You can’t make things like that that up; it sounds too crazy, and you loose narrative trust. But no shit there I was: a bonified All American hero, and on the president’s quick reaction force less than thirty years after President Kennedy was shot and killed, probably with Big Daddy involved. I was reviewed for a security clearance and diplomatic passport for an assignment in the Egypt and Israel, and was flagged by the FBI because of my name. I finally cleared, read the JFK Assassination report, and filled in the blanks myself. I don’t know why presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr didn’t release any of it, nor why presidents Bush Jr., Obama, and Trump, Biden and then Trump again wouldn’t release the final parts. To me, it seems that a president should be motivated to share everything they knew about how to stop people from killing presidents.
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 Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, “I Heard You Paint Houses.” Frank, a former WWII infantryman, Teamster leader, mafia hitman, and colleague of Big Daddy, claimed to have painted the wall of a Detroit suburb home red with Hoffa’s splattered blood. He mentions him throughout the book; for that, and because Hoffa’s prison sentence had to mentioned in any film about Hoffa’s life, my grandfather had a small part in The Irishmen to help move the plot along. Scorceses himself said he was making entertainment, not a documentary, and that his job was to sell tickets. I don’t know who gave him $257 Million to make a movie about Jimmy Hoffa, but I doubt it was anyone interested in focusing on my grandfather’s part in his story. What I wrote so far is the gist.
The Irishman was a whopping 3 hours and 29 minutes long. The burly actor Craig Vincent’s portrayal of “Big Eddie Partin” was edited down to five minutes, less time than a high school wrestling match. But he took his role to heart. Craig spoke with our family to research his role, calling Keith Partin, current Teamster Local #5 president after Doug Partin retired twenty years before, and Craig found Janice on a website of Partin genealogy.
When Craig 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 that there are few of us left alive. I admitted that most people had long forgotten who Ed Partin was. Craig, who is a few years older than I am, didn’t recall seeing 1983’s Blood Feud, or reading the incessant news and public debate about Big Daddy and Hoffa in the 60’s and 70’s. Had he not been researching Big Daddy’s role, he would never have thought to ask that question. Craig’s interest sparked my thought: why was the case still open? And, if Martin Scorcese couldn’t create a character based on Big Daddy’s aura, who could? I still don’t know.
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. It 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 aging and dying memories from the nooks of my brain with time and persistence and not a lot else to do. As I distilled the mountain of information into a manageable mound, a new perspective began to take shape. I realized that wanted to share the bigger picture with a larger audience, but it would be more ambiguous than Hollywood’s desire for a simple solutions, so I put pen to paper.
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 like Jimmy, I 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 there’s only one jasonpartin.com. Another url of mine, LSUmagic.com redirects there. My website says I’m a close-up magician who frequently performs at Hollywood’s Magic Castle and at small events around the world, and that I’m a combat veteran of the 82nd Airborne and former unarmed peacekeeper in the Middle East. My Linkedin profile adds things like my medical device patents, documents with puns built in, like “Active Compression Technology to facilitate healing of broken bones” letting me slip ACT now! into the text, a wrist-resurfacing implant made of pyrolytic carbon with a fin to stabilize it in the radius (it looks remarkably like a San Diego “fish” style surfboard and is dubbed The Fish), a hydrogel spine nucleus implant that rehydrates diurnally like a healthy nucleus (I ran out of jokes for that one), and a handful more under Jason Partin, Jason I. Partin, and Jason Ian Partin, depending on whims of attorneys and patent agents. I’m on a few national standards and ISO committee documents for safety in medical devices: a couple in spine fusion implant testing, one in mixed-metal implant corrosion testing (certain types of stainless steel act like one half of a battery terminal when near Nitinol inside the body), and safety standards for wrestling mats (impact softening, durability, anti-microbial, etc.) My Linkedin also says I sometimes consult medical device teams on quality assurance, and that I led courses in engineering, entrepreneurship, and physics at USD and UAB, and says that I was an assistant coach at Blaire High School while attending LSU.
During Covid, I added a page to my website that is this work in progress.
This isn’t just about what happened to Jimmy Hoffa or killing President Kennedy, it’s about why, and it’s about truth and freedom and what it means to be an American.
One of the most obvious points Jimmy Hoffa would make is truth in media. Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather have a free press than anything else, and Hitler said if he controlled media and textbooks he controlled the people. Big Daddy was dubbed an all-American hero, despite some people knowing the truth. That’s unfair to justice and democracy. fake news, foreign influence, or whatever; the effect is the same and lasts just as long. What do we do about it?
Justice and the law are different things. Our supreme court defines the law. How was the supreme court dubbed or influenced? Maybe they were they just dumbasses. I’ve known a few in my life; a fancy degree or title doesn’t mean you’re not a dumbass. But, again, what do we do about it?
Bobby Kennedy bent the fourth amendment to get Hoffa. Because of Hoffa vs The United States, and our freedoms haven’t been the same since 1966. Of the many examples, perhaps the most poignant is after the terrorists attacks flew airplanes into New York’s twin towers and Washington’s pentagon, when President George W. Bush Jr’s legal team used Hoffa vs. The United States as a cornerstone to build the Patriot Act, officially known as “The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism – USA PATRIOT – Act of 2001.”
That brilliant acronym was not created by a dumbass. I’ve haven’t met Bush, but buddies have and attest to his integrity. And I’ve read and reread Bush’s memoir, “Decision Points,” many times, including his subtle nod to Big Daddy and what happened to Hoffa. Yet here we are, today, hundreds of millions of Americans unknowingly monitored because of a loose interpretation of the fourth amendment dating back to 1966. And the Patriot Act paved the way for prisoners being detained in Guantanamo Bay wihtout a lawyer or trial, and being tortured for decades. That’s not the justice I fought to defend; if you disagree, fuck you; I don’t want to discuss things with dumbasses. For everyone else, what do we do about it?
If the foundation of our laws are built on lies, how do we repair the foundation without loosing the house? What is justice? Truth? The American Way? I don’t know the answers, but at least I’m trying to clarify the definitions, and what they look like as laws. I can’t do more than that, other than share my family’s history in a memoir, and hope that understanding the situation helps America know what to do next. Assuming their not dumbasses. Winston Churchill said the greatest argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with an average voter. I can’t argue that. What do we do about it?
As for people calling other people “Negro” in the 1960’s JFK and MLK Assassination Report, I’m sure Hillary Clinton would have a lot to say about that; I have not finished reading the MLK portion of the report, and know Jack about it.
I put pen to paper and focused on what I know to be true. Jack was Jon F. Kennedy’s nickname, I heard and read. I didn’t know where to begin, so I started with Wrestling Hillary Clinton, and tried to juggle what I knew then, what I know now, and what I hope this becomes. But 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.”
And sometimes, to keep the voices at a reasonable volume, I blend a few childhood friends and old army buddies into single characters; otherwise, it would be sipping water from a fire hydrant; trust me, I know. The JFK Assassination Report is based on a massive collection of documents that fills a medium sized government library, downloadable with 2001-era technology in about an hour and a half. The deluge drowns attention and caring. It’s hard to separate fact from mistaken but regurgitated information. To me, memoirs are the closest thing we have to analog copies of what happened, and every day there are fewer and fewer of us left alive to share our memories.
By the time of Covid in 2020 to around 2022, the internet was faster and I wrote programs to simplify my search. Again and again, I found that the foundation of my beliefs were based on faulty memories. One that surprised me most was after the Louisiana High School Athletic Association 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.
That hurt my brain at first. I was probably more shocked than you are right now. I called a bunch of old buddies and confirmed that, of course they said, Hillary’s last name was Moore (a few reminded me of that throw – it really was that good). You’d think I’d recall Hillary’s last name because he beat me so badly, but wrestling is not 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 meets, but we never spoke. Not once. I can’t tell you what he sounded like. To me, he wasn’t anything more than A Boy Named Sue, stronger than Hercules and the three-time undefeated state champion that I had set my sights on.
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. I used to see Clinton’s gym when I rode with Coach around southern Louisaina, delivering wrestling supplies during summer freestyle season; he’s credited with staring Louisiana Wrestling, and for getting the sport to what it was in 1990.6 And, obvious now in hindsight, I probably made a mistake with Hillary’s name in 1992, when incumbent president Bill Clinton sparked to the world finally know about Hillary Clinton.
At that time, just before I first read the JFK Assassination Report, I was in the All American pre-Ranger course. Around 5,000 Rangers graduate a year, and a few come from the All Americans. Competition is fierce and elitist to represent the 82nd Airborne among all other teams. Of the 268 E4 to E8 paratroopers, already adorned with airborne and air assault and combat badges, that removed our ranks and our badges and began the two week course, only nine of us crossed the finish line. Of the nine of us, six wrestled in high school, two also in college. As we ate and slept for the first time in longer than we could recall, we swapped stories, and because of the remarkable statistics of us having wrestled, we chatted about wrestling, why we crossed the line and others didn’t, sacrifice, cutting weight, coaches, teammates, luck, and more. We spoke of what spoke to us from memories from our youth. I was 19, and that was the first time I told the story about Hillary Clinton and held up my Spock-like left hand to show the proof. (I omitted the parts about Big Daddy’s funeral, Jimmy Hoffa’s tale, and any thoughts on who may have killed President Kennedy and why, for what I hope are obvious reasons.) Everyone laughed, and the name stuck. Thirty years passed, and I probably told that joke and held up my hand a hundred times or more.
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 and mimicked Spock’s monotoned blessing: live long and prosper. I can still see the other wrestlers in my mind at that match, 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 and wrestle for Iowa; my co-captain of the Belaire Bengals, Jeremy Gann, who won first at 142, would win second in state, and go on to still be a man of few words who helped his kids and their teams wrestle; and Hillary, captain of the Capitol Lions, who would win state at 145 and I’d never hear from again, but rumors are that he’s still alive and kicking. We all got together now and then, and a few of us would wrestle in the annual Meterie Old Timer’s tournament and keep in touch for more than thirty years.
And most importantly to me, after wrestling on Fort Bragg’s team and being honorably discharged with a chest full of medals and stack of papers that called me an All American hero, I proudly served as Coach’s assistant for the Belaire High Bengal wrestling team. Big Rodney, our heavyweight, still coaches Louisiana teams, and Little Paige Russel would wrestle in college then, while in the air force and stationed overseas, become South Korea’s midweight MMA champion. For years, I watched Coach shake each wrestler’s hand the same way, and tell them they did a good job. I trust all of them and our shared memories, and I would never have thought to focus on Hillary Clinton had it not been for writing this memoir. Life is even harder to distill down than the JFK Assassination Report and a bookshelf full of conflicting memoirs and court documents.
Coach passed away in 2014, but never once in 24 years did we discuss the past, other him tossing out a few of anecdotes about wrestling and lessons from his coaches. I can only imagine what we could learn if he were still around. As one commentator wrote before Coach’s funeral, before we knew of his Alzheimer’s therefore the sentiment should be heard rather than a jab, Coach Dale Ketelsen had forgotten more about wrestling than most of us will ever know. After his passing, when Louisiana finally renamed the Robert E. Lee memorial tournament the Coach Dale Ketelsen memorial tournament, everyone said it was about time. There but for the grace of good luck go I; it’s time I wrote my memories down for posterities sake.
In a memoir, words mean less than how a moment impacted you. Hillary was a beast, and a beast by any other name would have thrown me just as savagely. Regardless of the official results, I won that match in 1990. It’s not about your opponent, it’s about wrestling, and someone I love and trust told me I did a good job. Telling the story of Big Daddy and my small part in his story is now my job.
Given those disclaimers, this story is true.
Go to the Table of Contents
- From “Hoffa: The Real Story,” his second autobiography, published a few months before he vanished in 1975:
“But there’s another Edward Grady Partin, one the jury never got to hear about.
This Edward Grady Partin is mentioned in criminal records from coast to coast dating from 1943, when he was convicted on a breaking and entering charge, to late 1962, when he was indicted for first-degree manslaughter. During that twenty-year period Partin had been in almost constant touch with the law. He had had a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps. He had been indicted for kidnapping. He had been charged with raping a young Negro girl. He had been indicted for embezzlement and for falsifying records. He had been indicted for forgery. He had been charded with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.”
Big Daddy fills a big part in both of Jimmy Hoffa’s autobiographies, the first which was written in prison and sounded much, much angrier. I assume six years of beating the stuffing in prison mattresses calmed him down and let him focus on his words more; Hillary Moore’s coach would be proud.
↩︎ - Walter Sheridan, in his 1972 opus, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa,” coincidentally published the month I was born, he had to address the reputation of his star witness. Of the hundreds of names detailed in the appendix, Big Daddy takes up space second only to Hoffa. I trust Walter. He wrote:
“Partin, like Hoffa, had come up the hard way. While Hoffa was building his power base in Detroit during the early forties, Partin was drifting around the country getting in and out of trouble with the law. When he was seventeen he received a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps in the state of Washington for stealing a watch.One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dismissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi. Two years later Partin was back on the West Coast where he pleaded guilty to second degree burglary. He served three yeas in the Washington State Reformatory and was parolled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a plea to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamsters Union, went to work, and married a quiet, attractive Baton Rouge girl. In 1952 he was elected to the top post in Local 5 in Baton Rouge. When Hoffa pushed his sphere of influence into Louisiana, Partin joined forces and helped to forcibly install Hoffa’s man, Chuck Winters from Chicago, as the head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.
Walter noticed details, but he didn’t always elaborate. Walter didn’t elaborate on what it meant for Big Daddy to “forcibly install Hoffa’s man,” but I can only imagine.
↩︎ - That’s the story behind the discrepancy between Hoffa’s version of how Big Daddy was dishonorably discharged and Walter’s. I don’t think Walter lied; if anything, the stories should be the other way around. I believe it was a simple mistake from someone proving information to both of them, and they made the equally simple mistake of publishing their life’s work based on miscommunications and not verifying every sentence. Shit happens, and there’s no doubt that both men were good at their jobs. ↩︎
- See Hoffa vs The United States, 1966 US Supreme court records. ↩︎
- Chief Justice Earl Warren mentions Big Daddy 147 times in his three page missive attached to Hoffa vs The United States. Here’s said that without Big Daddy’s testimony, there would be no case against Hoffa. His words are:
“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.
Warren reiterated Big Daddy’s history to his fellow justices again and again, with the frequency and force of Hillary Moore’s kicks, yet WArren could not break through to his peers. I don’t know why. Here’s a taste so you can sample and ponder if you’d trust Big Daddy
“Here, Edward Partin, a jailbird languishing in a Louisiana jail under indictments for such state and federal crimes as embezzlement, kidnapping, and manslaughter (and soon to be charged with perjury and assault), contacted federal authorities and told them he was willing to become, and would be useful as, an informer against Hoffa, who was then about to be tried in the Test Fleet case. A motive for his doing this is immediately apparent — namely, his strong desire to work his way out of jail and out of his various legal entanglements with the State and Federal Governments. And it is interesting to note that, if this was his motive, he has been uniquely successful in satisfying it. In the four years since he first volunteered to be an informer against Hoffa he has not been prosecuted on any of the serious federal charges for which he was at that time jailed, and the state charges have apparently vanished into thin air.
(He even emphasized perjury – lying to a jury under oath – yet the supreme court still allowed his testimony to shape today’s laws.)
↩︎ - 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.
According to online reports, he revived a high school team in Iowa that went on to win a conference championship, produce 30 all-conference wrestlers, 20 district champions, eight regional champions and two state titlist; in the twelve years as head coach of the new LSU program, his teams won two SEC Intercollegiate Wrestling tournaments, and produced 15 individual conference champs, and rose LSU to be ranked 4th in the nation, surpassing even Iowa. As a young man, he wrestled at 126 pounds. At the weakest point in life, Coach was stronger than my grandfather ever was. May they both rest in peace.
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