Preface to Killing President Kennedy
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
As of 31 December 2024, this is mostly true.
My grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader famous for testifying against International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa and sending him to prison.2 He was portrayed by the big and handsome Brian Denehy in 1983’s “Blood Feud,” and by the burly Craig Vincent in 2019’s “The Irishman.” We called him Big Daddy, and this is his story.
In 1924, Big Daddy was born in Woodville, Mississippi, to Grady and Bessie Partin. Great-grandpa Grady ran out on them during the Great Depression, and my eventual-grandfather began providing for Grandma Foster (Bessie later remarried) and his two little brothers, Doug and Joe, men I’d eventually know to be as big as Big Daddy. In 1943, a 17 year old Ed Partin and a 12 year old Doug stole all of the guns in Woodville and sold them to crime bosses in New Orleans, two hours downriver from Woodville. They were arrested soon after.
Doug was set free because he was a minor, but the judge gave Ed a choice: join the marines or go to jail. He joined, punched his commanding officer in the face, and became a dishonorably discharged marine within two weeks of the judge’s decision, but returned to Woodville a free man. He turned 18, and with all young men away in the war and his brute size, he easily took over the Woodville sawmill union. Soon he also ran the teamsters who drove horse wagons to and from the sawmill. After the war, when trucks and gas were in supply again, he ran the trucker’s union, too. Big Daddy was ruthless and effective. In the 1950’s, Big Daddy and his young wife, my Mamma Jean, moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and he began to run Teamsters Local #5 under International Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa.
By the early 1960’s, after President Kennedy’s embargo had all-but strangled trade with Cuba, Big Daddy was meeting with Fidel Castro and shipping arms and boats from New Orleans to Cuba; allegedly, before Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs Invasion Big Daddy also trained Castro’s generals and a handful of what would have been their special ops soldiers. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover became interested, and his records show that in 1962 Edward Grady Partin and Jimmy Hoffa plotted to kill the president’s little brother, Harvard graduate and U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, by either tossing plastic explosives Big Daddy could get from either Castro or New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello into Bobby’s family home, killing him and potentially his wife and children; alternatively, because Big Daddy was adverse to killing kids, Hoffa said they could recruit a sniper with a high powered rifle outfitted with a scope to shoot Bobby as he rode through a southern town in one of the convertibles “that spoiled brat Booby” likes to ride around in and show off (Hoffa had been calling Bobby “Booby” and “spoiled brat” in public for many years). If they used a gunman, Hoffa said, they’d have to ensure he couldn’t be traced to the Teamsters.
A few months later, Big Daddy helped 23 year old Baton Rouge Teamster Billy Simpson kidnap his two young children. (Though he was averse to killing kids, my grandfather seemed okay with kidnapping them.) They were arrested and put in a Baton Rogue jail. Coincidentally, later that day, Big Daddy was also charged with manslaughter in Mississippi, saving Mississippi police from searching for him. Word got out, other charges began to roll in, and Big Daddy faced life in prison. He made a phone call, and 48 hours later Bobby Kennedy sprung him from jail (poor Billy remained), and offered Big Daddy freedom and immunity if he would infiltrate Hoffa’s inner circle and find “something” or “anything” to remove Hoffa from power. Bobby was desperate. He and Hoover and 500 agents on their Get Hoffa task force had been trying to hit for almost ten years. Journalists called their Blood Feud the longest, most expensive, and fruitless pursuit of one man in any government’s history, and Bobby had a black eye in the face of his big brother; he would do anything to get Hoffa, including freeing to a person like my grandfather. Big Daddy obliged, called Hoffa to set up a meeting, and began reporting what he gleamed to the Get Hoffa director, FBI agent Walter Sheridan, who was also a former aide to senator Kennedy and had campaigned for his presidency in 1961.
On 22 November 1963, a few months after Big Daddy was sprung from jail, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by at least one gunman as he rode through downtown Dallas in his open convertible. Less than an hour later, New Orleans native and Castro sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine who trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force under the alias Harvey Lee, was arrested for shooting and killing J.D. Tippit, a Dallas police officer and WWII bronze star recipient, with a .38 revolver outside of a downtown movie theater. Oswald was arrested, and police immediately charged him with killing President Kennedy. As evidence, they looked where Oswald worked, in the 6th floor of a downtown book repository overlooking where Kennedy was shot, and they found his 6.5mm Italian army surplus carbine, modified by a Dallas gunsmith to include a high-powered sniper scope. Oswald’s words, spoken before being read his Miranda Rights, were: “I am only a patsy!” Hoffa, upon hearing the news, told his entourage, “Bobby’s just another lawyer now,” and ordered all Teamster halls to keep American flags at full mast.
Two days later, Oswald was being escorted out of a Dallas police station in handcuffs and on international live television when Jack Ruby – a Dallas nightclub owner, air force veteran, low-level mafia runner, and associate of Hoffa and my grandfather – walked through the police station and past a few dozen police offers, and shot Oswald in the stomach with a Colt .38 “detective’s special” handgun that he carried in his pocket and fired using his middle finger, a mafia method for accurate close-up kills. (In theory, you’re more accurate if you point your trigger finger along the barrel of a stubby gun and fire with your middle finger when shooting from the hip.) A few hours later, Oswald was pronounced dead, coincidentally in the same hospital that had pronounced President Kennedy dead two days before.
Ten months later, in Jimmy Hoffa’s 1964 jury tampering trial monitored by Bobby and a team of federal agents reporting to Hoover, my grandfather stood up as the surprise witness. Hoffa’s otherwise stoic and calculating face showed shock, and he exclaimed “Oh God! It’s Partin!” in front of the jury, probably sealing his fate before Big Daddy gave his testimony. My grandfather claimed that Hoffa suggested he bribe a juror in the 1962 Test Fleet case: there was no other evidence. The new jurors deliberated less than four hours, believed my grandfather’s word over Hoffa’s, and found Jimmy Hoffa guilty of jury tampering. The judge sentenced Hoffa to eight years in federal prison based solely on Big Daddy’s word.3 Instantly, Hoover announced that he’d assign extra federal marshals to protect the Partin family from inevitable retribution. Coincidentally at that time, Chief Justice Earl Warren, with influence from Bobby and Hoover, concluded the hastily assembled 1964 Warren report on President Kennedy’s assassination. In it, the committee headed by Warren mistakenly – or intentionally – concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald.
Immediately after the trial, Hoffa began an extensive appeal process, and to protect the image of their only witness, Bobby and Hoover plastered Big Daddy and the Partin family – by then Mamma Jean had five children, my dad (Edward Grady Partin Junior), Janice, Keith, Cynthia, and Theresa – across national media, and dubbed Edward Partin an all-American hero for standing up to Hoffa and the mafia. Many of his criminal records vanished, and he returned to running Local #5 with federal immunity as long as Hoffa remained in prison.
Over the next two years, Hoffa’s army of attorney’s attacked Ed Partin’s credibility in national media, but no one could find records of all his crimes or dealings with Castro. It wasn’t a lack of resources: Hoffa had $1.1 Billion in untraceable cash from monthly dues of almost 3 Million Teamsters, money he had lent to the mafia to build casinos and hotels, and to Hollywood for films that used Teamster trucks to ship sets and Teamster trailers to house actors. Hoffa shared attorneys with lawyers like Frank Ragano, now known as a “lawyer for the mob” who’s only clients were Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Santos Trafficante Junior, men known for their ruthless tactics and debts to Hoffa (Marcello alone owned $21 Million). Hoffa used all of his resources to discredit Big Daddy or intimidate him into recanting his testimony, spreading word that all mafia debt – around $121 Million – would be forgiven if “someone” could do “something” to get Edward Partin to change his testimony.
They failed, and in 1966 Hoffa lost his final appeal in the U.S. supreme court in a landmark case that challenged the fourth amendment against unlawful search and seizure, Hoffa vs. The United States, overseen by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Big Daddy’s testimony was upheld, and Hoffa began his prison sentence, now a total of eleven years. Jimmy Hoffa spent the next six years pounding prison mattresses eight hours a day as his prison work detail, pondering how to become free. President Nixon pardoned him in 1971, and Jimmy Hoffa spent four years as a free man before vanishing from a Detroit parking lot on 30 July 1975.
In 1979, the U.S. congressional committee on assassinations completed the JFK and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report, but President Carter kept it classified, and so did Presidents Bush Sr. and Reagan. President Bill Clinton released the first part in 1992, but only after 10 million people saw Oliver Stone’s film, JFK – based on New Orleans district attorney’s memoir, “On the Trail of Assassins” – and demanded that the report be made public. It reversed The Warren Report, and said that, though they didn’t have proof and therefore it’s inconclusive, the three leading suspects with the means and motivation to kill President Kennedy were International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Santos Trafficante Junior.
A deluge of books and films followed the1992 partial release of the JFK Assassination Report, and more trickled out every time a new president – Bush Jr., Obama, and Trump (and then Biden and Trump again). Most were crap, written by partially informed and self-serving people who probably hoped to score a lucrative movie deal.
In the summer of 2019, film producing legend Martin Scorcese had spent around $257 Million to make and market his opus about Hoffa’s demise, The Irishman, based on a 2004 memoir by Teamster leader and mafia hitman Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran entitled “I Heard You Paint Houses.” The Irishman claimed to have painted the wall of a Detroit suburb home red with Hoffa’s splattered blood. Craig Vincent’s portrayal of “Big Eddie Partin” lasted five minutes. Craig spoke with our family to research his role (Keith Partin is the current Teamster Local #5 president after Doug retired twenty years before, and Janice runs a website for Partin geneology). He asked me what the taits were that led Big Daddy to being so easily trusted, and that got me thinking about what actually happened to Jimmy Hoffa and who killed President Kennedy.
Despite the success of Scorcese’s film, the cases on Hoffa and Kennedy remain open. No trial was held for Oswald, and no conspiracists confirmed. Hoffa’s body hasn’t been found; and though the FBI pronounced him dead in 1985, the case is still open, despite all of the books, television specials, and films claiming insider information on what happened, football fields unearthed looking for Hoffa’s remains, and a Wikipedia-esque task force of thousands of amateur investigators digging through all of facts and opinions for more than sixty years. Scorcese’s film opened in theaters with critical acclaim and box office success, but Covid shuttered theaters and Netflix picked up rights to The Irishman, which set global streaming records, but shifted priorities away from solving old crimes.
Covid was a remarkable two years in humanity that we have yet to understand and simplify; given that we’re still trying to understand Kennedy’s death sixty years later, I probably won’t live to see the long-term effects of Covid. Like billions of people, I sheltered in place and worked on a project that had been lurking in the back of my mind buy had been kept at bay by things I thought were more important before the pandemic. I begin coaxing the story out of my brain. Truth is based on information and perception, and as I distilled the mountain of information into a manageable mound, I wanted to share the bigger picture with a larger audience. This website is that Covid project, aged a few years.
I’m Jason I. Partin (Like James R. Hoffa, I sign documents using my middle initial, but I pronounce it as Jason Ian Partin). The internet has a gaggle of Jason Partin’s, ranging from convicts to MMA fighters to my cousin, Jason Partin, a Baton Rouge physical therapist and the grandson of Joe Partin, but, as far as I can tell, there’s only one jasonpartin.com and only a few children of Edward Grady Partin Junior. I can’t provide facts any more useful to you than I already have, but I can write a memoir about my perspective of a man whose footprint continues to shape our world.
The story isn’t just about killing President Kennedy: because Bobby Kennedy bent the fourth amendment so strongly that Hoffa vs The United States formed a cornerstone of President George W. Bush Jr’s legal team when building the 2001 Patriot Act (The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism – USA PATRIOT – Act of 2001). In other words, using Big Daddy’s word changed our Bill of Rights from requiring probable cause and prescribed things to be search, and allowed the U.S. to monitor hundreds of millions of Americans’s cell phones without a warrant, and the Patriot Act was also for many aspects of Guantanamo Bay prisoners held for what is now decades without a lawyer or trial. Since 9/11, I’ve thought a lot about Big Daddy’s part in history, but until Covid I never made time to put pen to paper. It’s about time.
A memoir is based on memory, therefore anything I write is inherently flawed. A lot has happened in half a century, and my memory isn’t what it used to be. And to prevent writing how most of us talk in daily chatter, full things like “um,” “hmm,” “what’s for dinner,” and “Dude,” I compress conversations into dialogue, “so that what’s said moves the story along.” But I cite quotes in media whenever I can, and I try to weave a story that’s as true as possible given our ignorance of what happens behind the scenes of public documents. And sometimes, to keep the voices at a reasonable volume, I blend a few childhood friends and old army buddies into single characters; otherwise, sharing the story would be offering a sip of water from a fire hydrant. The JFK Assassination Report is a massive document that fills a medium sized government library, downloadable with 2001-era technology in about an hour and a half.
The deluge of conflicting information, mixed with partially-informed opinions, is why I think the story about Edward Partin’s part in history hasn’t changed how see things yet.
Given those disclaimers, this story is true.
Go to the Table of Contents
- Jimmy Hoffa penned two autobiographies. The first in “Hoffa: The Real Story,” by James R. Hoffa and Oscar Fraley (Editor), was first published on 01 January 1971, and then re-published by Stein and Day on 01 October 1971; coincidentally, that when my mom met my dad, Edward Grady Partin Junior, the drug dealer for Glen Oaks High School, and around the time I was conceived. My mom and I had almost half a century to chat about nuances about Hoffa’s autobiographies, the JFK Assassination Report, and Big Daddy that only either of the Ed Partins would know; I’ll sprinkle some throughout this book.
↩︎ - This is copied 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:
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