A Partin History, Part 5

“You either loved or hated Ed Partin. There was no in between.”

– My great-uncle Doug in “From my Brother’s Shadow: Teamster Douglas Westley Partin Finally Tells His Side of The Story,” self published in 2017.

Big Daddy was interviewed for both the Warren Report and the JFK and MLK report, but not even Judge JJ or media would know that until President William “Bill” Clinton would release the first part in 1993.

It took Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK to prompt the release; his film was based on New Orleans attorney general Jim Garrison’s memoir about the only trial against alleged Kennedy assassination contributors and implicated FBI and CIA agents that voters demanded to see the file; like The Irishman, JFK was layered with stars to sell tickets and some would overlap with The Irishman decades later (Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who arrested Big Daddy based on photos of him with Oswald and Ruby, had a cameo as Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Joe Pesci played the pilot who was in the civil air patrol with Oswald in JFK and mob boss Russel Bufalino in The Irishman). 10 Million people saw JFK in theaters, and voters demanded that incumbent president William “Bill” Clinton to release part of the report when he assumed office in January of 1993.

In what would be a defining point in my understanding history, in 1993 I was serving on President Clinton’s quick-reaction force and that’s when I first read about my grandfather probably being behind President Kenendy’s assassination. The internet was still a baby and I had never logged on; I dug deeper with my Fort Bragg library card; at that time I still suspected Big Daddy had orchestrated Audie Murphy’s death, too, so I wasn’t surprised at what I read in the report.

Knowing what I know now, I don’t understand why the JFK assassination report didn’t make bigger waves when it landed. And I don’t know why it took so long to begin releasing parts of the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassination report or to release the final part, but that’s where a lot of details about Big Daddy are buried.

The JFK and MLK assassination report is a massive collection of documents that takes up a medium sized library or ten minutes to download with 2020 technology. It took eight years of focus and unlimited resources to collect and try to find patterns from thousands of interviews and hundreds of thousands of facts that were like a sawed off shotgun blast obliterating a target rather than a rifle bullet pinpointing the bullseye. But the facts were there fore anyone with the patience to look. I don’t know why presidents Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior, Obama, Trump, and Biden kept what they knew classified; or why Trump in his second presidential win decided to release the final part in January of 2025, sixty two years and ten presidents after Kennedy was shot and killed. If I were president, I’d want everyone to know how to stop people from killing presidents.

Bobby, Hoover, and newly appointed president Johnson either did what they felt was right at the time or acted impulsively; I do not know their motivations, but the result was using my grandfather’s disreputable testimony to send Hoffa to prison. In poetic justice, Hoffa outlived all of them and his name has persisted in American culture longer than theirs.

Bobby Kennedy was murdered in June of 1968; he was shot and killed during his presidential campaign by the redundantly named Serhan-Serhan soon after the six-part 1968 Life expose on organized crime. Martin Luther King Junior was also shot and killed in 1968, presumably by the racist James Earl Ray, who would alternate between confessions and denials until the day he died. J. Edgar Hoover died from a heart attack at age 74 in May of 1972, coincidentally when I was a few months along in Wendy’s belly and only a few weeks longer than Hoffa was released from prison. Johnson died of a heart attack at 64 years old in January of 1973. No one reputable suspects foul play in Hoover’s or Johnson’s deaths; Serhan-Serhan is still in jail without any conspiracy links; the case against Ray was so similar to the untried case against Oswald that their cases would be combined in the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report, though he has always played second fiddle to Oswald in the symphony of suspected assassins.

Later research would uncover that the lifelong bachelor J. Edgar Hoover was married to the FBI and spent 45 years shaping modern surveillance technology. He would be remembered also become known for using that technology to collect embarrassing and sometimes illegal information on politicians and judges and then blackmail them; Hoover shaped America from behind his desk. In that desk, he kept copies of shirtless FBI agents and his old college fraternity brothers; that may explain why he chose the shirtless photo of Big Daddy in the 1964 Life magazine. I never learned if he kept the original copy, or if he just taped the copy from Life magazine somewhere.

In his two autobiographies, Hoffa admitted he went to prison because he locked horns with Bobby Kennedy, and that he was fooled into trusting Big Daddy. Interestingly, though he lists Big Daddy’s crimes, he never says anything negative about my grandfather and instead sinks his teeth deeper into the unconstitutional justice methods he says railroaded him into prison. Had Hoffa lived past 1975, he would likely have resumed control of the Teamsters and worked with Big Daddy again. Until his the day he disappeared, Hoffa admitted he was glad President Kennedy was killed; but of course he denied having anything to do with it.

Of course John F. Kennedy is remembered all over the world and his face is immortalized on the American half dollar. Bobby Kennedy would be the source of books and television series all speculating on what may have been. Hoffa, ironically, became a pop culture icon that has persisted longer than anyone who pursued him. He died never having publicly said anything negative about Edward Partin. Big Daddy would, as he wanted, remain behind the scenes of history; to his dying day he would smile when asked but never share a word about Hoffa or the Kennedys; I have no smoking gun from my childhood memories that tell more than what is already public about my grandfather.

In 2019 and 2020, The Irishman ignited a resurgence in both Hoffa’s disappearance and who killed Kennedy. The internet made conspiracy theories abundant but short-lived; the masses quickly transitioned to the next thing of interest, and new conspiracies about Covid-19 dominated. A few historians were asked about The Irishman’s claims. The only person I spoke with was Craig Vincent, who probably had spent more time researching my grandfather than anyone other than me, my grandmother Mamma Jean, and Hoffa’s army of attorneys. He didn’t know anything more than I did.

As far as I know, of the acknowledged experts on history and law, only one of them knew Big Daddy; that was Dan Moldea, a former Teamster turned private journalist who published a series of books on the Teamster and the mafia in the 1970’s and was an elderly private investigator when The Irishman was released. Moldea dismissed Sheeran’s version of what happened to Hoffa as: “a fabricated, self-serving confession from a pathological liar trying to secure money for his family.”

A historian and law expert who also publicly commented on The Irishman was Harvard professor Jack Goldsmith. He had been an assistant attorney general under President Bush Jr.’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, and Ashcroft had assigned Goldsmith to find or build a legal foundation to justify Bush’s 2001 PATRIOT Act. Goldsmith became an expert on the case against Hoffa and another one against Chuckie O’Brien with similar 4th Amendment challenges.

In a flash of coincidence stronger than anything I’ve experienced, it turns out that Goldsmith was the adopted but estranged son of Chuckie O’Brien, the pit bull who jumped over Big Daddy to pistol whip the threat to Hoffa. The Irishman claims Chuckie drove him in the car that picked up Jimmy Hoffa from the Red Fox Restaurant parking lot and drove him to a nearby suburban house with plastic sheets on the living room floor.

Goldsmith released a book in 2019 exonerating Chuckie O’Brien from Hoffa’s murder called “In Hoffa’s Shadow: In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth.” It begins with his work on The PATRIOT Act and transitions into him reconnecting with Chuckie and finding peace with the past. (That’s how I learned some of Chuckie’s final words were: Fucking Partin. I should have killed him when I had the chance.”) After The Irishman film stirred national attention, Goldsmith published an online response through his personal and Harvard websites that refuted the film but in a way more politically correct than Moldea had; after a detailed analysis, Goldsmith said what Sheeran said happened couldn’t have happened, logistically.

I read Goldsmith’s books a few times looking for clues to my family history, and then reread Frank Sheeran’s book and saw the quickly tossed-out line used in the film by one of the bosses, that if they could kiss the president they could kiss Hoffa, and a post-script where Sheeran noticed men loading duffle bags of rifles soon before Kennedy was assassinated; I assumed they were 6.5mm Italian army surplus carbines outfitted with scopes. I was surprised that those lines didn’t get more attention than the debate on who killed Hoffa; I assumed Frank the agent knew the limits of what he could share in one book about The Teamsters and Mafia’s time in bed together.

During the pandemic I spoke with both Dan and Jack. Dan didn’t know Jack, and didn’t learn anything from them I hadn’t known for decades. Both had a lot of opinions about my grandfather and were looking for a smoking gun with fingerprints and a motive that would indict someone with a name that could be remembered. I was confident that organized crime dealt with Hoffa and was less interested in who pulled the trigger; details were less important to me than how humans organized to kill other humans.

From my experience, whoever was responsible was always low-level, simple-minded men who were acting at the low end of a long chain of ambiguous statements; and then that person was eliminated by another low-level, simple-minded person who either didn’t see the linked events, or thought they were special in whomever’s eyes they were trying to impress or become more deeply intrenched with. And then that person was kissed, too. Anyone who focused too much on who pulled a trigger, was, in my mind, reaching for low-hanging fruit on the tree of knowledge. There had to be a bigger picture.

I spent the next few years focused more on President Kennedy and my grandfather’s role behind the scenes, but that was only a distraction from what was really on my mind. The seed of this book was sowed in my mind in January of 1993, but it took my mom’s death in 2019 and the coincidental film about The Irishman for that seed to sprout. As she lay dying, nothing seemed more important than honoring my mother. Anything I had to present about Big Daddy and Kennedy has been told; if it’s told again it’s through a story about my mother, Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin, and me, Jason Ian Partin.

Again and again my mind drifted to the summer of 1976 when I still called my mother Wendy and lived with Mr. and Mrs. James “Ed” White, my PawPaw and MawMaw, the people who Wendy said would keep me safe, and who Judge JJ said viewed me as their own. World history means less to a little boy than understanding his place in it and whom to trust; in the end, it was arrogance and misplaced trust that killed Hoffa. 1976 is where I’ll begin narrating my memories of Edward Grady Partin and my small part in his story. To do that I’ll start with PawPaw.

Whatever I do, it’s in honor of my mother; may she rest in peace.

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