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, published just before he vanished from a Detroit parking lot in 1975
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.“
Chief Justice Earl Warren in his three-page summary attached to Hoffa versus The United States, the 1966 U.S. Supreme Court Case that allowed my grandfather’s 1964 testimony to convict Jimmy Hoffa of jury tampering
If public records were bookends of my life with Wendy, one end would be her obituary; it was published by The Baton Rouge Advocate from 08 April to 09 April 2019. I condensed my mother’s life into a few sentences similar to how Martin Scorcese squeezed Big Daddy’s part in history into five minutes of his epic 2019 film about Jimmy Hoffa’s life and death, The Irishman; this is what I wrote:
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 _____
The other bookend of our life together would be her divorce from my dad and the court records from their custody battle. The record that awarded my custody to Wendy is from 26 September 1976 and is an online record of the East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial Court. The family court judge was Judge JJ Lottinger; I was told he stepped away from a 30 year career in Louisiana legislative law trying to rid the state of my grandfather and assumed my custody case after the only family court judge in East Baton Rouge Parish removed me from Partin custody and then died unexpectedly.
I have a vague, brief, fuzzy memory of Judge Lottinger; my lingering impression half a century later is he was trustworthy and had a kind smile and asked me to call him Judge JJ. I do not recall 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). Unlike Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa versus The United States, in Partin versus Partin Judge Pughe did not leave records about my family for posterity to ponder; but Judge JJ left a treasure trove of information when he decided to remove me from Partin custody and give it to my mother. One of the more interesting parts to me in hindsight is the mention of Wendy having “habitual intemperance” – a phrase commonly used back then for alcoholism and prescient of how she would die 45 years later – yet Judge JJ focused on Wendy not drinking alcohol and being morally fit to raise me.
This is what Judge JJ had to say about Wendy and me on 26 September 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 said that I was told that Judge JJ had spent decades trying to rid Louisiana of Big Daddy, but when I wrote this I could not verify what I remembered. There are many judges and attorneys named Lottinger in Louisiana; like many things in my story there are family affairs and people overlap and names are easily confused.
President John F. Kennedy had rich and famous politician parents; all of America in the 1950’s and 60’s grew up knowing Johnny, Bobby, and Timmy, and as a kid I confused the three, especially when nicknames were used like John also being called Jack and Robert being called Bobby. In the years since Johny and Bobby were assassinated there have been more Kennedy’s in politics; Teddy went on to serve as a Massachusetts senator for decades, and the current head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is Bobby Kennedy Junior.
The Kennedys were similar to most names I recall from childhood stories. Governor McKeithen came from a family of politicians; Walter Sheridan came from a lone line of Sheridans in military and law enforcement service; New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison was also from a long line of Garrison attorneys and judges; and Judge JJ Lottinger came from a long line of judges and attornyes. All of the heads of mafia families passed their business to relatives; Carlos Marcello’s family is still in New Orleans and the name Marcello is now common around southern Louisiana for legitimate businesses that stem from when Marcello’s crime oversight stretched across New Orleans and Dallas. New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s memoir about his pursuit of Kennedy’s killers, On The Trail of Assassins, lists his lineage stretching back to practically the civil war and they all sounded the same to me.
For me, when I review history I’m biased towards understanding nature versus nurture. My great-grandfather was a drunkard during prohibition named Grady Partin who was in and out of jail most of his life and abandoned his family in pursuit of booze and gambling; my grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, a rapist, murderer, thief, extortionist, racketeer, and much more who served in prison from 1980-1986; and my father was Edward Grady Partin Junior, a convicted drug dealer who served in prison from 1985-1986 and who, on paper or in news, was often mistaken for his father. My great-uncle was Doug Partin, who was elected president of Teamsters Local #5 after my grandfather went to prison, and my uncle is Kieth Partin, who was elected president after Doug retired and is the current president of Local #5 under the current president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, James Hoffa Junior.
Confusion was bound to happen when so many names overlap similar roles. After my mother died and the Covid-19 pandemic slammed daily life to a shuttered halt, I googled my name for the first time and saw dozens of Jason Partins. One was my cousin, the Jason Partin who runs a physical therapy center in Zachary Louisiana and was the Zachary High School Bronco’s football star while I was wrestling for the nearby Belaire High School Bengals and whose smiling face looks down from Lamar Advertising billboards along Baton Rouge interstates (he and I look nothing alike; he has his father and my grandfather’s blue eyes but I have my grandmother and father’s dark brown eyes); another is a Jason Partin mixed martial fighter with videos on Youtube who coincidentally looked like a younger version of me; others ranged from typical people with Facebook accounts and to a few criminals with records posted online. I’m was the Jason Partin listed in the U.S. Patent and Trademark office for a range of patents in the 1990’s and 2,000’s for implants to accelerate healing of broken bones and torn or damaged soft tissue under either Jason Partin or Jason Ian Partin; my smiling face and grey beard where shown on the University of San Diego Shitley-Marcos School of Engineering’s website as running their innovation laboratory, Donald’s Garage, named after the San Diego medical device inventor Donald Shiley, with articles posted about the engineering and entrepreneurship courses I led for the university. I was the Partin or JiP listed on a few veteran websites from my days in the 82nd Airborne, though most used one of my nicknames from seven years of official military service: Scarhead, because of few scars on the back of my head including an eight-inch backwards letter C the thickness of a finger and because when I joined the army in 1990 the Al Pacino gangster film Scarface was still popular in my team’s vocabulary, and my most persistent nickname, Dolly, a play on how people usually pronounce muy last name like the big-bossomed country singer and actress Dolly Parton who was at the height of her popularity back then. And before my mom died I had coincidentally created a website and blog under JasonPartin.com to host my course notes and market my medical device consulting side-gig, which is how you came to be reading this online and became my focus when writing this story during the pandemic.
The source of much knowledge back then was Wikipedia; but it’s prone to human error just like any other source of information. We see one connection and become anchored to it and repeat it and truth becomes hard to separate from earlier errors; psychologist call this an anchor bias and then a confirmation bias when other people make the same error. When I look back at how Edward Grady Partin Senior’s history led to Edward Grady Partin Junior meeting my mother, I’m unsure what is fact and what is a propagated error; this introduction is what I believe happened rather than what I can prove happened.
In 1926 Big Daddy was born in a small Mississippi sawmill town about 3 hours upriver of Baton Rouge called Woodville. Great-grandpa Grady Partin was a drunk and gambler who left his family during the great depression. Big Daddy helped feed and clothes his two little brothers, my great-uncles Doug and Joe Partin, with petty crimes, and Grandma did sewing jobs for neighbors in the shotgun houses radiating out from the sawmill. She married a local man who had no children and became my Grandma Foster instead of Grandma Partin. World War II broke out to end the depression and Big Daddy was 17 years old and sharing a small shotgun shack with Grandma Foster, her new husband, and his two little brothers.
Big Daddy was arrested for raping a young girl who worked in a brothel catering to sawmill workers military recruits, yet somehow he was not convicted; Doug would later say that his barber was one of the jurors who voted not guilty, and that he told Doug: “Ain’t no white man need to go to jail for nothin’ he did to a negra girl.” That was Mississippi back then. Big Daddy was free and he and Doug were arrested again for stealing all of the guns in Woodville Mississippi. Big Daddy had found a way inside the Sears and Roebuck general store through an air vent on the roof and one night in the early 1940’s he tied a rope around 12 year old Doug’s waist and lowered Doug down; Doug scurried around like a crawfish on a fishing line until he found the gun counter and gathered as many rifles, shotguns, and pistols as he could carry. Even at 17 Big Daddy was remarkably strong; he heaved Doug and each armful of guns up hand over hand and lowered Doug down again and again until they had a pile of guns on the roof.
They loaded all but a few of the guns on a barge and floated past Baton Rouge to the port of New Orleans another hour or two downriver and sold them to a couple of men. I believe these were Marcello’s men, which would explain Big Daddy’s long relationship with the family and his eventual side-gig of smuggling weapons in and out of New Orleans; and, if true, could explain the breath of Big Daddy’s immunity to the national mafia syndicate known as “Las Cosa Nostra.” The now unclassified John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination reports explains Marcello’s national prestige:
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. (297) As the leader of “the first family” of the Mafia in America, according to FBI information, Marcello has been the recipient of the extraordinary privilege of conducting syndicate operations without having to seek the approval of the national commission.
Regardless of who bought the guns from Big Daddy and Doug, we know they used the money to buy two motorcycles and rode back to Woodville and had so much fun that to the day he died in a veterans convalescent home during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Doug’s eyes would light up when he talked about how much fun he had riding motorcycles with his big brother that summer. Their adventure lasted about two weeks. The Woodville sheriff saw them on new motorcycles in the impoverish shotgun shack district; it was easy to know what happened to all the guns in Woodville, or at least who took them and sold them; Big Daddy and Doug were arrested and confessed but never mentioned who bought the guns. Doug was released because he was a minor, but Big Daddy was given a choice of going to jail or joining the marines.
He read the judge’s proposal and agreed to join the marines; two weeks later, he punched out the commanding officer and removed the captain’s watch from his unconscious body. Big Daddy was dishonorably discharged; he had planned it, because he knew that his contract with the judge was to join the marines, not to stay in the marines. I believe that story was where Big Daddy developed his penchant for understanding contracts and finding loopholes; skills useful to labor union managers negotiating contracts with corporate management.
Big Daddy traveled around the country at a time when many if not most men his age were overseas fighting WWII; he was always the biggest, strongest, most handsome man in town and I don’t doubt that he had fun with that. When he returned to Woodville in his early 20’s he quickly took over the sawmill union and then the trucking union that brought in virgin trees and hauled away cut lumber; he became apt at organizing diverse labor into common teams, similar to how his Teamsters would eventually work with port workers in Baton Rouge and New Orleans to ship and receive goods from all over the world. Jimmy Hoffa was rising to power at the same time, and Big Daddy was just the type of person Hoffa wanted in his organization.
Ten years after taking over the Woodville unions, Big Daddy moved to Baton Rouge in 1954 and became president of Teamsters Local #5. He brought Grandma foster and his two little brothers with him. They became the first Partins in the Baton Rouge phone book; back then there were only around 75,000 or so people in Baton Rouge; most relied on trucking for their work in agriculture and the burgeoning petrochemical industry. Big Daddy’s Teamsters grew in number and power, and Baton Rouge adored him because he was so big and handsome and negotiated the best contracts for his Teamsters. Baton Rouge was and is also the capital of Louisiana; Big Daddy’s office was near the governor’s mansion and state legislators and he grew to know all of them and find ways to get his Teamsters lucrative state contracts.
In 1962 Big Daddy was arrested for helping 24 year old Teamster Sydney Simpson kidnap Simpson’s two young children after they were removed from his custody in the same court that would remove me from Partin custody 12 years later. While he was in the Baton Rouge jail with Simpson, he was also charged with manslaughter in the state of Mississippi. Big Daddy was looking at 11 years in prison. He made a phone call to an FBI contact in New Orleans and was released from jail 48 hours later due to direct intervention by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover under the direction of his boss, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, who was personally overseeing the 500 agent Get Hoffa Task Force. (It would turn out that Big Daddy’s interactions with Hoffa and Marcello were already being investigated by Hoover; I never learned how Big Daddy had the phone number to New Orleans’s regional FBI director.) Big Daddy agreed to become a mole in Hoffa’s camp in exchange for immunity for him and protection for his family; by that time he and Mamma Jean had five kids including my dad, Edward Grady Partin Junior.
One and a half years later President Kennedy was shot and killed; ten months after that Bobby Kennedy chose to have Big Daddy reveal himself and testify against Hoffa. At the time the entire U.S. FBI and law enforcement community was under attack for not stopping the president’s assassination, not finding evidence of was almost universally believed to be a large conspiracy to kill the president, and other scuttle bug in the news ranging from race riots to corruption to Kennedy and the CIA’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion against Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Media mocked Bobby and his the Blood Feud against Hoffa and the wasted money of having 500 federal agents pursuing one man; a reputable journalist said the Get Hoffa Task Force was the most expensive, fruitless effort to get one man in the history of any government.
Hoffa’s feud with the Kennedys had actually began when Bobby was still a college student and his big brother was Senator John F. Kennedy and on the labor union oversight committee also trying to tame Hoffa and his teamsters; when he became president and appointed fresh Harvard law graduate Bobby as Attorney General he tasked Bobby with two things: rid America of Hoffa and the mafia influence. Bobby knew his role was questionable in the public eyes so he focused on his job and told America that’s what he’d do. He verbally attacked Hoffa to reporters, and threw so many minor charges at Hoffa that Hoffa was busy being constantly in and out of court and paid for a small army of attorneys just to swat away the mosquitos of daily summons and orders to testify.
In public Hoffa called Bobby “Booby” and “snot nosed little brat” who was only Attorney General because of his big brother. Bobby was 6’2″ or so and towered over the 5’6″ or so Hoffa and had boxed at Harvard, but Hoffa was a street brawler who exercised and didn’t drink and could take care of himself around the most brutal hitmen in America; he lunged at Bobby in fits of rage and they came to blows in front of reporters. The spectacle became so intense that media dubbed their battle The Blood Feud; it became daily fodder for American newspapers and idle chatter around water coolers or labor lines. Some said it was a bigger battle between the privileged elite and the working class. Whatever it was, it dominated news for most of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s until it was trumped by President Kennedy’s assassination on 22 November 1963.
When President Kennedy was killed, Hoffa immediately told reporters “Bobby’s just another lawyer now,” and while all other American flags in the country were flown at half mast to honor Kennedy, Hoffa ordered all Teamster halls in to fly theirs at full mast. Ten months later Bobby told J. Edgar Hoover it was time to use Big Daddy.
Though speculation, many people today believe that the hot-tempered, reputably arrogant, and often rash Bobby Kennedy simply wanted to get Hoffa; he pulled the trigger with the only bullet he had loaded: Big Daddy’s word. He had told Hoover that Hoffa suggested Big Daddy bribe a juror in one of in 1962 during one of Bobby’s pesky legal attacks on Hoffa, a minor state-level labor ethics charge centered around The Test Fleet, a trucking company owned on paper by Hoffa’s wife. Part of the reason Bobby and Hoover took the risk to expose their mole in 1964 was Big Daddy himself: he was so handsome and charming and his southern drawl so sweet that they assumed he could convince a jury.
And that’s exactly what happened. When 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.” Big Daddy took the stand and court records show that he coaxed smiles from everyone with his confidence and fearlessness in front of Hoffa’s team.
That team is well known in today’s summary of Hoffa and included attorneys who also represented Carlos Marcello and Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Santos Traficante Junior, and a host of hitmen and bodyguards for Hoffa. In the days before Big Daddy stood up, a gunman burst into the courtroom and pointed a pistol at Hoffa; before the court security guards around Hoffa or the FBI agents in spectator benches could react, a young bulldog and runner who had been almost like a foster child to Hoffa and his family named Chuckie O’Brian lept across Big Daddy and tackled the gunman and ripped the gun from his hand and pistol-whipped him with it until security guards pulled Chuckie off; Chuckie then began patrolling Hoffa’s hotel hallways and court grounds with a .410 shotgun while Big Daddy, whom Hoffa ensured was trustworthy, acted as the Seargent at Arms to guard Hoffa’s hotel door and oversee who came and went. The deceipt sent shock waves through Hoffa’s camp that linger to this day; Chuckie’s almost dying words in 2020 according to his adopted son’s memoir, In Hoffa’s Shadow, were: “Fucking Partin. I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
Bobby and Hoover’s gambit worked: the jury debated just over three hours and believed Big Daddy over Hoffa. They found Hoffa guilty of jury tampering, a federal offense punishable by eight years in prison. That day, J. Edgar Hoover personally and publicly hand-picked federal marshals to protect my family 24 hours a day against inevitable retaliation.
Hoffa’s army of attorneys filed appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and attacked Big Daddy’s character in media to show that he shouldn’t be trusted. But Bobby and Hoover had prepared for that and removed as many court records implicating Big Daddy as possible. And they arranged for full issues of Life Magazine to focus on Big Daddy and showcase handsome photos of him and my family in the same issue that showcased newly appointed president Johnson’s first family; that was where Big Daddy was reimagined as the “all-American hero” Hoffa would use “bunny ears” to sarcastically point out along with using Life’s whitewashing of Big Daddy kidnapping kids as “a minor domestic problem.” Hoover ensured America that he trusted Big Daddy and even published lie detector tests and FBI records dating back to 1961 that proved the FBI had kept close watch on Partin and his dealings with Hoffa for years; Hoover told Life magazine he was personally choosing federal marshals to protect my family from inevitable retaliation by Hoffa’s Teamsters and his mafia allies.
Hoffa clandestinely tasked his contacts to convince Big Daddy to change his testimony. Their efforts made the news; news frequently showed Big Daddy with knife gashes and gunshot wounds and a charming smile that implied that whoever did that to him ended up worse off; his reputation as a charming yet brutal leader rose to be feared rose.
To fight his legal battle publicly, Hoffa accessed the $1.1 Billion untraceable Teamster pension fund he controlled and was fed by monthly cash dues from almost 3 million Teamsters. Hoffa’s attorneys were able to reach the supreme court because they rightfully pointed out that Big Daddy’s infiltration of Hoffa’s inner circle and time guarding Hoffa’s hotel room while he worked on Teamster business was a violation of both he 4th Amendment against illegal search and seizure and the 6th Amendment which provides accused people rights to an attorney and to cross examine a witness. The 4th Amendment was hand written into America’s constitutional Bill of Rights by our founding fathers in the late 1700’s; it succinctly 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 was unable to get Big Daddy to change his testimony and Hoffa’s team of lawyers lost the 1966 supreme court case Hoffa versus The United States. Chief Justice Earl Warren was the only one of nine supreme court justices to vote against using Big Daddy’s testimony to convict Hoffa in a case that was daily news fodder for America. Warren was already internationally known by the time of Hoffa versus The United States in 1966; he was Chief justice from 1953 to 1969 and oversaw landmark cases like Row versus Wade that legalized abortion; Brown versus the Board of Education that ruled separate but equal schools for African Americans was acceptable; and the case that led to The Miranda Rights being read to anyone arrested ensuring they know they have the right to remain silent and the right to a public defense attorney; but in 1966 he was most known as lead investigator of the 1964 Warren Report that was hastily assembled in the months following President Kennedy’s assassination and erroneously concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed Kennedy on 22 November 1963, and that Jack Ruby acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald two days later.
Warren rails against Big Daddy and mentions the name Partin 148 times in a rant against his character. He says he put it there for posterity to ponder, and I’ve read and reread it probably more times that the Harvard law students who still study it today; the case is still taught in law schools across America because it so obviosly changed America’s interpretation of the 4th Amendment and subsequent government surveillance methods. When it came to the 4th Amendment, Warren admitted his bias against Big Daddy and reminds his fellow justices and posterity that Big Daddy testified against Hoffa and was then charged with perjury in another case, an irony that is interesting but not legally relevant when it comes to the 4th Amenedment, so Warren eventually focus on facts to explain why he voted against convicting Hoffa
He acknowledged Big Daddy’s role as a trusted confident to Hoffa, quoting Hoffa’s defense in admitting that “Partin was in the suite ‘virtually every day’ as well as the ‘nightly meetings,’ had ‘ready access’ to the files and offices and acted as ‘sergeant-at-arms’ just outside the door of the suite.”
Warren cited other supreme court cases relevant to Hoffa and said: “A hotel room can clearly be the object of Fourth Amendment protection as much as a home or an office,” and “the protections of the Fourth Amendment are surely not limited to tangibles, but can extend as well to oral statements.“
To address that the 4th Amendment requires probable cause and describing what is to be searched or seized, Warren emphasizes that Big Daddy was not given specifics or a probable cause: what Walter Sheridan and the Get Hoffa Task Force asked Big Daddy to do: “Pursuant to the general instructions he received from federal authorities to report ‘any attempts at witness intimidation or tampering with the jury,’ ‘anything illegal,’ or even ‘anything of interest,’ Partin became the equivalent of a bugging device which moved with Hoffa wherever he went.
In other words: Big Daddy was an illegal wire tap without probable cause, specifics of what is to be searched, or a judge’s warrant. The change to America’s Bill of Rights was so great that President George Bush Senior and his Attorney General, John Ashcroft, would use it as a foundation to build the 2001 PATRIOT Act that allowed the government to monitor cell phones of hundreds of millions of Americans without a warrant or specifying what was to be searched or why; they used computers to essentially scrape cell phone conversations for “anything illegal” or “anything of interest.” (Bush would spend two chapters of his memoir, Decision Points, talking about the moral struggle he and his team had about wiretapping, and Assistant General Attorney and Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith would find the legal grounds for the PATRIOT Act but resign, in part, out of disgust for what most people believe was a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment in Hoffa versus The United States.)
Warren pointed out that Big Daddy’s word as a witness against Hoffa also violated the verbose 6th Amendment, which details the right to have an attorney present and for a defendant to cross-questions witnesses; part of the reason for that is to prevent a charming mole from coaxing words out of someone they’re monitoring and then use those words against them. If you knew Big Daddy, you could imagine his charming drawl steering someone’s thoughts or loosening their lips; as Hoffa said in his second autobiography to explain how he was fooled: “Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”
Despite the obvious violation of the 4th and 6th amendments Hoffa was sent to a New Jersey federal penitentiary based solely on Big Daddy’s word; as Warren said: “…without Partin, who was the principal government witness, there would probably have been no convictions here.” Unable to resist more personal jabs at Big Daddy and point out that even without violating the constitution’s Bill of Rights, no rational jury should have believed Big Daddy. Warren uses frequent footnotes to point out how obvious the fraud could have been; he attached the testimony of Sydney Simpson, the young Teamster in jail with Big Daddy for kidnapping, who spoke with Big Daddy after he called the New Orleans FBI office and was preparing to leave.
“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.'”
And:
“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. . . .”
Despite Simpson’s testimony, Big Daddy’s history of perjury charges, and obvious violations to the Bill of Rights, in 1966 Hoffa was incarcerated in a New Jersey federal prison. Most people looking at the facts thought that Bobby and Hoover somehow influenced the supreme court; by then Hoover and his FBI was known or suspected for having used illegal surveillance to monitor and blackmail countless politicians and business leaders into following Hoover’s orders, so that wasn’t unreasonable. It fueled the perspective that the rich and privledged will prevail in a system set up by them and overseen by them. But that fuel didn’t help Hoffa’s battle; he began his prison sentence in 1966.
Like how Big Daddy’s kidnapping sentence was layered with manslaughter, Hoffa had other charges against him and his total sentence was 11 years. America’s most famous labor leader was assigned a work detail pounding mattresses eight hours a day, which he did well and without complaint and stayed in remarkable physical condition. When Teamsters drove trucks into prison with food and mail they honked their trucks were plastered with Free Jimmy bumper stickers and they honked their loud bull horns and shouted encouragement to everyone inside; Hoffa was was a working class hero admired by his guards and cellmates. He was even more respected for maintaining control of the Teamsters and leading them from inside prison at the end of his work days.
Charles Brandt details a lot of Hoffa’s time in prison; he was the real-life attorney, reputable witness interrogator, and true-crime author who interviewed Frank Sheeran’ for 11 years and wrote Frank’s 2014 memoir, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa. That memoir would become Martin Scorcese’s 2019 The Irishman film that starred the burly Craig Vincent as “Big Eddie” Partin but omitted many parts in the book and squeezed my grandfather’s role into only 5 minutes so the already whopping three hour and twenty nine minute film could focus on Frank and Hoffa’s eventual disappearance. Charles had researched the facts and wrote:
The prison rule allowed for a total of three hours of visitation a month from a list of nonlawyers. The visitation list was restricted to nonlawyers. Inmates were permitted no phone privileges in those days. Letters were permitted to be written to only seven people from a list of relatives and lawyers. All letters in and out were screened. No union officer was permitted to visit or write to Jimmy Hoffa. There was no limitation on visitation from lawyers working on active cases. Hoffa’s son was a lawyer for the union and so was not restricted to the family member list; he could see his father as often as once a week.
Hoffa’s primary attorney and contact was Frank Ragano; he had three clients – Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante – and they were not working on active cases so Ragano could meet with Hoffa and receive coded messages. The coincidentally named Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran was still a trusted Teamster leader in Hoffa’s eyes (Frank was quoted around that time as saying: “I’ll be a Hoffa man ’til the day they pat my face with a shovel and steal my cufflinks,” a reference to being buried dead or alive and still wearing the cufflinks Hoffa had given him.) Frank Sheeran was also a mafia hitman with a dozen or so kills on American soil in addition to untold kills in Europe during his two years of service as an infantryman in WWII. The Irishman had access to Hoffa and the mafia’s attorneys and private conversations; his memories and anecdotes are sprinkled throughout Charles Brandt’s research and serve practically as a confession to what happened; Frank was Catholic, and admits he was facing death and wanted to be forgiven. The editor and publisher were reputable and checked all facts that had already been vetted by Brandt; there’s no obvious reason to doubt The Irishman’s word.
Frank told Charles Brandt what Hoffa said about Big Daddy in school – what the mafia called prison back then – and this is what he said:
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.
Though most of what Frank said after was omitted from The Irishman film, it makes sense that Big Daddy and getting him to change his testimony so Hoffa would be free and return to running the Teamsters would be on his mind.
Hoffa penned his first autobiography while waiting for his supreme court case and it was published his first year in prison. By then Big Daddy had been plastered across media as an all-American hero. In 1966 probably all Teamsters and millions of Americans read Hoffa’s book or talked about it. Here’s part of what Hoffa’s wrote about my grandfather:
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.
By then the rape charges had been glazed over in media and the part about smuggling guns to Castro no longer had court or FBI records and was so fantastic that few people took it seriously. I don’t know why Hoffa and the public didn’t attach to Sydney Simpson’s testimony; it seems like that would have been enough. But there were so many court cases lingering and current charges pending that Bobby Kennedy kept up a media image of Big Daddy as reputable and even brought him into the war on organized crime. A six month 1966 Life special series on orgnaized crime showed a photo of Big Daddy conducting Teamster business in Baton Rouge and details his refusing a $1 Million bribe from Carlos Marcello to change his testimony and free Hoffa; the premise was that the mafia was so linked to Hoffa and the Teamster pension fund in the past and that they’d do anything to get him out. Pundits scoffed that the mafia wasn’t in the business of bribing and they could simply kill Partin, but those pundits missed the point that if Big Daddy died without changing his testimony or providing evidence of illegal surveillance during Hoffa’s trials Hoffa would have no chance of being freed; and no one other than my family knew how Big Daddy had been working with Marcello ever since selling his men all the guns from Woodville Mississippi.
In his 1972 opus The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, Walter Sheridan ignored Simpson’s testimony and summarized the long list of charges against Big Daddy after they were whitewashed or vanished. By then he was a trusted NBC news investigative journalist, and the index of his trusted book covers hundreds of names and mentions Big Daddy more than any other than Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy. Walter summarized Big Daddy’s record by then, which allowed Walter to omit the rape charges and smuggling guns to Castro. He wrote:
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.
In Baton Rouge, Big Daddy thrived. He was a tough all-American hero fearlessly standing against to Hoffa, the mafia, and even federal agents. His face was front page news monthly. When the teacher’s union and a nurse’s union went on strike, Big Daddy was shown walking among them and telling the governor that if teachers and nurses weren’t offered a better contract his Teamsters would go on strike and slam the Louisiana economy to a halt. Hoffa had used the same strategy. When every product on every shelf in America was delivered by a Teamster and every product manufactured in an American factory or grown in American fields was shipped by Teamsters to ports for international trade, the Teamsters really could slam an economy to a hault; Hoffa’s $1.1 Billion Teamster pension fund was also used to pay his Teamsters during strikes, and Big Daddy had a similar fund in the Baton Rouge local #5 safe that backed up his threats and his Teamsters knew that. Governors usually capitulated and tasked their teams of attorneys to find a way to remove Big Daddy from power the same way President Kennedy had tasked Bobby to remove Hoffa.
On 27 January 1968 the New Orleans State Times published:
Partin Reign May be Short-Lived
Edward G. Partin, start witness in the trial of Jimmy Hoffa, is now reigning supreme over the Teamsters in central Louisiana.
‘I’m not going to have Partin and a bunch of hoodlums running this state,’ Gov. McKeithen told us. ‘We have no problems with law-abiding labor. But when gangsters raid a construction project and shoot men up at work I’m going to do something about it.
‘Partin has two Justice Department guards with him for fear Hoffa will retaliate against him,’ Gov. McKeithen said, ‘This gives him immunity.’
The governor referred to an incident in Plaquemine when 45 to 50 men shot up 30 workers of the W.O. Bergeron Construction Co.
“Baton Rouge has never has such a siege of labor violence as it’s seen since Partin came back from the Chattanooga trial with two Justice Department guards to protect him.”
Newspapers covered McKeithen’s fruitless attempts to rid Louisiana weekly. Baton Rouge was – and is – the capital of Louisiana, and McKeithen’s office was near Teamsters local #5 and reporters had easy access to everything that happened. A series of quotes tells what happened:
“These [Baton Rouge Teamster] hoodlums make Marcello and the Mafia look pretty good.”
And:
“[We’re going to arrest Partin] as soon as we get the evidence against him.”
But:
McKeithen is Warned to ‘Lay Off’ Partin
“Gov. John J. McKeithen reportedly received suggestions last month during a trip to Washington not to press the state Labor-Management Commission’s investigation of Baton Rouge Teamster Boss Edward G. Partin.”
“McKeithen said he met with [Walter] Sheridan, who is now an investigator for the National Broadcasting Company, to allay any suspicion that his motives in pressing the Baton Rouge labor investigation were to get Hoffa Free.
The governor said that the meeting was pre-arranged on a mutual basis, with each desiring to talk with the other. He said that Sheridan was a focal point of persons in the Justice Department and “national magazines” interested in seeing that Hoffa is not released.”
“The governor said he felt the recent series of Life Magazine articles on organized crime in Louisiana and the alleged bribe offers to free Hoffa were promoted by Partin. Since then, he said, Life Magazine has placed full confidence in him.”
Concluding in:
“Walter, get him out of my state. Now listen to what I am saying to you. Just get him out of my state. I’ll help you do it and I’ll give him immunity. You write it up and I’ll sign it. Just please get him across that state line.”
Walter compromised; though only known to our family, he arranged for Big Daddy to have a hunting cabin in the Coconino national forest surrounding Flagstaff; every year during Elk season Big Daddy would take his hunting knife and long-range 30-06 rifle and disappear for a few months. But he always returned and ran the state despite McKeithen saying he wouldn’t let Partin and a bunch of hoodlums running the state.
From prison while Big Daddy was running Louisiana, Hoffa sent word to President Nixon that he’d donate a few million dollars to Nixon’s reelection campaign and give his personal and professional endorsement if he could get Big Daddy to change his testimony. Hoffa used all of his contacts in congress and Hollywood to pressure Nixon, including America’s most decorated WWII war hero Audie Murphy, who had won every medal America had to give and was a household name after staring in around 40 Hollywood action films. He was born in Tennessee but became Texas star after his single mom moved him there, where he’s still revered and listed as the namesake of San Antonio’s Audie Murphy Memorial Veterans Medical Center. By every definition Audie Murphy was a true all-American; perhaps that label motivated Hoffa to ask Audie to help convince the false “all-American hero” to change his testimony. And by the time Hoffa tapped Audie from prison, Audie was a bankrupt and aging Hollywood action hero who needed the money.
Many mafia hitmen and Teamster strongmen were WWII veterans and revered Audie Murphy; Frank The Irishman Sheeran was one of them. Frank had two years of combat as an infantryman; he, like other killers in the 1950’s to 1970’s was trained by the government to be good at his job. Audie Murphy had something like 268 confirmed kills and had become eponymous in Hollywood films as the young, handsome hero with a machine gun in hand and facing off against platoons of Germans to save his men. Frank, like many tormented veterans, was reluctant to talk about his own trauma and pointed to Murphy, who had used his fame to become an outspoken advocate for veterans’ mental health treatments.
“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 flew Big Daddy back and forth to San Diego in one of Marcello’s small private planes so they could meet Nixon in his mansion on the bluffs of San Clemente above the surf break named after Richard “Dick” Nixon, Slippery Dick’s. Nixon granted Edward Partin a preemptive pardon for he admitted to perjury in Jimmy Hoffa’s 1964 trial. Big Daddy finally gave in and admitted that the government threatened him and his family if he didn’t perjure against Hoffa, and that he was ready to make things right by signing an affidavit in exchange for the pardon for perjury offered by Richard Nixon. Audie Murphy met with Big Daddy a final time and departed from the Baton Rouge airport in a plane that went down two weeks later and killed Audie and all four passengers.
Big Daddy recanted his recant and Hoffa remained in prison. In a twist of fate, Big Daddy was the prime suspect in orchestrating Audie Murphy’s death; mafia hitmen would talk amongst themselves that any man who would and could kill Audie Murphy was a man to be taken seriously; his reputation in the underworld exploded.
Hoffa funded Nixon’s campaign and offered his endorsement despite Nixon not being able to get Big Daddy to free Hoffa, in December of 1971 Nixon commuted Hoffa’s sentence after only six years served and in time for Hoffa to spend Christmas with his family. In exchange, Hoffa would be tasked in negotiating with Vietnamese government on behalf of Nixon to return American prisoners and find remains of missing soldiers from the Vietnam conflict that had begun under Kennedy with 55,000 special forces units and escalated to more than 500,000 soldiers under Johnson but was so unpopular that Nixon had to pledge to end it for his reelection. But Slippery Dick also slipped in a subtle stipulation that Hoffa had to refrain from Teamster business for eight years, practically to the end of what would have been his prison sentence anyway; Nixon didn’t want Hoffa to become his boss and have billions of dollars and millions of votes behind him. Hoffa was free but still shackled to Big Daddy’s testimony; he still needed Big Daddy to either recant or provide evidence that would have Hoffa’s 1964 conviction thrown out and negate Nixon’s stipulations.
Frank Sheeran was there to great Hoffa after his release and reviewed the pardon paperwork. Like Big Daddy, Frank was adept at reviewing contracts. He 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.”
Around that time is when my 16 year old mom met 17 year old Edward Grady Partin Junior at Glen Oaks High School. She lost her virginity to him at a New Years Eve party and discovered she was pregnant. She couldn’t afford an abortion and my dad proposed marriage; the dropped out of school and eloped to Woodville Mississippi, where my dad still had family they could stay with and where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old girl to get married. They returned to Baton Rouge and moved into one of Big Daddy’s houses and conveniently didn’t have to change names on utility records or in the phone book, because all were already listed under Edward G. Partin. As Judge JJ Lottinger wrote, I was born nine months later; that’s when I became a small part in history, a pun on my family name that I cherish to this day.
It would take me decades to decode the blurred blend of sites, sounds, and experiences form my early childhood. What’s reported in the courts matches what I would begin recalling, and I would grow up knowing all of the people listed in my custody report until the days they died. What everyone agrees happened was that my dad kept disappearing to buy drugs in bulk from some island in the Carribbean and Wendy abandoned me twice; the second time was when she was almost out of the money my dad left for food and looking for work on a coffee shop’s community memo board with me in her arms. She saw a handwritten note asking for shared gas money on a drive to California. She impulsively decided to call the poster and leave that day. On their way out of Baton Rouge, Wendy left me at a daycare near Glen Oaks High School and listed her best friend, Linda White, as my emergency contact. But now that everyone who knew more has died, I can only use what I read about Hoffa and my splattering of early memories to speculate on what happened while my dad was away and Wendy decided to abandon me.
When newspapers scoffed at the idea of Marcello offering a million dollar bribe to Big Daddy instead of killing him, they missed the point of Hoffa needing him alive. Frank Sheeran was a hitman spreading the word about Big Daddy, and his memoir details what Hoffa told him.
“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.”
And:
“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?” [a reference to Hoffa’s trial in Chatanooga Tenessee where he said Big Daddy’s testimony railroaded him to prison like in that old Tennessee song about the train called Choo Choo]
Other memoirs mention the same time period but from different perspectives. In Frank Ragano’s 1994 memoir Lawyer for the Mob, he also focuses on Hoffa and Big Daddy. That Frank wrote:
“[Jimmy Hoffa’s] mention of legal problems in New Orleans translated into his insistence that Carlos Marcello arrange another meeting with Partin, despite my warning that dealing with Partin was fruitless and dangerous.”
And:
“He wanted me to get cracking on the interview with Partin. In June, Carlos sent word that a meeting with Partin was imminent and I should come to New Orleans. As [my wife] watched me pack in the bedroom of our Coral Gables home, she began crying, imploring me not to see Partin. She feared that it was a trap and that I would be murdered or arrested.”
Other investigative books uncovered that Hoffa had sent word to all American mafia families using words similar to what Walter Sheridan had asked of Big Daddy inside Hoffa’s circle; Hoffa said that if “anyone” could do “anything” to get my grandfather to change his testimony, Hoffa would forgive the $121 Million of collective debt from the families. The Irishman ensured word was out that under no circumstances should Partin be killed, but that all other methods were fair game under the rules of Hoffa. Hoffa also promised to resume funding mafia hotels and casinos and Hollywood films like he had for years, ensuring a hefty return on the Teamsters pension fund and employment for Teamsters who hauled construction materials and film sets. Carlos Marcello owed approximately $21 Million of that money from building his New Orleans hotels. Had newspaper pundits known those parts of the story they may have seen the logic of Marcello offering Big Daddy $1 Million to change his testimony as a pragmatic business investment.
After the Life magazine article mentioned the million dollars, Marcello upped his offer to $2 Million but Big Daddy still refused. That’s when I believe that Marcello’s men drove the hour or so from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Like Frank The Irishman Sheeran they probably had little education, but they or someone with them could probably read the phone book and look up Edward G. Partin’s address. There were no rules other than to not kill Edward Partin, and by then it was known that Big Daddy had used extortion, blackmail, assault and brutal battery, murder, rape, and kidnapping to get what he wanted.
I believe that many of the unaccounted for physical scars on my body that led to my army nickname of Scarhead, and a nightmarish collage of flashes of memories of of cars exploding and houses on fire and and my beatings and Wendy’s screams were attempts by mafia hitmen to intimidate Big Daddy into changing his testimony or signing an affidavit of illegal surveillance so that Hoffa could regain control of the Teamsters; if Frank The Irishman Sheeran and even Audie Murphy had nightmares from combat, many of my early dreams centered around the consequence of their actions on my childhood in a continuous cycle of violence that persists in human beings since Cain slayed Abel, or when our primate ancestors first learned that killing a competitor brought a full belly and immediate satisfaction and led to more killing for millions of years despite the legal and moral objections against murder.
My family retained their federal protection and legal immunity while Hoffa was fighting to regain control of the Teamsters. I’m unsure how that worked, but it must have been ingrained in classified orders or government bureaucracies because few people with that level of power were left alive. Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated during his presidential campaign in 1968 by the redundantly named Serhan Serhan, and J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972 after 45 years of leading the FBI under eight presidents. Edward Grady Partin stopped receiving legal protection when Jimmy Hoffa vanished from a Detroit parking lot on 30 July 1975. The main suspects included Chuckie O’brien, who was driving Hoffa around that day and whose car still had Hoffa’s DNA from a stray hair; and Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, whose 2014 memoir details mafia families flying him to Detroit in a private plane so that Hoffa would see someone he trusted and step into the car with Frank and Chuckie. The title of Frank’s book was originally I Heard You Paint Houses, a reference to what Hoffa asked when they met and a coded reference to mafia hitmen who painted walls red with splattered blood; Frank replied that he also does his own carpentery, which meant he made the coffin that hid the body.
Frank says he and Chucky drove Hoffa to an empty house a few miles from the Red Fox restaurant parking lot and shot him in the back of the head twice and left so anonymous clearers could take Hoffa’s body to be cremated in a nearby funeral home. No one has since found Hoffa’s body or evidence of his demise and the FBI case is still open as I write this more than 70 years later. It’s interesting to note that Frank The Irishman Sheeran did, in fact, die still owning the cufflinks Hoffa had given him and confessing his murders to Charles Brandt in his final days. Old human testaments say those who live by the sword die by the sword, though both Chuckie and Frank would die of natural causes in 2014 and 2020, respectfully.
As soon as Hoffa vanished most people assumed he was dead. In Louisiana that also meant the beginning of the end to Ed Partin’s reign, seven years after newspapers first said it was going to happen. That’s when Judge JJ stepped down from legislative law overseeing the end of Big Daddy’s reign and into the role of family law vacated by Judge Pughe.
But not even Judge JJ could have known all that I know now; most of what I read began coming out of President Bill Clinton released the first part of the classified 1976 John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report in January of 1993; a tsunami of memoirs and documentaries had been building up and were unleashed in the decade that followed. Most were crap; all had pieces of the puzzle unknown to others and it wasn’t until Frank’s 2014 memoir that the big picture began forming in my mind; though I didn’t read it until after my mother’s death and 2019’s release of The Irishman film.
During the Pandemic I returned to my custody records to see if something would stand out now that I was older and new more of my family history; my quest was amplified by Uncle Doug’s passing in a Mississippi veterans covalescent home in 2020; from his bed he had dillegently written down most of the stories I grew up hearing and published them in unedited 2017 autobiography: From my Brother’s Shadow: Teamster Douglas Westley Partin Finally Tells His Side of The Story; it is full of chronological errors and typos not unlike my early attempts at a blog, and why I strove to write something a literary agent would promote and a reputable publisher would verify.
In addition to documenting that Wendy didn’t drink, it’s interesting to me that Judge JJ focused on Wendy’s morals and efforts to find work and a rent a “fine” home for us, but he barely mentions my father. At the time, my dad was as immune to prosecution as Big Daddy because of either the fear or laissez-faire attitude most Louisiana judges had when they heard the name Edward Grady Partin. Judge JJ detailed Wendy’s abandonment of me, but did not mention that my dad had been inexplicably released from jail after being arrested with a truckload of prescription opiods obtained from some undisclosed island in Latin America, and that he had abandoned both Wendy and me to go get them. Nor did he mention any of the criminal history of the Partin family; his sympathies focused on Wendy and “the welfare of the child,” which was me.
Knowing what I know now, I look back at the bookends of my life with Wendy I see an understatement in Judge JJ’s assessment of her triumphant battle against my father; every time I read my custody report, I can hear my mother’s soft, timid voice telling Judge JJ: “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.” And, knowing what I know now, I understand why she said “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.” In my mind, The Whites were Maw Maw and Paw Paw and Wendy made a wise choice given the situation at hand.
As for why Bobby Kennedy chose to unveil Big Daddy in 1964 and risk a weak trial, The Irishman mentions an FBI agent explaining it to him. Bobby was rash and loved his brother and was convinced Hoffa was involved in killing President Kennedy. Bobby and the FBI pursued anyone remotely involved, and though no evidence was shown linking them to Kennedy’s murder, many people went to prison for seemingly benign charges beneath an FBI’s level of investigation; the senior FBI agent reminded The Irishman that the famous Chicago gangster Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion, not murder and bootlegging during prohibition; Kennedy’s murders were probably put away for “anything illegal” the FBI could find. After Hoffa vanished, Edward Partin was no longer useful and Judge JJ was finally empowered to remove me from Partin custody and return me to Wendy.
All of that was speculation.
From 1976 onward, my memories solidify and I can begin telling the story of growing up as a Partin in Baton Rouge, and introduce you to Maw Maw, Paw Paw, Uncle Bob, Auntie Lo, Granny, Grandma Foster, Mamma Jean, my dad, Uncle Doug, Uncle Keith, and, of course, Edward Grady Partin Senior. A few other people are important, too, but they aren’t named in my court records and will come out chronologically.
They are the real story I’d like to share. The parts about Hoffa and Kennedy are just coincidences that make my story seem relevant in history.
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