A Partin History: Part 1

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, Louisiana. 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.

According to Chief Justice Earl Warren, my grandfather’s 1964 testimony was the sole reason Hoffa was sentenced to prison after 1966’s Supreme Court case Hoffa versus The United States. To protect my family against inevitable retribution from Teamsters and mafia families loyal to Hoffa, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover assigned a team of federal marshals to protect my family 24 hours a day. 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 scoffed at every day of the almost six years he spent in prison because of my grandfather’s testimony. Hoffa had worked with him since the mid 1950’s, and he knew Ed Partin 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 he was the only supreme court justice to vote against using my grandfather’s testimony to convict Hoffa – a lier with charges for perjury in another court while he was testifying against Hoffa. Ironically, that’s exactly why Hoffa chose to work with him.

Edward Partin Senior spent a year and a half as a mole in Hoffa’s inner circle. When he negotiated a deal with Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover to spy on Hoffa, my grandfather was in a Baton Rouge jail facing life in prison for manslaughter in Mississippi and for kidnapping the two young children of a fellow Baton Rouge Teamster who had lost custody of them. That was the “minor domestic problem” Hoffa used “bunny ears” to sarcastically describe the types of criminal charges that Bobby’s friend and editor of Life magazine whitewashed as daily problems blown out of proportion by Hoffa’s army of defense attorneys.

Life and Look! magazines were America’s premier source of news back then, read by more than 10 Million people each week, and they showcased the Partin family as a loving, laughing, and hard-working all-American family in the same issues where newly appointed president Lyndon B. Johnson’s family was also showcased. 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 that day, and the trials against Hoffa were so soon after that Life did double-duty showcasing both the Partin and the Johnson families to shocked Americans still processing how someone could kill the president.

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 (whose idols were president’s Linconln and Kennedy, both of whom were shot and killed while in office). Since Clinton released parts of the report, 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 and me.

Wendy Partin 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.

Wendy Anne Rothdram was born on 08 August 1955 in a middle class suburb of Toronto. When she was four years old, her mother – my Granny – fled an abusive husband and took Wendy to Baton Rouge. They lived with my Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob in until Granny found work and saved her pennies and bought a small house in an affordable neighborhood under the Baton Rouge airport flight path and in the Glenoaks school district.

Ten years later Wendy was a petite but athletic and strikingly attractive girl with strawberry blonde hair and hazel eyes that crinkled when she laughed, and she laughed often. She was a teenager at the height of the Vietnam conflict and kids unable to get into college were being still being drafted as soon as they graduated high school. She was a 16 year old junior at Glenoaks High School when she met the school’s 17 year old drug dealer, Edward Grady Partin Junior. He was tall and strong and had long black hair and drove an expensive sports car and defied anyone to try and draft him. He rarely smiled unless he was high, which was often. Wendy was enamored and got high Ed Partin Junior and lost her virginity to him on New Years Eve as 1971 transitioned into 1972.

Two weeks later Wendy learned she was pregnant with me. She couldn’t afford an illegal abortion (partially because Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Roe versus Wade case that legalized abortion was still a year away) so Wendy accepted my dad’s proposal; they dropped out of school and eloped an hour minutes up rural Highway 61 to Woodville, Mississippi.

Everyone in Woodville knew the name Edward Partin. It was and is a small rural town of only a few hundred people surrounded by pine forests and centered around a sawmill. My grandfather was born in there in 1926; his parents were been born there soon after the civil war ended. His father, my great-grandfather Grady Partin, was a typical sawmill worker and prohibition-era bar lover who had scraps with the law. In the 1930’s Grady Partin left his wife and three sons to fend for themselves. My grandfather was the oldest; he helped take care of his mother and practically raised his two younger brothers for the next couple of years. Even as a teenager he was a physically huge person and stood out as the biggest man in Woodville.

When he was 17, Ed Partin and his little brother – my great uncle Doug – stole all of the guns in Woodville by breaking into the local Sears and Roebuck and hauling everything two hours downriver to New Orleans. They sold the guns to low-level members of the burgeoning mafia and then immaturely flaunted their wealth in their Depression-era home town by buying motorcycles and paying for prostitutes. The local sherif arrested them. Doug was released because he was only 12, but my grandfather accepted a deal to avoid jail if he joined the marines. Two weeks after joining, he punched out the commanding officer and was dishonorably discharged but a free man. He returned as Woodville’s most notorious man.

When all other men his age were fighting in WWII, Ed Partin took over the labor unions of both the Woodville sawmill and the Mississippi truckers who hauled away cut lumber. Woodville had always relied on Teamsters to drive their economy. In the 1800’s and early 1900’s, before gas-powered trucks, Teamsters drove horse carriages into Woodville with freshly cut trees and back out with cut lumber (that’s why the Teamsters logo still shows the heads of two strong horses named Thunder and Lightning framing a steamboat-era pilot’s wheel). By WWII trucks had replaced horses, but Woodville still depended on Teamsters. All of Woodville’s commerce went through Edward Grady Partin.

In the late 1940’s Ed Partin was found not guilty of raping a young girl who lived in a brothel down the street from him, because one juror of his peers would not vote guilty. (Uncle Doug would write in his autobiography that he met one of those jurors, Woodville’s barber, who told him “Ain’t no white man deserve to go to jail for anything he did to a black girl.”) He could do no wrong in his home town, but by the early 1950’s my grandfather had grown too big for Woodville. He moved to Baton Rouge and took over Teamsters Local #5 and began working with Jimmy Hoffa.

In 1964, Ed Partin’s testimony against Hoffa and defiance against the mafia added to his legendary status across America, especially in his home town. By the early 1970’s, anyone named Edward Partin would have had a bed to sleep on in Woodville, Mississippi. Wendy arrived in Woodville not knowing any of that history.

Mississippi laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old girl to marry a 17 year old boy. Wendy Anne Rothdram became Mrs. Edward Grady Partin and left Woodville two days after arriving. She and my dadreturned to Baton Rouge and moved into one of my grandfather’s rural houses near the swampy forests surrounding the Comite River Bridge. It was already furnished and listed under Edward G. Partin; they didn’t have to change names for utilities or the phone book and quickly settled in to a new lifestyle.

I was born nine months later.

Wendy had a series of nervous breakdowns over the next year and tried to flee our home. Once was when my dad was away with his friends buying a truck load of drugs in Miami and then traveling to Jamaica to see a Bob Marley show in Kingston. He was gone a couple of months and had left Wendy with no car to get anywhere for work and only around $200 for food. While alone with me, she saw a handwritten note on a coffee shop community board asking to share gas to California. Wendy impulsively responded that she could leave that day; she left me at a daycare center near Glenoaks High school and gave the phone number of her best friend as my emergency contact. She and the stranger drove back onto I-110 at the airport exit and turned west on I-10 and followed it straight for 1,830 miles to where it ended at the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles, California.

Sun set and no one picked me up. The daycare called the phone number Wendy left them and it turned out to be for Linda White, Wendy’s best friend from high school, and the number Wendy remembered was Linda’s dad, my PawPaw. He answered the phone and rushed to the daycare and took me home. A few days later the only family court judge in East Baton Rouge Parish removed me from Partin custody and assigned PawPaw as my legal guardian.

Wendy woke up in Los Angeles and took a bus back to Baton Rouge. My dad returned soon after and learned what happened. They began fighting in court for the next couple of years while I grew up in the White’s house down the street from Glenoaks.

Wendy was allowed to visit me two days a month she usually took me to a park near PawPaw’s house to play, but she was ashamed of having abandoned me and for being a single teenage mother without a high school diploma; she taught me to call her by her first name so people would think I was her little brother. It worked, and I called my mother Wendy until the day she died.

When Wendy went into a coma on 03 April 2019 I was, coincidentally, living on the coast of California and 1,830 miles away from home. I flew home to be by her side. She passed at 8:42am. The next day I hastily wrote her obituary from a place of no sleep and shock at her passing so quickly. How do you summarize someone’s complex 63 years of life concisely? How do you explain why you call your mother Wendy? What was important enough to put on paper for posterity to see?

I wrote what I could and then scrolled through my phone for a photo to post. I chose one of Wendy and two rescue dogs from around ten years prior, when she was only 53 and would be recognized by classmates from Glenoaks, coworkers from her 20 years at the Exxon plastics manufacturing plant, and other volunteers from the local humane society.

Later that week, The Baton Rouge Advocate published what I wrote.

Wendy Rothdram Partin, a resident of St. Francisville, LA, passed way on Friday, April 5th, 2019 at the age of 63. Wendy attended Glenoaks High School in Baton Rouge, LA, and retired from Exxon Mobil. She is survived by her son, Jason Ian Partin, of San Diego, CA. She was preceded in death by her mother, Joyce Rothdram, and her aunt and uncle, Lois and Robert Desico, all of Baton Rouge, LA. During her retirement, she became a master gardener and enjoyed helping people with their lawns. She enjoyed cooking, and took food to anyone she knew who was ill or grieving. Wendy loved animals, and worked with local shelters to foster dogs until they found permanent homes. She passed away unexpectedly from liver failure. In lieu of gifts or a service, please spend time sharing what you love with your neighbor, listen to what they love, and help each other.

To plant trees in memory, please visit _____

There was more to tell but obituaries are short and sweet. I chose to include that she passed from liver failure because she had become an alcoholic later in life and I wanted people to see the consequence of that without focusing on details; it’s my way to document the truth for posterity’s benefit. I avoided details of our relationship because no one needed to know Wendy abandoned me as a kid.

But I wanted to talk about why, if only to better understand it myself. I began researching my Partin family history, because it’s hard to share Wendy’s story without sharing more about Edward Grady Partin Senior.

Jimmy Hoffa wrote entire chapters of his two autobiographies centered around my grandfather and the testimony that sent him to prison. Hoffa was notoriously sarcastic, and his humor centered around plays on words and pointing out ironies. He penned Chapter 10 of his second autobiography after spending six years in prison based on my grandfather’s word, and he named that chapter after an old folk song about a train called “The Chattanooga Choo Choo,” because he said Bobby Kennedy railroaded him into prison using my grandfather’s disreputable word. To explain how he was fooled, Hoffa opened Chapter 10 by summarizing my grandfather concisely: “Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”

Everyone in Baton Rouge called my grandfather Big Daddy after I was born (it differentiated my daddy from my grandfather, who was much bigger than my dad). Big Daddy was always the biggest man in the room. He was built like a bull, and he was a former heavyweight boxer with thick arms and fists the size of boxing gloves. He had sky blue eyes and wavy strawberry blonde hair, an all-American aryan look that appealed to the masses who read Life and Look! magazines and practically every person who met him. Big Daddy’s perpetual sly smile oozed confidence, his smooth southern drawl made people imagine a calm and trustworthy man. His ineffable aura led people to trust him; Hoffa’s jury would debate a mere three hours before trusting Big Daddy’s word.

Big Daddy’s all-American aryan looks and charm got him out of trouble in the 1940’s segregated and racist south. In the early 1950’s his it led to him to marrying my grandmother – who we called Mamma Jean – and led them to quickly having my dad and his four siblings. That’s mostly why Big Daddy outgrew Woodville. They all moved to Baton Rouge, and Big Daddy took his mother, stepfather, and two younger brothers with him. They became the first Partins in Louisiana.

Big Daddy grew to be so popular in Louisiana that governors sought his endorsement and newspapers said that if he had a college degree he’d be governor himself.

But he was also controversial. From the 1950’s until Jimmy Hoffa vanished in 1975, three Louisiana governors tried to rid the state of my grandfather the same way the Kennedys had tried to rid America of Hoffa. After he testified against Hoffa, Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover ensured no one at a state level could prosecute my grandfather. One of the governors who from 1964 to 1972 was Governor John McKeithen, and during his two terms his fruitless promises to convict Big Daddy accumulated in the New Orleans Times Picayune and the Baton Rouge Advocate. McKeithen’s words amounted to nothing other than idle words that, ironically, fueled Big Daddy’s reputation as a man above laws, governors, heads of mafia families, and even Jimmy Hoffa.

“I won’t let Edward Partin and his gangster Teamsters run this state!” McKeithen proclaimed early in his governorship.

“[We’re going to arrest Partin] as soon as we get the evidence against him.” McKeithen promised several times over the years.

‘Partin has two Justice Department guards with him for fear Hoffa will retaliate against him,’ Gov. McKeithen said, ‘This gives him immunity.’ Newspapers quoted him as saying.

“Baton Rouge has never has such a siege of labor violence as it’s seen since Partin came back from the Chattanooga trial with two Justice Department guards to protect him.” he explained, and the reporter clarified what McKeithen meant by adding: “The governor referred to an incident in Plaquemine when 45 to 50 men shot up 30 workers of the W.O. Bergeron Construction Co.”

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

But Big Daddy was protected from legal prosecution by Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover. McKeithen tried to compromise when he met with Walter Sheridan, the head of the Get Hoffa squad who was my family’s contact for our FBI protection, and begged and bargained for help.

McKeithen said: “Walter, get him out of my state. Now listen to what I am saying to you. Just get him out of my state. I’ll help you do it and I’ll give him immunity. You write it up and I’ll sign it. Just please get him across that state line.”

Walter’s response to the governor was posted in the new Orleans State Times on 08 March 1968.

McKeithen is Warned to ‘Lay Off’ Partin

“Gov. John J. McKeithen reportedly received suggestions last month during a trip to Washington not to press the state Labor-Management Commission’s investigation of Baton Rouge Teamster Boss Edward G. Partin.”

“McKeithen said he met with [Walter] Sheridan, who is now an investigator for the National Broadcasting Company, to allay any suspicion that his motives in pressing the Baton Rouge labor investigation were to get Hoffa Free.

The governor said that the meeting was pre-arranged on a mutual basis, with each desiring to talk with the other. He said that Sheridan was a focal point of persons in the Justice Department and “national magazines” interested in seeing that Hoffa is not released.”

“The governor said he felt the recent series of Life Magazine articles on organized crime in Louisianan and the alleged bribe offers to free Hoffa were promoted by Partin. Since then, he said, Life Magazine has placed full confidence in him.”

Hoffa was followed by as many people as Life, and in his first autobiography published soon after he lost his final appeal against my grandfather’s testimony in the U.S. Supreme Court, this is what he wrote to America:

“It was Edward Grady Partin who volunteered the testimony that sealed my doom in the Chattanooga court.

You may have read about him. Thanks to a government sponsorship he was portrayed as something of a national hero. he somehow looked the part, too: a rugged, firm-jawed man with slightly wavy hair and the appearance of sincerity and honesty that would have made him a successful salesman. Ah, you’d say upon meeting him, there’s a true-blue blood American, a churchgoer, no doubt, a man who contributes regularly to charity, a fellow who devotes much time to community-service groups, a chap who turns over most of his paycheck to a divorced wife.

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 ha 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 charged with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.“

Nothing stopped Big Daddy’s momentum in the 1960’s and 70’s. It wasn’t until after Hoffa vanished that Big Daddy finally went to prison in 1980. But even from prison he remained influential. Local #5 unanimously voted to keep him as president and pay Big Daddy while he watched color television in a relatively cushy minimum security Texas prison, just like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters had voted to keep Hoffa in power while he pounded mattresses eight hours a day for his work detail in a harsh and oppressive New Jersey penitentiary.

By 1980 governors courted him less, though that was their mistake. In a famous exchange, from Big Daddy’s prison cell he offered to endorse returning governor Edwin Edward’s 1980 campaign. He had already served two terms, from 1972 – the year I was born – until 1980 and shouldn’t have been able to run a third time, but Edwards was popular and corrupt and forced loopholes to remain in office. Baton Rouge is the state capital, and Edward’s had spent eight years down the street from Teamsters Local #5 and knew Big Daddy well. Edwards declined Big Daddy’s endorsement, telling reporters that my grandfather was too controversial, and that he didn’t need Ed Partin’s endorsement because he was so popular that the only way he could lose was if he were caught in bed with a live boy or a dead hooker. That quote went viral in newspapers, radios, and television commentaries about my grandfather’s recent imprisonment and the fate of Louisiana politics.

I don’t recall if Edwards was found in either of those situations, but Edwards lost the 1980 election and would practically beg my uncle Doug for Local #5’s endorsement four years later, which he would receive and then be re-elected.

In Louisiana, the endorsement of a Partin and their Teamsters was necessary to win an election. Even while in prison, news like what happened to Edwin Edwards made Edward Partin seem bigger in Louisiana than he had been in reality. Nationally, his image had been immortalized by the media portrayal Bobby Kennedy had cultivated in the 1960’s.

Americans knew what Ed Partin Senior looked and sounded like in his prime, especially because after Hoffa vanished in 1975 and those old photos and news interviews resurfaced. That’s why when producers of a 1983 national two-part movie about Hoffa and Kenendy cast actors, they had to find someone who resembled my grandfather and could mimic his southern drawl. That film was called Blood Feud, which was what people in the 1960’s called the violent public clashes and obvious hatred between Jimmy Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy. For Big Daddy’s role in The Blood Feud, they chose a new actor named Brian Dennehy, who would go on to be one of America’s most celebrated actors known for portraying ruggedly handsome men.¹

The series was heavily advertised and producers knew the Blood Feud was still on the mind of most middle aged Americans. Dennehy had green eyes and was smaller than Big Daddy, but otherwise the resemblance was so close that even I was confused when watching Blood Feud on our small black and white TV. Veteran actor Robert Blake with his hair slicked back looked just like Jimmy Hoffa, and that Blake won an Academy award for “channeling Hoffa’s rage.” Ernest Borgnine – the guy from McCall’s Navy everyone knew – was a convincing J. Edgar Hoover. Some tall daytime soap opera heartthrob whose name I can never recall portrayed Bobby Kenendy.

From behind his big color television, Big Daddy said he thought Blake nailed Hoffa and that Dennehy did a fine job portraying him. By coincidence in the summer of 1983, Brian Dennehy would rise to fame in another film with Blood in the name, Rambo: First Blood, as the ruggedly handsome Korean war veteran and mountain-town sherif pursuing Sylvester Stalone as Rambo through the mountains. (I never learned what Big Daddy thought of Rambo.²)

Two years later and still from his cushy cell, Big Daddy portrayed in by the wavy-haired handsome Ben Fuhrman 1985’s TV miniseries, Robert Kennedy and His Times. (I never learned what he thought of that, either.)

Big Daddy’s Louisiana fame was fueled by famous actors playing him in national movies and television series. In 1986 he was released early from prison due to declining health and he returned to Baton Rouge and spent most of his leisure days driving around Baton Rouge in his massive luxury Cadillac and visiting with Grandma Foster, his mother who had remarried a man name Foster and who lived a few streets over from Granny, which is how my dad had met Wendy in 1971 and how I happen to know so much about the history of Jimmy Hoffa, the FBI, and the Kennedys.

Big Daddy died in 1990, my senior year of high school and just before I left Louisiana for the army, which may be why I remember that his funeral seemed like a military assault on Greenoaks Funeral Home. Hundreds of Teamsters clogged the Baton Rouge arteries leading to Greenoaks with their lumbering and rumbling 18 wheeler trucks, and every Baton Rouge police car and motorcycle surrounded the parking lot with silent flashing lights so that no one would miss their presence. A couple of politicians and former mayors attended, and the 1954 national champion Louisiana State University football team reunited to attend. And of course my dad’s side of my family was there and so were Big Daddy’s latest wife and kids, who were technically my cousins though I barely knew them.

Officers stood at intersections directing traffic and at the entry doors controlling crowds trying to peek inside; though to be fair, not all of that attention was for my grandfather. Baton Rouge is home of the LSU Tigers, and a lot of the crowd was there to see LSU’s 1954 Heisman trophy winner, former pro footballer, and hometown hero who was chosen to wave down from Mardi Gras parades and whose face smiled down from billboards along I-10 and I-110, Billy Cannon. He was one of Big Daddy’s six hefty pallbearers who asked to help carry the truck-sized coffin (my great uncle Doug Partin and uncle Keith Partin were another two, and three burly Baton Rouge Teamsters who had been Big Daddy’s muscles completed the team). Billy Cannon alone would have brought hoards of Baton Rouge LSU Tiger fans to any event.

Mixed among everyone and listening in were Walter Sheridan, the former head of the FBI’s Get Hoffa Task Force, and a gaggle of FBI agents wearing Hoover-era G-man black suits with squiggly white wires trailing from one ear each. The case against Hoffa was still open, and they unabashedly served as both security for my family and as what Earl Warren called “walking bugging devices,” listening in on what was being said and asking what my grandfather’s final words to them were.

Teams of reporters from most major newspapers stood outside snapping photos of everyone who entered. The Los Angeles Times summarized what was known of Big Daddy’s history back then in a front page article. I’m mentioned, though not by name. I was Big Daddy’s oldest grandson and second oldest grandchild and the reason everyone called Ed Partin Big Daddy; but by 1990 Big Daddy had seven grandchildren and I was relatively inconsequential.

Obituaries are usually short and sweet, unless the deceased is infamous and the reason for their fame can’t be bypassed. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times newspapers summarized my grandfather’s life based on what was public knowledge back then by publishing this:

March 11th, 1990, BATON ROUGE, La. — Edward Grady Partin, the labor leader whose testimony sent Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa to prison in 1967 and who himself was convicted of extortion, has died at 66.

Partin, who died Sunday at a nursing home here, suffered from heart disease and diabetes.

A native of Woodville, Miss., Partin was business manager of Teamsters Local 5 in Baton Rouge for 30 years.

Partin, a close associate of Hoffa, helped then-Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy convict the Teamsters boss in 1964 of jury tampering. Partin testified that Hoffa had offered him $20,000 to fix the jury at Hoffa’s 1962 trial on charges of taking kickbacks from a trucking company. That trial ended in a hung jury, but Hoffa eventually was convicted of jury tampering and mail fraud and served nearly five years in federal prison.

James Neal, a prosecutor in the jury-tampering trial in Chattanooga, Tenn., said that when Partin walked in the courtroom, Hoffa gasped, “My God, it’s Partin!”

The government later spent several years and three trials prosecuting Partin on labor corruption charges before he went to prison in 1980 for conspiracy to obstruct justice by hiding witnesses and arranging for perjured testimony.

While in prison, he pleaded no contest to conspiracy, racketeering and embezzling $450,000 in union money. He was released to a halfway house in 1986.

Union members at one time voted to continue paying his salary while he was in prison. He was removed from office in 1981.

Survivors include his mother, two brothers, a sister, five daughters, two sons and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I left for the army soon after his funeral and the 1990-1991 Gulf war would dominate my thoughts and time for a while; but, I would see my grandfather’s name in books and films practically every year since I returned. In the 30 years since Big Daddy died, more than 2,000 books were written about Hoffa and the Kennedys. Countless television series, documentaries, and news specials would try to find Hoffa’s body or put clues together on who killed Kennedy – Hoffa had always been a suspect, so he was always the focus and Big Daddy’s role grew smaller. Most media built on previous books and became diluted like repeated photocopies of a Zerox that began with flaws. Some of those flaws were intentionally misleading, and over time errors and misinterpretations accumulated like rotted boards blended into a building’s framework.

By the 2000’s, authors publishing books on Hoffa were born after Hoffa had vanished, and the FBI agents assigned to his case were born after Big Daddy died. But one of the books co-written by someone who knew both Hoffa my grandfather stood out; it was the 2004 memoir “I heard you paint houses: Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and closing the case on Jimmy Hoffa.” I didn’t read it until 2019, coincidentally just before Wendy passed away.

That memoir provided a first-hand account of Big Daddy and Hoffa’s behind-the scenes efforts to get him to change his testimony in the 1960’s and 70’s, therefore before building upon what was published by the New York Times for Big Daddy’s obituary, it’s best to begin with the source: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran.

Go to the Table of Contents

1. Brian Dennehys’ breakout was in 1983’s summer hit coincidentally also with blood in the name; he costarred with Sylvester Stalone in Rambo: First Blood, and was the decorated Korean war veteran and rural mountain-town sheriff who pursued Sylvester Stalone as a Vietnam special forces veteran with PTSD named Rambo. A few years before, Stalone had portrayed a fictionalized version Hoffa in the 18-Wheeler union uprising film F.I.S.T. – the Federation of Inter-State Truckers – based loosely based on Hoffa and used Stalone, in his first film after the boxer Rocky, to show just how rough Hoffa had been; but I don’t know Dennehy’s overlap with Hoffa in Blood Feud influenced Stalone to work him in Rambo. A point I’m making is that it took Sylvester Stalone’s physique and brute force approach to convey what Robert Blake channeled and Al Pacino delivered; and all of them were probably understatements of the original. I never asked my grandfather what it was like to stand up against a man like Jimmy Hoffa, because in our mind everyone else would be asking that about Big Daddy. ↩︎
2. Brian Dennehy portrayed so many war hero’s that his ego led him to lying about his service; he admitted to stealing valor and using it to help promote his tough-guy persona. Dennehy died in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. I never got to discuss stolen valor with him; or ask him if he met Big Daddy when researching his role in Blood Feud, and if so what was the impression; or hear what he thought of Craig Vincent in The Irishman, which had been out a year by the time Brian Dennehy passed. ↩︎