Preface, 27 December 2024
But then came the killing shot that was to nail me to the cross.
Edward Grady Partin.
And Life magazine once again was Robert Kenedy’s tool. He figured that, at long last, he was going to dust my ass and he wanted to set the public up to see what a great man he was in getting Hoffa.
Life quoted Walter Sheridan, head of the Get-Hoffa Squad, that Partin was virtually the all-American boy even though he had been in jail “because of a minor domestic problem.”
– Jimmy Hoffa in “Hoffa: The Real Story,” 19751
This is mostly true.
My grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior (my father is Edward Grady Partin Junior), the was famous as the Baton Rouge Teamster leader of Local #5 who was pulled out of jail in 1962 by Bobby Kennedy in exchange for infiltrating Jimmy Hoffa’s inner circle.2
In Hoffa’s 1964 jury tampering trial, when grandfather stood up as the surprise witness, Hoffa exclaimed “My God! It’s Partin.” Hoffa was sentenced to eight years in prison based solely on my grandfather’s word, and he fought his conviction all the way to the supreme court with $1.1 Billion dollars and an army of attorneys at his disposal. But, in a landmark ruling overseen by Chief Justice Earl Warren, my grandfather’s testimony was upheld. That trial forever reduced America’s freedom that had, before Hoffa vs. The United States in 1966, been guaranteed since 1971 by the unambiguous single-sentence fourth amendment.3
To this day, my grandfather’s word shapes history in ways even Earl Warren didn’t see.
Ten months before Hoffa’s 1964 jury tampering trial, on 22 November 1963, Bobby Kennedy’s big brother, President John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed as he rode through downtown Dallas in his open convertible. The 1964 Warren report, overseen by Chief Justice Earl Warren, was wrong when it concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a New Orleans native who trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force (four miles from my grandmother’s home and a mile from where I grew up), acted alone when he shot and killed President Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby, an associate of Jimmy Hoffa and my grandfather, acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald two days later. Almost thirty years later, in 1992, newly elected president Bill Clinton released the first part of the classified JFK Assassination Report (it’s still partially classified as of this preface), implicating Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Santos Trafacante Junior as the people with the means and motivation to orchestrate the president’s murder, and Edward Grady Partin was a common link between those three men.4
The story is more personal than that.
I’m Jason Ian Partin: I was born on 05 October 2019, and knew my grandfather until his death on 11 March 1990. I’m a combat veteran of the 82nd Airborne, The All Americans and America’s Guard of Honor, and I held a diplomatic passport under President Bill Clinton. I grew up knowing that my family was protected by Bobby Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, but I didn’t talk about it much for what I hope are obvious reasons. His part in history was kept confidential, in part, because Bobby Kennedy wanted to protect his witness so that Hoffa would remain in prison. Because of Bobby and Hoover’s influence, national media dubbed Big Daddy as an “all-American hero,” but, as a kid, I knew my grandfather to be, at his best, a rapist, thief, murderer, and adulterer who my grandmother chastised for stopping attending church on Sundays in lieu of Teamsters duties; and I’ve always suspected that he was behind President Kennedy’s assassination. As an adult and member of America’s Guard of Honor, I kept my opinions to myself; as a decorated soldier in the All Americans, and by my definition, I did not share the opinion that Edward Grady Partin was, as Life told America, an all-American hero.
Thirty more years passed.
In the spring of 2019, I learned that said my grandfather, whom we called Big Daddy, would be portrayed by the burly actor Craig Vincent as as “Big Eddie Partin” in Martin Scorcese’s $257 Million, 3 hour and 29 minute opus about Jimmy Hoffa’s alleged killer, Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan. Frank was a Teamster leader and mafia hitman who knew Big Daddy well, and he wrote in his 2004 memoir, “I heard you paint houses,” that he shot Hoffa in the back of the head in a Detroit suburb home (mafia lingo for hiring killers was finding someone who painted houses red with splattered blood).
The summer of 2019, Scorcese’s “The Irishman” was released in theaters to critical acclaim. All the big names were in it: Pacino, DeNiro, Pesci, Ramono, etc., and the internet exploded with misinformed opinions. Coincidentally, my mother, Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin, one of only a few other people who shared my memories of Big Daddy, passed away just before The Irishman was released. I was grieving, and then Covid-19 shuttered theaters across the globe. For two years, life sucked for a lot of people. Netflix picked up the rights to The Irishman, and it set world-wide streaming records. Truth is based on information and perception, and I began to crave sharing the bigger picture with a larger audience. My mother was on my mind for many reasons, and her story overlaps Big Daddy’s, if only because of my dad and me, so to tell his story I’d need to share hers.
This website is that project, a few years older and still a work in progress.
A memoir is based on the root word for memory, is inherently flawed, and therefore should be read with empathy and perspective (and written that way, too). To prevent writing how most of us talk in daily chatter – full things like “um,” “hmm,” “what’s for dinner,” and “Dude” – most memoirists compress conversations into dialogue, “so that it moves the story along.” I compress conversations, and, to keep the number of voices palatable, I coalesce a few characters and interact with that version in ways that are, in a big picture, true. In the revered Vietnam conflict historical fiction, “The Things They Carried,” the author blurs lines between historical fiction and memoir to distinguish what is “story true” from “happening true.” Celebrated memoirists and novelist like John Irving, Mary Carr, and Dave Eggers emphasize that sometimes story-true is more true than happening-true; storytelling distills reality into a palatable bite we can digest and use.
I may make mistakes, because it’s been more tan half a century since I met Big Daddy, and more than 35 years since I attended his funeral. A lot has happened since then, and my memory isn’t what it used to be. Given that disclaimer, the rest of this story is true.
Go to the Table of Contents
- “Hoffa: The Real Story,” by James R. Hoffa and Oscar Fraley (Editor), was first published on 01 January 2019, and then re-published by Stein and Day on 01 October 1971, coincidentally when my mom met my dad and around the time I was conceived; like most kids in high school, they didn’t read many memoirs about Hoffa. I was born on 05 October 1971, and Hoffa vanished on 30 July 1975. My mom and I had almost half a century to ponder nuances from Hoffa’s autobiography, and they’re sprinkled throughout this work.
↩︎ - This is from Wikipedia, 27 December 2024:
Edward Partin
Edward Grady Partin Sr. (February 27, 1924 – March 11, 1990), was an American business agent for the Teamsters Union, and is best known for his 1964 testimony against Jimmy Hoffa, which helped Robert F. Kennedy convict Hoffa of jury tampering in 1964.[1]
Teamster Union and mob activities
Partin was the business manager of the five local IBTbranches in Baton Rouge for 30 years. In 1961, he was charged by the union with embezzlement as union money was stolen from a safe. Two key witnesses in the grand jury died. He was indicted on June 27, 1962, for 26 counts of embezzlement and falsification and released on bail.
On August 14, 1962, Partin was sued for his role in a traffic accident injuring two passengers and killing a third. He was also indicted for first-degree manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident. He also surrendered himself for aggravated kidnapping.
He was finally convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice through witness tampering and perjury in March 1979.[2] Partin pled no contest to numerous other corruption charges in the union, including embezzlement, and was released in 1986.[3]
Testimony against Hoffa
In 1963, Jimmy Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters, was arrested for attempted jury tampering in attempted bribery of a grand juror of a previous 1962 case involving payments from a trucking company. Partin testified that he was offered $20,000 to rig the jury in Hoffa’s favor. The testimony was the primary evidence of the Justice Department that led to Hoffa being sentenced to eight years in prison.[4] The entire case rested on his testimony and he was considered the lone witness.
Partin denied under oath that he was compensated by the Justice Department, but it was revealed that his ex-wife had her alimony payments given to her by the department. He originally denied that he would receive immunity or retroactive immunity for his testimony but it was later altered when he was under oath at a grand jury trial.[citation needed]
See also
J. Minos Simon, a Partin attorney
Blood Feud (1983 film)
References
“Edward Partin, 66; Union Aide Became Anti-Hoffa Witness”. The New York Times, March 12, 1990. March 13, 1990. Retrieved May 5, 2010.
Ap (1990-03-13). “Edward Partin, 66; Union Aide Became Anti-Hoffa Witness”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-12-19.
“Reading Eagle – Google News Archive Search”. news.google.com. Retrieved 2019-12-19.
“Reading Eagle – Google News Archive Search”. news.google.com. Retrieved 2019-12-19.
↩︎ - In 1966, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s was he only justice who dissented against using my grandfather’s testimony. In Hoffa vs. The United States, Warren referenced Big Daddy 147 times. His missive takes up three screens on my laptop; here’s an excerpt that sums up his opinion:
“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.
From the United States Library of Congress “Hoffa vs. The United States”
Title: U.S. Reports: Hoffa v. United States, 385 U.S. 293 (1966)
Names: Stewart, Potter (Judge); Supreme Court of the United States (Author)
Created / Published: 1966:
↩︎ - The U.S. National Archives, JFK Assassination Records, is a massive collection of information. Physically, it requires a medium-sized government library; fortunately, it’s online and with an every-evolving review process that shares new information, and, bit by bit, the final parts of the original 1979 report that Clinton began to share in 1992. As of 27 December 2017, the Assassination Records Review Board Report is at https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/review-board/report I’ll sprinkle small bites throughout this story.
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