A Partin History, Part 5
“Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”
– Jimmy Hoffa, 1975
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. Public demand prompted 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 as what Audie Murphy would have called a paratroop’ on Clinton’s quick-reaction force (how I got there will be part of my memoir after this introduction). That’s when I first read about my grandfather probably being behind President Kenendy’s assassination, and that was when the internet was still a baby and I still suspected Big Daddy had orchestrated Audie Murphy’s death, too. What’s relevant now is that 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 Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior, Clinton, Trump, and Biden kept the final parts classified; it wasn’t until after Trump’s second presidential win that he authorized the full release of the JFK and MLK Assassination report in January of 2025, sixty two years after Kennedy was shot and killed. If I were president, I’d want everyone to know how to stop people from killing presidents.
That’s why Kennedy’s assassination stuck in my mind more than Hoffa’s disappearance.
As for why Big Daddy was so supported 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 and Hoover did either 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 and lead to Hoffa becoming more of a cultural icon than both of them. Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed during his presidential bid and soon after the 1968 Life expose on organized crime by the redundantly named Serhan-Serhan. Martin Luther King Junior was also shot and killed in 1968, presumably shot by the racist James Earl Ray. 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. J. Edgar Hoover would oversee that process until his death of natural causes in 1972, coincidentally the year I was born and the fist year Hoffa was a free man after his 1971 Christmas present from President Nixon; Hoover’s surprisingly not discussed as much as you’d think in the assassination reports.
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.
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 my grandfather.
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. In his second autobiography, penned after five years of prison spent pondering what happened, Hoffa would summarize how he and so many of his inner circle were fooled by my grandfather when he wrote:
“Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”
No one who ever met my grandfather disagreed with Hoffa’s assessment; he was, after all, probably the world’s leading expert on my grandfather, and had given him more thought than anyone except – probably – me and my grandmother, Mamma Jean Partin, who will show up later in my story.
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. As far as I know, of acknowledged historians, only one of them knew Big Daddy and that was Dan Moldea, a former Teamster turned private journalist and investigator who published a series of books on the Teamster and the mafia in the 1970’s. Moldea dismissed Sheeran’s version of what happened as “a fabricated, self-serving confession from a pathological liar trying to secure money for his family.”
Another historian and law expert who 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. He became an expert on the case against Hoffa and another one against Chuckie O’Brien, and reluctantly acknowledged that their predicate cases could allow unwarranted surveillance of hundreds of Americans to find “something” or “anything of interest,” just as Hoover and Bobby had tasked my grandfather when he was what Chief Justice Earl Warren called “a walking bugging device.” Goldsmith published a 2019 book exonerating Chuckie O’Brien from Hoffa’s murder, which conflicted with The Irishman’s account that Chuckie drove him to meet Hoffa on that fateful day in 1975. After The Irishman stirred national attention, Goldsmith published an online response through his personal and Harvard websites in a way more politically correct than the gruff Dan Moldea had; he said what Sheeran said happened couldn’t have happened, logistically.
What sparked my attention in The Irishman’s book and was a quickly tossed-out line was one of the mafia bosses planning to kill Hoffa and saying that if they could kiss the president, they could kiss Hoffa. It was a last-minute addition to the book and took 14 years to coax from The Irishman, and I was surprised that line didn’t get more attention than the debate on who killed Hoffa.
During the pandemic I spoke with both Dan and Jack and didn’t learn anything from them I hadn’t known for decades. Both of them 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. 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. Focusing on who pulled a trigger, was, in my mind, reaching for low-hanging fruit on the tree of knowledge.
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 waht 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.
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, who Wendy said would keep me safe and 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. John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. is more complex, and will take a while to coax out.
1976 is where I’ll begin narrating my memories of Edward Grady Partin and my small part in his story. In it I’ll share how I would serve as a paratrooper in the first Gulf war and then on the quick reaction forces of both presidents Bush Jr. and Clinton, and how with what I learned by 1993 how I believe President John F. Kennedy was killed thirty years previously, before I was born but when my grandfather was involved. But to get us there it’s useful to start with the source.
Whatever I do, it’s in honor of my mother, Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin; may she rest in peace.
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