Havana, March 2019

But then came the killing shot that was to nail me to the cross.

Edward Grady Partin.

And Life magazine once again was Robert Kenedy’s tool. He figured that, at long last, he was going to dust my ass and he wanted to set the public up to see what a great man he was in getting Hoffa.

Life quoted Walter Sheridan, head of the Get-Hoffa Squad, that Partin was virtually the all-American boy even though he had been in jail “because of a minor domestic problem.”¹

Jimmy Hoffa, 1975

On March 1st, 2019, I was on a long series of flights from San Diego to Havana to learn more about my grandfather’s role in President Kennedy’s assassination and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. I was sitting inside of an airplane parked at Houston International Airport, scribbling notes in a paperback book, when a 30-something year old man plopped into the seat on my left.

He asked, “What’re you reading?”

I looked up and rested the open book on my tray table, whirled the pen around my finger like a magician flourishing a wand to direct attention, then laid the pen down to mark the page I was reading. I closed the book with the paperback cover facing up, and a small bulge formed over the pen inside. I smiled a thin smile, took a breath, and slowly removed my glasses and left earbud; it wasn’t playing anything, but I wear earbuds with noise canceling software to soften engine noise and to discourage small talk.

I looked at the young man and said, “Say again.”

He repeated himself.

I rotated the book so he could see the front cover. It was “I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa,” by Frank Sheeran and Charles Brandt, originally published as a hard cover in 2004 by Steerforth Press and reprinted in 2019 as a paperback.

The man’s gaze skimmed across the words. He looked back up and cheerfully asked, “What’s it about?”

I summed him up before answering.

I had noticed him looking at seat numbers before sitting down, so I assumed he didn’t need glasses to read. His smile was consistent but I felt it was superficial, though he may not realize it. He wore a collared polo shirt that was too tight and emphasized a bulbous belly that had likely grown since he bought the shirt; I assumed he chose it either mindlessly or to emphasize his arms, which had hints of muscle tone lurking beneath a few extra pounds, as if he had played some sport in college before getting an office job. His face was slightly tanned, and he had subtle raccoon-eyes that exposed pale white skin; I assumed he wore sunglasses to do something outdoors on weekends, like play golf with coworkers.

His smell was unremarkable. He had a clean shaven face but no hint of aftershave, and I sensed neither soap nor body odor. He was young and educated enough to not smoke or spend time around people who did. His smile was one that I’d expect from someone his age who had a plush office job yet was still junior enough to fly economy class. He was young enough to not know much about Jimmy Hoffa.

I never met Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan, but in my mind’s ear I heard him say something I had just read in his book: “Kids nowadays don’t know who Hoffa was. I mean, they may know the name, but they don’t know how much power he had.” Frank’s voice was, in my mind, what I imagined a brusque, 80-something year old working-class New Englander; a WWII infantryman with two years of combat experience killing a lot of people up-close; a ruthless labor union leader with Teamsters Local #26 who spent 13 years in prison for racketeering; a mafia hitman who publicly said he’d be “a Hoffa man until the day he died,” but also says that he killed Hoffa on behalf of the mafia on 30 July 1975; and a man who claims to have seen his mafia colleagues carrying a duffle bag of compact assault rifles like what Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly used to kill President Kennedy on 22 November 1963; but that was only a tiny anecdote in the book, dangled in front of readers to imply a bigger story, but Frank’s book was otherwise focused on the history of the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa, and how Frank allegedly killed Hoffa. Martin Scorcese had scored $257 Million – more than a quarter of a Billion dollars – to make a film based on Frank’s book. I wouldn’t call the young man sitting next to me a kid, but I could see how Frank would – he’d probably call me a kid.

I didn’t feel like giving a history lesson, so I forced another smile and rotated the book again so the young man could see the back cover. The paperback version was released to help market Scorsese’s upcoming film, The Irishman. There was likely to be an advertisement for the film in in-flight entertainment, and the book had been in the news recently because The Irishman would star classics of the gangster genre, like Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, etc. Even a kid would know those names.

He glanced down and looked back up less than three seconds later. He smiled and said, “Did you go to LSU?”

I kept smiling and pondered how to answer concisely.

I’m Jason Partin. I was born in Baton Rouge in 1972, and grew up knowing Skip Bertman’s reign over LSU baseball in the 80’s, when we won six of ten College World Series and were challenged only by California’s Stanford, who won the other four. I saw the world-record setting 1988 50-yard touchdown throw in sudden-death overtime against two Tigers, Auburn and LSU, in the LSU Tigers’s Death Valley stadium, when around 88,000 fans celebrated by jumping up and down to the LSU marching band beat and shook the Earth so strongly it registered a 3.8 on the Richter scale, and we’re still in the Guinness Book of World Records for the only human-made Earthquake ever recorded. We knew Shaquelle O’neal before anyone else, when he played basketball for LSU from 1988-1992, before becoming pro with the newly formed Orlando Magic. I was co-captain of the renewed LSU wrestling program from 1994-1997 and mentored by Coach Dale Ketelsen, the former olympian and Iowa coach who led LSU to becoming 4th in the nation until the team was disbanded in 1979. I graduated from LSU in May of 1997 with a summa cum laude degree in civil and environmental engineering (one of only 11 environmental engineering degrees in America back then) and went to graduate school at UAB for biomedical engineering (a new program funded by an 11 Million dollar grant from the Witiker Foundation, and coincidentally of only a handful of biomedical engineering degree programs), then married a San Diego native and moved to a condo near the beach so I could surf and spearfish without needing a car. I flew home often for LSU football games, crawfish season, music festivals, and occasionally for the Robert E. Lee High School wrestling invitational, which was renamed the Coach Dale Ketelsen memorial tournament for what are probably obvious reasons by now.

I said, “I’m not sure why you ask.”

He nodded towards my head and said, “Because your hat says LSU.”

You couldn’t get anything past this guy. I had chosen an old LSU wool baseball cap that was so faded you could barely make out the letters. Instead of purple and gold, the hat was more of a weak brown with a sunburnt yellow L, S, and U letters. I could have worn any hat, but at that time the faded LSU cap was the one I found myself wearing the most out of about a dozen hats that included three other LSU baseball caps. I first saw it the previous May, just after returning from last year’s sabbatical, when I was surfing a remote break off Point Loma Nazarene University. It was a Santa Anna day, hot and dry and without any clouds or dust to block sun rays, so my skin was sizzling and turning the bright red of a boiled crawfish. My sunscreen was waining on my nose, and I could feel the heat of my scorched scalp. I told myself that I should go back to shore, and wished I had brought a hat to cover my recently noticed bald spot; it made me look like the San Diego Padres baseball mascot (a robed Friar with an exaggerated bald spot), and though I only follow LSU baseball I said I wished I had a Padres cap. I was about to give up and paddle in, but I saw a hat bobbing almost a football field length from the Point Loma cliffs between the ocean and the university, about 30 or 40 yards from where I was straddling my longboard. I paddled over to retrieve it, already respecting the coincidence, and I laughed out loud when I saw it was an LSU baseball cap. I sat upright on my board, shook the hat to fling out salt water and any seaweed or crabs may have been inside, and inspected the inner rim. It was a licensed size 7-1/4, a tad bit smaller than my 7-3/8th head. It was a snug fit, which was serendipitous because it would cling to my head when paddling into waves. I surfed for another couple of hours with my bald spot and nose shielded from the overhead afternoon sun.

When I got home later that aafternoon, I snipped the hat’s rim with scissors from one of my a Leatherman tools so it would fit more comfortably. It had been my go-to hat since, especially because of the coincidence. I wore it on the flight to shield my thinning hair and relatively new bald spot from overhead air conditioners that inevitably seem to target my head like campfire smoke seeks my eyes no matter where I sit. And, wearing an LSU baseball cap makes me smile inside, so I wear one often. Friends quip that I bleed purple and gold, and one of my most persistent nicknames since moving to San Diego has been LSU Magic, a moniker I sometimes use when performing at the downstairs member tables of Hollywood’s Magic Castle.

I told the man, “I grew up in Baton Rouge.”

He asked if I lived in Houston now.

I sighed to myself and told him that I was focused on reading. He shrugged, and busied himself adjusting the overhead air away from him and inadvertently onto my head. I adjusted the brim of my hat to keep cold air off my face, and put the earbud back in, turned on the generously named noise-canceling feature, and returned to reading and scribbling. He pulled out his smart phone and busied himself by scrolling Facebook. The plane took off, and he paid the WiFi up-charge and scrolled through his phone for the rest of the flight without interrupting me; I don’t know if he scrolled through an advertisement for The Irishman.

The man probably assumed I lived in Houston, because we were at the Houston airport and Houston golf courses are sprinkled with LSU baseball caps. Our economy was so driven by agriculture and tourism that many LSU grads go to Houston or Atlanta for office jobs, so many that Houston has the second largest crawfish boil outside of Louisiana. San Diego has the largest – 36,000 people – and crawfish are trucked from Louisiana in a fleet of 18 wheelers driven by Teamsters every May, just before the “Gator By The Bay” festival, and any one of those people may have dropped their hat overboard or left it on one of San Diego’s 78 miles of coastline, so it really wasn’t that surprising to find an LSU hat bobbing off of Point Loma. If anything, it had gotten me thinking about my family history, and the history of Teamsters in America, especially because Billy Cannon, LSU’s first Heisman trophy winner from the 1954 national champion team and former Houston Oilers pro player, had just passed away an hour upriver from Baton Rouge, in his Saint Francisville home that was coincidentally down the street from where my mom had retired a few years prior.

My grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader famous in the 1960’s and 70’s as Hoffa’s insider turned government informant. His testimony sent Hoffa to prison. He was portrayed by the ruggedly handsome Brian Dennehy in 1983’s Blood Feud, and in The Irishman he would be portrayed by the burly brute Craig Vincent. Most of Baton Rouge called my grandfather Big Daddy, and when I was growing up I saw Big Daddy followed by his entourage of equally massive Teamsters and an ensemble of 1954 LSU football players, including Billy, who would be one of the six pallbearers heaving Big Daddy’s casket at his 1990 funeral; his entourage also consisted of relatively diminutive FBI agents in J. Edgar Hoover’s now-ridiculous “men in black” suits, and a handful of equally dwarfed federal marshals whose pretentious Washington DC mannerisms never quite blended in with the boisterous southerners who surrounded Big Daddy and spoke like we did. His funeral was attended by the mayor and practically every Baton Rouge police officer, a horde of national news reporters, and Walter Sheridan, the former head of the FBI’s “Get Hoffa” task force and campaign manager for both John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy (overlapping with Bobby’s1968 assassination, two years after Hoffa went to prison). By 1990, my senior year of high school, Walter was a relatively well known NBC news correspondent, and Big Daddy’s funeral was deemed national news.

At home, my bookshelf at home had around two dozen marked-up books about Hoffa and the Kennedys curated from the thousands on Amazon, and my grandfather was a focal point of all of them. For my trip to Cuba, I put an e-reader in my carry-on backpack with hundreds of more books, at least a hundred archived news reports from the 1960’s to 1980’s, dozens of court reports about my family, a few handwritten family letters I had scanned into .pdf’s, and the entire latest release of the 1979 congressional JFK and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report. It was 2019, and Kennedy had been assassinated 55 years earlier, on 22 November 1963, yet President Trump still kept part of the report classified. I couldn’t access the final part, even with my friends in the secret service helping, but I hand’t seen much of interest since the first parts were made public in 1992. Every president since Jimmy Carter had seen the report, but it wasn’t until the 1992 film JFK sparked public outrage at the secrecy that President Bill Clinton began releasing it bit by bit.

My grandfather’s role in the big picture of history was too blurry for me to articulate yet, but every now and then I read something or met someone who gave me another piece of the puzzle, and the bigger image became a bit more legible. At the center, I could Big Daddy’s charming smile, and hear his smooth southern drawl; it was only a matter of time before a new piece of information shed more light on the big picture. I don’t know what Trump saw in 2017 – if he read it – or why he deemed the final part remain confidential, but Presidents Obama and Bush Junior had both decided to keep it confidential, too. I don’t know if they read it, but I skimmed whatever they did release every four years since 1992, and used either Word and Pages to scan for keywords rather than print the warehouse full of documents and dive into the deluge of paper with a box of pens and highlighters. Nothing notable to me had surfaced since 1992. I was going to Cuba using an Obama-era loophole, an “entrepreneurship visa,” that I didn’t completely understand. I was faculty of engineering at USD and ran their innovation laboratory, called “Donald’s Garage,” an advisor for UCSD’s entrepreneurship program in the similarly named “Basement,” and advised a couple of nonprofit organizations placing entrepreneurship programs in public schools, but I didn’t know what was expected of me while using Obama’s visa. I did know that the Trump administration was about to close that loophole, and the spring of 2019 was my last chance to legally visit Cuba, at least until the next presidency. I suspected there was something to old family folklore of Big Daddy and Fidel Castro, but I had no evidence.

I opened to book to my marked page and smoothed the covers flat again. I held the pen in ready position, sighed and took a deep breath, and leaned back in to the words of Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan. I finished reading his book somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico. There wasn’t much to look at out our right hand side of the plane other than clouds and an occasional glimpse of the ocean, so I reread my scribbles and let my mind connect the dots with other books I had read, and my childhood memories of things people said around my grandfather and his colleagues. But The Irishman was still too fresh in my mind. It hadn’t digested yet, and with the way my mind worked, I’d have to be off of the airplane and walking around in fresh air for a few days for anything I read to either bring the big picture into more focus or to feel that I didn’t need to keep a marked up copy on my bookshelf.

We landed in Fort Lauderdale about an hour later. My row stood up and gathered our baggage from the overhead bins. When the airplane doors finally opened, the man beside me moved forward and looked over his shoulder and cheerfully said, “have a nice vacation.” I nodded and said, “You, too.”

I hadn’t checked anything, so I wore my carry-on backpack with a pair of squat black scuba fins strapped to the outside and hand-carried my personal items bag and a rolled up purple yoga mat. I left the airplane and walked through the Fort Lauderdale terminal to a smaller jet bound for Havana.

I pushed my yoga mat to the back of the overhead compartment and crammed my carryon bag in front of it, barely squeezing it all in to the smaller plane. I sat down with my personal item bag and glanced around at every on board. Most were dark complected, probably Cubans returning home. The caucasians on board may have been Canadians or Europeans able to fly to Cuba without a visa, or Americans who qualified for one of the other dozen loopholes for things like journalism, academic research, and humanitarian aide. I could assume what they were supposed to do with their visa, but I was unsure what to make of mine. It came with no instructions other than to not give money to any state-owned business. I planned to travel lightly and offline, rock climb and scuba dive whenever possible, and let what I read on the plane digest.

An elderly Cuban gentleman sat down next to me and tipped his a bolero hat in my direction. I was sure it would do a fine job of protecting his mostly bald head from the AC. He smiled and said, “Buenas tardes,” that blissfully Spanish greeting that doesn’t ask for a forced reply. I smiled back and nodded and replied in kind. He replaced his hat, opened a magazine, and flipped through it silently. I didn’t pay attention to which magazine he was reading, but I did notice it was in Spanish. I thought to myself that I should find a few books in Spanish to read, so I flipped through the Lonely Planet until I saw a description of a used bookshop and cafe in Havana cleverly named Cuba Libro. I circled it on the map, and went back to scribbling notes for casa particulares, private rooms that met my visa requirements to not stay in state-owned hotels. Satisfied, I read the Lonely Planet’s notes for Americans who traveled to Cuba illegally, advising how to hire private cars and avoid using a credit card with records of the visit, which conveniently matched the requirements of my visa.

About an hour and a half later, I stepped off the plane and on onto the tarmac, finally in Cuba after a quarter of a century of thinking about it. All I needed to do was pass customs inspections, and then I’d begin that year’s sabbatical.

Go to The Table of Contents

Footnotes:

1. After national media portrayed my grandfather as an all-American hero who had been to jail for “a minor domestic problem,” Jimmy Hoffa used “rabbit ears” to emphasize his sarcasm about Bobby Kennedy’s influence on the media and therefore on public opinion. In his first autobiography, “The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa,” published by the Henry Regnery Company in 1970, Hoffa wrote:
   
   “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 had 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 charded with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.”
   
   Walter Sheridan, a respected senior FBI agent and former campaign manager of both John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, addressed the growing public realization that his star witness against Hoffa was controversial in his best-selling opus, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, published by Saturday Evening Press in 1972. Big Daddy takes up the most references of the massive book with over 1,000 characters described; he’s cited more than anyone other than Bobby Kennedy and Hoffa himself. The part in Hoffa’s rant about Big Daddy smuggling arms to Fidel Castro couldn’t be verified, which is probably why Walter didn’t even address it. If there were evidence, the records vanished before 1972 as definitively as Jimmy Hoffa vanished in 1975. Walter conceded the other charges, though, and wrote:
   
   “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 in the state of Washington for stealing a watch.One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dismissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi. Two years later Partin was back on the West Coast where he pleaded guilty to second degree burglary. He served three yeas in the Washington State Reformatory and was parolled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a plea to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamsters 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 the head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.
   
   I never learned what it meant to “forcibly install Hoffa’s man,” but I assume it wasn’t pleasant for the people removed. Many records, including links to Castro and Cuba, vanished long ago, so we may never know the details.
   
   Chief Justice Earl Warren hints to how that the records disappeared, even for someone at his level overseeing Hoffa’s appeal against Big Daddy’s testimony. Warren was a 40 year veteran of the United States Supreme Court. People assumed he would have had all access to Hoffa’s defense team records, FBI reports from Hoover, and department of justice reports from Bobby Kennedy. He looked at all the evidence, and even though some of the worse allegations had vanished from record, like arming Castro for his revolution and against the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Warren dissented against using Big Daddy’s testimony to convict Hoffa. In 1966, Warren wrote a three-page missive permanently attached to Hoffa vs. The United States explaining his logic; he put so much thought into my family history that he mentions Edward Partin 147 times so that his thoughts would be read and reread by posterity. He said, among many other things:
   
   “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. 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.
   
   Warren would continue berating Big Daddy, and begin his concluding remarks about how such a witness undermines American justice, and the process by which he was placed in Hoffa’s camp violates the US constitution’s bill of rights. He wrote:
   
   “This type of informer and the uses to which he was put in this case evidence a serious potential for undermining the integrity of the truthfinding process in the federal courts. Given the incentives and background of Partin, no conviction should be allowed to stand when based heavily on his testimony. And that is exactly the quicksand upon which these convictions rest, because, without Partin, who was the principal government witness, there would probably have been no convictions here. Thus, although petitioners make their main arguments on constitutional grounds and raise serious Fourth and Sixth Amendment questions, it should not even be necessary for the Court to reach those questions. For the affront to the quality and fairness of federal law enforcement which this case presents is sufficient to require an exercise of our supervisory powers. As we said in ordering a new trial in Mesarosh v. United States, 352 U. S. 1, 352 U. S. 14 (1956), a federal case involving the testimony of an unsavory informer who, the Government admitted, had committed perjury in other cases:
   
   ‘This is a federal criminal case, and this Court has supervisory jurisdiction over the proceedings of the federal courts. If it has any duty to perform in this regard, it is to see that the waters of justice are not polluted. Pollution having taken place here, the condition should be remedied at the earliest opportunity.‘”
   
   Hoffa vs The United States case changed America’s interpretation of the 4th and 6th amendments, and is, to this day, taught in practically every law school in America, though it is long forgotten that Hoffa claimed Bobby influenced national media and even the supreme court to convict him and create the precedent used for controversial surveillance of American citizens that continues to this day. Warren was the only supreme court judge to vote against using Big Daddy’s testimony, and in 1966 Jimmy Hoffa began an eight year prison sentence in 1966 based solely on Big Daddy’s word and the endorsement and media coverage led by FBI agent Walter Sheridan, US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
   
   To keep their star witness shining, Bobby had Big Daddy portrayed as hero willing to stand up to corrupt unions. My grandfather’s perceived bravery and perseverance in the face of Hoffa and the mafia were what led him to being dubbed an “all-American hero.” Hoffa watched all of this unfold, knowing the only way he would be freed was if my grandfather changed his testimony or was somehow discredited and the 1964 case revoked. For the next few years, Hoffa’s attorneys tried to discredit Big Daddy, and Walter Sheridan oversaw protecting my family’s reputation and keeping us free from prosecution and portrayed favorably in media. Hoffa spent every day of that time pacing in his cell, reading the news, and pondering what to do about Edward Grady Partin. ↩︎