O1 March 2019

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.”¹

Jimmy Hoffa, 1975

On 01 March 2019, I was wriggling in my seat, trying to find the least uncomfortable position an Airbus parked on the Houston runway. I began the day grumpy. After an irresponsibly late night, I woke before sunlight illuminated my eastern facing balcony, but still later than I had planned. I took a Lyft two miles to the San Diego airport, where a kid in a TSA costume confiscated the Leatherman on my belt and the Victorionox from my keychain that I had forgotten to remove. I smiled thanks to that glitch in my cheeks as he lectured me about TSA rules and airplane safety, and I resisted the urge to tell him that I’ve parachuted from more planes than he had boarded. He was probably in diapers when the Twin Towers fell, and by then I had been carrying knives on airplanes longer than he was old. In fairness, the way I felt with every extra minute our layover was delayed, it’s probably a good thing that he took my knives. I shifted again, trying to get my hips away from a right angle by leaning into the open seat beside me and resting my knees against the window. A pen was in my right hand, and half-read copy of “I Heard You Paint Houses” was in my left.

The intercom cracked on, and a voice that sounded like it was accepting my order from a drive-through speaker mumbled an apology, and that – mumble mumble mumble – those passengers were boarding now. I glanced up and craned my neck to see three people hurrying on board without carryon bags. There were only three seats available, and I sighed and began to reconfigure my body back into a more uncomfortable position. A young man, about 30 to 35 years old, navigated down the isle, glancing between seat numbers and the ticket in his hand, as if he either didn’t recognize the pattern of seats or expected the number on his ticket to magically change. He stopped beside the empty seat next to me (it was the only one left) and looked back and forth between his ticket and the seat number twice before plopping down and sighing loudly so that would know what a good person he was for being so cheerful despite the – mumble mumble – ordeal he had experienced. I focused on reading and scribbling notes in the margin; I knew I was grumpy, and that the nicest thing I could do was keep quiet. Focusing helped.

“What you reading?” he asked cheerfully.

I straightened my head, and spun the pen around my thumb like a magician doing a flourish, like I had learned by watching Iceman in 1985’s Top Gun. I set the pen in the open paperback and closed the book with the front cover facing up. I slowly removed my glasses and rotated to look at him. I was smiling that automatic smile; it’s useful, and probably the greatest gift my grandfather gave me.

“Say again,” I said.

“What are you reading?” He asked even more cheerfully.

I twisted my left wrist to show the book cover more clearly. He glanced down for a brief moment.

“What’s it about?”

I had seen him reading his ticket and the seat numbers without glasses, so I assumed he could see without aid. I rotated my hand to show the back cover. He glanced down for another moment, then looked up at my baseball cap and back down to my eyes. The book hadn’t registered.

“Did you go to LSU?” the young man asked.

You couldn’t get anything past this guy. I was wearing a sun and salt-water faded licensed LSU baseball cap that was 100% wool. It was so faded that the purple was more like a soft brown, and what used to be gold L S U letters was more like the sunburnt yellow of a southwestern adobe lime-stained paint. Dana called it “sunset gold.” I didn’t plan on talking, so I hadn’t rotated it backwards. I wore it to protect my newly discovered bald spot from overhead airplane air conditioners that target my scalp like campfire smoke finds my eyes no mater which way the wind blows. I had hoped the faded color would reduce the ostensible peacocking of people who flaunt their tribe.

I said, “I don’t know why you ask.”

He smiled broadly at his observation skills and nodded towards my head. “Because you’re wearing an LSU baseball cap.”

I loved that cap. I had found it floating off the cliffs of Point Loma Nazarene University the April before, a few days after I returned from a three month sabbatical to Nepal and India. It was an epic surf day, glassy water and evenly spaced waves and no clouds on a sunny San Diego Tuesday. To this day, it’s the best surf session I ever had. I stayed out longer than I should, catching wave after wave and paddling back out with arm strength from three months of yoga and climbing in the Himalayas, and I could have gone on forever had my nose and yet-to-be-noticed bald spot weren’t sizzling. I could see my nose, a blurred but bright red boiled crawfish just below my vision, and I knew my sunscreen had long since vanished; it was only good for 80 minutes, according to the package, and my watch told me I had already been out for two hours. I was beyond the break, resting sitting upright on my 7’6” fun board and trying to override my desire to stay because I knew it would hurt more tomorrow if I did. I wished I had remembered to bring my surfing hat, a thin orange cap with a chin strap that floated when it inevitably slid off after a tumble; but I hadn’t known about my bald spot then, and I didn’t know how epic the session would be. I sighed, a pleasant sigh of capitulating to wisdom and happy about that, and was about to lie down and paddle towards the break when my peripheral vision caught a what looked like a dark brown hat bobbing in the waves about 25 yards out. I spun around, lied down, and paddled out. When I picked it out of the water and saw what it was, I laughed out loud. It was a size 7-1/4, a tad tight for my head, which was even more auspicious because it would cling to me when I inevitably got tumbled (I’m not a very good surfer, I just love the activity and seek out calm days that other surfers find unchallenging). I wasn’t as surprised by finding an LSU hat off the coast of San Diego as you’d imagine; we have an active LSU alumni association and host the largest crawfish boil west of The Mississippi every April, hosting up to 36,000 people in Qualcomm Stadium and requiring a few 18 wheelers driven by Teamsters to truck thousands of pounds of mudbugs 3,000 miles from southern Louisiana to Southern California. The boil is followed by a Louisiana-sponsored Gator by The Bay festival downtown, where a more 18 wheelers driven by more Teamsters bring end-of-season mudbugs, gator on a stick, shrimp for Po’Boys on stale bread, and other dregs from the Louisiana festival season to major cities who don’t know they’re eating the dregs; but with the beer that flows and festive Zydeco music playing, even I don’t mind, and I go almost every year. Any one of the truckers, alumni, or tourists could have dropped their LSU cap overboard on a fishing charter to Point Loma’s underwater kelp forests, or lost it playing in the water along our 78 miles of coastline. When I got home and the hat dried out, it was somewhat purple and somewhat gold. A quick snip with my Victorionox scissors made it fit me perfectly. A few days later, my peeling scalp let me know that I should start wearing a hat more often, and I had worn it practically every day since.

“I grew up in Baton Rouge,” I told him.

“Do you have family in Houston?” He asked.

Bobby Kenedy bought Mamma Jean and her five children a four bedroom house in a Houston suburb to get her away from the threats to Partins four hours away in Baton Rouge. That house was paid for in 1964, and when she passed away in 1996 several of my relatives faired well on the sale. Aunt Cynthia and Aunt Theresa and about a dozen of my cousins and second cousins were, and are still, there, listed in the phone book under their married names. I summed the kid up before answering.

He was a white guy around 35 years old, with chubby cheeks and a polo shirt that may have once fit him but was now too tight. It emphasized his arms, which looked like he had once done a sport in college but was too busy with work to exercise regularly now. He had slight raccoon eyes, and I assumed he wore designer sunglasses to golf with coworkers on weekends. It made sense that he’d ask about family in Houston, because their economy is more conducive to college degrees than Louisiana’s agriculture, oil, and tourism industries; practically all of my engineering friends from LSU had moved to Houston or Atlanta. And since Katrina, about another 200,000 Louisiana folks had migrated there. He probably played golf with people who wore LSU caps and liked to talk about it. He was clean shaven and smell was unremarkable, with either no aftershave or an unobtrusive one, and I couldn’t smell cigarette smoke so I assumed he didn’t smoke and didn’t spend his days with people who did. He was educated, or at least smart enough to not smoke and wealthy enough to wear brand name clothes and fly away to for a weekend in Fort Lauderdale, our plane’s destination (I assumed he wasn’t transferring overseas or joining me in Cuba), but he didn’t seem to recognize the book I was reading.

My mind replayed what I had just read Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan saying in 2014, when he was a brusque 80-something year old man with nothing to loose. In my mind’s ear, his voice had a gruff, no-bullshit working class northern accent, forged into a sharp rasp that grated your ears by two years of combat as an infantryman in WWII, twenty years as a hitman for Philidelphia and New Jersey families, a decade of Teamster leadership in Local #35, and 13 years in prison for what he and my grandfather and a slew of other old-school Teamsters did under Hoffa, racketeering. He bluntly pointed out the the United States taught him to kill and rewarded him for being good at it, and the irony of never being convicted of murder and spending 13 years for a word few even understand because of Kennedy’s crack-down on Hoffa and organized crime sharpened his rasp and gave a rare and outdated type of wisdom to his speech. He said, “Kids nowadays don’t know who Hoffa was. I mean, they may know the name, but they don’t know how much power he had.” He had also said he’d be a Hoffa man until he died, then says he killed the man that weirded so much power, showing just how fearless and calculating he must have been. I wouldn’t call the young man sitting next to me a kid, but I could see how Frank would. He’d probably call me a kid.

I took a deep breath slowly without changing my smile, and exhaled just as slowly. I told him I was reading and didn’t want to chat. He shrugged, kept smiling, and pulled out his iPhone and began scrolling Facebook. We took off and he paid the uncharge for WiFi access, and adjusted the overhead air conditioner. The cold air hit my cap and rolled off the brim. I smiled a genuine smile and returned to scrubbing notes.

The plane passed over the Gulf of Mexico, but I was on the right hand side and couldn’t see Louisiana. All I could see through the clouds were a few stationary offshore oil rigs and tankers moving around them like ants circling dead bugs. I kept reading and finished just as we crossed the Florida panhandle. I set the book on my open tray table and rested my glasses atop the book. I fidgeted with the pen in my hand, absent mindedly making the cap vanish and reappear, and concentrated on relaxing so that what I read and noted could digest and mix with thirty years of reading different versions of the same thing. I knew I was like most people, biased and often ignorant of my biases, and that you can’t add to a full cup, so I was trying to let my mind settle before thinking too much about what I read. It’s odd growing up knowing more about Hoffa and Kennedy’s demise than the FBI; you learn to keep your thoughts private, otherwise you invite debate or sound like a conspiracy theorist. Even with The Irishman’s so-called definitive answers, the FBI still assigned rookies to solving Hoffa’s disappearance. They, like the kid who took my Leatherman tool, probably think a lot of their job. One thing kept wiggling it’s way into my thoughts, though, no matter how much I tried to ignore it. In the afternoons of the re-released paperback, timed to match the marketing of Martin Scorcese’s impending $257 Million opus, Frank mentioned seeing fellow hitmen loading duffle bags of Italian 6.5mm carbines like the one Lee Harvey Oswald owned. Despite Chief Justice Earl Warren’s mistaken Warren Report, few people today doubt that more than one rifle was used. I hand’t considered that multiple shooters trying to frame one person would require identical rifles, so maybe I didn’t know as much as I imagined. That realization was worth reading to the end of The Irishman.

Our plane landed in Fort Lauderdale and the young man put away his phone and said in the cheerful voice of someone on a golf vacation without a lot on their mind, “Have a great vacation!”

I told him “You, too,” and gathered my small personal item backpack with the book in it. I reached into the overhead bin and yanked out my carryon backpack with scuba fins strapped to the outside, and fished deep inside to reach my rolled up yoga mat that always seems to sneak past attendants counting carryon items.

Go to The Table of Contents

Footnotes:

1. After national media portrayed my grandfather as an all-American hero who had been to jail for “a minor domestic problem,” Jimmy Hoffa used “rabbit ears” to emphasize his sarcasm about Bobby Kennedy’s influence on the media and therefore on public opinion. In his first autobiography, “The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa,” published by the Henry Regnery Company in 1970, Hoffa wrote:
   
   “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 had 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 charded with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.”
   
   Walter Sheridan, a respected senior FBI agent and former campaign manager of both John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, addressed the growing public realization that his star witness against Hoffa was controversial in his best-selling opus, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, published by Saturday Evening Press in 1972. Big Daddy takes up the most references of the massive book with over 1,000 characters described; he’s cited more than anyone other than Bobby Kennedy and Hoffa himself. The part in Hoffa’s rant about Big Daddy smuggling arms to Fidel Castro couldn’t be verified, which is probably why Walter didn’t even address it. If there were evidence, the records vanished before 1972 as definitively as Jimmy Hoffa vanished in 1975. Walter conceded the other charges, though, and 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 drifting around the country getting in and out of trouble with the law. When he was seventeen he received a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps in the state of Washington for stealing a watch.One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dismissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi. Two years later Partin was back on the West Coast where he pleaded guilty to second degree burglary. He served three yeas in the Washington State Reformatory and was parolled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a plea to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamsters 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 the head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.
   
   I never learned what it meant to “forcibly install Hoffa’s man,” but I assume it wasn’t pleasant for the people removed. Many records, including links to Castro and Cuba, vanished long ago, so we may never know the details. Chief Justice Earl Warren hints to how that the records disappeared, even for someone at his level overseeing Hoffa’s appeal against Big Daddy’s testimony. Warren was a 40 year veteran of the United States Supreme Court. People assumed he would have had all access to Hoffa’s defense team records, FBI reports from Hoover, and department of justice reports from Bobby Kennedy. He looked at all the evidence, and even though some of the worse allegations had vanished from record, like arming Castro for his revolution and against the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Warren dissented against using Big Daddy’s testimony to convict Hoffa. In 1966, Warren wrote a three-page missive permanently attached to Hoffa vs. The United States explaining his logic; he put so much thought into my family history that he mentions Edward Partin 147 times so that his thoughts would be read and reread by posterity. He said, among many other things:
   
   “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.
   
   Warren would continue berating Big Daddy, and begin his concluding remarks about how such a witness undermines American justice, and the process by which he was placed in Hoffa’s camp violates the US constitution’s bill of rights. He wrote:
   
   “This type of informer and the uses to which he was put in this case evidence a serious potential for undermining the integrity of the truthfinding process in the federal courts. Given the incentives and background of Partin, no conviction should be allowed to stand when based heavily on his testimony. And that is exactly the quicksand upon which these convictions rest, because, without Partin, who was the principal government witness, there would probably have been no convictions here. Thus, although petitioners make their main arguments on constitutional grounds and raise serious Fourth and Sixth Amendment questions, it should not even be necessary for the Court to reach those questions. For the affront to the quality and fairness of federal law enforcement which this case presents is sufficient to require an exercise of our supervisory powers. As we said in ordering a new trial in Mesarosh v. United States, 352 U. S. 1, 352 U. S. 14 (1956), a federal case involving the testimony of an unsavory informer who, the Government admitted, had committed perjury in other cases:
   
   ‘This is a federal criminal case, and this Court has supervisory jurisdiction over the proceedings of the federal courts. If it has any duty to perform in this regard, it is to see that the waters of justice are not polluted. Pollution having taken place here, the condition should be remedied at the earliest opportunity.‘”
   
   Hoffa vs The United States case changed America’s interpretation of the 4th and 6th amendments, and is, to this day, taught in practically every law school in America, though it is long forgotten that Hoffa claimed Bobby influenced national media and even the supreme court to convict him and create the precedent used for controversial surveillance of American citizens that continues to this day. Warren was the only supreme court judge to vote against using Big Daddy’s testimony, and in 1966 Jimmy Hoffa began an eight year prison sentence in 1966 based solely on Big Daddy’s word and the endorsement and media coverage led by FBI agent Walter Sheridan, US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
   
   To keep their star witness shining, Bobby had Big Daddy portrayed as hero willing to stand up to corrupt unions. My grandfather’s perceived bravery and perseverance in the face of Hoffa and the mafia were what led him to being dubbed an “all-American hero.” Hoffa watched all of this unfold, knowing the only way he would be freed was if my grandfather changed his testimony or was somehow discredited and the 1964 case revoked. For the next few years, Hoffa’s attorneys tried to discredit Big Daddy, and Walter Sheridan oversaw protecting my family’s reputation and keeping us free from prosecution and portrayed favorably in media. Hoffa spent every day of that time pacing in his cell, reading the news, and pondering what to do about Edward Grady Partin. ↩︎