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.

By then, Big Daddy had been indicted by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in charges related to killing President Kennedy, and he had always been a known associate of New Orleans mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello. But the trial judge refused to allow any of Big Daddy’s history to be used in the case against Hoffa. The supreme court had access to what was denied as evidence against Big Daddy’s character, yet still voted to convict Hoffa and send him to prison for eight years. 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. He worked eight hours a day pounding mattresses in the prison mattress factory, and spent evenings pondering how to get out and resume control of the Teamsters.

While Hoffa pounded mattresses, Hoffa versus The United States was published for public review. To this day they are available on the U.S. supreme court and archives websites for posterity to ponder, and practically all law schools in America still require review of the case and what Warren and the other justices wrote to justify their decisions. Earl Warren documented his reasons in a lengthy missive; he railed on my grandfather’s character so vehemently that sixty years later his words leap with the sprite of an angry teenager. Warren 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 writing:

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. Soon after Hoffa went to prison, Walter – whom I’d grow to know and trust later in my story – left the FBI and became a trusted investigative journalist for NBC. He was known to be thorough and detailed and as persistent as a hound dog on the trail of his focus. He published an anticipated book in 1972, The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa; his index cites hundreds of names, and Big Daddy’s is on the most pages after Bobby Kennedy and Hoffa himself. Walter got the disreputable aspects of Big Daddy 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.

Walter’s summary of Big Daddy omitted mentioning the rape charges or the parts about smuggling weapons to Fidel Castro. The weapons came from 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. Walter either didn’t know those details or chose to focus on Hoffa’s guilt for jury tampering instead; his book was thick enough to be used as a step stool, and he had to draw a line somewhere in his version of what happened.

As for how Big Daddy bypassed the rape charge, my great-uncle Doug clung to that story until the day he died by writing in his self-published memoir, “From my Brother’s Shadow: Teamster Douglas Westley Partin Finally Tells His Side of The Story.” He penned his story from his Mississippi Veterans convalescent home near his hometown of Woodville, and he met with the jury of his Woodville peers who voted against convicting Big Daddy because: “Ain’t no white man deserve to go to jail for nothin’ he did to a nigger girl.” Life magazine simply said that the charges against Big Daddy were plots by locals to embarrass or threaten the growing union leader for disrupting their lifestyles.

Hoffa never forgot the disreputable history of his Judas, and would forever mock that Big Daddy as an “all-American hero” who was put in jail for “a minor domestic disturbance.” Earl Warren summarized the irony by writing:

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. 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 in prison 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 when it pointed to Ragano’s three clients as the men with the motive, means, and opportunity to orchestrate Kennedy’s assassination. In particular, the report emphasizes that Marcello was unique and above other mafia families; the report says:

“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 with the other mafia families, the leaders of organized crime owed Hoffa $121 Million. That was a jaw-dropping sum of money back then. It was enough to kill for.

Hoffa sent word via his attorneys and therefore via Marcello that all mafia debt would be forgiven if – in a jab at the clause that put him in prison – “anyone” could find “any way” to get my grandfather to either change his testimony against Hoffa or to testify that Bobby and Hoover used illegal surveillance of Hoffa’s legal defense, and therefor have the trial revoked. That was too complex for most low-level mafia runners to understand, so 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 the small detail that Big Daddy had to be alive for Hoffa to get out of jail.

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.)

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 his life and how his death in a plane crash soon before Hoffa was released (and I was conceived) in 1971, and how Audie Murphy influenced my life in the years that followed.

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