Introduction to A Part in History

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,” 1975¹

I’m Jason Partin.

Hillary Clinton broke my left ring finger on 03 March 1990; it healed askew, and to this day my two middle fingers have a gap above the middle finger that looks like Dr. Spock’s split-finger salute on Star Trek, when he wishes someone to “Live long, and prosper.”

My father is Edward Grady Partin Junior, a public defense attorney listed in the Baton Rouge phone book as Edward G. Partin, Attorney at Law. When I was in middle school and during President Reagan’s war on drugs, my dad and I were surrounded by 24 armed deputies with a warrant signed by an Arkansas judge, and he was soon sentenced to a year an a half in prison for “cultivating a controlled substance.”

I was returned to my mother in Baton Rouge. He was – and is – an intelligent and tenacious person who successfully passed the bar exams of of both Arkansas and Louisiana, then sued them both to change their laws and allow a convicted felon to practice law, own a firearm, and vote. My dad is a pit-bull clamped down on the arm of justice.

He inherited his intelligence and tenacity from his father, Edward Grady Partin Senior.

My grandfather was the Baton Rouge Teamster leader famous as the surprise witness who sent Jimmy Hoffa to prison in 1964, ten months after President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. He died two weeks after Hillary broke my finger, and I attended his funeral with my two middle fingers buddy-taped, which is why I still associate my split-finger salute with President Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s assassination, and my grandfather’s part in history.

In law school, my dad – just like every law student in America – studied Edward Partin’s testimony in the 1966 supreme court case “Hoffa versus The United States.” Of nine supreme court justices, only Chief Justice Earl Warren voted against using Ed Partin’s testimony send Hoff prison. In his written summary of why, he mentions my Edwards Partin 148 times, and he says, for posterity to ponder, that to use my grandfather’s testimony would “pollute the waters of justice,” and forever change America’s right to an attorney, and the right to be safe from illegal search and seizure. Those rights have been guaranteed by our founding fathers in the Bill of Rights’s Fourth Amendment since 1792, but Hoffa versus The United States used Big Daddy’s testimony to bend our system of justice only 150 years later.

Most law students know Chief Justice Warren’s history; but, after Kenendy’s assassination, Earl Warren was a household name. He was internationally famous for the 1964 Warren Report, which was read by or summarized to practically everyone on Earth. Kennedy was shot and killed by at least one sniper as he rode through downtown Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963; The Warren Report mistakenly said that New Orleans Native Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President Kenendy, and that Jack Ruby, a low-level runner for Hoffa and the mafia, acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald on live television two days later. At that time, the international focus on Kennedy’s murder and abundant conspiracy theories led to Warren’s oversight of Jimmy Hoffa’s case becoming daily news, which added to my grandfather’s fame, especially in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Hoffa’s army of attorneys and mafia allies fought my grandfather’s testimony for a decade, and to keep him in prison President Kennedy’ little brother, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover falsely showcased the Partins as a wholesome family across national media. Because of inevitable retaliation by Hoffa and the mafia, Hoover hand-selected his top federal marshals to follow and protect my grandfather, grandmother, and their five children. That continued until Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975, three years after I was born.

Bobby and Hoover asked Walter Sheridan, former head of the 500-agent Get Hoffa Task Force, to buy my grandmother a house and pay her a monthly salary to remain silent, a right ironically supported by Chief Justice Earl Warren and his well-known Miranda Rights: the right to remain silent, and the right to an attorney. She was Mamma Jean, a Southern Belle and beauty queen without an education but with five young children, but that was hidden from public and she moved from Louisiana to protect my family.

The Partins became what was known as America’s first family of paid informants, which was – and is – different than anonymous informants in protection programs because my grandfather embraced his national fame and returned to running the Louisiana Teamsters and collaborating with Carlos Marcello, which was also followed in news. Ny grandfather became probably the most famous and recognizable person in Louisiana.

Everyone in Baton Rouge called my grandfather Big Daddy. He was a big, handsome, charming man who was almost always smiling, and was so convincing that Hoffa’s jury took only four hours to believe his word against Hoffa’s. In only four hours, they convicted the world’s most powerful man not a Kennedy for jury tampering.

In Hoffa’s second autobiography, published by Stern and Day in 1975, a few months before Hoffa vanished, all he could say about how my grandfather fooled him was:

“Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”

Everyone who knew Ed Partin, including me, believes that was the most concise summary of Big Daddy possible.

In 1983, Big Daddy was portrayed by the ruggedly handsome actor Brian Dennehy in “Blood Feud,” a rare two-part televised series with enough marketing to ensure everyone in America saw it. The iconic actor Robert Blake, whose intense and square-jawed face looked like Hoffa’s, won an academy award for “channeling Hoffa’s rage,” a daytime soap opera heartthrob whose name I can’t recall portrayed Bobby Kennedy, and Ernest Borgnine portrayed J. Edgar Hoover. I was in middle school then, about two years shy of being arrested with my dad, who had also lost his federal protection after Hoffa vanished.

Blood Feud focused on Hoffa’s plot to kill Bobby Kennedy by blowing up his home and family. He asked if Big Daddy could get military plastic explosives, C4, from his childhood colleague, Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans mafia boss. Big Daddy refused, saying he wouldn’t kill kids (though he would soon be arrested and mysteriously freed for kidnapping two kids, the two and six year old children of a Baton Rouge Teamster named Sydney Simpson). America dubbed Big Daddy an all-American hero, and that whitewashed kidnapping charge was the “minor domestic problem” that Hoffa used “bunny ears” to sarcastically describe for the rest of his life. In addition to being a kidnapper, Big Daddy was also a rapist, murderer, thief, adulterer, and racketeer who, ironically pointed out by Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa versus The United States, was also a habitual perjurer who bore false witness to jurors and newspapers most of his life, though those parts of his background were mostly hidden from Life Magazine and the producers of Blood Feud.

In 1993, newly elected president, Bill Clinton, was the first president to release part of the classified John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report, which was finalized in 1976 after ten years of investigation. It reversed the Warren Report and said that Kennedy was probably killed as part of a larger conspiracy, multiple shooters were likely involved, and that a few months before Kennedy was shot in the back of his open convertible, Big Daddy and Hoffa had also plotted to shoot Bobby Kennedy with a lone sniper as he road through a southern town in a convertible. Coincidentally, at that time I was a paratrooper on President Clinton’s quick-reaction force, with diplomatic passport and national security clearances, and with my name and access to classified information I began to understand my grandfather’s part in history.

A slew of books and television specials followed, though all missed key points and therefore came to mistaken conclusions; most, if not all, were rushed to publication in hopes of a lucrative movie deal, which means few people read all versions before coming to a conclusion.

In 2019, Big Daddy was portrayed by the burly actor Craig Vincent in Martin Scorsese’s opus about Hoffa, “The Irishman,” based on a 2004 memoir called “I heard you paint houses,” by Charles Brandt and Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a mafia hitman, Teamsters leader, and colleague of Big Daddy’s who claims to killed Hoffa in a suburban Detroit home in 1975. To paint houses was mafia lingo for coloring a wall red with splattered blood, and Hoffa’s Teamster story is intertwined with America’s mafia stories and Kennedy’s assassination.

Scorsese was the most celebrated mafia and gangster film producer in history. He raised $257 Million to make his film for what he said was entertainment to sell tickets, not a documentary. He spent a decade recruiting all the best name actors, like Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and a dozen more names known for bringing in audiences to buy tickets.

Craig Vincent was chosen for a small role portraying Big Daddy. Craig was – and is – a 6’6″ Italian-American with a barrel chest, dark complexion, and northeastern tough-guy accent. He had worked with Scorcese and the other actors before, in 1995’s Casino, and to adapt to Craig’s accent and darker complexion Scorsese changed Big Daddy to be “Big Eddie” Partin. Craig researched his role by calling my uncle, Byron Keith Partin, who was current president of the Baton Rouge Teamsters, and by speaking with me, who was harder to find. He asked us what were the personality traits that allowed my grandfather to fool the Teamsters, mafia, and FBI. I couldn’t answer concisely, but it got me thinking, and a year later I watched the Irishman with an insider’s perspective.

Scorcese had to edit Big Eddie’s role down from twenty minutes to only five so they could squeeze my grandfather into an already whopping three hour and 29 minute film. The Irishman sold out theaters the summer of 2019, and hundreds of millions of dollars profit on their $257 Million investment, but Covid-19 shuttered public spaces worldwide soon after. Netflix streamed it beginning in November of 2019, and by 2020 it had set global streaming records; almost a Billion people saw a simplified version of my family’s part in history.

What was not discussed was how Big Daddy’s testimony forever changed how the mafia found investors, who had, until Hoffa went to prison, relied on Hoffa’s $1.1 Billion unregulated and mostly cash Teamster pension fund. And, The Irishman didn’t touch on how the federal government monitored and prosecuted people in America, which, until Big Daddy’s testimony, had been restricted by the 4th Amendment’s restrictions on search and seizure. But, perhaps by accident or maybe due to a stroke of genius in storytelling by Martin Scorcese, a scene from The Irishman that made its way around the internet was of Big Eddie standing silently behind all of the big-name actors, but with Craig’s bulk exaggerated by a low camera angle with a zoom lens that made him seem larger than life, a puppeteer standing over the names everyone knew from history and had paid to see.

The most remarkable violation of the 4th Amendment was, in my mind, when Hoffa versus the United States was used by President Bush Junior as a foundation for the 2001 PATRIOT Act, which allowed unwarranted surveillance of all American cell phones following the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks that took down New York’s World Trade Center twin towers and sent an airplane into the U.S. military’s headquarters in Washington DC. In addition to monitoring the cell phones of hundreds of millions of Americans, the 2001 PATRIOT Act led to terrorist suspects being held without a trial or access to a lawyer, and being tortured in Guantanamo, Cuba, for more than twenty years; that’s an indirect result of my grandfather’s 1964 testimony, and why Hoffa versus the United States is still part of the curriculum in law schools across America.

The Hillary who broke my finger was not Hillary Rodham Clinton, who became a household name when Arkansas governor William “Bill” Clinton became president in 1992. The Hillary who broke my finger was the returning three-time undefeated Louisiana state champion wrestler, captain of the revered Baton Rouge Capital High School Lions wrestling team, and winner of the 1990 Baton Rouge city tournament on 03 March 1990. My victory was overshadowed in local news by my grandfather’s death and funeral, but I had long since grown used to being identified more by my Partin family than anything I did. Soon after his funeral, I graduated high school, left for the army, fought in the first Gulf war of 1990-1991, and briefly served on President Bush Senior’s quick reaction force until President Clinton took office and I first read the John F. Kennedy assassination report.

Every four years, I read what was released by each new president. I don’t know why presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush Senior kept the entire report classified, nor why presidents Bush Junior, Obama, Trump during his first term, and Biden still kept some parts classified. Some people said it was to protect witnesses, hide social security numbers and other sensitive information, or to protect former president George Bush Senior, who had been director of the Central Intelligence Agency for years. In his second election as president, Donald Trump released the final parts in 2025, but it didn’t provide much more insight than what Clinton released in 1992, at least from my perspective.

Like how Hoffa spent six years in prison pondering how Big Daddy fooled him and plotting how to regain power in the Teamsters, I spent two years of the pandemic pondering how answer Craig’s question about Big Daddy and wondering how to show that it still matters.

By the time of Covid-19, I was looking back through time with the eyes almost half a century old. For most of my life, I had read practically every book by or about Big Daddy, Jimmy Hoffa, and President Kennedy, trying to understand how to use history to help America and democracy improve based on facts. But no one knows everything, which is why I decided to write a memoir instead of a true crime, or like Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran may have unknowingly done, historical fiction. No one knows all versions of a story, and Frank died before Covid and therefore is unable to clarify questions left unanswered. Hoffa’s body hasn’t been found, the FBI case is still open, and the world still doesn’t have closure on President Kennedy’s murder.

What I realized was that Craig’s question didn’t have a concise answer, and that to share what I’ve learned in the thirty years since Big Daddy’s funeral, I’d have to begin with wrestling Hillary Clinton and go from there.

Go to the Table of Contents

1. From “Hoffa: The Real Story,” his second autobiography, published a few months before he vanished in 1975 ↩︎