A Partin History, Part 3
“We can report that Edward G. Partin has been under investigation by the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office in connection with the Kennedy Assassination investigation… based on an exclusive interview with an Assistant District Attorney in Jim Garrison’s office. We can report that Partin’s activities have been under scrutiny. In his words: “We know that Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald were here in New Orleans several times… there was a third man driving them and we are checking the possibility it was Partin.”
WJBO radio, New Orleans, 23 June1964
“As noted in the account of Ruby’s telephone records, the committee confirmed the existence of several contacts between Ruby and associates of Hoffa during the period of October and November 1963, including one Hoffa aide whom Robert Kennedy had once described as one of Hoffa’s most violent lieutenants.”
– The Congressional Committee on Assassinations John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Assassination Report
Chief Justice Earl Warren was the was the only justice to vote against using my grandfather’s testimony to convict Jimmy Hoffa of obstructing justice by jury tampering. Six justices allowed the testimony and two abstained. Hoffa was sentenced to eight years in prison based solely on Big Daddy’s word. An additional and seemingly incidental charge of mail fraud were added later, and Hoffa’s total sentence grew to 11 years. He began serving in a small cell in a New Jersey federal penitentiary in 1966. The trial records then became public and published for posterity to review in 1966’s Hoffa versus The United States.
Earl Warren documented his reasons for his vote against using Edward Partin’s testimony to convict Hoffa in 1966’s Hoffa versus The United States in a lengthy missive permanently attached to the case for posterity to ponder. He railed on my grandfather’s character so vehemently that his words leap of the page; he and the other justices reference Edward Partin on 24 pages of the 30 page court record of Hoffa versus The United States, and the name Edward Partin or Partin is typed 148 times, more than twice as many times as Hoffa’s. Warren began his rant by saying:
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.
Not even Walter Sheridan could deny Big Daddy’s disreputable background, but by the time he would publish his 1972 opus, The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa, no one could confirm that Big Daddy smuggled weapons to Fidel Castro and the rape charge had been whitewashed in Life and Look! magazines, which were the most common and trusted sources of media influencing Americans back then. His thick and almost overly referenced book’s index lists hundreds of witnesses and people involved in the pursuit of Hoffa; Big Daddy name is cited third only to Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy, and Walter got the disreputable aspects out of the way to focus on other parts by saying:
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 for stealing a watch. One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dimissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi,. Two years later Patin was back on the west Coast where he pleaded guilting to second degree burglary. He served three years in the Washington State Reformatory and was paroled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a pleas to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamster 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 head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.
By the time of his 1972 book, Walter had retired and was a respected NBC investigative journalist. His summary of Big Daddy omitted the rape charges (a Life magazine article said it was filed by the girl’s pimp to embarrass or blackmail my grandfather). The parts about smuggling weapons were related to millions of dollars Hoffa had presumably lent to arms dealers to sell to both sides of the Cuban revolution – Batista and Castro – during the late 1950’s, but Bobby Kennedy pressured Senator Thomas Dodd of the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security to drop the investigation against my grandfather because he was such a valuable witness against Hoffa; at Hoffa’s trial, the judge said that Big Daddy’s alleged arms smuggling to Cuba was inadmissible in the trial against Hoffa for jury tampering. Similarly, none of the charges against Big Daddy’s were deemed admissible, including perjury to other juries.
Warren summarized the discrepancy and irony by saying:
Here the Government reaches into the jailhouse to employ a man who was himself facing indictments far more serious (and later including one for perjury) than the one confronting the man against whom he offered to inform.
Warren agreed with fellow judges that using disreputable has been a part of the justice system for all of history, and that they will always be useful in a court of law. But he emphasized that Edward Partin’s word should not be used in American court of law because of his incentives to get out of jail, and repeated the irony of Big Daddy’s history of perjury; or, as my devout Christian grandmother Mama Jean would call it later in life, bearing false witness. And in what I believe was a warning to posterity about Hoover’s growing illegal wire tapping surveillance program, Warren wrote:
Partin became the equivalent of a bugging device which moved with Hoffa wherever he went. Everything Partin saw or heard was reported to federal authorities and much of it was ultimately the subject matter of his testimony in this case.
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.
He concluded his three-page rant against my grandfather by saying:
I cannot agree that what happened in this case is in keeping with the standards of justice in our federal system and I must, therefore, dissent.
Warren would die in 1974, long before surveillance technology grew beyond his imagination and his warning would be viewed as prescient in hindsight. Big Daddy being a walking bugging device would resurface and be used as a cornerstone of President George Bush Jr.’s legal justification of the 2001 PATRIOT Act (a brilliant acronym that stood for Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act), and allowed unwarranted wiretapping of hundreds of millions of American’s cell phones and computer anallysis to find “anything of interest,” just as Big Daddy had been tasked by J. Edgar Hoover’s 1962 FBI and therefore allowed as a legal precedent. Other cases from Big Daddy’s time period were also used to justify the PATRIOT Act, including Chuckie O’Brien’s eventual conviction and many others in Hoffa’s inner circle.
Bush Jr. would focus almost a fourth of his memoir on his Attorney General and team of attorneys struggling with the obvious continued erosion of American rights. His book was called Decision Points, and justified his decision by pointing out that at the time America had just been attacked by terrorists who hijacked four passenger jet liners and coordinated them to take down the World Trade center twin towers in New York City and crash into the military’s Pentagon headquarters in Washington DC. Conspiracy theorists would shout about Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s assassination and the military industrial complex and a few would softly utter Earl Warren’s warnings from Hoffa versus the United States, but by then we were once again at war in the Middle East and that began to dominate the news.
Ten years later, President Trump’s administration would build upon the PATRIOT Act to allow ICE agents to question anyone they met and use “anything illegal” to arrest, detain, and eventually deport them without an attorney or due process. By then few people would remember who people like Earl Warren and Jimmy Hoffa, much less Edward Grady Partin. By then, social media had replaced Life and Look and NBC news, and there were so many partially informed voices cluttering the internet that I stayed offline and practiced my Miranda Rights.
Some law professors say that modern government surveillance liberties and prosecution methods violate the original Bill of Rights and can be traced back to allowing my grandfather’s testimony in Hoffa versus The United States. What Earl Warren and practically every historian and law professor agree upon today is without recorded evidence, my grandfather’s word was the only thing keeping Jimmy Hoffa in prison.
Hoffa could only get out only if Big Daddy changed his testimony or testified that Bobby and the FBI illegally monitored Hoffa’s legal defense team, which would lead to his case being thrown out and Hoffa returning to power in the Teamsters. In prison, Hoffa was only allowed visits inprison from friends or family once every three months, though he could speak weekly with his attorneys if they weren’t working on other cases. Hoffa shared attorneys with mafia families and paid them to not take on other cases. Because of attorney-client privileges, they could meet in private and Hoffa could communicate with the mafia families via code.
Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran spoke about the days Hoffa was in school, which is what the mafia called prison, and Charles Brandt quoted him as saying:
In school Jimmy talked a lot about Partin. Frank Ragano was supposed to be getting an affidavit from Patin that the government set Jimmy up. There was a [District Attorney] in New Orleans who arrested Partin, and they were supposed to get that D.A. off Partin’s back in exchange for the affidavit. The same D.S. arrested Walter Sheridan for bribery, and that was supposed to help Jimmy by making Sheridan look bad in the papers. All that help came from [mafia boss Russel Buffalo’s] and Jimmy’s good friend, Carlos Marcello, the boss in New Orleans who had the D.A.
Per penitentiary requirements, only attorneys not working on cases could visit Hoffa. To ensure he had constant coded contact with his Teamsters and mafia families, Hoffa paid for attorneys like the coincidentally named Frank Ragano to have no other cases and to ensure the right to attorney-client confidentiality. Ragano was the attorney for Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss Santos Trafficante Jr.
Their codes were well planned because all of Ragano’s clients were being watched by FBI daily; the eventual 1976 classified John F. Kennedy Assassination Report would explain why. It says:
“Since the Warren Commission’s and FBI’s investigation into the possibility of a conspiracy was seriously flawed, their failure to develop evidence of a conspiracy could not be given independent weight.”
“Following the completion of its investigation of organized crime, the committee concluded in its report that Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, and James R. Hoffa each had the motive, means, and opportunity to plan and execute a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.”
“Any evaluation of Marcello’s possible role in the assassination must take into consideration his unique stature within La Cosa Nostra. The FBI determined in the 1960’s that because of Marcello’s position as head of the New Orleans Mafia family (the oldest in the United States, having first entered the country in the 1880’s), the Louisiana organized crime leader had been endowed with special powers and privileges not accorded to any other La Cosa Nostra members.“
Marcello was so powerful that people at even The Irishman’s level did not know his confidential role. Even fewer knew that Marcello owed Hoffa $21 Million for financing New Orleans hotels and mafia operations; when combined the American mafia families, organized crime leaders owed Hoffa $121 Million, which was a jaw-dropping sum back then. Hoffa sent word via his attorneys and therefore via Marcello that all mafia debt would be forgiven if, in what I wonder is a jab at the guidance Bobby Kennedy gave my grandfather, any one could find any way to get him to change his testimony.
Hoffa emphasized again and again that Partin should not be killed. The Irishman said:
“Partin was no good to them dead. They needed him alive. He had to be able to sign an affidavit. They needed him to swear that all the things he said against Jimmy at the trial were lies that he got from a script fed by Bobby Kennedy’s people in the Get Hoffa Squad. Partin had to say that he did all of this because he had kidnapping charges hanging over his head and not because Jimmy had made threats to whack Bobby. That was Jimmy’s best chance on the jury-tampering matter. Partin knew that nobody was going to kiss him [mafia slang for kill him] as long as he strung them along. Partin gave Jimmy’s lawyers useless affidavits and even a deposition. In the end, they never really got him to say that he railroaded Jimmy Hoffa. All they ever got out of him about railroading amounted to no more than, “Partin, me boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?”
Not even media picked up on that detail: Big Daddy had to remain alive.
A six month expose on organized crime in 1968 by Life magazine showcased Big Daddy refusing a $1 Million bribe from Carlos Marcello in exchange for changing his testimony. Baton Rouge lauded that as Big Daddy unafraid of the mafia or possibly even in charge of the mafia. Partially informed national pundits scoffed at Life and said the mafia wouldn’t bribe someone they could kill, but what no one realized, probably not even the FBI, was that Marcello already knew Big Daddy and that bribing an old colleague with $1 Million was good business if it erased $21 Million owed to Hoffa, and that by killing him they’d be honor-bound to repay $21 Million. (Nor did anyone know that Marcello upped the bribe to $2 Million and Big Daddy still refused; like Hoffa, he craved power and had more than enough money.)
As for why Big Daddy was so privileged by Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, Charles Brandt in The Irishman cites his interviews with aging FBI agents familiar with the case against Hoffa. They told him that prisons are filled with high-profile people who were able to avoid prosecution for major crimes but were sentenced based on minor charges and prosecuted to the maximum penalty possible; Hoffa going to prison for jury tampering was similar to the famous 1930’s Chicago mobster Al “Scarface” Capone spending his final years in prison for tax evasion and was put there not by the FBI, but by his accountant.
Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed soon after that Life expose on organized crime and during his presidential bid in 1968 by the redundantly named Serhan-Serhan. So was Martin Luther King Junior, who was presumably shot by the racist James Earl Ray. Serhan-Serhan is still in jail without any conspiracy links, but the case against Ray had so many similarities to the untried case against Oswald that the house committee on assassinations grouped their clandestine investigation into the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report. J. Edgar Hoover would oversee that process until his death of natural causes in 1972, coincidentally the year I was born.
(Hoover would become known as a lifelong bachelor married to his job; he created the modern FBI and served under eight presidents, and was old enough to remember two presidential assassinations, Kennedy in 1963 and McKinley in 1901. He would also become known for using FBI surveillance technology to collect immense embarrassing and sometimes technically illegal information on politicians and judges to blackmail them, and for collecting photos of shirtless FBI men in his office drawers and home; that may may explain why he chose the shirtless photo of Big Daddy in Life magazine. I never learned if he kept the original photo of Big Daddy, or if he just taped the copy from Life magazine somewhere.)
All of that time Big Daddy continued running the Teamsters. Newspaper reports flooded in about him being stabbed and shot, and about unprecedented violence and shootouts and explosions in Baton Rouge as mafia hitmen from around the country poured in and tried “anything” to convince Big Daddy to change his testimony.
Nothing intimidated Big Daddy. From prison, Hoffa tried other tactics. He sent word to President Nixon that he’d give millions to Nixon’s re-election campaign and offer his endorsement and therefore millions of Teamster votes – and probably more from millions of other people who listened to Hoffa’s word – if Nixon would offer Big Daddy a preemptive pardon for perjury and clemency for the future in exchange for changing his testimony. To strengthen the offer, Hoffa then negotiated with a man who would appeal to all Americans, Audie Murphy: America’s most decorated war hero and star of more than 40 action films, the Texas star and WWII veteran who was revered by citizens, politicians, the mafia, and even The Irishman.
Later in this story I’ll talk more about Audie Murphy and how his story had influenced my life so far. But it’s useful to start with him and how, after his death just before I was conceived in 1971, his story impacted Wendy and me.
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