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

I squirmed in my cramped economy class airline seat and tried to get less uncomfortable. We were delayed during a layover in Houston, and I thought, in hindsight, that I should have paid for extra legroom seats. I had booked my flight relatively last-minute, and the extra legroom seats seemed uncomfortably expensive, but at that moment I would have paid double to stretch out.

I adjusted the book in my left hand and held a pen in my right, using the armrests to keep my hands at face level. I was about half way through a paperback version of “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 hardcover in 2004 by Steerforth Press and reprinted in 2019 as a paperback to coincide with Martin Scorcese’s upcoming epic film, “The Irishman.” Scorcese had bought the rights to Frank’s book and raised $257 Million to get all the big-name gangster actors together – Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, etc. – for one final telling of Jimmy Hoffa’s rise and fall. I was lucky that the isle seat had been empty on the flight from San Diego to Houston, and I could wiggle against the window and rotate my legs so that my disproportionately large feet could rest in the empty floorspace beside me. But a group of people who had been on a delayed flight boarded, and a young man – maybe in his late 20’s or early 30’s walked towards my row and the only vacant seat, so I shifted back into a more uncomfortable position and crammed my feet under the seat in front of me. I resumed reading and making notes in the margins.

The man plopped down next to me and exhaled a sigh, letting everyone know how much of an ordeal he had experienced. From the corner of my eye, I saw him glance at my book and look back at me reading it.

He asked: “What’re you reading?”

I slowly rotated my head, smiled subtly, and rested the open book on my lap, which was cramped and pulled tightly to my body. I’m not that tall – only 5’10” to 5’11”, depending on if it’s morning or evening – but I never outgrew my gangly limbs and oversized feet, and I had underestimated the shrinking size of economy seats when planning my trip to Cuba. I took a deep breath to let him know how I had been focused and was changing gears, whirled my pen around my finger like a magician flourishing a wand, and laid it in the open book. I closed the book around it and left the cover facing up. I slowly removed my glasses and left earbud. My iPhone wasn’t playing anything, but I wear earbuds with noise-canceling software to dampen engine noise and to discourage small talk. Sometimes it works.

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

He repeated himself.

I rotated the book a bit. His gaze skimmed across the words, and he looked back up and cheerfully asked: “What’s it about?”

I took a less obvious breath and 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 would have bet that he wore sunglasses to do something resembling an outdoor sport 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 had just read Frank talk about young people 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.” In my mind, I heard Frank’s voice, which added a coarse rasp to his words and made “kids” sound like something he’d scrape off the bottom of his shoe. I never met him, but my mind imagined what he’d sound like. Frank was a brusque, 80-something year old working-class brute from Pennsylvania; 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. Franks words grated my mind’s ear as I contemplated how to answer what his book was about. 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 smiled a bit more, and flipped the book over so the young man could see the back cover. He glanced down and looked back up less than three seconds later. His gaze fell on my hat for a moment. It only had three letters to read.

He smiled broadly and said: “Did you go to LSU?”

I pondered how to answer concisely.

I’m Jason Ian Partin, and I was born in Baton Rouge in 1972. I 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. In high school, friends and I knew Shaquelle O’neal before anyone else in the country, because he played basketball for LSU from 1988-1992, leaving before graduating to play professional ball 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), 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 frequently flew home 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’m still recognized by name or face all over Baton Rouge, if only because my cousin is also named Jason Partin. He’s a former football star who was known even before he opened a well-known physical therapy business. He posts our name and his face on Lamar Advertising billboards up and down I-110 and the I-12 commuting corridor. We don’t look that much alike – he has my grandfather’s sky blue eyes, and I have my grandmother’s dark brown eyes – but there aren’t many Partins in Baton Rouge and a lot of people assume that I’m him. I graduated from Belaire High School in 1990 and was a relatively well-known wrestler and magician because Baton Rouge only had around 150,000 people, and my high school only had around 600 kids, so anyone around my age, 47, still recognizes me, and old friends come out of the woodwork when I fly into town.

Other people, usually people a decade older or younger, often ask if I’m really related to Edward Partin. They may still assume I’m the billboard Jason Partin, but the name Edward Partin is known around town and there aren’t many Partins, so everyone accurately assumes we’re related. Depending on their age, they’re either asking about my dad, Edward Grady Partin Junior, or my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin Senior. My dad’s a controversial Baton Rouge public defense attorney who often makes the news for taking on hopeless cases where the public assume guilt, like the well-publicized Foothill Five gang rape of a white college girl, and for his own shortcomings with a pile of DUI’s published in the Baton Rouge Advocate, multiple arrests for minor narcotics, a year in federal prison for unwisely selling weed during Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs in the 1980’s, and an awkward event after an LSU sorority party where he woke up from a blackout drunk naked, lost along sorority row, peering into windows and looking for a couch with a pile of his clothes as a pillow. Most of my friends parents knew my dad well – he was the town’s drug dealer in the 70’s, at the height of my grandfather’s rein.

My grandfather was famous as the Baton Rouge Teamster leader who practically ran the state for twenty years, helped build LSU’s stadiums and the Baton Rouge International Speedway (originally called Pelican Speedway until he decided to sell it with a hyperbolic name), influenced the building of I-110 to nothing but a row of smoking chemical factories that trucked products out using Baton Rouge Teamster labor, and brought Hollywood films to Baton Rouge using Teamster trucks and actor trailers. In the 80’s, the movies my friends flocked to see filmed included the 1985 ironically named Everybody’s All American, the football film where half of town showed up dressed up in 1950’s garb and packed the city stadium. It was a success and starred Dennis Quaid, Jessica Lang, Timmothy Hutton, and John Goodman; in a famous touchdown scene, filmed in the Baton Rouge city football stadium, you can see about 10,000 of us who turned out for the casting call, dressed in 1950’s garb and cheering in the stands as a stand-in for Dennis runs for a touchdown. You can see our plantations in 1983’s racial commedy The Toy, starring Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason, who stayed in Teamster trailers while filming. In the 60’s and 70’s, people would recall a John Wayne movie or two that used our plantations as a civil war backdrop, and newspapers reported how Big Daddy brought jobs and celebrities to town and housed them in Teamster-driven trailers on film sets, putting Baton Rouge on the map and giving Teamsters work that kept them closer to home.

Before Hollywood came to Baton Rouge, my grandfather became nationally famous in 1964, when he was spotlighted in national media as the man who risked his life and probably saved Bobby Kennedy’s life by infiltrating Jimmy Hoffa’s inner circle and testifying against what was considered the most powerful man in America not a Kennedy. J. Edgar Hoover stepped in and confirmed with Life Magazine that the FBI had been monitoring Hoffa and my grandfather, and that Hoffa had asked his help in killing U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. America was still reeling from the assassination of his brother, President Kennedy, ten months prior, and that skyrocketed my family’s name and photos into national media.

My grandfather’s testimony sent Hoffa to prison, and to this day his word is studied in every law school in America (to my dad’s chagrin) and resurfaced during President Bush’s 2001 Patriot Act, when Hoffa vs. The United States was used to legally justify bending the 4th Amendment based on the then-controversial role my grandfather played under Bobby Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s efforts to prosecute Hoffa and stop the newly recognized national organized crime syndicate, including Marcello. Every book about Hoffa is almost half about my grandfather, and even 45 years after Hoffa vanished Frank “The Irishman” Shenan wrote an entire chapter about him, President Nixon, and Audey Murphy. (Martion Scorcese chose to eliminate that from the film, which was already a whopping 209 minutes, because no one understands it yet, and in Hoffa’s first autobiography he said the exact same thing about why they couldn’t make a Hollywood film out of his story.) After he went to prison in 1980, his brother, my great-uncle Douglas Wesley Partin, assumed his role as the local Teamsters president; then my dad’s brother, my uncle Byron Keith Partin, took over and was still the local president, making three generations and almost 70 years of Partin leadership in Baton Rouge.

Everyone I knew called my grandfather Big Daddy, and he was to Louisiana what Hoffa was to America. Though I never grew into his height, I had Big Daddy’s feet, and those feet were crammed under the seat in front of me. I was anxious to return to reading The Irishman. But, I was feeling snarky. I’m unsure if I was irritated at having to rotate away from what had been a less uncomfortable position, or if I was just trying to distract myself and take a break from thinking about Big Daddy and Hoffa for a while. Or, maybe I wanted to see if I were correct when I saw him glance at my hat. Whatever the reason, I said: “I’m not sure why you ask.”

The young man smiled, probably pleased that he was clever, and nodded towards my head. He said: “Because your hat says LSU.”

You couldn’t get anything past this kid. I had hesitated wearing an LSU hat because I don’t like attracting attention, but I wanted a hat to shield my newly discovered bald spot from airplane air conditioning that always finds my head like campfire smoke always finds my eyes, and an LSU hat makes me smile inside even when my body is crammed into an economy sized seat next to a chatty person.

I said, “I grew up in Baton Rouge.”

He asked if I lived in Houston now.

I sighed in my head, held up my book, 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.

I opened the book, removed the pen, and smoothed the covers flat again. I held the pen in ready position, took a deep breath, and leaned into 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.

This had all began when Craig Vincent, the burly actor who had starred in Scorcese’s Casion and was chosen to play Big Daddy in The Irishman, had called Uncle Keith and Aunt Shanon to research his role. Keith was easy to find because he’s listed on the Teamsters web page, and Janice was an organizer for the Partin name on a popular genealogy website, and they connected him to me, one of the few remaining family members who remembers Big Daddy alive. (Doug was in a nursing facility and not easily woken, and because I’m the oldest grandson, all of my cousins were too young to remember a lot of details.) Craig and I spoke a few times, and his questions got me thinking because I couldn’t answer him concisely and he had asked what decades of FBI investigators and biographers hadn’t: what were the traits of Big Daddy that allowed him to fool some of the world’s sharpest and most influential people, like Jimmy Hoffa, Bobby Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and a small army of Teamster and mafia leaders who were more street-wise than any of the white-collar politicians who were also fooled. It was a good question, and I was surprised that I hadn’t considered it from an actor’s perspective before.

I had been thinking about it since, especially because, coincidentally, one of the humongous pallbearers from Big Daddy’s 1990 funeral had just passed away. He was Heisman trophy winner and hometown hero from the 1954 LSU national champion team, Billy Cannon, a man known by practically everyone in town. When Hollywood filmed Everybody’s All American in the fictionalized “University of Louisiana,” most people assumed it was about Billy; in the film, Dennis Quaid goes to play pro with the Denver Broncos, and Billy went on to the Houston Oilers before returning to Baton Rouge and becoming a dentist with billboards all over town. He passed away in his Saint Francisville home, down the street from my mom in a small community of around 1,500 people an hour upriver of Baton Rouge, and my mom had mentioned his passing a few times over the previous year and had been reminiscing about the Partin family, too; she had recently retired from Exxon Plastics, one of the chemical plants at the end of I-110, and had a lot of time on her hands to reflect on her life and how she met my dad in high school without realizing who his dad was and the attention it would dump on her. I hadn’t mentioned The Irishman to her, because I had postponed reading it until my annual sabbatical. I was taking the time to read it and to reread old notes, looking for patterns people may have missed in the 60 years since President Kennedy was shot and Jimmy Hoffa went to prison. It was a lot to digest, and I took a few mental breaks to stare out the window and watch cotton ball clouds float under the wing.

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 blissful Spanish greeting that doesn’t probe for a reply. I smiled back and nodded and replied in kind. He replaced his hat, opened a glossy 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. It felt wonderful to finally get off a plane and stretch my legs. As I mentioned, in hindsight I would have paid extra for more legroom.

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. ↩︎