Preface & Dedication
“Punch them in the gut first. Get it out of the way. Then tell them what to do, and go from there.”
Jimmy Hoffa: circa October 1971, New Jersey Federal Penitentiary1
In the summer of 2019, Martin Scorsese’s 3 hour, 29 minute opus, The Irishman, opened in theaters. Investors spent $257 Million making the film, and it starred all of the biggest names actors, many of whom had worked with Scorcesse in his gangster films over the previous few decades. Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Ray Ramona, and many more viewer magnets stared in The Irishman. which suggested it would explain Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa’s famous 1975 vanishing. In this version, the film says he was killed by a Teamster leader and mafia hitman, Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan, based on his 2004 memoir, “I Heard You Paint Houses.” To paint houses was mafia lingo for painting walls red with spattered blood, and Frank says he painted a suburban Detroit home red with Hoffa’s blood on 30 July 1975.
My grandfather, Baton Rouge Teamster leader Edward Grady Partin Senior, had a small part in the film as the Teamster leader in Hoffa’s inner circle who was also a mole, working with U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to find “something” or “anything” against Hoffa; it worked, and my grandfather’s surprise testimony in 1964 convicted Hoffa jury tampering, and sent Hoffa to prison in 1966. He was portrayed by the burly actor Craig Vincent as “Big Eddie” Partin, a simplified character to match Craig’s physical appearance and Italian-American accent; in Baton Rouge, where he spoke with a southern drawl Craig couldn’t master, we called my grandfather Big Daddy. Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan knew Big Daddy well and mentions him throughout his memoir, focusing on Big Daddy’s interactions with President Nixon and national war hero Audie Murphy, but those parts were omitted from the film because the focus was on Hoffa and the man he trusted but allegedly killed him, not on the man he trusted who sent him to prison.
What stuck in my mind was from before The Irishman was filmed, when Craig called my family to research Big Daddy’s. At the time, my uncle Kieth Partin was still president of Teamsters Local #5, and Aunt Janice ran the Partin family genealogy website. Craig asked me to help him understand the personality traits that led people like Hoffa, Bobby Kennedy, FBI to trust him and to be intimidated by him. It’s more than just brute size, and Craig wanted to tap into it. Like all of the few people who remember Big Daddy, especially those of us who were at his funeral in 1990, we couldn’t answer Craig’s question concisely.
Craig’s part in The Irishman was so simplified it only garnered about five minutes in the final cut, but it got me thinking: how do you characterize a person like Big Daddy?
I read “I heard you paint houses” and saw “The Irishman,” I saw what Scorsese did: he changed the camera angle to show Big Eddie Partin as even bigger and more looming, a snapshot of storytelling to show how one person would be unafraid to be a mole in Hoffa’s inner circle of brutal Teamsters and mafia heads; in other words, Scorcesse made him larger than life. But, Scorsese admitted he was making a film to sell tickets, that $257 Million was a lot to owe to investors, so to simplify the script and move the story about Hoffa along. That bothered me, not because of family ties, but because it’s the bigger story that keeps getting brushed aside to give people what they want: a simplified answer to what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.
I spent most of Covid trying to answer Craig’s question, but with my own take: what was it about Big Daddy that led my family to trust him? In answering that, I could answer Craig’s question, and in our stories the bigger picture of what happened to Hoffa and why, and what happened to President John F. Kennedy, Bobby’s big brother, and why it still matters today. Personally, it’s a opportunity to blend in my own story of a kid growing up under Big Daddy, and my lifelong interest in nature versus nurture; which, for me, has been demonstrated by family versus teammates, those we’re born with, and those we join and choose to stay with. My story centers around Big Daddy’s 1990 funeral, and is bookended by two teams, a high school wrestling team in 1990, and a team of paratroopers in the first Gulf war of 1990-1991.
A memoir is based on memory, so anything I say is inherently flawed. I wrote what I believed to be true, and I cited original sources when I could. Sometimes, to keep the voices at a reasonable volume, I blend old army buddies into single characters and condense our conversations; the wrestlers, on the other hand, are the real team, because they were the ones there when my grandfather was sick and dying. To prevent writing how most of us talk in daily chatter, full things like “um,” “hmm,” “what’s for dinner,” and “Dude,” I compressed conversations into dialogue, “so that what’s said moves the story along.”
I try to keep it light. A lot of the story is harsh, and metaphors are more fun to write and read than what really happened. I make a few jokes, and whether funny or not, they are just jokes: appropriate for the characters in this book, and not meant to offend anyone other than the person I call a dumbass, asshole, or jerk. This is only a draft, and it may change daily as characters develop.
I’d be a jerk if I didn’t begin any memoir I by acknowledging my teammates from the 82nd Airborne Division. They are called The All Americans, America’s Guard of Honor, and the quick-reaction force of American presidents. They were my teammates after the wrestling team centered around my grandfather; for the next few years, my team centered around the 82nd.
For decades, the 82nd Airborne served on two-hour call for presidents who had the power to send 12,000 All American paratroopers into battle for 30 days without approval from congress. (Think about that the next time you vote for a dumbass, asshole, or jerk.) I’m a veteran of the first Gulf war by choice, and we did a fine job in ways I’ll share in the first chapter. But they aren’t the
My first platoon was Anti-Tank Platoon #4 (pronounced with a cadence: AT4, Delta Company, 1st of the 5-0-4). There were about 15 to 18 of us in AT4 at any given time, and the Delta-Company “Delta Dawgs” ranged from 85 to 100 anti-armor infantryman (standard M16’s and M203’s, plus 50 caliber machine guns, MK-19 grenade launchers, and TOW II missiles)
When I was growing up in the late 1970’s to late 1980’s, The 82nd was on the news every couple of years, usually to take over an airport and extract American embassies and citizens during a local military conflict. The 82nd was the first to arrive by airplane or parachute in Honduras (1979), The Dominican Republic (1982), Grenada (1985), Panama (1989-1990), and Sadia Arabia and Iraq (1990-1991); Panama was a 30 day occupation to overthrow President Noriega, and Saudi Arabia was to “draw a line in the sand” against Saddam Hussein’s 400,000 soldiers and the world’s largest fleet of tanks that had just invaded Kuwait, and were poised to invade Saudi Arabia. Nine months later, the 82nd was still there and spearheading the ground invasion of 560,000 allied soldiers, led by General Stormin’ Norman Swarrtzcoff. The ground war ended, officially at least, with the capture and destruction of Khamisiyah Airport, a base of Soviet MiG fighters and Saddam Hussein’s storehouse for the chemical nerve agent Serin. I’m a veteran of the team that led the capture of Khamisiya, Delta-Company, 1st Batallion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division.
The first part of this story is dedicated, in part, to All Americans past and present, wherever they are now: may they rest in peace. This story isn’t about the 82nd or my service, it just has to be mentioned because it was such a big part of my life around Big Daddy’s death and the years that followed. And it shaped my views in ways I hope are transparent. Getting it out of the way now lets me focus on Big Daddy, and my small part in his story.
After Desert Storm, I served on the quick-reaction forces of presidents George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton. It was under President Clinton in 1993, the year he released the first part of the then-classified 1979 John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report, when I had national security clearances and a diplomatic passport, that I first became interested in my grandfather’s role in killing President Kennedy. I’m biased, and I focused on parts of the report related to my family name, Edward Grady Partin, and what I knew or remembered, Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, Walter Sheridan, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Audie Murphy. What I learned hasn’t changed much in thirty years, but my perception of what’s important for posterity versus what’s transient and a distraction from what’s important has, and I hope to show that evolution in this memoir.
After the war, I jump ahead 30 years and pick up the story about my grandfather again, but this time in the month leading up to my mother’s death from liver failure on 05 April 2019. Like a lot of people who learn to love their family too late in life, I was a dumbass to not empathize with her life and her part in Big Daddy’s story. This memoir brings her into what happened with the Partin family, and why it still maters today.
Her part in history is a long story that needs some background and a shared vocabulary to understand, which is why I structure this book to begin with my grandfather’s funeral and the first Gulf war. Knowing what I know now, I’d be an asshole if I didn’t also dedicate this memoir to my mom, WAR.
May she rest in peace.
JiP 🙂
This is still a work in progress, and the introduction will change as I add or delete sub-plots.
Go to The Table of Contents
Footnotes:
- I made that up to make a point: I pepper headers and footnotes with original references from court records, memoirs, FBI reports, and a personal family letter that, combined, paint the picture of who my grandfather was as a person, and probably what happened to Jimmy Hoffa and President Kennedy; if you just want the parts about them, skip to “Introduction, Part II” and go from there, though you’d miss the build-up to a punchline if you don’t read, “Introduction, Part I.” ↩︎