Introduction
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.”
– Jimmy Hoffa in “Hoffa: The Real Story,” 1975
A lot of history happened between 1955 and 1971, which was the year I was conceived.
The first thing that I know shaped who I became was that in 1955 Wendy Anne Rothdram was born to Joyce Hicks Rothdram in Toronto, Canada. Four years later, Granny fled her abusive husband – a man whose first name I don’t know but whose last name was Rothdram – and took Wendy to live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob.
Auntie Lo was Lois Hicks Desico, Granny’s older sister. She had moved to Baton Rouge a few years earlier after Uncle Bob accepted an offer from Montreal’s Bulk Stevedoring to manange their American operations out of an office in the port of New Orleans. He lived in a New Orleans apartment weekdays and returned to Baton Rouge on weekends. Baton Rouge was about 80 miles upriver from New Orleans along the serpentine River Road, but the newly built Interstate 10 made his commute only 50 minutes or so. He and Auntie Lo decided to buy a new suburban in Baton Rouge’s Sherwood Forest subdivision and near the Sherwood Forest country club. Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob had plenty of space to share on weekdays, but on weekdays Auntie Lo felt cramped with Granny and Wendy using the two spare bedrooms. Auntie Lo said they were child-free and wanted to remain that way; they gave Granny a year to find a job and a place to live with Wendy.
Granny began working as a typist and secretary at CoPolymer, one of the many petrochemical plants that had been growing twenty miles north of downtown Baton Rouge and billowed smoke and steam and were part of what we called Chemical Alley. They linked to I-10 via the confusingly named I-110, a 20 mile stretch of interstate that branches off I-10 in downtown Baton Rouge and goes north past the airport and abruptly terminates just before the African American community of Scotlandville and Chemical Alley; beyond Scotlandville, there were miles of dark rural highways passing through pine forests and paper mills, past the River Bend nuclear power plant, and ending in the charming hamlet of Saint Francsiville, a tourist destination three hours upriver from New Orleans surrounded by former slave plantations turned into historic sites, bed-and-breakfasts, and event halls. Granny decided closer to Baton Rouge so that Wendy could attend public school at the nearby Glen Oaks elementary, middle, and high schools rather than the Scotlandville or Baker schools closer to Chemical Alley. She saved enough to put a down payment on a 806 square foot, three bedroom, two bath house a mile from the Baton Rouge Airport and only a half hour from CoPolymer. The house cost $36,000, a bargain bargain price because it was directly under the airport’s flight path; every twenty minutes the cabinets rattled from jet engines passing overhead so closely that you could look up and see the expressions on passenger faces peering down into her back yard.
Granny had one of the nicest yards in that subdivision. It was partially circled by a small creek shaped into a drainage canal that directed fall hurricane rains towards one of the nearby bayous. The back yard was filled with pecan and gumball trees, and in the front yard there was a massive sprawling stately oak tree draped in grey Spanish Moss. Wendy grew up climbing those trees and catching crawfish, tadpoles, and bullfrogs from the creek; she attended nearby Glen Oaks elementary school, middle school, and high school. She rode a bicycle to high school and competed on the swimming team; Glen Oaks High was a small school of only 150 students and did not have a swimming pool, but some parents carpooled the kids to and from a Catholic girls school a half hour away for practice after school. Granny had to work her minimum wage job until the engineers were off work at around 5pm, so she could not participate in carpools and by 1971 she and Wendy rarely saw each other because Wendy was either at school, at a swim meet, or climbing trees around the neighborhood with her growing group of girlfriends, mostly Debbie and Christy LeBoux, two Cajun sisters who lived in subsidized Section 8 apartments a half hour away on the busy Florida Bulevard and near the mostly African American and Asian Belaire subdivision, but Cristi had a car and preferred the trees and relatively empty streets near Glen Oaks. Their other friend was Linda White, daughter of Glen Oak’s custodian and landscaper, the diminutive and cheerful one-eyed tree surgeon, Mr. Ed White. Wendy was 16 years old in 1971, just turning old enough to get her driver’s license learning permit so that Christy could teach her to drive.
Wendy and Linda and the LeBoux sisters learned where they could buy little plastic dime bags of marijuana. They quit swimming but told Granny they were spending time at school and swimming but were actually spending time in parks picking flowers to put int their har and getting high and tossing Frisbee and laughing and talking about the Led Zepplin song Going to California; it was the most famous song in America that year, and to this day is considered a classic and I can repeat the lyrics from memory, hearing Rob Paige’s mournful voice predicting my future:
Spent my days with a woman unkind
Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine
Made up my mind to make a new start
Going to California withg an achin’ in myhear
Someone told me there’s a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair
Two years after Going to California topped worldwide music charts, Wendy would abandon me and go to California; for most of my life, I’ve believed that Wendy abandoning me was related to the story of Jimmy Hoffa; that relationship is part of this story.
The second thing that happened between 1957 and 1971 that would impact my life was Jimmy Hoffa rose to power in The International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He served as president and famously became what was known as the most famous and powerful man in America not a Kennedy. His story is well known: he grew up in the depression era and as a teenager famously refused to unload a truck of strawberries that was rotting outside of a grocery store until the companies that used temporary labor agreed to pay a minimum amount for workers who showed up, regardless if there was work that day. Fights erupted daily, and though only 5’6″ tall and without military experience, Hoffa gained a reputation a a brutal fighter who would lead the way for any group of laborers willing to follow him; he epitomized the infantryman’s statue of Iron Mike holding a rifle in one hand and becoming with the other in his famous words: “Follow Me!” Hoffa and his followers pitted off against former WWII soldiers who were out of work and hired to guard warehouses against Teamsters, many of whom were also unemployed soldiers. Over time, Hoffa and his Teamsters won. When Wendy was born in 1955, Hoffa was already vice president, and by the time Granny bought her home near Glen Oaks he was international president.
There were approximately 2.7 Million Teamsters out of around 150 Million people in America; everyone knew a Teamster, and as Hoffa pointed out there wasn’t a product on a shelf that wasn’t delivered by a Teamster, nor was there a product sold from American farms and factories that weren’t delivered by Teamsters to ports and loaded by stevedores onto ships for international trade. New York and New Jersey were Teamster hubs under Hoffa’s rule, and he set his sites on expanding into America’s second largest port, New Orleans, which had direct trade with Cuba and most of Latin America. Those 2.7 Million Teamsters paid monthly membership dues for the safety net of a pension and guaranteed pay when work was slow; they paid up to $10 each in cash every month, and Hoffa controlled that pension fund and grew it to more than $2.1 Billion dollars of untraceable money; that’s a lot by any measure, but in the 1950’s it was more money than even a Latin American island dictator could fathom.
Hoffa began lending money to Italian-American mafia leaders to build hotels in New Orleans and New Jersey, and casinos in the newly formed and rapidly growing city of sin, Las Vegas; Hoffa’s Teamsters gained all of the construction and shipping rights. Similarly, Hoffa funded Hollywood films that hired Teamsters to haul equipment and house actors in trailers driven to filming sites; if you sit through the credits of practically every film from the 50’s and 60’s, the final screen is a massive Teamster logo of the two horse heads – named Thunder and Lightening – framing a ship’s steering wheel to remind people who was driving the economy.
The Teamsters influence on American and world events and Hoffa’s access to unlimited money alarmed then senator John F. Kennedy, chairman of the United States labor relations committee; Kennedy began setting sights on was funded by the Boston Irish mafia. For many reasons, Senator Kennedy began to focus on riding America of Hoffa, the Italian Mafia, and the growing threat of Cuba’s communism and their new leader, Fidel Castro, who was taking land from American businesses and mafia bosses who had been using Cuba as their off-country playground.
John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 and assumed office in January of 1961. His first act was to appoint his little brother, recent Harvard law school graduate Bobby Kennedy, as the United States Attorney General with two tasks: remove Jimmy Hoffa from power, and stop the influence of mafia in America. President Kennedy focused on the threat of communism at the heals of the McCarthy anti-communism media campaign, leading to a feud with Fidel Castro, an embargo against the island, the Cuban Missile crisis that brought America and Russia to the brink of nuclear war, and the failed American-fueled invasion of Cuba at The Bay of Pigs.
Inside of America, the feud between Bobby Kennedy and Hoffa escalated to heights greater than thermonuclear war. He was a tall, handsome, and privileged man born into a wealthy family of politicians who were grooming each generation for presidency. Bobby was known to be a brawler with a temper and arrogant and smug with his older staff; even seasoned FBI director J. Edgar Hoover bowed down to Bobby and allowed a direct phone line to be put between his office and Bobby’s so that Bobby could call him for hourly updates on progress hunting Jimmy Hoffa.
The street-smart and quick-tempered Hoffa was defiant. When he and Bobby faced off in public, their intensity became as popular in America culture as two heavyweight boxers building up energy to promote their fights and sell tickets. Hoffa repeatedly called Bobby “Booby” to his face and in front of reporters, and said Booby was a “snot nosed little brat” who only got his job because of his president brother. Bobby retaliated with a barrage of arrests and legal challenges that kept Hoffa in and out of court. The two men even came to blows in public, and the spectacle was so fierce that media and practically every American household grew to know the battle between Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy as The Blood Feud.
Bobby sought the full might of American intelligence and resources. He tasked Hoover to focus the full force of America’s FBI. 500 federal agents were assigned to the task under FBI agent Walter Sheridan, a Kennedy loyalist who had served as a campaign manager for Senator Kennedy’s presidential big. The feud escalated, and a few years later media said that the Get Hoffa task force was “the most expensive and fruitless effort of any government to pursue one man.” I believe that statement to be close to the truth, at least if you don’t include the first years or decades of our pursuit of Fidel Castro, Manuel Ortega, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden.
Hoover was known for his advanced surveillance and monitoring all Americans illegally, including politicians and judges that he would blackmail for alleged communist links and sexual deprevity (a hypocritical act; Hoover was a lifelong bachelor who took fellow FBI agents on shirtless trips to remote cabins and kept their photos hidden in his office). Bobby tasked Hoover to focus on finding a way to either remove Hoffa from power or put him in jail. 500 federal agents were assigned under FBI agent Walter Sheridan, a Kennedy loyalist who had led part of Senator Kennedy’s presidential bid.
Hoffa knew the full force of American intelligence was after him, and he grew diligent in everything he said and did. He was an intense and intentional man who built alliances with the most brutal union leaders he could find; that’s where Big Daddy came into the story.
In his opus about Hoffa, the head of the FBI’s Get Hoffa task force, Walter Sheridan, would spend more time discussing my grandfather than any character other than Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy; this is how Walter described Big Daddy’s background:
“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” a Teamster leader, but whatever happened impressed Hoffa so much that Big Daddy became a confident in Hoffa’s inner circle. He ran the Louisiana Teamsters like Hoffa ran the international union, and with his newfound wealth brought his two younger brothers and their mother from their simple shotgun shack in Woodville Mississippi to Baton Rouge, and after his step father died he bought his mother, my Grandma Foster (she remarried a man named Foster after Grandpa Grady Partin left her and their children in 1936) a home near Glen Oaks High School coincidentally a half mile from Granny’s house under the flight path.
In 1962 Big Daddy was arrested for kidnapping the two young children of a 24 year old Baton Rouge teamster named Sydney Simpson after Simpson lost them in a divorce court custody hearing. As soon as Big Daddy and Sydney were locked in a jail cell, additional charges came in against Big Daddy for manslaughter in Mississippi from when Big Daddy fled the seen of a car accident a few weeks earlier. Big Daddy was facing life in prison. He made a phone call to the New Orleans FBI office, and 48 hours after being arrested he was set free by Hoover in exchange for reporting on “something” or “anything” that could convict Hoffa. (Simpson remained in jail and would be convicted of kidnapping though wouldn’t serve time.)
FBI reports showed that Big Daddy had been monitored because of his involvements with Cuba and Castro, and because of Hoffa’s trust in him. It turns out that before Big Daddy was arrested, Hoffa had confided in him that Bobby Kennedy had to be killed. Hoffa had asked Big Daddy to obtain plastic explosives from his contacts with Carlos Marcello, the mafia boss who controlled New Orleans and most of Dallas, and presumably from Castro via the port of New Orleans. Hoffa wanted to blow up what he called Bobby’s fancy home when he was there his wife and children were there. Big Daddy refused; he said he wouldn’t harm children (kidnapping them was, in his way of thinking, the right thing to do to reunite them with their Teamster father). Hoffa then said they could recruit a sniper and give him a rifle with a scope to shoot Bobby as he rode through a southern town in his fancy convertible with the top down; Hoffa suggested a southern town because of right-wing, anti-Kennedy sentiment, lax gun laws, and Big Daddy’s connections. If they went that route, Hoffa said, they’d have to ensure the shooter couldn’t be traced back to the Teamsters.
After Big Daddy was freed and was flying all over America with his role as a Teamster leader and FBI mole, my grandmother, Mamma Jean (whom Walter Sheridan had described as a “quiet, attractive Baton Rouge girl”) fled Big Daddy with their five children and hid each one of the children in her sisters’ and aunts’ families’ hunting and fishing camps spread throughout southern Louisiana and Mississippi. She was only quiet around Walter; around us she was tough and opinionated, but she never detailed everything she saw or heard or believed that led her to flee Baton Rouge and hide from Big Daddy and his Teamsters.
On 22 November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by at least one sniper as he rode through downtown Dallas in his open convertible. The alleged shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine and New Orleans native who had defected to Russia and married a Russian girl and had a baby while there; inexplicably, the FBI paid for his flight back to New Orleans, where Oswald spent days bouncing around menial jobs, handing out pro-Castro pamphlets, and training in the Baton Rouge civil air force in the airport near both of my grandmothers’ houses under the alias Harvey Lee. Six months before Oswald was arrested for murdering President Kennedy, he was given a job in the 6th floor of a book repository in downtown Dallas that overlooked the spot where Kennedy was shot, and his 6.5mm Italian army surplus rifle outfitted with a scope by a Dallas gunsmith was found in Oswald’s office with bullets that matched the ones extracted from Kennedy. Two days after the shooting, Oswald was in handcuffs and being escorted from the Dallas police station on live television when Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, low level mafia runner, and former Teamster who called Hoffa frequently, walked past the police who knew him well and stood next to Oswald and removed a Colt .38 special from his trench coat pocket and shot Oswald point-blank in the stomach on international live television. Oswald died later that day in the same hospital that had pronounced Kennedy dead 48 hours earlier, and Jack Ruby was arrested for murder and would die in prison two years later. Ten months after Kennedy and Oswald died, the hastily assembled Warren Report, led by Chief Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, erroneously concluded that Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President Kennedy, and Jack Ruby acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald; that report would be reversed in 1979 by the classified JFK Assassination Report, but even in 1964 most people suspected that Kennedy was killed as part of a larger conspiracy that involved the mafia, Cuba, CIA, and FBI; those rumors persist to this day and have spawned thousands of books, films, documentaries, and websites dedicated to uncovering what happened.
Around the time the Warren Report was released and the biggest topic at dinner tables and water coolers around the world, Jimmy Hoffa was on trial for jury tampering in a 1961 minor state-level labor trial orchestrated by Bobby Kennedy, The Test Fleet case that charged Hoffa with illegally owning a fleet of trucks and profiting from his union deals. The jury found him innocent and Hoffa walked away from The Test Fleet to distance himself from trouble, but Bobby had pushed charges that Hoffa influenced the Test Fleet jury; if true, that would be a felony and send Hoffa to prison. By then Hoffa was used to Bobby’s charges and trials; he kept a small army of the country’s best and most notorious attorneys who represented only Hoffa and the heads of major mafia families.
Hoffa sat in court for a week and listened to arguments and was confident that he’d win the latest case until the prosecution called their key witness and Big Daddy stood up. According to witnesses and countless books on what happened next, Hoffa’s usually stoic face paled and his usually rigid jaw dropped, and in front of the jury he exclaimed, “My God, it’s Partin!”
Big Daddy testified that Hoffa handed him $20,000 from the petty cash safe in Hoffa’s hotel room and implied that Big Daddy offer it to a juror in the Test Fleet Case. There was no recording: it was Hoffa’s word against Big Daddy’s. In his book, Walter Sheridan describes how they were unable to hide the FBI’s most advanced wireless bug, which he wrote “was about the size of a king-size pack of cigarettes,” because Big Daddy’s strong and tapered body squeezed into his tailored suit and made carrying anything too risky; they decided to trust his word; Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover believed Big Daddy so deeply that they risked years of surveillance to put him on the stand. Records say he was charming and witty and wooed the jury; they only deliberated four hours before believing Big Daddy over Jimmy Hoffa; the judge sentenced Hoffa to eight years in prison based soley on Big Daddy’s word that a bribe was implied; no juror ever admitted they had been approached.
Hoffa’s army of attorney’s attacked the prosecuting team’s use of Big Daddy as a violation of the 4th and 6th Amendments, the right against unlawful search and seizure and the right to an attorney present around witnesses, and they attacked Big Daddy’s character; he was portrayed as a drug addict, and letters were found from Castro’s generals expressing appreciation of Big Daddy’s help in arming and training Cuban soldiers. Simultaneously, Hoffa directed Teamsters loyal to him and mafia families to do “anything” to get Big Daddy to change his testimony; Hoffa said he’d forgive the $121 Million mafia families owed him if Big Daddy lived but changed his testimony, regardless of which family made it happen.
At the moment Big Daddy stood up and under the orders of J. Edgar Hoover, former Get Hoffa agents were assigned to follow and protect Big Daddy 24 hours a day. With their key witness hopefully safe from immediate retaliation, Bobby Kennedy stepped forward to buoy up Big Daddy’s reputation in what was becoming the most debated witness in America. Bobby began by asking Hoover to find Mamma Jean and my aunts and uncles and return them to Baton Rouge; Walter Sheridan succeeded in finding them and formed a deal where Mamma Jean would maintain her right to remain silent (hence him saying she was a “quiet girl) in exchange for a house and monthly living stipend and 24 hour protection from federal agents. To keep her close to her family but far away from Teamsters and a probably corrupt New Orleans FBI office, Walter moved her and her five children to a wealthy suburb in Houston, Texas. This was not a witness protection program: it was considered the first use of what became known as “paid informants,” part of the escalating war on organized crime that led to most witnesses remaining anonymous but a few embracing the spotlight. Big Daddy was the first.
“In all my years as an FBI agent,” Walter Sheridan wrote, “all witnesses wanted protection from the mafia. But not Partin. He welcomed the publicity.”
Big Daddy returned to Baton Rouge and ran the state with brute force that made Hoffa’s Teamsters seem timid; if management wouldn’t switch to Teamster labor, they were killed. Big Daddy became brazen in his confidence that as long as Hoffa was on trial or in prison, he could do anything without prosecution. Louisiana governor McKeithen and the state’s lawyers fought to rid Louisiana of Big Daddy the way President Kennedy and Bobby Kenndy fought to rid America of Hoffa. State newspapers covered their feud the same way national media covered the Blood Feud in the years leading up to Hoffa’s conviction.
The New Orleans Times Picyune published a series of quotes:
“I’m not going to have Partin and a bunch of hoodlums running this state,’ Gov. McKeithen told us. ‘We have no problems with law-abiding labor. But when gangsters raid a construction project and shoot men up at work I’m going to do something about it.” The governor referred to an incident in Plaquemine when 45 to 50 men shot up 30 workers of the W.O. Bergeron Construction Co.
That incident was famous in Baton Rouge because so many people were involved; and like how Hoffa rallied former WWII soldiers who fought other WWII soldiers hired by businesses resisting the union, Baton Rouge businesses hired Vietnam and Korean war veterans to defend themselves against Big Daddy’s small army of Teamsters, veterans, former LSU football players, and low-level mafia men from New Orleans. Unlike Hoffa, Big Daddy embraced the publicity and blatantly flaunted his immunity from prosecution. Baton Rouge was and is a relatively small capital city and college town; back then there were only around 100,000 residents and a dozen or so high schools; because the economy depended on shipping petrochemicals from Chemical Alley and agriculture products from the surrounding fertile Mississippi Delta, practically every family in Baton Rouge either had a Teamster working for Big Daddy, or was one of the people beaten and shot for not becoming one; everyone else followed the spectacle daily, and Edward Grady Partin became the most known name in Baton Rouge if not all of Louisiana.
‘Partin has two Justice Department guards with him for fear Hoffa will retaliate against him,’ Gov. McKeithen said, ‘This gives him immunity.’
“These [Baton Rouge Teamster] hoodlums make Marcello and the Mafia look pretty good.”
“[We’re going to arrest Partin] as soon as we get the evidence against him.”
Governor McKeithen and his legal team could not touch Big Daddy, so McKeithen began negotiating with federal agents to temper Big Daddy while Hoffa was awaiting an appeal. He met with Walter Sheridan and 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.”
That led to Big Daddy having elk hunting cabins near Boulder Colorado and Flagstaff Arizona, small towns with airports similar to Baton Rouge’s; he spent his time hunting elk while Hoffa’s legal team battled Big Daddy’s testimony.
Hoffa’s appeal reached the US supreme court in 1966, but only Chief Justice Earl Warren voted against using Big Daddy’s testimony; six judges accepted it and two abstained. Many people claimed that was Hoover influencing the opt-unassailable supreme court; to protect the future of American justice, Warren countered by explaining why he was against using Big Daddy’s word to convict Hoffa by writing a three page missive permanently attached to Hoffa versus The United States for posterity to ponder. In it, he mentioned my grandfather’s name 148 times and is unequivocal in his opinion.
Warren focused on two things: Big Daddy’s character, and the fourth and sixth amendments. He began his missive by writing:
“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 rants on Big Daddy’s incentives for a while, then discusses what he said in the few days he languished in the Baton Rouge jail cell with Sydney Simpon.
“One Sydney Simpson, who was Partin’s cellmate at the time the latter first contacted federal agents to discuss Hoffa, has testified by affidavit as follows:
“Sometime in September, 1962, I was transferred from the Donaldsonville Parish Jail to the Baton Rouge Parish Jail. I was placed in a cell with Partin. For the first few days, Partin acted sort of brave. Then when it was clear that he was not going to get out in a hurry, he became more excited and nervous. After I had been in the same cell with Partin for about three days, Partin said, ‘I know a way to get out of here. They want Hoffa more than they want me.’
On one occasion I asked Partin if he knew enough about Hoffa to be of any help to Daniels and the FBI, and Partin said, ‘It doesn’t make any difference. If I don’t know it, I can fix it up.’
“While we were in the cell, I asked Partin why he was doing this to Hoffa. Partin replied: ‘What difference does it make? I’m thinking about myself. Aren’t you thinking about yourself? I don’t give a damn about Hoffa. . . .”
Warren then focused on the 4th Amendment, which states that private property can only be searched with a warrant signed by a judge specifying what is to be searched, where it will be searched for, and the reason for the search. Warren restated the guidance given to Big Daddy from Hoover’s Get Hoffa task force:
Pursuant to the general instructions he received from federal authorities to report “any attempts at witness intimidation or tampering with the jury,” “anything illegal,” or even “anything of interest,” Partin became the equivalent of a bugging device which moved with Hoffa wherever he went. Everything Partin saw or heard was reported to federal authorities and much of it was ultimately the subject matter of his testimony in this case. For his services he was well paid by the Government, both through devious and secret support payments to his wife and, it may be inferred, by exe- cuted promises not to pursue the indictments under which he was charged at the time he became an informer.
Here the Government reaches into the jailhouse to employ a man who was himself facing indictments far more serious (and later including one for perjury) than the one confronting the man against whom he offered to inform. It employed him not for the purpose of testifying to something that had already happened, but rather for the purpose of infiltration to see if crimes would in the future be committed.
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.
Despite Warren’s best efforts, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Big Daddy’s testimony. Hoffa began serving his sentence in a New Jersey federal penitentiary in 1966 and worked eight hours a day pounding the stuffing into mattresses on his work detail in a prison mattress manufacturing factulty. But Hoffa maintained presidency of the Teamsters for another year and oversight of the Teamster Pension fund through a puppet he placed in charge, and he conducted business from his cell despite only being allowed visitors once every three months via coded messages to his attorneys and trusted Teamster leaders. According to one of those visitors, Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan (the one who would one day claim to kill Hoffa and be portrayed by Robert DeNiro in 2019’s Martin Scorcese epic about Hoffa, “The Irishman”), Hoffa spoke about Big Daddy every time and told people to focus on getting him to change his testimony; if anything happened to Partin, Hoffa said, he would have to serve his entire sentence without hope for parole.
Hoffa still tried for parole. From prison, he donated millions of dollars of the Teamster pension fund to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign and promised the first endorsement of a Republican by a major union if Nixon could either parole him or get Big Daddy to change his testimony. To negotiate that deal, Hoffa tapped America’s most decorated war hero and a popular and handsome and charismatic action movie star, Audie Murphy, a household name after his service in WWII that led him to being awarded every medal America had to give; he had 278 confirmed kills, including heroic stances that became staples in Hollwood: the young fatherless Texas boy taught to shoot by hunting and bravely standing atop a German tank with a machine gun and holding off entire platoons while his men escaped to safety, and charging into a bunker with a machine gun blazing and epitomizing the infantry’s “Follow Me!” creed. Audie could call meetings with senators and presidential contenders who wanted to be seen with America’s most decorated war hero and former movie star.
Hoffa had financed some of Audie’s earlier movies, and promised to fund more if Audie helped. It was 1970 by then, and Audie was an aging man with less mass appeal in movies; and he had filed for bankruptcy and was suffering from PTSD from his years of combat and self-medicating with alcohol and an alternating mix of uppers and downers to help him sleep and function the next day. To honor his mother, he locked himself in a hotel room for a week and sweat out his addictions and focused on getting Big Daddy to change his testimony. National media focused on why Audie would be flying on one of Carlos Marcello’s private planes between the Baton Rouge airport and San Diego and driving to Nixon’s oceanfront mansion in San Clemente. This coincided with more media coverage of American mafia, with a Time magazine feature showing Big Daddy running the Teamsters and refusing $1 Million bribes from Carlos Marcello to free Hoffa; strengthening Big Daddy’s reputation as a tough leader unafraid of anyone.
After dropping off Big Daddy and leaving the Baton Rouge airport, Audie Murphy’s airplane crashed in the mountains of Virginia on 28 May 1971. Audie and all four passengers died. Big Daddy was rumored to have orchestrated the crash; that would later be proven false — Marcello’s planes were notorious for lackluster maintenance, and mechanical failure was eventually blamed for the crash — but Big Daddy relished in the fame he received from the mafia undeworld; even mafia hitmen respected Audie’s 278 man official kill record, and any man who could kill Audie Murphy and publicly defy Carlos Marcello and live as a mole in Jimmy Hoffa’s camp was a man to be left alone.
Edward Grady Partin Junior had been watching all of his father’s story unfold in the news from his room in Mamma Jean’s Houston house and rebelled. While Audie was flying around with Big Daddy, my dad left Houston and moved in with Grandma Foster when he turned 16 years old. He grew marijuana in the surrounding woods and bayous, and quickly became Glen Oak High School’s drug dealer; because Baton Rouge was so small and Big Daddy’s name and face were so well known, Ed Partin Junior was instantly known in all high schools as a drug dealer who was as equally immune to legal prosecution as his father.
Big Daddy was never in the state — he was spending most free time either flying around with Audie or meeting with Nixon or in one of many hunting cabins around America that Walter Sheridan had arranged for him to have after meeting with Governor McKeithen and being asked to “just get him out of the state” – and my dad was free to do whatever he wanted the summer after Audie Murphy died. He waded through bayous near Grandma Foster’s home and planted patches of marijuana and bought cars and crashed them and was arrested but released every time; both Edward Grady Partins were impervious to prosecution as long as Hoffa was in prison. In the fall of 1971 my dad was a 17 year old senior at Glen Oaks High School and he met my 16 year old mother when she was a junior there and just beginning to experiment with marijuana with her friends, Linda white and the DeBoux sisters.
Wendy lost her virginity to my dad around New Years between the end 1971 and beginning of 1972, and I was conceived. She couldn’t afford an abortion, so she accepted my dad’s proposal and they dropped out of school and eloped to Mississippi, where my dad still had family and it was legal for a 16 year old girl to get married without parental consent. They returned as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Partin and moved into one of Big Daddy’s many houses around Baton Rouge; conveniently, they didn’t have to change the name in the phone book: Edward G. Partin. I entered this story nine months later when I was born in Our Lady of the Lake Hospital at 8:38am on 05 October 1972.
Wendy abandoned me twice over the next year. The second time, my dad was in Kingston, Jamaica, buying opiates wholesale. He had left her with no car and only a couple of hundred dollars to buy groceries. One morning she was running out of money ands earched the notice board of a coffee shop for work. She saw a handwritten note asking for someone to share a ride to California and contribute to gas, and on impluse she called the young man and said yes and left me at a daycare center near Glen Oaks High School. Wendy listed Linda White as my emergency contact; when no one showed up at the daycare to pick me up they called Linda and her dad rushed over and picked me up. He called the police, and a judge removed me from Partin custody and assigned Linda’s parents as my legal guardians. Wendy and my dad both returned on their own and spent the next few years getting a divorce and fighting each other and the Whites for my custody.
Like most of my family history that’s online, the details are omitted and the bigger picture is told by either intentional or ignorant omissions. Judge Lottinger knew most of my history, but focused on Wendy and me when he wrote:
This is a suit by Edward Partin, Jr., plaintiff, seeking a divorce from his wife, Wendy Rothdram Partin, defendant, after having lived separate and apart for more than one year following a judgment of separation from bed and board. Plaintiff also seeks custody of the minor child, Jason Ian Partin, and the defendant reconvened asking that she be granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child.
The Trial Court had previously, by ex parte order, awarded the temporary care, custody and control of the minor to Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White. Following trial on the merits, plaintiff was awarded a divorce as well as the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child, with the temporary physical custody of the minor child to remain with Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White. The defendant has appealed this judgment as it regards the custody of the child.
This couple was married when plaintiff was 17 and the defendant was 16 years of age. Nine months following the marriage, they gave birth to young Jason. While we are not concerned with the facts surrounding the separation and divorce, it was apparently one of incompatibility as defendant testified that at the age of 17 she found herself married to a man who did not love her and so she left. Her testimony was as follows:
“As I say I was emotionally upset. I was receiving little support from Edward. I was scared, very confused. I didn’t know exactly which way to turn. I felt I had no one to listen and help with the situation at hand.”
Several weeks later she returned and lived with her husband again. She found that the situation hadn’t changed, and felt she had to get away again. She heard of a man who wanted someone to share expenses on a trip to California, so she quit her job and with her last wages left with him. She testified that she had no sexual relations with this man, and plaintiff does not accuse her of such. Following this trip she returned to Baton Rouge still emotionally upset. Her husband was suing her for separation and told her he was going to take custody of Jason. She went to live with her aunt and uncle, got a full time job with Kelly Girls paying $512.00 per month.
In February, 1975, the defendant’s mother was injured in an accident and she moved in with her to care for her. In September, 1975, following the recuperation of the mother she returned to live with her aunt and uncle.
During these above periods of time, the minor child lived with Mr. and Mrs. White. The Whites came to regard Jason as their own and, although the separation judgment awarded custody to the plaintiff with reasonable visitation privileges to the defendant, the Whites decided the defendant-mother could only see the child two days a month and that she could never keep the child over night. The reason the defendant did not contest custody at the separation trial was because at the time she felt unable emotionally and financially to care for her son.
We note that the petition for separation was grounded on habitual intemperance, as well as abandonment of the husband and the minor child. There are no other grounds listed for the separation nor for custody. The petition for the separation and custody of the minor child was not contested by the defendant, and a default judgment was granted. Defendant testified in the instant proceedings that the reason she did not contest custody in the separation proceeding was that she was not financially or emotionally capable of caring for the minor, and that knowing the Whites were going to be caring for him, she knew he would be in good hands.
Though the petition for separation had as one of its allegations “habitual intemperance”, the plaintiff in the instant proceeding testified that he had never accused his wife of drinking, nor had he ever seen her drink.
The welfare of the child is the main issue that the Court is concerned with. This issue is more important than any wishes or wants the parents may have. Fulco v. Fulco, 259 La. 1122, 254 So.2d 603 (1971), rehearing denied (1971). As a general rule, and in particular where children of young age are involved, preference is given to the mother in custody cases. This preference is very simply explained, the mother is normally better able to care for the child and look after the education, rearing, and training necessary. Estes v. Estes, 261 La. 20, 258 So.2d 857 (1972), rehearing denied (1972).
No argument is made that the mother is not now morally or emotionally fit to care for the child, or that the house in which she lives is not a proper place to rear a child. In fact, the Trial Judge admitted that it was a fine home.
The Trial Judge has not favored us with written reasons for judgment, however, we must conclude from various statements by the Trial Judge that appear in the record that he could find no fault with the defendant, nor was there anything wrong with the house in which she lived. It thus becomes apparent to this Court that the Trial Judge applied the “double burden” rule to the defendant. We have already ruled that the “double burden” rule does not apply in this situation, and thus, under the established jurisprudential rules, we can see no reason why the defendant-mother should not be granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child with reasonable visitation privileges granted to the father.
In consideration of our above opinion, there is no need to discuss the specification of error as to the ex parte granting of custody to the Whites.
Therefore, for the above and foregoing reasons, the judgment of the Trial Court is reversed, and IT IS ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that the defendant-appellant, Wendy Rothdram Partin, be and she is hereby granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor, Jason Ian Partin, and IT IS FURTHER ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that this matter be and it is hereby remanded to the Trial Court for the purpose of fixing specific visitation privileges on behalf of plaintiff-appellee Edward Partin, Jr. All costs of the appeal are to be paid by plaintiff-appellee.
What’s not mentioned, besides Judge Pugh’s name, is that Judge JJ left 30 years of legislative law to assume Judge Pugh’s role as the only family court judge in East Baton Rouge Parish’s 19th Judicial district, and that he had served under three governors trying to rid Louisiana of Edward Grady Partin Senior. Jimmy Hoffa had been missing since 30 July 1975 and was presumed dead; the Partin’s were no longer needed and their legal immunity vanished along with Hoffa’s body. That’s what finally gave Louisiana the teeth to finally take a bite out of Big Daddy; around the time of Ed Partin Junior’s loss of my custody, Ed Partin Senior was arrested for embezzlement from the Teamsters Union. That case would languish in court for a few years because the 400 pound thick steel safe was found without fingerprints and empty under a Comittee River bridge by the house were Wendy and I had lived with my dad, and the two witnesses who reported Big Daddy were found beaten and bloody. The survivor refused to testify, but newly empowered prosecutors pursued the case daily.
Newspapers once again focused on Big Daddy, but now without Jimmy Hoffa in the picture; my first memories began to form around that time, and my part in his story begins there.
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