Ten months after President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed, my grandfather was the surprise witness who sent Jimmy Hoffa to prison. Hoffa fought my grandfather’s testimony all the way to the Supreme Court, and his army of lawyers dug up evidence to discredit my grandfather, showing letters from generals of Fidel Castro, thanking my grandfather for training their soldiers and supplying weapons and ships to Castro ahead of the Bay of Pigs invasion; and they showed evidence of drug use, perjury, and a host of other records that were vanishing from court records across the country. After two years and untold millions of dollars in defense, Hoffa lost and went to prison. In 1975, Hoffa vanished as thoroughly as my grandfather’s criminal records.
Hoffa wrote two autobiographies centered around my grandfather and Bobby Kennedy. For his second autobiography, published after he vanished, Hoffa started the chapter about Big Daddy by summing up twenty years of knowing and looking up to him by saying, “Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged man who could charm a snake off a rock.”
That’s the worse Hoffa could say after spending eight years in prison based, according to Chief Justice Earl Warren, almost solely on the testimony of my grandfather. Warren was less generous. He called Big Daddy “a jailbird, languishing in a Baton Rouge jail cell” until Bobby Kennedy pulled him out to infiltrate Hoffa’s inner circle and find ‘something” or “anything” that would put an end to the government’s 10-year pursuit of Hoffa, something millions of dollars and almost 500 FBI agents of the Get Hoffa Task Force had not achieved. A famous reporter dubbed Bobby’s efforts as “the most expensive and fruitless government pursuit of one man in history, which probably remained true until the U.S. pursued Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. (In one of the most odd coincidences I’ve ever seen, Big Daddy’s testimony in 1966’s “Hoffa vs The United States” is taught in today’s law school’s because it loosened the 4th Amendment’s protection against unwarranted search and seizure, and was used by President George Bush Junior as a predicate to justify the 2001 PATRIOT act that monitored hundreds of millions of American cell phones to find something or anything that could find Bin Laden).
After testifying, Big Daddy continued to run the Baton Rouge teamsters. Our family was famous in the 1960’s and 70’s, because national media and films focused on us every time Hoffa was in the news, especially after he vanished in 1975. The big and handsome Brian Dennedy portrayed Big Daddy in 1983’s “Blood Feud” (Robert Blake won an academy award for “channelling Hoffa’s rage), and in 2019 the burly Craig Vincent portrayed him as “Big Eddie Partin” in Martin Scorcese’s $257 Million film based a memoir by Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan, a former Teamster leader and mafia hitman who claimed to have killed Hoffa on behalf of the mafia, and alluded to their involvement in killing President Kennedy. But by 2019, few people remembered the original film or the daily household drama centered around Hoffa, Bobby Kennedy, and Big Daddy, so few people notice that the big, rugged, charming man with a smooth southern drawl was replaced by a northeast Italian-American who played a bit role in Scorcese’s opus, and with actors like Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, most people just assumed it was another of Scorcese’s gangster movies.
My dad is Edward Grady Patin Junior, my mother was Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin, and I’m Jason Ian Patin. Big Daddy died on 11 March 1990, my senior year of high school. His final words – which sound funny if you say it out loud after pronouncing our last name out loud – were, “No one will ever know my part in history.” This book is to illuminate his part in history by sharing my small part in his story.
It’s a long story with too many names and history lessons for most people to enjoy or for me to write, so I’m focusing on a narrative memoir that delves into my family’s personalities and tells a bigger story through our dialogue and footnotes of court records, news articles, and excerpts from books by Hoffa, Hoffa’s lawyers, The Irishman, and many others (I’ve read and notated probably around 800 of them, and I wouldn’t subject you to anything but the most relevant quotes). I’d like whatever I end up writing to be easily adapted to visual media, whatever that will look like in the future.
