Jason

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,” 1975, published just before he vanished from a Detroit parking lot.

I’m Jason Partin. I was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on 05 October 1972.

My biologic father is Edward Grady Partin Junior, a drug dealer who went to prison in 1986 during the height of President Reagan’s war on drugs; he became a lawyer and is currently a public defense attorney in Baton Rouge who lives nearby where I grew up in the aptly named Slaughter, Loiusiana. His father – my grandfather – was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader who became famous as the mole inside Jimmy Hoffa’s inner circle, and who I believe was involved in killing President Kennedy.

According to Chief Justice Earl Warren, my grandfather’s 1964 testimony was the sole reason Hoffa was sentenced to prison. The 1966 supreme court case Hoffa versus The United States is still taught in every American accredited law school, and is known as crippling blow to America’s fourth 4th Amendment by using Ed Partin’s testimony. Warren was the only dissenting judge, and he permanently attached his thoughts on my grandfather for posterity to ponder:

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.

To protect my family against inevitable retribution from Teamsters and mafia families who knew where Ed Partin lived, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover assigned a team of federal marshals to protect my family 24 hours a day from the day my grandfather stood up in court as a secret witness and as long as Hoffa was in prison. At least two agents followed my grandfather and his children around until the year I was born.

To protect the reputation of the government’s only witness against Hoffa, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy plastered the Partin family across national media and whitewashed my grandfather’s criminal history. Edward Grady Partin was dubbed an all-American hero, something Hoffa read about in his jail cell and scoffed at every day for almost six years for what Chief Justice Earl Warren said was solely because of my grandfather’s word.

That’s why Hoffa said: “And Life magazine once again was Robert Kenedy’s tool.”

Hoffa had worked with my grandfather since the mid 1950’s knew he was a thief, rapist, murder, adulterer, racketeer, dishonorably discharged marine during World War II, weapons smuggler during the Cold War, and – as Earl Warren repeatedly pointed out when discussing my grandfather’s testimony – a lier with charges in another court for perjury while he was testifying against Hoffa (my great-uncle Doug Partin would add “bearing false witness” to my grandfather’s sins).

With poetic irony, those traits are exactly why Jimmy Hoffa chose to work with my grandfather in 1954. It’s also why the supreme court in debating Hoffa versus The United States, wrote Edward Partin or Partin 144 times across 22 pages, more than even Hoffa himself.

When my grandfather negotiated a deal with Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover to spy on Hoffa, he was pacing in a Baton Rouge jail and facing life in prison for the combined charges of kidnapping two children in Baton Rouge and manslaughter in Mississippi. The kidnapping charges came after Big Daddy’s legion of Teamsters united to aid a 22 year old fellow Teamster named Sydney Simpson snatch his two and six year old after Simpson’s wife won custody them in court.

Life spun his kidnapping into a tale of loyalty, and Louisiana Teamster membordship soared. That kidnapping was the “minor domestic problem” Hoffa used “bunny ears” to sarcastically describe how Bobby Kennedy whitewashed my family using media as his tool.

Life and Look! magazines were read by more than 10 Million people each week and were considered America’s most reliable news and culture resources. Both showcased the Partin family as a loving, laughing, and hard-working all-American family. To add to the image, the Partins were showcased in the same issues as newly appointed president Lyndon B. Johnson’s family was also shown. My grandfather had testified against Hoffa only ten months after Bobby Kennedy’s big brother, President John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed by an assassin; vice-president Johnson assumed presidency later that day, and by showing the Partin and Johnson families together there was little doubt that America could trust Edward Grady Partin.

My grandfather died my senior year of high school in 1990. In 1993 the then-classified John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior report was partially released by President Bill Clinton. Since then, I’ve believed my grandfather was behind killing President Kennedy. That’s part of what this story is about – who killed Kennedy, why, and how – but mostly it’s about Wendy Partin and me.

Wendy was my mother. I called her by her first name until the day she died on 05 April 2019.

Anything I have to say should begin by introducing her and explaining why I called my mother Wendy.

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