Big Daddy

“Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”

– Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa spent six years in prison based solely on my grandfather’s word. He was in a high security New Jersey penitentiary and only allowed visitors other than his attorneys once every three months. He spent eight hours a day between family visits doing nothing but pounding mattresses for his work detail; at night he exercised to keep in shape and pondered how to regain power of the Teamsters and thought about how Ed Partin fooled him and penned his second autobiography.

Hoffa was notoriously sarcastic, and his humor centered around plays on words and pointing out ironies. Chapter 10 was about my grandfather’s surprise testimony in a Chattanooga, Tennessee court room, and he named that chapter after an old folk song, “The Chattanooga Choo Choo,” because he said Bobby Kennedy used my grandfather’s disreputable word to railroad him into prison. After six years of reflection, Hoffa began Chapter 10 with a concise summary of my grandfather: “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 him from my daddy, and made so much sense to everyone who knew us that the name caught on.

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.

Big Daddy’s all-American aryan looks and charm got him out of trouble in the 1940’s segregated and racist south when a juror said “Ain’t no white man need to go to jail for nothin’ he did to a black girl.” In the early 1950’s and when he was 26 years old, his good looks and charm led to him to marrying my 18 year old grandmother, whom we called Mamma Jean and who knew nothing of Big Daddy’s past. They quickly produced my dad and his four siblings, and that’s a big part of how Big Daddy outgrew Woodville.

Big Daddy moved Mamma Jean and their five children to Baton Rouge, and they took Big Daddy’s mother, stepfather, and two younger brothers with them. They became the first Partins in the Baton Rouge phone book.

Big Daddy thrived running Teamsters Local #5. Southern Louisiana was – and is – an aggricultural and petroleum economy that needed Teamsters just as much as Woodville, but Baton Rouge was the state capital and the Teamsters had constant contact with the governor and legislators. 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. But, to protect the reputation of their only witness against Hoffa, Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover influenced local police officers and judges so that Ed Partin wouldn’t be convicted of any crimes.

One of the governors who tried to remove Big Daddy from power was Governor John McKeithen, who won two terms from 1964 to 1972 (the year I was born), and was famous for, among many things, paving the way for the massive New Orleans Superdome. That Superdome is now known around the world; it is the home of the New Orleans Saints football team and countless international spectator events, and was shown on international news filled with waterlogged residents after Hurricane Katrina drowned the city. Despite that level of influence, Governor McKeithen failed at every attempt to convict Big Daddy of anything. McKeithen’s empty threats accumulated in the New Orleans Times Picayune and the Baton Rouge Advocate but 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 McKeithen 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.” McKeithen explained; the reporter clarified what he meant by a siege of labor violence by explaining: “The governor referred to an incident in Plaquemine when 45 to 50 men shot up 30 workers of the W.O. Bergeron Construction Co.”

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

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 penitentiary, just like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters had voted to keep Hoffa in power while he pounded mattresses eight hours a day in his New Jersey prison.

By 1980 governors courted him less, though that was their mistake. In a famous exchange, from his prison cell Edward Parting offered to endorse returning governor Edwin Edward’s 1980 campaign. Edwards had already served two terms, taking over from McKeithen in 1972 and lasting until 1980, he shouldn’t have been able to run a third time, but Edwards was popular and corrupt and forced loopholes to remain in office, including having been impeached just before completing a term and therefore being edible for another. Edward’s had spent eight years in the governor’s mansion, which was down the street from Teamsters Local #5, and he 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 he lost the 1980 election and would practically beg my uncle Doug for Local #5’s endorsement four years later, which he would receive and serve as governor from 1984-1988. He’d run again after Big Daddy died, and he’d receive Doug’s endorsement again and serve as governor from 1992-1996. (After 16 years in a governor’s role, in 2001 Edwards would ironically be sentenced to ten years in prison for racketeering, the same crime as one of the charges that sent Big Daddy to prison in 1980.)

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

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 a 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 in Texas, 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 a special forces commando with PTSD named Rambo. Though it was released the same year as Blood Feud, I never learned what Big Daddy thought of Rambo.²

Two years later, 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. The point is that in the 1980’s Big Daddy had become a meme nationally and a legend in Baton Rouge.

In 1986 Big Daddy was released early from prison due to declining health and he returned to Baton Rouge and spent most of his leisure days driving around town in his massive luxury Cadillac, attending LSU football games in his VIP box seats, and visiting with Grandma Foster, his mother who had married a man named Foster. Grandma Foster 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.

There are many reasons LSU adored Big Daddy. His Teamsters helped build LSU facilities, and – just because he could – he had hired many of the burly 1954 team who couldn’t find work after football to be his entourage of bodyguards in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. And it turns out that Joe Partin, Big Daddy’s equally big little brother, became Zachary High School’s respected and talented football coach and grew players for LSU like farmers grow potatoes for a market.

Perhaps the strongest reason was that, like Hoffa’s Teamsters funded Hollywood films, Big Daddy had brought Hollywood to Baton Rouge with films still fresh in everyone’s minds. His first films were John Wayne civil war films that used Baton Rouge and Saint Francisville plantations as backdrops in the 1950’s, and by the 1980’s popular movies were still being filmed in town. 1983 brought in Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason to live in a local mansion for The Toy, and in 1985 Dennis Quaid, Jessica Lang, and John Goodman were in town to shoot scenes with around 10,000 locals staring as backdrops for football scenes in Everybody’s All American, a film loosely based on Billy Cannon and with a title that led everyone in Baton Rouge to become movie stars and talk about how Big Daddy was an all-American hero.

Mixed among local fans at Big Daddy’s funeral and listening in to what everyone said were Walter Sheridan, the former head of the FBI’s Get Hoffa Task Force, and a gaggle of FBI agents. They wore Hoover-era G-man black suits that became the Men in Black comic and film series, but was still a lingering costume for aging Hoover loyalists. They had pot bellies and didn’t try to hide the squiggly white wire trailing from an ear. 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,” a reference to using Big Daddy to listen in on whatever Hoffa’s inner circle said. Because everyone was so used to G-Men following Big Daddy and his LSU bodyguards around, no one seemed surprised they were at his funeral, especially because their black suits blended in with everyone’s funeral attire.

Teams of reporters from most major newspapers stood outside snapping photos of everyone who entered. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times summarized what was known of Big Daddy’s history back then in front page articles. The LA Times wrote 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 remember noticing that I was 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. To confuse things, Joe’s burly football playing son at Zachary was also named Jason Partin. His name was more known than mine, meaning that any mention of Jason Partin was attributed to Joe’s son. I was a wrestler at Belaire High School, and anyone who followed the local sports section probably assumed that Joe’s son was such a star athlete that he won most valuable player awards in local football and also placed in city wrestling tournaments.

I left for the army soon after my name almost appeared in front page news, and then 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 from war. 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. Sensationalist reporter Geraldo Rivera even scored a two hour prime-time live event digging up a New Jersey football stadium that had been built by Teamsters and was reputed to have Hoffa’s body buried under the 50 yard line. Hoffa’s legend grew bigger 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.

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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. ↩︎