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, published just before he vanished from a Detroit parking lot.
I’m Jason Partin.
My biologic father is Edward Grady Partin Junior, a drug dealer who went to prison in 1986 during the height of President Reagan’s war on drugs; he became a lawyer and is currently a public defense attorney in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
My grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader who became famous as the mole inside Jimmy Hoffa’s inner circle; according to Chief Justice Earl Warren, my grandfather’s testimony was the sole reason Hoffa was found guilty in 1966’s Hoffa versus The United States. Prosecutors hid that Edward Grady Partin Senior was also a lier, thief, rapist, murder, adulterer, racketeer, and weapons smuggler. To protect their only witness, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover whitewashed my grandfather’s history, plastered him across national media, and shielded anyone with the name Edward Partin from legal prosecution as long as Hoffa remained in prison. I believe he was also involved in killing President Kennedy, though probably not at a high enough level to warrant his prosecution in lieu of getting Hoffa.
But this memoir is not about my grandfather, it’s about Wendy Partin and nature versus nurture.
Wendy was my mother. She was born Wendy Anne Rothdram on 08 August 1955 in a suburb of Toronto, Canada. When she was four years old, her mother – my Granny – fled an abusive husband and moved them to Baton Rouge to live with my Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob. Twelve years later Wendy was a petite but athletic and strikingly attractive girl with strawberry blonde hair and hazel eyes that crinkled when she laughed; she was a junior at Glenoaks High School and met the area’s 17 year old drug dealer, Edward Grady Partin Junior. He was a tall, handsome, strong, and defiant teenager with long black hair and narrow brown eyes so dark they blended into his black hair. He had the nicest sports car in Baton Rouge (though I don’t recall which brand) and was immune to police prosecution. He rarely smiled.
My mom lost her virginity to my dad and discovered she was pregnant with me two weeks later. She couldn’t afford an illegal abortion (partially because Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Roe versus Wade case that legalized abortion was still a year away) so Wendy accepted my dad’s proposal; they dropped out of school and eloped to Woodville, Mississippi, only an hour away in my dad’s fast muscle car (whatever it was). My grandfather was born there in 1926, and his mother, my Grandma Foster, and his father, Grady Patin, were born there in the 1800’s. Everyone knew the name Edward Partin there and they had plenty of spaces to stay.
Mississippi laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old girl to marry a 17 year old boy. They returned to Baton Rouge as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Grady Partin and moved into one of my grandfather’s rural houses near the swampy forests surrounding the Comite River Bridge, where my dad could hunt and grow weed on hidden patches of dry land that poked up from the marsh. The house was already furnished and listed under Edward G. Partin; they didn’t have to change names for utilities or the phone book and quickly settled in to a new lifestyle. I was born nine months later.
Wendy had a series of nervous breakdowns. One time was when my dad was away with his friends buying drugs in Miami and seeing a Bob Marley show in Kingston; while alone with me, she saw a handwritten note on a coffee shop community board asking to share gas to California and she impulsively responded and abandoned me at a daycare near Glenoaks, a rural high school three miles from the Baton Rouge airport and the Interstate I-110 that led to downtown and the cross-country Interstate-10. She and the stranger left the daycare and turned west on I-10 and followed it straight for 1,830 miles until it ended at the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles. East Baton Rouge Parish’s only family court judge removed me from my parents’s custody and I entered the Louisiana foster system.
Wendy woke up in Los Angeles and took a bus back to Baton Rouge. She visited me two days a month and took me to play at parks near Glenoaks while she fought to get me back. She was ashamed of having abandoned me and for being a single teenage mother without a high school diploma, and she taught me to call her by her first name so people would think I was her little brother. It worked, and I called my mother Wendy until the day she died on 05 April 2019.
I flew home to be by her side during her final few hours. The next day I hastily wrote her obituary, and this is what was published published in the Baton Rouge Advocate from 08 to 09 April 2019:
Wendy Rothdram Partin, a resident of St. Francisville, LA, passed way on Friday, April 5th, 2019 at the age of 63. Wendy attended Glenoaks High School in Baton Rouge, LA, and retired from Exxon Mobil. She is survived by her son, Jason Ian Partin, of San Diego, CA. She was preceded in death by her mother, Joyce Rothdram, and her aunt and uncle, Lois and Robert Desico, all of Baton Rouge, LA. During her retirement, she became a master gardener and enjoyed helping people with their lawns. She enjoyed cooking, and took food to anyone she knew who was ill or grieving. Wendy loved animals, and worked with local shelters to foster dogs until they found permanent homes. She passed away unexpectedly from liver failure. In lieu of gifts or a service, please spend time sharing what you love with your neighbor, listen to what they love, and help each other.
To plant trees in memory, please visit _____
There was more to tell but obituaries are short and sweet, and it’s hard to tell Wendy’s story without beginning with Edward Grady Partin Senior.
We called my grandfather Big Daddy. He was tall, built like a bull, and had sky blue eyes and wavy strawberry blonde hair and a perpetual gentle smile that led people to trust him. His all-American looks and charm led him to be elected president of Baton Rouge Teamster’s Local #5 in the mid 1950’s and re-elected every year for almost thirty years. Big Daddy’s face on front page news of Louisiana papers at least once a month, and after he testified against International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa rarely a year went by without national magazines like Life or Look! showcasing him or national news repeating his words.
Americans knew what Big Daddy looked and sounded like, so when producers of Blood Feud, the 1983 national two-part movie about Hoffa and Kenendy, cast actors, they had to find someone who resembled my grandfather. They chose a new actor named Brian Dennehy, who would go on to be one of America’s most celebrated actors known for portraying ruggedly handsome men (his breakout role followed the summer after Blood Feud and coincidentally had blood in the name; he played the Korean war veteran and rural mountain-town sheriff who pursued Sylvester Stalone as the Vietnam special forces veteran with PTSD in Rambo: First Blood). Dennehy had green eyes and was smaller than Big Daddy, but otherwise the resemblance was so close that even I was confused when watching him on the small black and white TV Wendy and I shared.
From his minimum prison cell with a big color television, Big Daddy said he thought Dennedy did a fine job portraying him. (I never learned what he thought of Rambo.) And 1985 Big Daddy was portrayed by the wavy-haired and handsome Ben Fuhrman in the TV miniseries Robert Kennedy and His Times, but I never learned what he thought of that, either.
In 1986 Big Daddy was released early from prison due to declining health and he returned to Baton Rouge. He died in 1990, my senior year of high school and just before I left Louisiana for the army. Hundreds of Teamsters clogged the Baton Rouge arteries leading to Greenoaks Funeral Home with their lumbering and rumbling 18 wheeler trucks; every Baton Rouge police officer was on duty directing traffic and controlling crowds, and the 1954 LSU Tigers national champion football team reunited for the funeral. A couple of politicians and former mayors attended, and of course my dad’s side of my family was there. Mixed among us and listening in were a gaggle of FBI agents; the case against Hoffa was still open, and they unabashedly served as both security and eavesdroppers hoping for a clue. Teams of reporters from most major newspapers stood outside snapping photos of everyone who entered. The Los Angeles Times summarized Big Daddy’s history in a front page article. They wrote:
BATON ROUGE, La. — Edward Grady Partin, the labor leader whose testimony sent Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa to prison in 1967 and who himself was convicted of extortion, has died at 66.
Partin, who died Sunday at a nursing home here, suffered from heart disease and diabetes.
A native of Woodville, Miss., Partin was business manager of Teamsters Local 5 in Baton Rouge for 30 years.
Partin, a close associate of Hoffa, helped then-Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy convict the Teamsters boss in 1964 of jury tampering. Partin testified that Hoffa had offered him $20,000 to fix the jury at Hoffa’s 1962 trial on charges of taking kickbacks from a trucking company. That trial ended in a hung jury, but Hoffa eventually was convicted of jury tampering and mail fraud and served nearly five years in federal prison.
James Neal, a prosecutor in the jury-tampering trial in Chattanooga, Tenn., said that when Partin walked in the courtroom, Hoffa gasped, “My God, it’s Partin!”
The government later spent several years and three trials prosecuting Partin on labor corruption charges before he went to prison in 1980 for conspiracy to obstruct justice by hiding witnesses and arranging for perjured testimony.
While in prison, he pleaded no contest to conspiracy, racketeering and embezzling $450,000 in union money. He was released to a halfway house in 1986.
Union members at one time voted to continue paying his salary while he was in prison. He was removed from office in 1981.
Survivors include his mother, two brothers, a sister, five daughters, two sons and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Big Daddy is described in hundreds of books about Hoffa and the Kennedys published beginning in 1966 and reaching into today, including the 2004 memoir “I heard you paint houses: Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and closing the case on Jimmy Hoffa.” Frank was a WWII infantryman with PTSD like Rambo and countless other veterans; he had killed probably hundreds of people in his two year deployment during an unprecedented 345 days of hands-on combat at a time when soldiers still died hearing each side scream from only a few feet away. Sheeran was honorably discharged from the army and became a mafia hitman; that’s how he met Hoffa.
I heard you paint houses lingo for paining a wall with splattered blood; Frank said that’s the first thing Hoffa said to him. He replied: “Yes. And I do my own carpentry work,” meaning he also disposed of the bodies. Frank became a delivery truck driver for Teamster local #107 in Philadelphia and then was elected president of local #326 in Delaware, similar to how Big Daddy was president of Local #5 in Baton Rouge. Both were called lieutenants in Hoffa’s army.
Frank was pulled from prison in his 70’s due to ill health; his release was facilitated by the co-author of Frank’s memoir, Charles Brandt, an established true-crime author and attorney with a reputation for coaxing truth from witnesses and convincing juries of their authority. Brandt worked with Frank The Irishman for 14 years to nurture I heard You Paint Houses into a narrative memoir that is also a treatise on Hoffa and the mafia. Aiding their effort was Frank Sheeran’s latent Catholic upbringing: he wanted to confess his sins before he died. Frank passed away a few months before his memoir was finally published in 2004; in it, he confesses to more than a dozen unsolved murders in the 1960’s and 70’s, including Hoffa’s. He claims to have painted the wall of a Detroit suburban house red with Hoffa’s blood on 22 November 1975, though Hoffa’s body or evidence of his remains have never been found.
Martin Scorcese bought the movie rights to I Heard You Paint Houses from Steerforth Press and raised $257 Million to make his opus about Hoffa and the mafia. Scorcese hired the best Hollywood actors and had worked with them in decades of gangster classics and centered his opus around Frank Sheeran and renamed it The Irishman.
Big Daddy was portrayed by the burly Craig Vincent who had played a thug in Scorsese’s 1995 Casino. Craig researched his role by watching Dennehy in Blood Feud and contacting surviving Partins, but he couldn’t mimic Big Daddy’s southern drawl and sly smile like Dennehy had. Scorcese modified the role to fit Craig’s dark complexion and northeast Italian accent and fit “Big Eddie” Partin into twenty-five minutes of film. After editing, Big Eddie was squeezed into five minutes of Scorcese’s whopping three hour and twenty nine minute film, probably the most that modern movie-goers would sit and watch. The Irishman sold out theaters the summer of 2019 and quickly recouped the quarter of a billion dollar investment.
Scorsese was an artist and one of the century’s most nuanced film makers. In one scene, Big Eddie Partin is towering silently behind the more well known actors like Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Ray Ramono. Scorcese had lowered the camera angle to make Craig Vincent appear even larger than he was in real life; it looks like he’s a puppet master controlling the men below him. (After The Irishman was released, I told Craig he did a fine job and my grandfather would have appreciated that scene.)
In March of 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered all theaters on Earth; Netflix picked up The Irishman and it set global streaming records. For the next year, approximately one Billion people saw a condensed version of my grandfather’s part in history.
During Covid-19 my mother had been deceased a year and hardly anyone alive remembered her or knew her relationship with my grandfather. I decided to work through my grief by immersing into what was already published on Hoffa and The Kennedys. I ordered around 50 books from Amazon not already on my bookshelf, and I used the internet to research what was publicly known versus only existed in my memories or our family’s letters and memorabilia. That’s when I stumbled upon my 1976 custody court report that was inexplicably available online forty-four years after my mother took her stand against the Partin family.
For decades my custody report was only available in the East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial District under Partin versus Partin. Judge JJ Lottinger assumed oversight of my case immediately after Hoffa vanished and he worked with Wendy for more than a year to ensure she had the support she needed to regain my custody.
When I read it in 2020, what surprised at first was that I had – and still have – a fuzzy memory of Judge Lottinger and Wendy and me. I can see us in what must have been his private chambers in the downtown courthouse; he was trustworthy and had a kind smile and asked me to call him Judge JJ. What he learned he documented in Partin versus Partin, and this is what Judge JJ had to say about Wendy and me in 1976:
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.
1976 is when my memories first begin forming; everything before that is only what I’ve read or heard, but everything after that is what I know to be true. To get the whole story – or at least my perspective – it’s useful to start with Jimmy Hoffa. He vanished in 1975 and his story is well known. This is what I believe.
James R. Hoffa was a hard working high school dropout during the Great Depression and was a street-wise teenager who, like many men back then, loaded and unloaded trucks when there was work and didn’t eat when there wasn’t work. Hoffa famously convinced men to unionize; they waited until truckloads of fresh and expensive strawberries arrived in the hot sun and refused to load them into a refrigerated grocery store. The timing gave him negotiating power; his men were guaranteed a minimum for showing up and a bit more when they worked.
Over the next few years, Hoffa and anyone who followed him were beaten, threatened, and arrested; but he persevered and was elected president of the Detroit local Teamsters. He was only 5’6″ but kept in peak physical form and never drank alcohol to keep his mind sharp; and to compensate for his size he surrounded himself with the biggest, toughest Teamsters willing to take on teams of mercenaries hired by managers to keep unions away from their companies. Hoffa was elected president of The International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1954, around the same time Big Daddy moved to Baton Rouge and took over the Baton Rouge Local #5 Teamsters.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters was the world’s largest labor union. It began as a union of horse-carriage driving teamsters in the late 1800’s and grew to approximately 2.7 Million truck drivers by 1954. Those millions of members paid monthly dues in untraceable cash of between $6 and $10 each, somewhere around $25 Million a month in cash. Hoffa accumulated and controlled a $1.1 Billion pension fund, which was an unfathomable sum of money back and was untraceable by federal regulators.
The Irishman said:
“Jimmy Hoffa didn’t care anything about money. He gave it away. But he did like power.”
Hoffa lent millions from the Teamster pension fund to mafia families to build their casinos and hotels in exchange for jobs for his Teamsters and hefty returns to the fund; he used that fund to pay a salary for striking Teamsters who remained loyal and then a retirement after a around 30 years of work. To even meet with Hoffa and discuss a loan cost around $40,000, which he would use to build more power and support more Teamsters. And Hoffa financed Hollywood films that used Teamsters to haul equipment and house actors. Films from those decades end with the Teamsters logo as the final screen: two horse heads named Thunder and Lightening behind a ship’s steering wheel. If any worker used a wheel, they could become a Teamster.
Hoffa became the most famous and powerful man in America who was not a Kennedy. If Hoffa ordered a national strike – which he often threatened to do – the U.S. economy would slam to a halt. Every product and all food on every shelf in every store in America was brought there by Teamsters, and every product made in American factories or grown on American soil for international trade was shipped by Teamsters to ports and across the globe. Teamsters drove America. The $1.1 Billion pension fund would hold them over while they waited for Hoffa to get his way.
The then-senator, decorated WWII veteran, Pultizer-prize winning author, and Irish-Catholic Bostonian John F. Kennedy was chair of the U.S. labor relations committee and set his sites on removing Hoffa from power. Kennedy was elected president in 1959 and assumed office in January of 1960; his first act was to appoint his brash and quick to battle little brother Bobby Kennedy as U.S. Attorney General and task Bobby with two and only two goals: get rid of Hoffa and stop the mafia’s growing power in America.
Bobby Kennedy was fresh out of Boston’s Harvard law school and young and anxious to impress. President Kennedy gave him the full force of America’s judicial system and an unlimited budget. Bobby oversaw aging FBI architect J. Edgar Hoover and ordered the focus of 500 federal agents with the sole purpose of finding “something” or “anything illegal” that would remove Jimmy Hoffa from power. Hoover assigned FBI agent and former John F. Kennedy campaign manager Walter Sheridan to head what became known as The Get Hoffa Task Force.
Hoffa was harassed daily and Hoover used the most advanced surveillance technology to get him. Every month Bobby initiated trivial state-level criminal charges against Hoffa and the Teamsters so they would be bogged down in court. Walter – whom I’d grow to know and trust and shows up later in my story – reported progress daily to both Hoover and Bobby. By then Bobby had installed a direct phone line between Hoover’s office and his so they’d have constant updates and could adapt to new information and plot new paths.
But Hoffa persisted and prevailed against the many court cased hurled at him. In public he railed against Bobby and called him “Booby” and “snot nosed little brat” in every press conference, saying Booby still “wet behind the ears,” and that he only had his job because the president was his big brother and they were both from a privileged family who did not know the working class of America. The hot-headed Bobby and street-brawling Hoffa exchanged insults and even pushed and shoved each other in front of reporters. Their public battle became so fierce that media dubbed it The Blood Feud.
By 1962 media called the Get Hoffa Task Force the most expensive, fruitless effort to get one man in the history of any government. Most people saw The Blood Feud as a waste of taxpayer money and a distraction from more important crisis; by then America was at the peak of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Kennedy had orchestrated the failed invasion of communist Cuba in the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and in October of 1962 the world watched Kennedy and Khrushchev ease from the brink of nuclear war after the Soviet Union had moved nuclear missiles within striking distance of Miami during The Cuban Missile Crisis. Between world events and while leading America’s justice system, Bobby sat in briefing rooms trying to prevent nuclear war and reporting to his big brother that he still could not get Hoffa despite the full might of America behind him.
But in 1962 Bobby gained a huge weapon against Hoffa during The Cuban Missile Crisis: my grandfather. Big Daddy was arrested for kidnapping the two small children of a 24 year old Baton Rouge Teamster named Sydney Simpson (it was the “minor domestic problem” Hoffa would sarcastically explain by using “bunny ears” until the day he disappeared). Big Daddy and Simpson were placed in a Baton Rouge jail cell and the next day manslaughter reports against Big Daddy came in from Mississippi; he was facing life in prison. According to Chief Justice Earl Warren’s comments in Hoffa versus The United States, this was Simpson’s sworn testimony:
“A few days later Partin was released from the jail. From the day when I first saw the deputy, until the date when Partin was released, Partin was out of the cell most of the day and sometimes part of the night. On one occasion Partin returned to the cell and said, ‘It will take a few more days and we will have things straightened out, but don’t worry.’ Partin was taken in and out of the cell frequently each day. Partin told me during this time that he was working with Daniels and the FBI to frame Hoffa. 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. . . .'”
J. Edgar Hoover and Bobby Kennedy met with Big Daddy and made a deal that became the basis of dozens of books and 1983’s Blood Feud and Big Daddy’s small part in The Irishman. But there’s more to the story and it’s been muddled with time and noise from so many conflicting books and films; who killed President Kennedy, why, and how.
This is what is known. On 18 November 1963 Bobby and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had approached President Kennedy and told him there was a credible threat on his life. The president listened while they described Big Daddy and his plot with Hoffa to shoot and kill Bobby Kennedy as he rode through a southern town in a convertible by a sniper with a scope who would not be traced back to Hoffa and the Teamsters. They finished talking and Kennedy said there was always a plot to kill him and that he was going to Dallas, anyway.
Four days later President Kennedy was shot and killed at approximately 1:26 pm on 22 November 1963 by at least one 6.5mm rifle round from an Italian surplus WWII carbine as he rode through downtown Dallas in his open convertible.
The main suspect in Kennedy’s death was New Orleans native Lee Harvey Oswald. While he lived in New Orleans, Oswald trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force a few miles from where my parents met at Glenoaks High School seven years later. He defected to Russia in 1959 and married a Soviet citizen and they had a baby; in June of 1962 the FBI paid for all three of them to fly back to New Orleans and arranged for Oswald to find an apartment and menial work that he grew to resent. He was pro-communist and pro-Cuba and pro-Castro, and Oswald handed out fliers trying to rally support to anyone in New Orleans willing to listen. The office for his pro-Castro moonlighting was in a building between New Orleans FBI and CIA offices.
In the spring of 1963 Oswald was offered a job in a downtown Dallas book repository. He left New Orleans and moved into an apartment with his wife and son and ordered a 6.5mm Italian carbine from a mail order catalog. He had it outfitted with a scope by a local gunsmith took a photo of him brandishing it with his .38 caliber Smith and Wesson Model 10 pistol, the same hefty revolver most police used back then. He showed it to local political activists and – though this wouldn’t be known for a few more months – attempted to shot and kill an army general in the general’s Dallas home a few months before Kennedy was killed.
Oswald’s marine records would show that he was an abysmal shot, and the Italian surplus carbine was notorious for inaccuracy; it had been mass produced for Mussolini during WWII and designed to be cheap and useful only in close warfare, where you within a football toss of the other side. Even with a scope, you’d have to be lucky to hit anything far away with it.
President Kennedy was shot by Oswald’s rifle from the 6th floor window of the book repository where Oswald worked, which was about 88 yards away from where the president and his wife were riding through downtown with the Texas governor and his wife in Kennedy’s open convertible. The governor was injured and rushed to a Dallas hospital with Kennedy. Oswald’s rifle were found at the open window; cartridges were laid out on the windowsill like a sniper expecting to take several shots, and another round was inexplicably found beside the Texas governor’s hospital gurney. Oswald’s prints were all over the room and rifle, and repeated FBI and independent analysis continues to show that a round recovered from Kennedy was fired from that rifle.
Oswald was missing. Two hours later he nervously emerged from a nearby movie theater and impulsively shot and killed Dallas police officer JD Tippit with the pistol he had brandished in photos with his rifle. As he was arrested for Tippit’s murder, Oswald exclaimed: “I’m just a patsy!” (that was two years before Chief Justice Earl Warren oversaw Miranda versus Arizona, which led to the Miranda Rights being read to anyone arrested so they know their right to remain silent and wait for an attorney).
President Kennedy was pronounced dead around that same moment and an hour later Oswald was charged with multiple counts of murder. It was quickly concluded that Oswald’s rifle had been used in the attempted assassination of the army general, and markings on that recovered bullet matched the ones that killed Kennedy. Few people doubted Oswald was involved, but his words and the shock of one person changing the course of history instantly led to most of the world believing a larger conspiracy was behind Kennedy’s assassination.
Two days later Oswald was handcuffed and being led out of the Dallas police station when Dallas nightclub owner, mafia runner, and Hoffa associate Jack Ruby walked past police and removed a small Colt .38 detective’s special from his trench coat pocket and used it to shoot Oswald from an arms-reach away and on international live television. A reporter snapped a photo of a handcuffed Oswald doubling over and his face screaming in pain, and Ruby’s hand holding the pistol from two feet away with Ruby’s middle finger on the trigger and his first finger aligned with the barrel; that was known to be mafia guidance for accuracy when firing at with a small pistol whipped from your pocket. Two hours later Oswald died in the same hospital where President Kennedy had been pronounced dead.
There was no doubt Ruby was guilty of killing Oswald. At his trial records showed he called Hoffa and several of Hoffa’s lieutenants multiple times in the weeks leading to Kennedy and Oswald’s deaths, but no correlation could be proved. Ruby pleaded temporary insanity and claimed that he adored the Kennedy’s and was so distraught that acted on impulse to protect Kennedy’s wife from a lengthy trial by killing Oswald. But Ruby slipped out that he planned on shooting more than once, which implied he planned the murder rather than acting impulsively. A few months later a jury would find Ruby guilty of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison, though before he died he reversed his testimony and said he was set up and there was a conspiracy and that the FBI was giving him pills that caused cancer; he died from complications secondary to lung cancer two years into his life sentence. (He was a lifelong smoker.) Oswald was never tried because the U.S. does not try deceased people, and probably no one will ever know what he meant about being a patsy.
When news broke that Kennedy had been murdered, Jimmy Hoffa was sitting with colleagues in Florida and surrounded by reporters. He told them: “Bobby’s just another lawyer now,” and ordered all Teamster local halls to fly their flags full mast and. He said he was glad Kenendy was dead. He assumed the hot-tempered and inexperienced Bobby Kennedy would be replaced by whomever vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson appointed.
But Johnson kept Bobby as attorney general and had him involved in finding who killed his brother; the attorney general oversees all U.S. FBI and justice investigations. A team was assembled of politicians (including future president Gerald Ford), a wealthy banker, and a former CIA director was assembled; and Johnson asked Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren to oversee the investigation.
Warren was famous in his own right. He was a WWI veteran and attorney who became governor of California, and was controversial for supporting the unconstitutional detainment of 250,000 Japanese-Americans including the ones held in remote California concentration camps. Despite controversy, his transparency and almost religious adherence to the U.S. Constitution were unassailable. He ran for president but was overshadowed by WWII war hero General Eisenhower, who became president and appointed Warren as Chief Justice of the nine-justice Supreme Court in 1953. One of his first cases was Brown versus The Board of Education, which began making segregated schools illegal in 1954; that case alone made him a household name. Despite his personal views, Warren was a devout believer in a systematic approach to justice.
Judge Warren and his committee were followed internationally by a world suspecting that a bigger conspiracy was at work: The Soviet Union, Fidel Castro, the mafia, and factions inside the FBI and CIA were – and still are – the most discussed suspects. Some people saw an collaboration on a global scale linked to the industrial military complex that President Eisenhower had famously warned of in his final speech; the evidence they saw was a rapid escalation of American’s involvement in Vietnam after Kennedy’s death (Kennedy had intended to use fewer than 50,000 elite soldiers trained in what is now known as the Kennedy Special Forces Center and train Southern Vietnam instead of fight for them, but Johnson quickly ramped up to 550,000 drafted soldiers with an average age of 19 and added another ten years to the war). Who killed Kennedy and why was the most discussed global topic of 1964.
To most people’s disbelief, ten months after the committee began their investigation, the hastily assembled Warren Report mistakenly concluded that there was no conspiracy and that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President John F. Kennedy and Jack Ruby acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald.
Around the time, Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover decided to use Big Daddy against Hoffa. They were willing to risk exposing their most valuable informant that had been feeding Walter Sheridan and the Get Hoffa Task Force information. Hoffa was on trial in Chattanooga Tennessee for another Bobby-influenced charge of influencing jurors in a 1962 minor state-level labor trial where Hoffa was found not guilty of using his Teamster role to benefit a Detroit trucking company owned by his wife called The Test Fleet.
Hoffa’s 1964 trial for obstructing justice in 1962 was its own national spectacle. FBI agents loomed everywhere around the trial in Chattanooga, and Hoffa’s men stood guard at his hotel. Teamsters, mobsters, and corporate managers were in and out of Hoffa’s room throughout the trial. Hoffa told them that Ed Partin was standing at the door and was to be trusted. When prosecutors seemed to know details about Hoffa’s case, Hoffa had begun to suspect a mole, but big Daddy was so trusted that he was never considered and Hoffa kept him closer to prevent anyone from eavesdropping on Teamster business and his court strategy.
Hoffa was a notoriously calm man in courtrooms. He remained unfazed when a man burst in the Chatanooga courtroom and pointed a pistol pointed at him; Hoffa’s menttee, a stout pitbull without a leash who had boxed in youth named Chuckie O’Brien, leapt across Big Daddy and tackled the man and pistol whipped him with his own gun before courtroom security guards could pry him off. For the rest of the trial, Chuckie patrolled the courtroom hallways during the day and lurked with a .410 shotgun in Hoffa’s hotel at night and kept bumping into Big Daddy but suspected nothing. Hoffa increased his diligence and tightened his inner circle.
Jimmy Hoffa’s face was a chiseled chunk of granite in the courtroom. But when prosecutors called their surprise and Big Daddy stood up from Hoffa’s inner circle and faced the jury, Hoffa’s rigid jawline dropped and his skin turned pale and he probably sealed his own fate when he gasped: “My God, it’s Partin!” The jury only deliberated for three hours before believing Big Daddy’s word and convicting Hoffa of obstructing justice by jury tampering. The shock sent ripples across time; Chuckie, among his final words before passing away in 2020, would say: “Fucking Partin. I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
Immediately after Big Daddy’s role became public, Hoover announced that he was assigning federal marshals to follow and protect my family from inevitable Teamster and mafia retaliation. Bobby used his contacts at Life and Look! magazines to quickly whitewash Big Daddy’s past and showcase him as an all-American hero for standing up to Hoffa’s corrupt Teamsters and their mafia connections. By then, Big Daddy’s most controversial criminal chargers were missing and have not been found since.
Hoffa had the best and lawyers his $1.1 Billion pension fund could afford. By then even his son, James R. Hoffa Junior, was an attorney and motivated to help his father. Hoffa’s army of attorneys left the courtroom and immediately began trying to discredit Big Daddy and appeal based on violations of the 4th and 6th Amendments in our Bill of Rights. The 6th is relatively long and complex and related to what would become the simplified Miranda’s rights; it overlaps with the 1st Amendment’s right to remain silent and ensures a suspect can have a lawyer present so they aren’t manipulated into saying something incriminating or out of context. The 4th Amendment was penned by hand in the 1700’s and concisely protects people against unwarranted search and seizure. It says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Hoffa’s attorneys petitioned that Big Daddy could have influenced Hoffa’s words and therefore violated the 6th Amendment, and that his unwarranted task to find “something” or “anything of interest” violated the 4th Amendment. They rose through appeal courts with that violation leading their charge.
Hoffa, to combat Bobby Kenendy’s whitewashing of the only witness against him, used his fame to lash out at Big Daddy’s character. He wrote:
It was Edward Grady Partin who volunteered the testimony that sealed my doom in the Chattanooga court.
You may have read about him. Thanks to a government sponsorship he was portrayed as something of a national hero. he somehow looked the part, too: a rugged, firm-jawed man with slightly wavy hair and the appearance of sincerity and honesty that would have made him a successful salesman. Ah, you’d say upon meeting him, there’s a true-blue blood American, a churchgoer, no doubt, a man who contributes regularly to charity, a fellow who devotes much time to community-service groups, a chap who turns over most of his paycheck to a divorced wife.
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 ha 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 charged with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.
Hoffa’s word had no power over Life and Look! magazines, which were the most distributed weekly publications and trusted source of news for Americans back then. Big Daddy’s charm oozed from the pages; that’s how he gained the moniker all-American hero that Hoffa would scoff about in public when he ranted about the “minor domestic problem” that Big Daddy was up against when Bobby set him free.
Hoffa’s army of attorneys clawed their case through appeal courts and all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, one of only a few dozen cases out of thousands petitioning to reach the docket. One verdict could set the president for future generations and essentially rewrite the U.S. Constitution. Attorney General Bobby Kenendy followed every step, and newspapers fed the final results to America.
Earl Warren was the was the only justice to vote against using my grandfather’s testimony in Hoffa versus The United States: he would relentlessly focus on both Big Daddy’s character and the obvious violation of the 4th Amendment that meant the case should not have even been tried. Six justices allowed the testimony and two abstained. Hoffa was sentenced to eight years in prison based solely on Big Daddy’s testimony. An additional and seemingly incidental charge of mail fraud were added later, and Hoffa’s total sentence grew to 11 years. He began serving in a small cell in a New Jersey federal penitentiary in 1966.
Earl Warren documented his reasons for his vote against using Edward Partin’s testimony to convict Hoffa in 1966’s Hoffa versus The United States in a lengthy missive permanently attached to the case for posterity to ponder. He railed on my grandfather’s character so vehemently that his words leap of the page; he and the other justices reference Edward Partin on 24 pages of the 30 page court record of Hoffa versus The United States, and the name Edward Partin or Partin is typed 148 times, more than twice as many times as Hoffa’s. Warren began his rant by saying:
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.
Not even Walter Sheridan could deny Big Daddy’s disreputable background, but by the time he would publish his 1972 opus, The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa, no one could confirm that Big Daddy smuggled weapons to Fidel Castro and the rape charge had been whitewashed in Life and Look! magazines, which were the most common and trusted sources of media influencing Americans back then. His thick and almost overly referenced book’s index lists hundreds of witnesses and people involved in the pursuit of Hoffa; Big Daddy name is cited third only to Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy, and Walter got the disreputable aspects out of the way to focus on other parts by saying:
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 for stealing a watch. One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dimissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi,. Two years later Patin was back on the west Coast where he pleaded guilting to second degree burglary. He served three years in the Washington State Reformatory and was paroled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a pleas to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamster 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 head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.
Warren agreed with fellow judges that using disreputable has been a part of the justice system for all of history, and that they will always be useful in a court of law. But he emphasized that Edward Partin’s word should not be used in American court of law because of his incentives to get out of jail. Warren hammers the point of irony again by saying:
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.
And, in what I believe was a warning to posterity about Hoover’s growing illegal wire tapping surveillance program, Warren wrote:
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.
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.
He concluded his rant by saying:
I cannot agree that what happened in this case is in keeping with the standards of justice in our federal system and I must, therefore, dissent.
Warren would die in 1974, long before surveillance technology grew beyond his imagination and his warning would be viewed as prescient in hindsight. Big Daddy being a walking bugging device would resurface and be used as a cornerstone of President George Bush Jr.’s legal justification of the 2001 PATRIOT Act (a brilliant acronym that stood for Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act), and allowed unwarranted wiretapping of hundreds of millions of American’s cell phones and computer anallysis to find “anything of interest,” just as Big Daddy had been tasked by J. Edgar Hoover’s 1962 FBI and therefore allowed as a legal precedent. Other cases from Big Daddy’s time period were also used to justify the PATRIOT Act, including Chuckie O’Brien’s eventual conviction and many others in Hoffa’s inner circle.
Bush Jr. would focus almost a fourth of his memoir on his Attorney General and team of attorneys struggling with the obvious continued erosion of American rights. His book was called Decision Points, and justified his decision by pointing out that at the time America had just been attacked by terrorists who hijacked four passenger jet liners and coordinated them to take down the World Trade center twin towers in New York City and crash into the military’s Pentagon headquarters in Washington DC. Conspiracy theorists would shout about Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s assassination and the military industrial complex and a few would softly utter Earl Warren’s warnings from Hoffa versus the United States, but by then we were once again at war in the Middle East and that began to dominate the news.
Ten years later, President Trump’s administration would build upon the PATRIOT Act to allow ICE agents to question anyone they met and use “anything illegal” to arrest, detain, and eventually deport them without an attorney or due process. By then few people would remember who people like Earl Warren and Jimmy Hoffa, much less Edward Grady Partin.
Some law professors say that modern government surveillance liberties and prosecution methods violate the original Bill of Rights and can be traced back to allowing my grandfather’s testimony in Hoffa versus The United States. What Earl Warren and practically every historian and law professor agree upon today is without recorded evidence, my grandfather’s word was the only thing keeping Jimmy Hoffa in prison.
Hoffa could only get out only if Big Daddy changed his testimony or testified that Bobby and the FBI illegally monitored Hoffa’s legal defense team, which would lead to his case being thrown out and Hoffa returning to power in the Teamsters. In prison, Hoffa was only allowed visits inprison from friends or family once every three months, though he could speak weekly with his attorneys if they weren’t working on other cases. Hoffa shared attorneys with mafia families and paid them to not take on other cases. Because of attorney-client privileges, they could meet in private and Hoffa could communicate with the mafia families via code.
Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran spoke about the days Hoffa was in school, which is what the mafia called prison, and Charles Brandt quoted him as saying:
In school Jimmy talked a lot about Partin. Frank Ragano was supposed to be getting an affidavit from Patin that the government set Jimmy up. There was a [District Attorney] in New Orleans who arrested Partin, and they were supposed to get that D.A. off Partin’s back in exchange for the affidavit. The same D.S. arrested Walter Sheridan for bribery, and that was supposed to help Jimmy by making Sheridan look bad in the papers. All that help came from [mafia boss Russel Buffalo’s] and Jimmy’s good friend, Carlos Marcello, the boss in New Orleans who had the D.A.
Per penitentiary requirements, only attorneys not working on cases could visit Hoffa. To ensure he had constant coded contact with his Teamsters and mafia families, Hoffa paid for attorneys like the coincidentally named Frank Ragano to have no other cases and to ensure the right to attorney-client confidentiality. Ragano was the attorney for Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss Santos Trafficante Jr.
Their codes were well planned because all of Ragano’s clients were being watched by FBI daily; the eventual 1976 classified John F. Kennedy Assassination Report would explain why. It says:
“Since the Warren Commission’s and FBI’s investigation into the possibility of a conspiracy was seriously flawed, their failure to develop evidence of a conspiracy could not be given independent weight.”
“Following the completion of its investigation of organized crime, the committee concluded in its report that Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, and James R. Hoffa each had the motive, means, and opportunity to plan and execute a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.”
“Any evaluation of Marcello’s possible role in the assassination must take into consideration his unique stature within La Cosa Nostra. The FBI determined in the 1960’s that because of Marcello’s position as head of the New Orleans Mafia family (the oldest in the United States, having first entered the country in the 1880’s), the Louisiana organized crime leader had been endowed with special powers and privileges not accorded to any other La Cosa Nostra members.“
Marcello was so powerful that people at even The Irishman’s level did not know his confidential role. Even fewer knew that Marcello owed Hoffa $21 Million for financing New Orleans hotels and mafia operations; when combined the American mafia families, organized crime leaders owed Hoffa $121 Million, which was a jaw-dropping sum back then. Hoffa sent word via his attorneys and therefore via Marcello that all mafia debt would be forgiven if, in what I wonder is a jab at the guidance Bobby Kennedy gave my grandfather, any one could find any way to get him to change his testimony.
Hoffa emphasized again and again that Partin should not be killed. The Irishman said:
“Partin was no good to them dead. They needed him alive. He had to be able to sign an affidavit. They needed him to swear that all the things he said against Jimmy at the trial were lies that he got from a script fed by Bobby Kennedy’s people in the Get Hoffa Squad. Partin had to say that he did all of this because he had kidnapping charges hanging over his head and not because Jimmy had made threats to whack Bobby. That was Jimmy’s best chance on the jury-tampering matter. Partin knew that nobody was going to kiss him [mafia slang for kill him] as long as he strung them along. Partin gave Jimmy’s lawyers useless affidavits and even a deposition. In the end, they never really got him to say that he railroaded Jimmy Hoffa. All they ever got out of him about railroading amounted to no more than, “Partin, me boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?”
Not even media picked up on that detail: Big Daddy had to remain alive.
A six month expose on organized crime in 1968 by Life magazine showcased Big Daddy refusing a $1 Million bribe from Carlos Marcello in exchange for changing his testimony. Baton Rouge lauded that as Big Daddy unafraid of the mafia or possibly even in charge of the mafia. Partially informed national pundits scoffed at Life and said the mafia wouldn’t bribe someone they could kill, but what no one realized, probably not even the FBI, was that Marcello already knew Big Daddy and that bribing an old colleague with $1 Million was good business if it erased $21 Million owed to Hoffa, and that by killing him they’d be honor-bound to repay $21 Million. (Nor did anyone know that Marcello upped the bribe to $2 Million and Big Daddy still refused; like Hoffa, he craved power and had more than enough money.)
Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed soon after that Life expose on organized crime and during his presidential bid in 1968 by the redundantly named Serhan-Serhan. So was Martin Luther King Junior, who was presumably shot by the racist James Earl Ray. Serhan-Serhan is still in jail without any conspiracy links, but the case against Ray had so many similarities to the untried case against Oswald that the house committee on assassinations grouped their clandestine investigation into the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report.
All of that time Big Daddy continued running the Teamsters. Newspaper reports flooded in about him being stabbed and shot, and about unprecedented violence and shootouts and explosions in Baton Rouge as mafia hitmen from around the country poured in and tried “anything” to convince Big Daddy to change his testimony.
Nothing seemed to intimidate Big Daddy. From prison, Hoffa tried other tactics. He sent word to President Nixon that he’d give millions to Nixon’s re-election campaign and offer his endorsement and therefore millions of Teamster votes – and probably more from millions of other people who listened to Hoffa’s word – if Nixon would offer Big Daddy a preemptive pardon for perjury and clemency for the future in exchange for changing his testimony. To strengthen the offer, Hoffa then negotiated with a man who would appeal to all Americans, Audie Murphy: America’s most decorated war hero and star of more than 40 action films, the Texas star and WWII veteran who was revered by citizens, politicians, the mafia, and even The Irishman.
Audie had 268 confirmed kills, enough to impress even hardened hitmen. But he did it as a 17 year old kid of a single mother who believed he was acting for a greater cause. In one of his earliest battles, the diminutive yet handsome Audie stood atop a defunct tank and used a stubby machine gun to faced off against a platoon of Germans while his men retreated to safety; they lived because of him, and Audie earned his first field promotion and went on to be awarded every medal America had to give; he won most medals at least twice, and returned home and became famous as America’s most decorated war hero.
Audie Murphy became the star of more than 40 Hollywood action films until he aged out of the role. He suffered from PTSD publicly in an effort to help more veterans like him, and he publicly refused lucrative cigarette and alcohol endorsements because he didn’t want to influence kids for unhealthy habits. Audie remains popular today: his tomb in Arlington Cemmetary is still the second most visited and is only surpassed by John F. Kennedy’s. Every army medic trains in the San Antonio Audie Murphy Memorial Veterans Medical Center, and because he was an infantryman he’s showcased in Georgia’s Fort Benning Infantry Museum, where a few months after Big Daddy’s funeral I would stand under Audie’s display and see what a true all-American hero looked like. Not even the Irishman questioned Audie Murphy’s valor or intentions. Frank Sheeran said this about Audie Murphy and my grandfather:
“Still suffering nightmares from the war, Murphy had fallen on hard times. He had filed for bankruptcy in 1968 and had been acquitted on an assault-with-intent-to-murder charge in the 1970’s. Still, to a southerner like Partin, the decorated soldier from Tennesee was a shining star. Hoffa brazenly wrote that for the deal to turn out profitable for Audie Murphy and Partin, an unspecified favor was needed from Jimmy. [I assume that was a typo and Frank meant “for” Jimmy.] Hoffa wrote that shortly after the deposition, “Senator George Murphy [California Republican and former movie actor] personally took [the deposition] to Attorney General John Mitchell, and Audie Murphy gave it to President Nixon.”
Audie was enticed by Hoffa funding another film or a business venture. He was given access to one of Marcello’s private planes and pilots to fly Big Daddy back and forth between Baton Rouge and San Diego to meet at Nixon’s beachfront estate in San Clemente, a beach town an hour north of San Diego where I’d live most of my adult life. That apparently worked. Big Daddy reported to newspapers that he had lied about Hoffa because Walter Sheridan was threatening to send him to prison for life on kidnapping charges and that he was worried about his family’s safety in the growing violence of Hoffa’s Teamsters.
But then Marcello’s plane crashed in West Virginia two weeks after leaving Big Daddy in Baton Rouge and Audie and all four passengers died. Texas would name their Veterans Hospital the Audie Murphy Memorial Veterans Medical Center and Big Daddy would recant his recant. To his dying day in 2020, my great uncle Doug Partin would swear Big Daddy had Audie and those men killed rather than change his word against Hoffa, and that by killing Audie Murphy Big Daddy garnished fear in the mafia hitmen targeting him (though I believe the evidence pointing to a mechanical failure in Marcello’s poorly maintained plane.)
Hoffa funded Nixon and gave his endorsement anyway; Nixon was re-elected and commuted Hoffa’s sentence in time for Christmas in 1971, only days before Wendy met Edward Partin Junior and I was conceived. As part of the deal and to highlight his promise to wind down the Vietnam conflict, Nixon asked Hoffa to represent the U.S. in negotiating with Vietnam for the return of American Prisoner’s of War and unclaimed bodies.
But Nixon wasn’t altruistic. He would become famous for resigning the presidency in 1975 instead of inevitably loosing an impeachment for widespread wiretapping and influencing justice, the same things that sent Hoffa to prison and would eventually send Big Daddy to prison. Richard Nixon’s role in history is immortalized in the surf break under his San Clemente mansion named after him: Slippery Dick’s. What sticks in my mind is that Slippery Dick affected my life by slipping a clause into Hoffa’s release contract: he barred Hoffa from Teamster activity for another eight years and stipulated that Hoffa would return to prison if he violated the terms.
That clause surprised even Hoffa and his team of attorneys. The Irishman wrote:
“It said that Jimmy could get out with his good time and all in November 1975, but Nixon was letting him out now. It didn’t say one word about Jimmy not being able to run for office until 1980. I can assure you that I would have picked that up right away. Jimmy was already planning to run in 1976. I might not have a lott of education, but I had been reading union contracts and legal documents for a living for many years. I had read hundreds of documents that were far more complicated than that pardon. All it said was that Jimmy was getting out, finally. We were happy people in that lunchroom, and after a lot of double-crossing by Partin and Fitzsimmons and Nixon and Mitchel, Jimmy was finally getting what he paid for. He was getting out for Christmas.”
Hoffa got out of prison and wanted back in control of the Teamsters. The Irishman said:
“Once he got out of jail he was goin gto take back control of everything. And I was going to help him.”
Frank knew how to help Hoffa get what he wanted. He knew a lot of men with names who would show up in his memoir and on film in Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman, men like Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio, Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo, Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio, Whispers DiTullio, and more. To get what they wanted or what was asked of them, these men were known to torture victims, kill their family members, or do whatever their bosses ordered. To refuse was to end up dead at the hands of your peers. The entire U.S. mafia was alerted that Edward Grady Partin still needed to change his testimony. Their only restraint was that my grandfather should not be killed.
They complied but they were growing tired of Hoffa’s demands, and Hoffa had begun threatening them by saying he had enough on the families to send them to prison if they didn’t help him.
At that time, at least one mafia family was known to be advising Francis Ford Copula for 1972’s The Godfather, a masterpiece film that set the standard for realistically depicting organized crime families. In one of the most famous scenes, an arrogant Hollywood producer who disrespects The Godfather wakes up with a severed horse head bleeding across his bedsheets, which is, to me at least, an obvious reference to the Teamsters horse heads of Thunder and Lightening shown at the end of older Hollywood films. The link between the Teamsters, the mafia, Hollywood, and public perception of the mafia persists to this day: Al Pacino was a costar in 1972’s The Godfather, and the star of The Godfather II in 1974 and The Godfather III in 1990; and he would portray Jimmy Hoffa in 2019’s The Irishman. Whether Frank Sheeran killed Hoffa or not, most historians agree that the national mafia kissed Hoffa into silence on 22 July 1975.
But in 1972 killers behind the scenes of The Godfather set their sites on Baton Rouge. Frank Sheeran grew up Irish Catholic and like most people had probably heard the bible’s guidance to “do onto others as you would have them do onto you.” Because of Time magazine and Hoffa’s rants, all of America knew that Big Daddy was in jail for kidnapping when he made a deal to get Hoffa. Frank said he may not have much education but he could read contracts, and I assume most mafia hitmen back then could read the phone book or knew someone who could.
There were only five Partins listed in the Baton Rouge phone book back then, and only one Edward G. Partin. With the new Interstate 10 connecting New Orleans to Baton Rouge it was only an hour drive between the two, and there was a phone book in every phone booth and convenience store once they arrived.
No one would have known there was an Edward Grady Partin Junior. And he was rarely home so Wendy and I were usually there alone; she was a petite teenager and most people thought I was her little brother. I have flashes of memories from my first few years of life; they’re all centered around bursts of pain and fear and fire and explosions and burning houses and Wendy screaming and people grabbing my arms and me waking up in hospitals. I have scars on the back of my head I do not recall, and x-rays of my left elbow show growth plates hindered by an old fracture I do not remember. Wendy would never open up and talk about it; I believe anyone looking up Edward G. Partin’s home address and showing up unannounced and when my dad was away would have assumed Wendy and I were Big Daddy’s children.
It’s no wonder she fled. What’s remarkable is that she returned.
The day after Hoffa vanished on 30 July 1975 Edward Grady Partin was no longer useful to anyone and most people were focused on Slippery Dick’s resignation and the long-awaited American withdrawal from Vietnam and backlash at American war atrocities like the Mai Lai massacre. Freed from their restraints, Louisiana prosecutors replaced mafia hitmen in the pursuit of my grandfather. He was charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, racketeering, and, after $450,000 was missing from Local #5 and the safe was discovered under the Comitte River Bridge a mile from the house listed under Edward G. Partin, embezzling union money. That’s when Judge JJ left legislative law and took over my case as the only family court judge in East Baton Rouge Parish and began helping Wendy get me away from Partin custody.
In 2020 I re-read what Judge JJ had to say about Wendy and me in 1976, and I would finally see why my mother had nervous breakdowns and abandoned me with someone she felt would keep me safe. I can still hear her soft southern accent with a slight Canadian twinge telling Judge JJ: “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.”
Statements like that are peppered throughout court records and news media about my family history. I can read between the lines at what is not said and assume things, but I do not know what happened. My first memories begin to solidify the summer of 1976.
Coincidentally, 1976 was also when the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Report was finalized but kept classified from public review. It took Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK to prompt the release; his film was based on New Orleans attorney general Jim Garrison’s memoir about the only trial against alleged Kennedy assassination contributors and implicated FBI and CIA agents that voters demanded to see the file; like The Irishman, JFK was layered with stars to sell tickets and some would overlap with The Irishman decades later. Public demand prompted President William “Bill” Clinton to release part of the report when he assumed office in January of 1993. Coincidentally, I would by then be serving on Clinton’s quick-reaction force; how I got there will be part of my memoir after this introduction.
What’s relevant now is that I don’t know why it took so long to begin releasing parts of the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassination report or to release the final part, but that’s where a lot of details about Big Daddy are buried. It’s a massive collection of documents that takes up a medium sized library or ten minutes to download with 2020 technology. I don’t know why presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior, Clinton, Trump, and Biden kept the final parts classified; it wasn’t until after Trump’s second presidential win that he authorized the full release of the JFK and MLK Assassination report in January of 2025, sixty two years after Kennedy was shot and killed. If I were president, I’d want everyone to know how to stop people from killing presidents.
The seed of this book was sowed in my mind in January of 1993, but it took my mom’s death in 2019 and the coincidental film about The Irishman for that seed to sprout. As she lay dying, nothing seemed more important than honoring my mother. Again and again my mind drifted to the summer of 1976 when I still called my mother Wendy and lived with Mr. and Mrs. James “Ed” White, who Wendy said would keep me safe and Judge JJ said viewed me as their own. World history means less to a little boy than understanding his place in it and whom to trust; in the end, it was misplaced trust that killed Hoffa.
1976 is where I’ll begin narrating my memories of Edward Grady Partin and my small part in his story. In it I’ll share how I would serve on the quick reaction forces of both presidents Bush Jr. and Clinton, and how I believe President John F. Kennedy was killed. But to get us there it’s useful to start with the source.
Whatever I do, it’s in honor of my mother, Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin; may she rest in peace.
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