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 his second autobiography, Hoffa: The Real Story
If public records were bookends of my life with Wendy, one end would be her obituary published in the Baton Rouge Advocate newspaper from 08 April 2019 to the 9th; the other would be my birth certificate on 05 October 1972 and a series of court custody cases in the 1970’s.
Wendy was my mother. She was born Wendy Anne Rothdram on 14 August 1955 in Toronto, Canada but moved to Baton Rouge a few years later. She was 16 years old in 1971 when met Edward Grady Partin Junior, the 17 year old drug dealer at a small rural high school on the outskirts of Baton Rouge; she lost her virginity to him soon after and two weeks later discovered she was pregnant with me.
Wendy told me later that she couldn’t afford an abortion so she accepted my dad’s proposal and they dropped out of school and eloped three hours upriver to Woodville, Mississippi, where my dad had family where they could stay and where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old girl to marry.
(I read that Roe versus Wade was reviewed under Chief Justice Earl Warren’s court after I was born, and I believe abortions were expensive back then but I wouldn’t know.)
Wendy and my dad returned to Baton Rouge as Mr. and Mrs. Edward G. Partin and I was born nine months later. Soon after Wendy had two of what were called nervous breakdowns back then and abandoned me both times. The second time my dad was in Jamaica to see a Bob Marley concert and buy prescription opioids in bulk to sell back in Baton Rouge; while he was gone Wendy left me at a daycare center near the high school where she had met him, left her best friend’s phone number as my emergency contact, and fled to California with a young man she met who was asking around for someone to share gas money. They left Baton Rouge on Interstate 10 and followed it straight for 1,830 miles until it ended at the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles.
Wendy took a bus back from Los Angeles on her own, sought to divorce my dad, found work, and spent seven years fighting to get me back while visiting me two days a month but never overnight. She was ashamed of her age and having abandoned me and taught me to call her by her first name so people would think I was her little brother. It worked, and I called her Wendy until the day she died on 05 April 2019; since then, I’ve had a hybrid version that comes out more in writing than in speech.
I’m Jason Partin. My mother was Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin; her obituary as published in the Baton Rouge Advocate from 08 to 09 April 2019 and is still available online. After a few drafts, this is what I wrote to summarize my mom’s 63 years on Earth:
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 _____
My father is Edward Grady Partin Junior. He was convicted of dealing drugs during President Reagan’s war on drugs and went to prison in 1985; when he was released he obtained his high school equivalency, a dual college degree in history and political science, and his law degree. He’s currently a public defense attorney in Baton Rouge and was not invited to my mother’s funeral.
My grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior; he was a murder, rapist, kidnapper, thief, lier, weapons smuggler, racketeer, perjurer, and dishonorably discharged marine during WWII. We called him Big Daddy. He was elected president of Baton Rouge Teamster’s Local #5 in the mid 1980’s after helping Hoffa forcibly install Hoffa’s other man in New Orleans; he continued to get elected every year and ran it until a year after his imprisonment in 1980 (that year was possible because they voted him into office and paid him while he was in prison). He became famous for his surprise 1964 testimony that sent International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa to prison for jury tampering.
Big Daddy was considered the most man person in Louisiana for decades; rarely a month went by without his face on front page news and pundits said that if he had a college degree he’d become governor. Governor McCain repeatedly kept claiming he wouldn’t let “Edward Partin and his hoodlum gansters keep running this state!” until the day he died.
In 1983 while Big Daddy was in prison, he was portrayed by the ruggedly handsome Brian Dennehy in the four-hour nationally televised two-part movie about the battle between Hoffa and the Kennedys: Blood Feud.
(Dennehy coincidentally looked somewhat like Big Daddy and it became his breakout role; he played alongside veteran actor Robert Blake, who coincidentally looked like Jimmy Hoffa with his slick-backed black har, won an accademy award for “channeling Hoffa’s rage.” The also-famous Ernest Borgnine portrayed Hoover and though not as believable as Blake, bore a remarkable resemblance to J. Edgar in his final days; some tall and handsome daytime soap opera heartthrob whose name I can never recall portrayed Bobby Kennedy. Coincidentally, Dennehy’s next role also had blood in the name; he co-started with Sylvester Stallone portraying a rugged and honorable small town sheriff pursuing Stallone as an unhinged Vietnam special forces veteran with PTSD in Rambo: First Blood. Having such a famous actor portray Big Daddy made him seem bigger to people in the small capital city of Baton Rouge; as an anecdote about what it was like growing up in his big shadow, Big Daddy told me from his prison cell with a color TV that he thought Brian Dennehy did a fine job of portraying him except for the slap; that never happened; no one had ever slapped and lived; and he hoped I learned something from that. I never learned what he thought about Rambo.”)
Big Daddy’s small part in history is described in hundreds of books about Hoffa between 1964 and today, including the 2004 memoir “I heard you paint houses: Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and closing the case on Jimmy Hoffa.”
I heard you paint houses lingo for paining a wall with splattered blood; Frank said that’s the fist question Hoffa asked him and it wasn’t a question. Frank was a WWII infantryman and – though he would not talk about his military history even on his deathbed – probably killed hundreds of people in his two year deployment with an unprecedented 345 days of combat. He left the service and became a mafia hitman and that’s how he met Hoffa. Hoffa drew people like Frank close to him and set The Irishman up to be a truck driver for Teamster local #107 in Philadelphia and then president of local #326 in Delaware.
(Until his dying day I’ve never heard of Frank saying anything negative about Edward Partin; Frank seems respectful in a peer sort of way; in 2003 he did, after all, finally confess to killing Hoffa by shooting him in the head; all he had to say about Big Daddy was probably in his book or tucked away in a file somewhere.)
Frank was pulled from prison in his 70’s due to ill health and he was aided in that effort by the primary author of Frank’s co-authored memoir, Charles Brandt. He was an established true-crime author and attorney with a reputation for coaxing truth from witnesses and convincing juries of their authority. Brandt’s literary agent was coincidentally named Frank; he was Frank Weiman from The Literary Group and one of the most respected biography agents on Earth. He worked with Brandt for 14 years to ease out subtle clues to a bigger story: Hoffa and the mafia’s involvement in assassinating President Kennedy on 22 November 1963. By then most people suspected the mafia was involved in both Hoffa’s disappearance and Kennedy’s murder; The Irishman provided names and dates of men who dead by then. Frank died just in 2003 shortly before his memoir was released in 2004 at age 83.
Martin Scorcese bought the movie rights from Frank Weiman and The Literary Group 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 classics like Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, and a long list of more. He centered his opus around Frank Sheeran and renamed it as The Irishman. Big Daddy was portrayed by the burly Craig Vincent who had played a thug in Casino and was reliable; to match Craig’s dark complexion and northeast Italian accent Scorcese changed Big Daddy to Big Eddie Partin and squeezed his role into twenty-five minutes of the epic film focused on Frank, but then cut all but five minutes out to help bring the film down to what was still considered a whopping three hour and twenty nine minute production that would test the patience of modern movie-goers.
There was a lot more to the story, but I read on Wikipedia that Scorcese was considered one of the world’s greatest film makers and knew how to compress complex stories into compact films that kept audiences engaged without weighing them down with too many details; he said he was not making a documentary, he was making an entertaining film and his goal was sell tickets, which he excelled at. Big Daddy’s Wikipedia page changed to match the film.
The Irishman sold out theaters the summer of 2019, but then in early 2020 Covid-19 pandemic shuttered most public spaces on Earth shuttered in early 2020. Netflix had streaming rights and took The Irishman from the big screen to homes all across the planet; it set global streaming records and approximately one Billion people saw a condensed and somewhat contrived version of Big Daddy. In one scene still showcased on the internet, Big Eddie Partin is towering silently behind famous 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.
(I can see why Scorcese could be considered one of the greatest filmmakers of the century; during the Pandemic I streamed most of his other films.)
By Covid my mother had been deceased a year and hardly anyone alive remembered her or my grandfather. During the global shutdown I sheltered in place like Billions of other people and mourned my mom; that scene of Big Daddy manipulating the big names stuck in my mind, and my history with him and childhood with Wendy began wiggling itself out of the depths of my mind. To work through the grief and use idle time during the pandemic I used the internet to research what was publicly known on the internet; Over two years I ordered Amazon to order around 200 books about Hoffa and the Kennedys that I didn’t already have or weren’t in the public libraries (which remained open). That’s when I began writing drafts of the memoir you’re reading now.
One of the things that surfaced in my mind wasn’t in any book and it doesn’t come across in writing well anyway: my mother’s unique sense of humor. She laughed at irony and enjoyed puns; before she died she saw an advertisement for The Irishman with Big Daddy portrayed, and she called me and quipped again that she was born WAR and that marrying a Partin WARP’ed her, and she reminded me of the same pun I use in this introduction: Edward Partin was a big man with big part in history, and that I was a small part in his story.
(It sounds funnier if you pronounce our name and say it out loud; it was the first joke I remember her telling me as a kid. And – unfortunately, but truthfully; she was suffering from alcoholism and her liver was failing. Her body was unable to process toxins and she kept drinking; when she called she called in a stupor and mumbled and repeated herself, not unlike an aging parent with dementia or a drunken date. I smile every time I ready it out loud; I hope you try it.
You can see hints of what she meant about being warp’ed from what she said in my 1976 court custody report. It’s available online now, but for decades it 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. He quotes her explanation of abandoning me compassionately; this is what he said 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.
I downloaded it in 2020 and made the joke in Wendy’s name that I was looking back at his story with 20/20 hindsight; my memory began to shift, and more and more I saw her other version of why I wanted her to call her Wendy: she wanted us to be friends. But I had reflected on that before; what surprised me most when I first read Partin versus Partin is that I have a vague, brief, fuzzy memory of Judge Lottinger and Wendy and me.
He was trustworthy and had a kind smile and asked me to call him Judge JJ. I was probably too young to remember meeting the trial judge who removed me from Partin custody, Judge Pughe (which is pronounced in the Cajun French accent as Puh-Yew, like a sound you’d make when reacting to a bad odor, someone I honestly don’t recall told). Unlike Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa versus The United States and Judge JJ in Partin versus Partin, Judge Puh-Yew didn’t write down the facts and examples and his reasons like a judge is supposed to, so we have to start from the beginning. That’s why we have a court of law; to learn from the past and make the future better. In my memories, Judge JJ was a conglomeration of people and celebrities I met my first few years, but I sincerely have a vague memory of him and Wendy and my dad and me; I trusted everyone in the room; the memory is so strong that it’s my first impression of the 4th and 6th Amendments and Big Daddy’s testimony against Hoffa.
To get the whole story – or at least my perspective – it’s useful to start with Jimmy Hoffa.
His story is well known. 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. He and his men were beaten, threatened, and arrested; but he persevered and was elected president of the Detroit local Teamsters. He continued his drive and was elected president of The International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1954.
It was the world’s largest labor union. Approximately 2.7 Million Teamsters paid montly dues in untracable cash and Hoffa accumulated and controlled a $1.7 Billion pension fund; that was an unfathonable amount of money back then, more than the gross domestic product of many countries and a shock to the government trying to control him. Hoffa lent millions to mafia families to build thier casinos and hotels in exchange for jobs for his Teamsters and hefty returns to the pension fund. And he financed Hollywood films that used Teamsters to haul equipment and house actors; the Teamsters two horse heads and ship steering weel logo took up the final and largest screen of credits, and proceeds added to Hoffa’s untraceable and untaxed pension fund. People said Hoffa was the most powerful man in America not a Kennedy, some said it was the other way around.
It wasn’t just the cash; if Hoffa ordered a national strike – which he threatened to do often – 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. Then Senator John F. Kennedy was chair of the U.S. labor relations committee and set his sites on removing Hoffa from power.
Sentator Kennedy was elected president and assumed office in January of 1960; his first action was to appoint his little brother and fresh Harvard law school graduate as the U.S. Attorney General and tasked him with only two things: get rid of Hoffa and stop the American mafia’s growing power. He knew two were related because of Hoffa’s pension fund and the muscle he hired and used to enforce Teamsters contracts. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was given the full force of America’s judicial system and practically an unlimited budget. Legendary FBI architect J. Edgar Hoover reported to Bobby and was told to oversee the 500 agent Get Hoffa Task Force. Hoover put FBI agent and former Senator Kennedy campaign manager Walter Sheridan at its head. Bobby and his task force monitored and pestered Hoffa with multiple petty trials trying to convict him of anything that would remove him from power, but Hoffa persisted and prevailed and publicly railed against Bobby, calling him “Booby” and “snot nosed little brat” and more. Hoffa’s hatred of the Kennedy’s and their nepotism became daily fodder for American chatter. Bobby was cherished for his handsome smile and relation to the president, but he was also known to be impulsive and quick to anger; he and Hoffa exchanged insults and even pushed and shoved each other in front of reporters. Their public feud was so brutal media dubbed it The Blood Feud.
By 1962 the Get Hoffa Task Force was labeled the most expensive, fruitless effort to get one man in the history of any government. That was when my grandfather was arrested for kidnapping the two and six year old children of a young Baton Rouge Teamster named Sydney Simpson (it was the “minor domestic problem” Hoffa used “bunny ears” to sarcastically express until the day he vanished). Big Daddy and Simpson were arrested and placed in a Baton Rouge jail cell. The next day manslaughter reports against Big Daddy came in from Mississippi and were added to his charges; he was facing life in prison. Big Daddy made a phone call to the New Orleans FBI director and two days later was released from jail. He met with Hoover and agreed to spy on Hoffa; the rest is known history and was the basis of 1983’s Blood Feud and Big Daddy’s brief role 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. This is what I believe is true:
On 22 November 1963 President Kennedy was shot and killed by at least one 6.5mm rifle round from an Italian WWII surplus carbine as he rode through downtown Dallas in his convertible on 22 November 1963. The main suspect was New Orleans native Lee Harvey Oswald; while he lived in New Orleans he trained in the civil air force under the alias Harvey Lee and knew Big Daddy. He defected to Russia and married and had a baby; inexplicably the FBI paid for his airplane ticket back to New Orleans after two yers in the Soviet Union and at a peak time during the cold war; around that time was when President Kennedy launched a failed overthrough of communist Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco and America and The Soviet Union and the United States stood poised on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Oswald was pro-Cuba and pro-Castro and handed out fliers trying to rally support to anyone in New Orleans willing to listen. He worked odd jobs including in a building next door to the local FBI office that Big Daddy had called.
Oswald was given a job at a downtown Dallas book repository the spring of 1963 and President Kennedy was presumably shot by a 6.5mm Italian WWII surplus rifle from that window as he rode through downtown in his open convertible at approximately 1:26pm on 22 November 1963. Oswald’s matching rifle was found there and it had been outfited with a scope by a Dallas gunsmith a few months earlier. Matching cartridges were laid out on the windowsill like a sniper expecting to take several shots.
Oswald was arrested two hours later as he emerged from a nearby movie theater and shot and killed Dallas police officer JD Tippit using his model 10 Smith and Wesson .38 caliber pistol. As he was arrested, he exclaimed: “I’m just a patsy!” Kennedy was pronounced dead around that same moment and Oswald was charged with multiple counts of murder. Photos Oswald himself had shared with local political extremists showed him brandishing his 6.5mm scoped rifle and .38 caliber pistol; FBI and independent examination over decades has repeatedly shown that at least one bullet that hit Kennedy came from that rifle, and it also matched an attempted assassination of a U.S. Army general in Dallas a few months earier. The Texas governor riding beside Kennedy had also been wounded by what FBI first said was a bouncing or ricochet from the single bullet. (Inexplicably, later that day an unfired 6.5mm round was found beside the governor’s hospital gurney near where Kennedy had been brought and pronounced dead.)
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 Colt .38 detective’s special and shot and killed Oswald on international live television. (At his trial he would claim that he loved the Kennedy’s and was distraught and acted on impulse when he shot Oswald, but he would also say he planned on shooting more than once which implied a pre-meditated murder; Ruby was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison; before he died he reversed his testimony and said he was set up and that the FBI was giving him pills that caused cancer; he died from lung cancer two years after sentencing; he was a lifelong smoker.)
Hoffa was sitting with colleagues in Florida and near reporters when news broke that Kennedy had been murdered. He told the reporters “Bobby’s just another lawyer now,” and ordered all Teamster local halls to fly their flags full mast. 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. Johnson asked Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court Earl Warren to oversee the investigation. Warren was and is one of the most respected justices in history (though I read on Wikipedia he was still controversial for things like supporting internment camps for 250,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII). Warren had or would oversee landmark and controversial cases such as Roe versus Wade (abortion), Brown versus The Board of Education (civil rights), and Miranda versus Arizona (the case that gave us Miranda Rights: the statement read by modern law enforcement whenever someone’s arrested – including Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby – and includes the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney), and more.
Judge Warren and his committee were followed internationally by a world suspecting that a bigger conspiracy was at work: The Soviet Union, Fidel Castro, and the mafia were the most discussed suspects. To most people’s disbelief, ten months after the committee began their investigation the hastily assembled Warren Report mistakenly concluded that there was no other gunman and that there was no orchestrated murder; that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President John F. Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby acted alone when he shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald.
The same month the Warren Report was released, Bobby and 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. They based their trust on a series of lie detector tests that Hoover was advocating as the latest FBI technology and he personally oversaw Big Daddy’s tests and had been verifying Big Daddy’s statements since he was let out jail in 1962. Hoffa was on trial in Chattanooga Tennesee 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 on paper called The Test Fleet.
The Test Fleet trial was its own national spectacle. FBI agents loomed everywhere in Chatanooga and Hoffa brazenly conducted Teamster business from his hotel room. Teamsters, mobsters, and corporate managers were in and out of Hoffa’s room throughout the trial; Hoffa told everyone that Ed Partin was to be trusted, and he asked Big Daddy to be his Sargent at arms guarding the door to his hotel room and sit with him in the courtroom public seating area, which was packed with a barely cloaked assortment of Hoffa’s closest allies, mafia hitmen, Teamster strongmen, and federal agents. Hoffa had begun to suspect a mole, but Big Daddy was so trusted that he was never considered.
Hoffa was a notoriously calm man when being interrogated by prosecutors and he toyed with them as a taunt to Bobby, using double-talk and feigning not remembering with sentences like: “I can not recall if I remember the answer to the question which you are asking me to recall.” He even remained calm even when a man burst in the courtroom and pointed a pistol pointed at him; his mentee, Chuckie O’brien, a short and stout pitbull without a leash who like most of Hoffa’s men had boxed in youth and knew how to handle firearms, leaped across Big Daddy and surprised bodyguards and tackled the man and ripped his gun from his hand and pistol whipped him with it before courtroom security guards or any of Hoffa’s other men could react. 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 bumping into Big Daddy but suspected nothing. Nothing seemed to surprise Jimmy Hoffa.
During prosecuting final arguements they called their surprise Big Daddy stood up in court the otherwise stoic Hoffa’s face showed shock, his otherwise rigid jawline dropped, and in front of the jury and reporters he exclaimed: “My God! It’s Partin.”
(As an anecdote for what Life magazine told me and I know to be true: Big Daddy took the stand and court records show that he charmed the jury with his confidence and fearlessness in front of Hoffa’s team; Life magazine would report that when mafia men gave a signal he’d be targeted by flicking their thumbs against their front teeth, Big Daddy “just smiled.” That was his solution to most challenges, and he was usually smiling.)
The jury only deliberated for three hours before believing Big Daddy’s word and convicting Hoffa of Jury Tampering. 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, and Bobby used his contacts with Life and Look! magazines and other media to whitewash Big Daddy’s criminal records and showcase him as an all-American hero for standing up to Hoff and the mafia; by then, Big Daddy’s criminal chargers that didn’t have too many witnesses 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 Amendment, which protected against unwarranted search and seizure, and the 6th Amendment, which allows a defendant to have a lawyer present when confronted with a witness.
Their effort brought the appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, one of only a few dozen cases out of thousands petitioning to reach that level. One verdict could set the president for future generations and essentially rewrite the U.S. Constitution. Chief Justice Earl Warren was the was the only one of nine justices to vote against using my grandfather’s testimony to convict Hoffa; six allowed the testimony and two abstained, and Hoffa was sentenced to eight years in prison based solely on Big Daddy’s testimony; additional charges were added 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’s statement for record on why he voted to not allow my grandfather’s testimony was and is permanently attached to Hoffa versus The United States as public information. Practically anyone who read it began to doubt American justice; many people believed and still believe that Bobby and Hoover influenced the U.S. Supreme Court. Hoover was already known to have used FBI surveillance to record and then blackmail senators, congressmen, and people of influence who didn’t want their private lives made public. It was an easy step to assume Bobby’s rage against Hoffa and Hoover’s resources combined to influence all justices except Warren; the irony of convicting Hoffa on jury tampering screamed to be heard.
Warren railed on my grandfather’s character so vehemently that his words leap of the page; he references Edward Partin on 24 pages of the 30 page court record; the name Edward Partin or Partin is typed 148 times, more than twice as many times as Hoffa’s, as if Big Daddy were on trial instead. Warren repeats facts a few times to hammer home the nail of irony and uses descriptive adjectives to ensure no one misses his points about why Edward Partin was a disreputable witness whose testimony should not be allowed.
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.“
The extent of charges against Big Daddy that vanished more completely than Hoffa from a Detroit parking lot were long; hints to them were published in Hoffa’s first autobiography, penned from his prison cell and used to inform America of the injustice done to him as he plotted his release and return to power. 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.
Not even Walter Sheridan could deny Big Daddy’s disreputable background, but by the time he published his 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 drifint 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.
Earl Warren couldn’t find evidence of all crimes Big Daddy committed, but some were irrefutable and were used as evidence in Hoffa versus The United States. Warren pulls the testimony of Big Daddy’s cellmate and fellow kidnapper, Baton Rouge Teamster Sydney Simpson, who testified and Warren copied for his fellow justices and posterity to ponder:
“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. . . .'”
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.
But Warren’s main argument was not Big Daddy’s character, it was Warrens belief that the FBI violated the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights and 4th Amendment; it was hand-written by our founding fathers in the 1700’s to protect people in the privacy of their home and to hobble a potentially oppressive government from unreasonable search and seizure of property, and the it concisely 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.
Warren reminds his fellow supreme court justices and posterity that the 4th Amendment applied to Hoffa in his hotel room and considers oral statements as personal property by citing other supreme court verdicts. He wrote:
“A hotel room can clearly be the object of Fourth Amendment protection as much as a home or an office. United States v. Jeffers, 342 U. S. 48. The Fourth Amendment can certainly be violated by guileful as well as by forcible intrusions into a constitutionally protected area. Gouled v. United States, 255 U. S. 298. And the protections of the Fourth Amendment are surely not limited to tangibles, but can extend as well to oral statements. Silverman v. United States, 365 U. S. 505.“
And:
“What the Fourth Amendment protects is the security a man relies upon when he places himself or his property within a constitutionally protected area, be it his home or his office, his hotel room or his automobile. There he is protected from unwarranted governmental intrusion. And when he puts something in his filing cabinet, in his desk drawer, or in his pocket, he has the right to know it will be secure from an unreasonable search or an unreasonable seizure.”
And Warren puts another nail in a coffin that should have already been shut tightly by repeating the 4th Amendment’s insistence on probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, and by saying that Big Daddy was tasked by federal officials to find: “‘anything illegal,’ or even ‘anything of interest,'”
And, in what I believe was a message or warning shot to 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.”
Warren goes on and then spends more time discussing the 6th Amendment, which deals with the right to have an attorney present and to confront a witness; what Warren does not point out and only people who knew Big Daddy or any charming person with an agenda would know, it’s possible to influence what someone says therefore verbal statements shared in a confidential conversation between friends – which is how Hoffa and Big Daddy were often described – can be influenced or even manipulated; imagine if every time you laughed with a friend they were manipulating you to say “anything of interest” that could send you to prison. Instead, Warren returns to emphasizing Big Daddy’s character.
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 wit- ness, there would probably have been no convictions here.
Warren was right, but eventually over decades after Hoffa’s disappearance more books and allies would confirm that Hoffa frequently influenced juries with bribes and threats, and that Big Daddy probably reported exactly what had happened. But no one knew that at the time, and Warren ended his missive by insisting that a government be kept in check regardless of individuals in that government’s zeal. He knew that allowing such a violation of our constitution’s 4th Amendment would “pollute the waters of justice” and forever change America’s judicial warrant system. Warren would die in 1974, long before surveillance technology advanced beyond his imagination and his warning would be viewed as prescient; Hoffa versus the United States would become a cornerstone of President Bush Junior’s 2001 PATRIOT Act that controversially allowed unwarranted wiretapping of hundreds of millions of Americans’s cell phones and used computers to analyze voices for “anything of interest,” and that would widen the path for President Trump’s untrained ICE agents to poke and prod anyone they met and use whatever was said to arrest, detain, and eventually deport them. To this day, Hoffa versus The United States and using my grandfather’s word to convict Jimmy Hoffa of jury tampering is studied in practically every law school in America as both topic of discussion and a point for how each case matters to posterity.
The only way Jimmy Hoffa could get out of prison early was if Big Daddy either changed his testimony or reported other illegal surveillance methods used by Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover’s Get Hoffa Task Force. In prison he was only allowed visits from friends or family once every three months, though he could speak weekly with his attorneys and only if they weren’t working on other cases; he shared attorneys with mafia families and they could communicate with each other via code.
That’s the beginning of my story with Wendy. I first began learning about the connection from the 2004 memoir I Heard You Paint Houses. Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran talked about those days when Hoffa was in school, which is what the mafia called prison; 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 Oreleans who had the D.A.
Ragano was the attorney for Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss Santos Trafficante Jr.; all three had been inmplicated in the 1993 partially declassified John F. Kennedy Assasisnation Report that reversed the Warren Report and said there were more than one gunman and that the three people most likely to have had the motive, opportunity and means to assassinate the President were Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante. Marcello was cited in particular as having special respect within all mafia families in America; the report said:
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.
Few people at even The Irishman’s level knew that. Also, not even The Irishman knew that Marcello owed Hoffa $21 Million for financing New Orleans hotels and mafia operations, that when combined the American mafia families owed Hoffa $121, and that Hoffa sent word via his attornies 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; but, Hoffa emphasized again and again, Partin can 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. 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; some partially informed national pundits scoffed at Life and said the mafia wouldn’t bribe someone they could kill. What no one realized, probably not even the FBI, was that Marcello bribing Big Daddy with $1 Million was good business if it erased $21 Million owed to Hoffa. (Nor did they know that Marcello upped the bribe to $2 Million and Big Daddy refused that, too.)
Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed during his presidential bid soon after that Life series by the redundantly named Seran-Seran; no link to Hoffa or the mafia was found. Big Daddy continued running the Teamsters and 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.
From prison, Hoffa tried multiple 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 if Nixon would offer Big Daddy a preemptive pardon for perjury and clemency for the future in exchange for changing his testimony. Hoffa then negotiated with a man who would appeal to all Americans, America’s most decorated war hero and star of more than 40 action films, the Texas star and WWII veteran who had won every medal America had to give and was revered by citizens, politicians, the mafia, and The Irishman: Audie Murphy.
Frank Sheeran said:
“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 used one of Marcello’s private planes to fly Big Daddy back and forth between Baton Rouge and San Diego to meet at Richard Nixon’s private beachfront estate in San Clemente hovering over the humorously named surf break Slippery Dick’s. 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.
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. Nixon would become famous for resigning the presidency instead of inevitably loosing an impeachment and gain the nickname Slippery Dick; what he had done that affected my life was slip in a clause to Hoffa’s freedom that Hoffa was barred from Teamster activity for another eight years. It surprised everyone. 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 wanted back in control of the Teamsters. It was never about money. The Irishman said:
“Jimmy Hoffa didn’t care anything about money. He gave it away. But he did like power. And jail or no jail, he wasn’t about to give that power away.”
And;
“Once he got out of jail he was goin gto take back control of everything. And I was going to help him.”
Frank knew a lot of men like him, 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. Many of these men were known to torture victims to get what they wanted, kill their family members, or do whatever their bosses ordered; to refuse was to end up dead at the hands of your peers.
The mafia was once again alerted to do anything to get Edward Grady Partin to change his testimony. Big Daddy had gotten out of jail on kidnapping charges, and quoters of the bible said “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.” There were fewer than five Partins in the Baton Rouge phone book back then, and only one listing for Edward G. Partin; that’s where I lived with Wendy when my dad left to buy drugs in bulk and she had a nervous breakdown and fled to California.
I only have flashes of memories from my first few years of life, and 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 do not know what happened and Wendy would never open up and talk about it, but I believe that my childhood was scarred by repeated attempts to grab me or Wendy and convince Edward Grady Partin to change his testimony against Hoffa or to testify that the case against Hoffa used illegal surveillance. I don’t know the literacy of mafia hitmen, but I assume most could read the phone book or knew someone who could. No one would have known there was an Edward Grady Partin Junior, and because Wendy was a teenager and most people thought I was her little brother it’s likely they assumed we were his children.
Hoffa famously vanished on 30 July 1975. Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran said he had to either kill Hoffa or be killed himself or potentially have his family hurt. The day after Hoffa vanished Edward Grady Partin was no longer useful to anyone; that’s when his own criminal charges began to catch up with him and when Judge JJ took over my case and began helping Wendy get me away from Partin custody.
When I re-read her testimony, I see why my mother would have had a nervous breakdown and abandoned me with someone she felt would keep me safe. I can here her soft southern accent 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.” Every day since she died I’ve wondered where she found the strength to return to Baton Rouge and fight to get me back.
No one will ever know. I can’t remember that time period. My first memories begin to solidify the summer of 1976, when I lived with Mr. and Mrs. James “Ed” White. Wendy said she knew I’d be in good hands with them, and Judge JJ said they grew to regard me as their own. That’s where I’ll begin narrating my memories of Edward Grady Partin and my small part in his story.
Whatever I do, it’s in honor of my mother, Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin; may she rest in peace.
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