Big Daddy
“Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”
– Jimmy Hoffa in Hoffa on Hoffa, published months before his disappearance in 1975
Edward Grady Partin Senior was always the biggest man in the room. Everyone called him Big Daddy, which made sense to me because my daddy was Edward Grady Partin Junior and Big Daddy was much bigger than he was.
And Big Daddy looked the part. He was built like a bull, a former heavyweight boxer with arms the size of tree trunks and fists the size of boxing gloves and long arms that shouted they could swing hard and send you flying into the air. But what most people noticed first was not his brute strength, it was that he was handsome and always wore a subtle smile that oozed confidence, and that his smooth southern drawl drew people in and led them to trust him. They looked up to him, not just because he was big, but because Big Daddy had an 1950’s all-American aryan appearance with sky blue eyes and wavy strawberry blonde hair that appealed to the masses, especially in the 1950’s and 60’s when Hollywood was putting images on screen of men who were smaller, paler versions of my grandfather.
In person, everyone either trembled in fear or swooned in his awe of his presence. As Jimmy Hoffa said, Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.
In his self-published 2014 autobiography, Big Daddy’s little brother, my great-uncle Doug Partin, who was himself around 6’4″ and 260 pounds when I knew him, summarized Big Daddy as a teenager as concisely as Jimmy Hoffa summarized him as an adult. Doug said: “[Ed] was a big, strong, handsome, young man, and everyone liked him.”
He was born that way. His and Doug’s father, Grady Partin, was also big and strong and charming. Great-grandpappy Partin was a typical sawmill labor worker who was quick to smile and faster to brawl and spent most of his weekly paycheck in a prohibition era speakeasy. Grandma fell for him and had four children before fleeing Woodville and leaving all of them there. She returned just before Grady spent his last paycheck and left Woodville for good and Grandma became a single mother. Big Daddy was the oldest child, and at around age 15 he did what he could to help care for his siblings and mother, but mostly he took care of himself, just like his father had. From a young age, my grandfather learned that his strength and charm were his most useful assets.
Most people agreed. Their perception allowed Big Daddy to take over the local sawmill union in the 1940’s, and people also began to see him as not just big and strong and handsome, but as successful, too. If he developed any positive traits in that time, it was a life-long aversion to alcohol; he saw it ruin families including his own, and, later in life, he saw that it loosened tongues and led people to make foolish choices. He learned to be mindful of what he said and why he said it. With a controlled tongue, his reputation grew less from what he said and did, and more from what he did not say.
In the early 1950’s and when he was 26 years old and already married with children, my grandfather’s good looks and charm and leadership reputation in Woodville led 18 year old Norma Jean Stidwell – who knew nothing of Big Daddy’s past or his other wife – to falling for Big Daddy as soon as she saw him. She was from Spring Hill, Louisiana, a tiny town near Shreveport, and was in Woodville visiting one of her cousins. One of the first things Norma Jean noticed about Big Daddy – after his handsome looks and charming accent – was that he attended church every Sunday and swore off alcohol because he said it loosened lips and dulled the mind. Mamma Jean believed Big Daddy would make a good father. Six weeks after meeting him she became Norma Jean Stidwell Partin, my Mamma Jean.
Big Daddy and Mamma Jean moved into a modest two-bedroom home in Woodville. There wasn’t a lot to do at night, and they quickly had Aunt Janice, then my dad, then aunts Cynthia and Theresa, and finally Uncle Keith five years after my dad was born. I never learned what happened to Big Daddy’s former wife and children.
By the time Hoffa heard of Big Daddy’s work running unions in Mississippi, my family had outgrown their small town. In the mid 1950’s, Big Daddy moved Mamma Jean and their five children to Baton Rouge, and he took his mother, new stepfather, sister, and three younger brothers with them. Grandma Foster took her new husband’s name and my great-aunt married and took her husband’s name; that led to the first and only Partins in the Baton Rouge phone book being Douglas W. Partin, Donald Partin, Joseph P. Partin, and Mr. and Mrs. Edward G. Partin.
In 1957, Big Daddy was elected president of Baton Rouge Teamsters Local #5 and began working directly with Jimmy Hoffa, who had by then been elected president of The International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Big Daddy thrived running the Local teamsters and his life paralleled Jimmy Hoffa’s.
Walter Sheridan was the expert on both Hoffa and Edward Partin. He was a senior FBI agent, a former campaign manager for John F. Kennedy, and in the 1950’s and 60’s led 500 agents in the Get Hoffa task force. He would also serve as Bobby Kennedy’s campaign manager in Bobby’s 1968 presidential bid, and then he’d become a respected investigative journalist for NBC who hosted one of the first documentaries on John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In his massive 1972 opus, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, Walter lists around 1,000 names in the index and he cites Edward Partin more than anyone other than Jimmy Hoffa and Bobby Kenendy. (I’d get to know and trust him later in my life, which is why I call him Walter).
Walter’s writing style is to summarize controversies quickly to get them out of the way. This is what Walter had to say about my grandfather’s past:
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.
I never learned what it meant to “forcibly” install Chuck Winters, but in Hoffa and Big Daddy’s world, extortion, beatings, kidnappings, and murder were as common as contract negotiations. Whatever happened, Big Daddy’s reputation grew and so did his wealth. He bought a big home and several smaller homes around town, like the one Wendy, my dad, and I lived in for a while. And for the next several decades no one in Louisiana challenged a Partin’s reign over the Teamsters; Big Daddy would be re-elected president of Local #5 every year for almost 30 years, then my great-uncle Doug Partin would be elected and serve another 30 years, and currently my dad’s little brother, the 6’6″ 280 pound Kieth Partin, is president.
James R. Hoffa Junior is currently president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and the Kennedy’s remained political powerhouse: Bobby was a presidential candidate when he was assassinated, Teddy was a Massachusetts senator for decades, Maria Shriver (a Kennedy) married the future governor of California, Arnold Swarzenegger, and Bobby Kennedy Junior was appointed secretary of health under President Trump. Keith says he and Hoffa Junior don’t discuss their fathers’s shared history with the Kennedys, the books about them, or the films. No one knows if old feuds linger. But Keith and my dad and aunts and I agree that Walter Sheridan was mistaken about something: Mamma Jean was not quiet.
She was a fiery woman with flaming red hair who loved her children and praised Jesus. She first suspected Big Daddy was not what he appeared when he began skipping church on Sundays and taking my five year old dad to Teamster meetings instead. When she learned of Big Daddy’s crimes, she chastised him for breaking at least five of the 10 commandments: adultery, murder, theft, bearing false witness, and keeping the sabbath holy.
Mamma Jean fled Baton Rouge with her five children, part of a long history of women fleeing Partin men and remaining silent about why, which is why Walter assumed she was always a quiet woman. She could quote the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights as thoroughly as she quoted the bible and the ten commandments, and she studied law with the devotion of a saint. The first amendment is the right to remain silent, the fifth is the right to not self-incriminate, and though not a constitutional right, the U.S. supreme court had determined that someone can choose not to testify against their spouse. She wasn’t quiet just around Walter; she had learned that loose lips lead to misfortune, and she didn’t want anyone to know where she had hid her children. Mamma Jean spread them in remote hunting and fishing camps her Stidwell family owned throughout southern Louisiana. She knew that if she hinted to where they were, Big Daddy would find them.
That’s when Big Daddy was arrested for kidnapping the two young children of 22 year old Baton Rouge Teamster Sydney Simpson, who had just lost a custody court hearing but was still in possession of his two month old daughter and six year old son. Big Daddy lent him one of his cars and gave him some cash from the Local #5 safe and asked a few burly Teamsters to assist Sydney in keeping his ex-wife and the police away. Big Daddy and Sydney were put in jail, and the next day manslaughter charges came in from Alabama; Big Daddy had hit and killed a soldier – no one ever reported what kind of soldier – and then asked Doug to hide the damaged car and have it repaired to remove evidence.
Prosecutors would undoubtedly file additional charges for fleeing the scene of a crime and obstructing justice. And the other Teamsters who helped were going to be arrested, too, and to stay out of prison it’s likely they’d squeal on things Big Daddy did as a Teamster leader who “forcibly” removed opponents. Big Daddy knew he was facing life in prison, so he reached in his pocket for a phone number and used the Baton Rouge jail’s pay phone to call the FBI’s regional director in New Orleans. I never learned how he had the number, but what happened next is well documented.
In Hoffa versus The United States, Warren described what happened by saying:
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.
Big Daddy called the New Orleans FBI office and was released by J. Edgar Hoover and Bobby Kennedy. He hadn’t met Walter yet; the New Orleans FBI office had called Hoover directly. After meeting with Bobby, Big Daddy agreed to call Hoffa and travel to see him in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was preparing to defend himself in a minor labor-law trial about Hoffa’s Test Fleet, a Detroit trucking company in Hoffa’s wife’s name that was a potential conflict of interests for the president of an international trucking union. Bobby and Hoover knew they’d need a reputable witness, so they asked Walter to find Big Daddy’s wife and children and make them an offer they wouldn’t refuse.
Walter was a talented and hard working FBI agent and investigative journalist. He found Mamma Jean and promised to keep her and her children safe. He had resources to purchase her a suburban home in Houston near a big church and guarantee 24 hour a day federal protection. When Big Daddy stood up in court two years after the Test Fleet case as the government’s surprise witness, Life magazine was poised to begin a media campaign; their photographers followed Big Daddy and my dad and his siblings around Baton Rouge with Big Daddy’s smiling face showing what a family man he was. And that was true: at home, Big Daddy was attentive and present and charming and by our perception an honorable father and grandfather. No one knew his criminal history until after Hoffa started assailing it, and even then we believed Look! and Life magazines and news reports that said Hoffa was fabricating and spreading rumors to help discredit the only witness against him.
There was no evidence to Hoffa’s claims, and Chief Justice Warren explained why when he described my grandfather’s motivations to get Hoffa.
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.
From his maximum security New Jersey penitentiary cell, Hoffa penned his first autobiography. This is what he had to say about Big Daddy:
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.
Big Daddy thrived running Local #5. Southern Louisiana was – and is – an agricultural and petroleum economy that needed Teamsters just as much as Woodville, but Baton Rouge had around 150,000 residents and was the state capita. As president of Local #5, Big Daddy had constant contact with the governor and legislators, local companies and major corporations, and heads of every other union in the states. And Baton Rouge’s position only 80 or so miles up the Mighty Mississippi River from the port of New Orleans and access to all of Latin America led him to trade with Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
Dan Moldea, an investigative author, private investigator, and former Teamster who knew Big Daddy, The Irishman, and Jimmy Hoffa, mentions my grandfather’s arms deals with Castro in his 1978 book The Hoffa Wars.
Edward Partin, a Teamster leader in Louisiana – a close Hoffa aide during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and later a government informant – explains the operation: “Hoffa, Bill Presser, and another person had bought a bunch of arms and were selling them to anyone who wanted them in Cuba. They bought some planes from the army surplus, and they were ferrying these weapons and planes from Florida to Cuba.”
Most charges thrown at Big Daddy slid off, so his background is full of more allegations than convictions. The evidence for selling arms to Cuba vanished when Bobby Kenendy cornered congressmen leading the national security level investigation and got them to back down, so Walter didn’t include those parts about Big Daddy’s background. The rape was whitewashed and omitted. Some charges had discrepancies, like the one both Hoffa and Walter highlighted about his marine service; Hoffa called it a bad conduct charge, Walter said he stole a watch. It turns out that after my grandfather punched out the marine base commander, on a whim he reached down and removed an expensive watch from the mouthy but now unconscious captain; the captain was too embarrassed to admit the part of the watch, so he emphasized Big Daddy’s bad conduct and it took Walter digging deeper to learn about the watch.
Each and every one of the dozens of charges against Big Daddy had different perspectives from people involved, but in the end not a single charge stuck to him after he testified against Hoffa.
Big Daddy’s confidence grew after he testified against Hoffa. Walter Sheridan said:
“Most of the sources I had dealt with in the past had asked for anonymity and for promises that they’d never be called to testify. Partin made no such request.”
Big Daddy loved the spotlight and the publicity bolstered his image as a man behind the scenes who could get things done and was unafraid to stand up against anyone. His tough reputation, ability to stay out of jail, and skill at negotiating labor union contracts led Big Daddy to become so popular in Louisiana that governors sought his endorsement, and the state’s district attorney said that if Edward Partin had a college degree he’d be governor himself.
But he was also controversial. From the 1960’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.
One of the governors who tried to remove Big Daddy from power was Governor John McKeithen, who won two terms from 1964 to 1972 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 in 2005 international news showed it crawling with waterlogged residents after Hurricane Katrina drowned the city.
Despite having the level of influence to build the Superdome, in eight years as 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 said. (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.”)
McKeithen despondently admitted:“These [Baton Rouge Teamster] hoodlums make Marcello and the Mafia look pretty good.”
McKeithen was on the defensive about Marcello after Life and other media showed Big Daddy defying Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans mafia boss whose unquestioned territory stretched from Florida to Dallas and who was from the oldest Cosa Nostra family in America; McKeithen couldn’t do anything about Marcello, either. Life had showed Big Daddy refusing a $2 Million offer from Marcello to free Hoffa, and McKeithen was under pressure to control crime in Louisiana. But Big Daddy was harder to curtail because his reign was supported by the federal government.
But Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover protected Big Daddy from prosecution all of those years. 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 published 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.”
Nothing stopped Big Daddy’s momentum in the 1960’s and 70’s. Bobby was shot and killed in 1968 and Hoover passed away in 1972, but Walter was alive and entrenched policies and people following old orders kept state prosecutors away from Big Daddy while Hoffa pounded mattresses on his daily prison work detail. It wasn’t until after Hoffa vanished in 1975 that circling vultures swooped in and began pecking at my grandfather.
One of the first charges against him came after a 600 pound safe the size of a refrigerator was stolen from Local #5 headquarters and found in the murky waters under the Comite River bridge. $450,000 and all paperwork was missing, and the two witnesses who initially pointed to Big Daddy were found bloody and beaten. One returned to work and had a dump truck full of sand bury him alive. The other survived but refused to testify. But after a police tow truck pulled the safe from under the bridge, there there was enough evidence for a grand jury to begin prosecuting Big Daddy for embezzlement. Newspaper accounts cite the safe being found under the Amite River bridge, but that was a common mistake for people back then because both rivers were shallow slow moving murky waters on the outskirts of Baton Rouge; our roux-colored water obscures whatever is tossed from bridges, and alligators and crawfish get rid of all evidence except for things like 600 pound steel safes.
Chargers for racketeering – a fancy name for running a business that makes money through threats and extortion and is usually associated with the mafia – followed his embezzlement charges. Big Daddy was running around the country defending himself and hiring the best lawyers he could find, but without federal protection he was exposed prey. A jury found him guilty of embezzlement and racketeering in 1979, and in 1980 he began serving an eleven year sentence in a minimum security federal penitentiary about six hours from Baton Rouge in a remote part of Texas.
But he was so charming that even from prison Big Daddy remained influential. Local #5 unanimously voted to keep him as president and on salary, just like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters had voted to keep Hoffa in power while he was in prison.
Louisiana governors courted Big Daddy less after he went to prison, 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. Wikipedia says he’s known as one of only seven U.S. Governors to serve four terms, though that’s debatable because impeachments kept him from completing two of them.
Edward’s had spent eight years in the governor’s mansion during the time when my dad was buying drugs in the Carribbean and Wendy was on her way to California. The governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge is down the street from Teamsters Local #5, and Edwards knew Big Daddy and all of the Partins well. He 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.
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. He received and won and served his third term as Louisiana 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 1992-1996.1 Edwin Edwards, like Puerto Rico’s assassinated Teamsters president and all of the Teamsters in New Orleans, never said a negative word about a Partin again.
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 was 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.2
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. But there was no streaming back then, so the only way to see films was in the theater and I never learned what Big Daddy thought of Rambo.3
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. By that time, his health was declining and he was probably more focused on getting paroled than discussing what he watched on television.
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. She lived a few streets over from Granny near the Baton Rouge airport in the Glenoaks school district, which is how my dad had met Wendy in 1971.
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 in lumbering and rumbling 18 wheelers and dump trucks clogged the Baton Rouge arteries leading to Greenoaks, and flashing red and blue lights from Baton Rouge police cars and motorcycle officers directed traffic and kept crowds out of the Greenoaks parking lot.
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.
Armed police officers kept reporters and gawkers outside of the entry door. But 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, Billy Cannon.
He was one of Big Daddy’s six hefty pallbearers, and everyone in town knew his face; it smiled down on them from Baton Rouge based Lamar Advertising billboards along I-110 and I-10, showing his perfect white teeth and advertising his dentistry business. And Billy was usually waving down at people from his perch as king of Mardi Gras in the Spanish Town parade. And he had been famous for crimes, too; Billy served a couple of years from counterfeiting from his Saint Francisville home before resuming his dental business, and after his release he became the defacto dentist of Angola prison on the outskirts of Saint Francisville. People wanted to see Billy Cannon wherever he was, and his role as Big Daddy’s pallbearer and former bodyguard added to my grandfather’s legend.
The other pallbearers were the current president of Local #5, Doug Partin, and their business agent, Keith Partin, and three burly Teamsters who had also been part of Big Daddy’s bodyguard entourage. I don’t know if they were the ones who helped him kidnap Sydney Simpson’s children, but they were big and brutal and known around town for standing with the LSU Tigers that surrounded Big Daddy.
But Billy Cannon alone would have brought hoards of Baton Rouge LSU Tiger fans to any event. Baton Rouge is aptly called Tiger Town.
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 nurtured a garden to grow the biggest pumpkins for a parish fair. Big Daddy had hopes that his children and grandchildren would become the next Billy Cannon.
Perhaps the strongest reason Tiger Town adored Big Daddy 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 dressed in 1950’s costumes and serving 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. For a town the size of Baton Rouge, having 10,000 locals star in a nationally celebrated film was the talk of town for a generation.
Almost everyone in town somehow had their jobs, careers, or livelihood touched by my grandfather. He was a local legend and his funeral was a royal procession of people I had grown up known, people who did not know that most of my grandfather’s real history was still hidden then, even if only in dusty books on library shelves, and in the bowels of FBI records about Fidel Castro, Jimmy Hoffa, and President Kennedy.
Mamma Jean skipped Big Daddy’s funeral, but was in town to visit us and talk about the good times with him and was still kept under FBI protection; she refused to speak with any reporters and kept her lips shut as tightly as an oyster shell at low tide around her protectors. Attending the funeral and mixed among local fans were Walter Sheridan 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. And it had only been twenty years since Big Daddy’s testimony against Hoffa, so most people at his funeral remembered the hoopla in daily news and everyone had loose tongues that expounded on his life running Louisiana from behind the scenes; after all, you’d have to be important to have Billy Cannon as your pallbearer and personal bodyguard.
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.
This is what the LA Times had to say about his part in history, which is all that was known back then:
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 in national news, 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 so I was relatively inconsequential. To confuse things, my great-uncle Joe Partin had become the popular football coach of Zachary High School, and Joe’s burly football playing son at Zachary was also named Jason Partin. I was a wrestler at Belaire High School, so 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. He was younger than I was, and that Jason Partin was a rising star in Louisiana sports while I was a graduating senior on my way out of Louisiana and into the army.
I left for basic training a few months after Big Daddy’s funeral, and the 1990-1991 Gulf war would dominate my thoughts and time for a while. But when I returned from the war and after the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report was partially declassified in 1993 I would see my grandfather’s name in books and films practically every year since.
More than 2,000 books were written about Hoffa and the Kennedys since Big Daddy testified against Hoffa. Most mention his name or refer to him as the witness or the mole or simply a controversial Teamster. 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. In every situation, Big Daddy lurks in the background, though to focus on Hoffa many journalists called him the witness, the mole, or simply a controversial character.
Hoffa’s legend grew bigger and Big Daddy’s role grew smaller. By the early 1990’s, my dad was in his 30’s and in law school and, like every other law student in America, he studied Hoffa versus The United States. But though Big Daddy’s name is cited 144 times across 22 pages, most law students were born in the 70’s and didn’t remember all the publicity and simply referred to hims as “the witness” and Hoffa as “the defendant,” and their focus was on how Hoffa versus The United States changed America’s use of paid informants and weakened our 4th Amendment rather than the personalities and events behind a case that was decided before they were born.
By the 2000’s, authors publishing books on Hoffa were born after Hoffa had vanished, and the FBI agents assigned to still-unsolved case were born after Big Daddy died. Each version was a trope of a previous version and farther and farther from what I remembered.
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.” Frank was a close ally of Hoffa’s and a mafia hitman who knew Big Daddy well. He summarized my grandfather by saying:
“Partin was a big tough-looking man with an extensive criminal record as a youth. Hoffa misjudged the man and thought that because he was big and tough and had a criminal record and was out on bail and was from Louisiana, the home states of Carlos Marcello, the man must have been a guy who paints houses.”
To paint houses was mafia lingo for painting a wall red with splattered blood. That was the world Big Daddy thrived in, and anytime someone was “forcibly” installed or removed from power it’s likely a house was painted in the process. In his memoir, published a few weeks before he died at age eighty three, Frank claimed to have painted a Detroit suburb house red with Hoffa’s blood on 22 July 1975.
Over time, everyone who knew Big Daddy, Hoffa, and Frank The Irishman died; most took what they knew to the grave, and evidence vanished with them.
But he popped up and peered from the grave now and then.
In 2005 national news showcased Baton Rouge for an event that became late-night comedy talk-show fodder. Men in black suits like the film series Men in Black waltzed into Baton Rouge’s police station and flashed credentials and asked for all physical and recorded evidence from Edward Partin and Barry Seal’s incarcerations in the 1960’s and 1980’s. The police handed over the boxes, but all mainstream federal agencies – all with three letter acronyms – denied being involved, and the boxes of evidence haven’t been seen since. That alone would have led to lampooning Baton Rouge by late-night policical comedians, but it overlaid with another report that a Baton Rouge fire station burned down after firefighters were frying a turkey inside the station and responded to an alarm and rushed out of the building, leaving eight gallons of boiling peanut oil above a flaming propane stove. Commedians pounced on that, and then the mood shifted as Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and thousands of residents sweltered away atop the Superdome.
But for a few people like myself, that news sparked memories. Big Daddy is obviously one, but so was Barry Seal. I grew up hearing his name. He was the Baton Rouge native who went to Airborne school and then became a Green Beret in Veitnam and one of the world’s youngest commercial pilots, but fell to earth on charges of smuggling weapons and drugs in his small fleet of surplus military airplanes in and out of Latin America via Baton Rouge; he’s swoop in low and drop man-sized boxes of cocaine before landing and allowing his planes to be inspected. Seal was arrested in Florida but copped a deal and became a CIA (central intelligence agency) smuggler and DEA (drug enforcement agency) informant against that decades most notorious cartels, which overshadowed his weapons smuggling; he was suspected of aiding the CIA and Ronald Reagan in the Iran-Contra affair that sold weapons to Iran to fight against Iraq and funneled the money into Nicaragua to fund anti-communist fighters. Barry Seal became a trope for a CIA funded, surplus airplane flying weapons and drugs smuggler. Fictitious versions of Seal are portrayed by Tom Cruise in the 2017 film American Made, Michael Pare in 2016’s The Infiltrator, and Dennis Hopper in 1990’s Doublecrossed.
Like Big Daddy testifying against Hoffa, Barry Seals’s testimony against the cartel was national news and invoked retribution, and a $500,000 bounty was placed on his head. In 1986, when I was in the ninth grade and just beginning to pay attention to local news, the real life Barry Seal was machine-gunned to death by a Mac 10 in a Baton Rouge Salvation Army parking lot off Airline Drive, just down the street from Teamster’s Local #5 and coincidentally the same year Big Daddy got out of prison and returned home.
Both Seal’s death and Big Daddy’s return were highlights of Baton Rouge news in 1986, and both of their faces stared at me from the front page of the Baton Rouge Advocate, but I don’t know if other people from Baton Rouge remembered that when television hosts laughed about it in 2005. As a Partin, seeing Big Daddy in the news fifteen years after his death and alongside Barry Seal slapped me in the face and – briefly – inspired me to dig deeper. But, like with late-night comedians and political pundits who pounced on the news, Hurricane Katrina soon dominated my thoughts. My free time was given to fund-raisers, not researching my family history, and my motivation waned over time. But like most of my family history, that news was one more log in my mind that was piling up like firewood waiting for a bonfire.
Soon after the hurricane flood waters receded and the police evidence files on Big Daddy were presumed lost, legendary film maker Martin Scorcese snatched up the film rights for I Heard You Paint Houses. he raised $257 Million to make an opus about Hoffa and the mafia. Like with most films based on people, Scorcese said he was not making a documentary, he was making a film to sell tickets, and America – or at least the generation of America that threw a quarter of a billion dollars at I Heard You Paint Houses – was still fascinated with Jimmy Hoffa.
Scorcese had already made influential films like Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Cape Fear, Casion, Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, and many more. Hollywood’s best actors stared in his films for decades: Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Robert DeNiro, and many more. He called all of them to star in his new film, and he asked Craig Vincent, a big brute who wore a cowboy hat in 1995’s Casino, alongside Pesci and Pacino, to portray Big Daddy. To research his role, Craig reached out my uncle Kieth Partin, who ran the Baton Rouge Teamsters and was easy to find on the Teamsters web site, and Aunt Janice, who had changed names when she married but still ran an online Partin genealogy project. And me, because Keith connected us.
My grandfather is mentioned throughout I Heard You Paint Houses, and Craig was planning on a big role in another Scorcese film. As an actor seeking to portray a character, Craig asked a question that was more insightful than any FBI agent or investigative journalist or historian I’ve ever met: what about Edward Partin led so many people to trust him and be fooled by him? I told him most of what I’ve already shared, but said that facts on paper don’t convey what he was like in person. Every one of us just kept quoting Hoffa that Big Daddy was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock. But studying those words for years gives you nothing but a pale and flaccid facsimile compared to spending few moments in person with Big Daddy; just ask Mamma Jean how quickly she married him, or imagine someone like Jimmy Hoffa falling just as hard.
Craig rewatched Brian Dennedy in Blood Feud and a few Youtube videos of old interviews with Big Daddy and leaned into his role. But Scorcese renamed I Heard You Paint Houses as The Irishman to focus the story around Frank Sheeran, and he omitted most parts about Big Daddy in order to squeeze the epic tale into 3 hours and 29 minutes, the most even die-hard Scorcese fans would tolerating sitting in a theater. Scorcese said he was making a film for entertainment, not a documentary, and to match Craig’s dark complexion and northeastern Italian accent, he recast Big Daddy as Big Eddie Partin and shrunk the role into only 20 minutes; after editing, Big Eddie shows up in five minutes of film about The Irishman.
When Wendy died The Irishman was already being advertised and my grandfather had a small part in it, but no one who had met Wendy in more than 40 years knew her history with the Partin family; by then there were enough Partins in Louisiana that no one made the quick connection between her and either of the Ed Partins. She passed with only me knowing what she had overcome.
The Irishman opened in theaters a few months after Wendy passed and set summer box office records for the year. In March of 2020 Covid-19 hit and shuttered theaters globally, but Netflix picked up The Irishman’s streaming rights and moved it online and it set global streaming records. More than a billion people – approximately out of every 8 people on Earth in 2020 – watched a fictionalized version of my grandfather.
Scorcese was an artist. In one of Big Eddie Partin’s brief scenes, Scorcese had Craig Vincent stand behind the easily recognized big names of acting. Robert DeNiro was The Irishman, Al Pacino was Hoffa, Joe Pesci was mafia boss Russel Bufalino, and a few other of the Goodfellas sat beside them. Scorcese lowered the camera and peered up at them with Big Eddie standing silently in the background and listening to everything, making the already massive Craig Vincent seem larger than life and implying, very subtly, like an artist would, that my grandfather was a puppet master controlling the smaller men speaking freely beneath his observant eyes.
When I last spoke with Craig, and I told him that my grandfather would have appreciated how he was portrayed, and both of us agreed with Big Daddy that Brian Dennehy did a fine job in 1983. Privately, I thought that Craig would have made a more realistic Barry Seal, who grew to be a big sedentary blob in his late years in Baton Rouge, but still showed latent muscle under the flab and that Tom Cruise, no matter how much weight he packed on to portray Seal, could never match. Hollywood rarely shows people as who they were in real life.
I didn’t read I Heard You Paint Houses until March of 2019, coincidentally just before Wendy passed away. When I answered the call that she was in a coma I put my pen-marked copy aside when I bought a plane ticket home to be by her side as she passed. I picked up The Irishman again during the pandemic, and I began cross-referencing what The Irishman said with old books on my bookshelf and online files of the JFK Assassination Report. The firewood was piled high, and Wendy’s death was the match.
But I was less interested in Big Daddy’s history than I was Wendy’s. I wanted to understand what drove Wendy to abandon me, and somehow I knew that it was related to why people were still interested in my grandfather’s part in history forty years after Hoffa’s disappearance.
To share what I learned, it’s best to begin Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and how he knew my family.
Go to the Table of Contents
- In 2001, after 16 years in a governor’s role, something so rare that only seven or so governors in America’s history come close, 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. From what I heard, when Edwards was in prison, his comments about being found in bed with a live boy came back to bite him in the ass. ↩︎
- Brian Dennehy passed away in 2020 during Covid-19. His Wikipedia page goes on and on with lists of his roles as big, handsome, rugged men. And it addresses one of his controversies; after his success portraying veterans and sheriffs pursuing veterans with extensive combat experience, Dennehy lied about his own service and claimed he saw combat and won awards, which is known as stealing valor and ranks on par with any sin to many people.
↩︎ - Stalone was famous in my time as Rambo and Rocky, both brutal but likable fighters, and as a fictionalized and more muscular version of Jimmy Hoffa organizing a national trucker’s union in F.I.S.T., Federation of International State Truckers. Hoffa was so legendary as a tough fighter that it took someone like Sylvester Stallone to portray him in early characterizations.
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