JFK

“We can report that Edward G. Partin has been under investigation by the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office in connection with the Kennedy Assassination investigation… based on an exclusive interview with an Assistant District Attorney in Jim Garrison’s office. We can report that Partin’s activities have been under scrutiny. In his words: “We know that Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald were here in New Orleans several times… there was a third man driving them and we are checking the possibility it was Partin.”

WJBO radio, New Orleans, 23 June1964

President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed as he rode through downtown Dallas in an open convertible at approximately 1:26pm on 22 November 1963. A couple of hours later, Lee Harvey Oswald was exiting a downtown Dallas movie theater and bumped into, then shot and killed, an unsuspecting police officer named J.D. Tippit, a 39 year old WWII veteran who had served 11 years on the Dallas police force. Oswald was arrested.

The police soon found his 6.5 Italian army surplus carbine outfitted with a sniper rifle in the sixth floor of a book depository overlooking where Kennedy had been shot and where Oswald, a New Orleans native who had moved to Dallas only six months before, had been working. Three bullets were perched on the windowsill, and matched bullets recovered from Kennedy’s body and laying on a hospital gurney near the Texas governor, who had been riding with Kennedy and was wounded and brought to the same hospital where Kennedy was pronounced dead around the time Oswald was arrested. Oswald’s words upon being arrested were: “I’m just a patsy!”

Vice president Lyndon B. Johnson assumed presidency.

Two days later, Oswald was handcuffed and being escorted from the Dallas police station in front of an army of reporters and television crews broadcasting his transfer on international live television. Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with a history of misdemeanors with local police, a low level mafia runner and Hoffa loyalist who had been calling Hoffa weekly the preceeding few months, walked through the police station, past dozens of armed officers, strolled up to an arm’s reach of Oswald, pulled a Colt .38 special from his trench coat pocket, and shot Oswald in the stomach on live television. Police subdued and arrested Ruby. Oswald died a few hours later in the same hospital that housed former president Kennedy. The black and white photo that would be spread around the world showed Oswald, still handcuffed, bent over and screaming in pain; Ruby’s middle finger on the trigger of his pistol, an old mafia technique alleged to give more accuracy, and police officers surrounding both of them. Ruby was charged with murder.

Jimmy Hoffa ordered Teamster buildings all over the world to fly their flags at full mast, told reporters “Bobby’s just another lawyer now,” and admitted that he was glad Kennedy was gone and his little brother would no longer be a pest.

President Johnson asked Chief Justice Earl Warren to lead a commission investigating Kennedy’s assassination.

What quickly became known was that Oswald was an antisocial marine veteran with abysmal marksmanship records who had defected to the soviet union, where he lived for two years and married a Russian woman and had a baby boy. Inexplicably, the FBI paid for his flight back to America, where Oswald and his new family moved back to New Orleans and took up a series of odd jobs and handed out pro-Castro pamphlets from an office located practically next to CIA and FBI branches. Jack Ruby was an air force veteran without marksmanship records on file, a former Teamster business agent with a dump truck business before getting into the nightclub business and running small errands for local mafia, who were under the reach of New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and had been calling Jimmy Hoffa every few weeks for several months.

Ten months after Kennedy’s funeral, the globally anticipated Warren Report mistakenly said that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed Kennedy, and that Ruby acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald. The global scuttlebutt was that either a conspiracy was being concealed, or that the government investigators were incompetent. Some of the most compelling evidence were the many witnesses who heard multiple shots, the multiple wounds of people in the convertible, and several collaborated reports of remarkably clean clothed and physically fit “hobos” around downtown being shuttled by police into train cars after Kennedy was shot, which was a time when all police would have been focused on finding the shooter.

Johnson kept Bobby Kennedy as the U.S. Attorney General. While people debated the Warren Report, Bobby personally oversaw Hoffa’s trial in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for a jury tampering charge after a 1962 minor state-level charge that said Hoffa using his own trucking company, the Test Fleet, was a violation of labor laws for a trucking union leader. A few days into the Test Fleet jury tampering trial, Hoffa, for the first time in his life and after a long list of trials thrown at him by Bobby, appeared to be loosing to the prosecutors. He suspected a mole, and he was right; near the end of the trial, the prosecution called their final witness, and my grandfather stood up. Hoffa’s face dropped in surprise – something so remarkable that no one had seen it before – and he said, in front of the jury: “My God! It’s Partin.”

Big Daddy had served as Hoffa’s seargent at arms, guarding the door against hitmen, FBI, and anyone unwanted; he had unfiltered access to everything said and done by Hoffa’s inner circle. Big Daddy testified that Hoffa had implied he bribe a juror with $10,000 in petty cash in his his back pocket, tapping his pocket and saying that should do it. Hoffa denied it, and his team of attorneys – who were also the attorneys for Carlos Marcello and another mafia boss, Miami’s Santos Trafficante Junior – threw everything they could at the judge and jury to discredit Big Daddy, but the judge continued to say Big Daddy’s past was irrelevant to this case. The jury debated only four hours before trusting Big Daddy over Jimmy Hoffa, and Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering, a federal offense, and into the jurisdiction of Bobby Kennedy.

Hoffa used millions of dollars and the best attorneys available to appealed for two years to appeal the Chatanooga verdict. He lost in the 1966 supreme court case, Hoffa versus the United States, where ironically Chief Justice Earl Warren was the only justice to vote against using my grandfather as a witness. Two of the nine justices abstained; five voted to allow the testimony, even though it violated the 4th Amendment, the right against illegal search and seizure that requires a warrant specifying what is to be searched and why (Bobby and J. Edgar Hoover, through Walter Sheridan, had tasked Big Daddy to find “something” or “anything” to convict Hoffa), and probably the 6th, a more convoluted right dealing with attorneys being present and the person charged being able to confront witnesses. Warren wrote a three page missive against using Big Daddy’s testimony, citing my grandfather’s name 148 times and giving examples his criminal record and personal motivations, emphasizing that some of the charges included perjury, lying to a jury, and that to use his testimony in lieu of all of that and the violation of the 4th Amenendment would “polute the waters of American justice.”

Hoffa began serving his prison sentence in a New Jersey penitentiary, working eight hours a day pounding mattresses for his work detail, and plotting his return to the Teamsters, and, according to Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, who was a trusted Hoffa ally and one of the few visitors allowed every few months, talking about my grandfather and how to get him to recant his testimony almost all the time.

Ruby was found guilty of first degree murder, not of the impassioned third-degree murder that his attorneys professed and would carry a lesser charge, mostly because of statements Ruby said about planning more than one shot; hence the middle finger. He was sentenced to life in prison. He would change his testimony several times, saying he was part of a bigger plot, and that the FBI was trying to kill him by slipping cancer-causing drugs in his food and medications. He died of complications secondary to lung cancer two years into his sentence. He was a lifelong smoker.

Oswald was never tried, because U.S. law doesn’t try deceased people. New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison would make national headlines with the only trial against someone for Kennedy’s murder, New Orleans buisnessman Charles Shaw, who had considerable overlap with Carlos Marcello and

After Hoffa’s trial, Big Daddy had returned to Baton Rouge and continued business as usual. He would run the local Teamsters for a total of 30 years; he’d be charged with a long list of crimes soon after Hoffa vanished in 1975 – presumably shot and killed by The Irishman – and without Big Daddy needing to be around to keep Hoffa in prison, he was found guilty and began his prison sentence in 1980. His little brother, my great-uncle Doug Partin, would take his place. Big Daddy died in 1990. My dad’s little brother, Keith Partin, would succeed Doug in the late 1990’s.

Two years after Big Daddy died, film maker Oliver Stone released JFK, a film based on Jim Garrison’s book about the trial of Charles Shaw, On the Trail of Assassins. An alleged photo of Big Daddy with Oswald and Ruby was never found, and the two witnesses had vanished. Around 10 Million people watched JFK in theaters, and demanded that presidential candidate Bill Clinton release government records about Kennedy’s death. In January of 1993, as soon as he was sworn in, President Clinton released approximately 60% of the classified 1976 congressional committee on assassinations report on the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior, finalized a year after Hoffa vanished, which, after fifteen years of research after the Warren Report, reversed the official stance but in typical bureaucratic terms; it said that Kennedy’s death was probably the result of a large conspiracy, that probably more than one shooter was involved, and that the three main suspects for orchestrating Kennedy’s assassination were International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Santos Traficante Junior. A tsunami of books, confessions, films, documentaries, and television specials followed with so much noise that whatever may have been gained from the report was drowned in the deluge.

Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. had witheld the report. Clinton without part, and presidents Bush Jr., Obama, Trump in his first term, and Biden would without parts; Trump would release the final part at the beginning of his second term in January of 2026. To the best of my knowledge, no useful information was released after January 1993. As late as 2019, films like Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman tap into the aging population that remembers Kennedys assassination and the Blood Feud between Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa, which dominated news for almost two decades.

James Hoffa Junior became an attorney and is currently the elected president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Uncle Kieth is still the elected president of Teamsters local #5 in Baton Rouge. Hoffa Junior and Keith Partin have a professional relationship without ever discussing the past. Donald Trump is president for the second time, and is trying to change the constitution to run a third time; he appointed Robert F. Kennedy Junior as the Secretary of Health and Human Services the same month he released the final part of the JFK and MLK assassination report.

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