Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part II
“We can report that Edward G. Partin has been under investigation by the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office in connection with the Kennedy Assassination investigation… based on an exclusive interview with an Assistant District Attorney in Jim Garrison’s office. We can report that Partin’s activities have been under scrutiny. In his words: “We know that Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald were here in New Orleans several times… there was a third man driving them and we are checking the possibility it was Partin.”
WJBO radio, New Orleans, June 23rd, 1964
My grandfather had been the head of Teamster’s Local #5 since the 1950’s, thirty years total, and was probably the most famous person in Baton Rouge if not all of Louisiana. Most people I knew called him Big Daddy, but he known nationally as Edward Grady Partin, the big, rugged, handsome Teamster leader who was in a Baton Rouge jail on kidnapping and manslaughter charges when U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover freed him infiltrate the Teamster’s inner circle and find something – anything at all – to remove International Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa from power; kidnapping two young children was the “minor domestic problem” Hoffa would quip about for the remaining 11 years of his life.
All of Baton Rouge relished the Life magazine spotlight on the Partins shared with newly appointed President Johnson’s family, especially the photo of Big Daddy with his five children atop the state capital building, smiling and holding my dad in his arms. My dad and I looked so so much alike that many people confused us, especially because we were only 17 years apart in age. He was my dad, and ever since I was a toddler calling my grandfather Big Daddy made sense.
Big Daddy’s 1964 testimony and Bobby and Hoover’s phrasing of his task reached the supreme court and was followed nationally, not just because it was Hoffa but also because the case was overseen by Chief Justice Earl Warren1, internationally famous for the 1964 Warren Report that mistakenly said Lee Harvey Oswald, a New Orleans native who trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force under the alias Harvey Lee, acted alone when he shot and killed President Kennedy in 1963; and that Jack Ruby, a Dallas night club owner and gopher for Hoffa and the mafia, acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald 48 hours later. To protect their star witness from deformation by Hoffa’s army of lawyers, Bobby, the president’s little brother who was thrust into power solely to get Hoffa, and Hoover, a man in power so long he had seen two presidents assassinated, showcased the Partin family across national media, plastering photos of Big Daddy shirtless in his boxing shorts and gloves, strapped to a lie detector, and posing with my dad, Uncle Keith, and aunts Janice, Cynthia, and Theresa as a smiling family perched atop the state capital, happier than pigs on a small Iowa farm. For a few years, the Partin family was famous nationally, maybe even internationally.
Bobby said that Big Daddy was an “all-American hero” for risking his life and the lives of his family to clean up corrupt unions and stand up against Hoffa’s mafia colleagues, men like New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello. Life magazine, whose editor was a buddy of Bobby, dedicated issues to Big Daddy and the Partin family and shared with the new first-family, the Johnsons, after vice-president Johnson assumed presidency. The moniker stuck, and Big Daddy’s prestige grew in Baton Rouge because he could defy America’s most powerful man, the mafia, and the constitution of the United States with impunity.
Big Daddy returned to Louisiana and continued to run the Louisiana Teamsters, and his picture made front page news in Louisiana every month or so. His name came up again nationally when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 and Hoffa vanished in 1975, and as part of the almost monthly campaign against organized crime. In 1983’s film “Blood Feud,” people remembered what Big Daddy and Hoffa looked like, and the burly and handsome actor Brian Dennehy portrayed Big Daddy in one of his first major roles, the same year he portrayed the Korean war veteran and sheriff who pursued Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood, a film about a Special Forces Vietnam veteran with PTSD who shot up a small town with an M-60 after deputy sheriffs drew First Blood.
In Blood Feud, named for the years of intense public battles between Hoffa and Bobby, Robert Blake won an academy award for channeling Hoffa’s rage, Ernest Borgnine portrayed J. Edgar Hoover, and some daytime soap-opera heartthrob whose name I can’t recall portrayed Bobby. Big Daddy was our home-town hero and everyone talked about him more than anyone else in the film, and every time Brian Dennehy was in a new film Baton Rouge people were reminded of his role as Ed Partin.
Big Daddy ran the Louisiana Teamsters for thirty years, including when he was in his cushy minimum security prison with a color television in his room in the early 1980’s, just like Hoffa ran the International teamsters from behind federal bars where he pummeled mattresses eight hours a day for his prison work detail, writing his memoir about how Big Daddy and Bobby Kennedy put him there. From his prison room, Big Daddy said he would endorse governortorial candidate John Edwards, a four-time governor despite two-term limits because Edwards was impeached twice and didn’t complete two terms; Edwards refused the endorsement, saying my grandfather was too controversial, and boasting he was so popular that he’d win without the endorsement and the only way he’d loose was if he were caught in bed with “a live boy or a dead hooker.” Yet Big Daddy was too controversial for him.
In 1981, my equally huge but much less controversial great-uncle Doug Partin was elected president of the Teamsters in Big Daddy’s place, just like Hoffa was eventually replaced by his protege, Fitzgerald. Uncle Keith, my dad’s little brother and, like Doug, an inexplicably mellow gentle giant, was on deck to take Doug’s place. Keith and Doug looked identical, sharing Big Daddy’s sky blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair, which came from Grandma Foster’s family line and bore no resemblence to great-granddady Grady’s hazel eyes, and Keith missed the dark brown eyes from Mamma Jean that dominate the difference between me, my dad, Aunt Janice, and the blue-eyed Partins who made the news most often.
The Partins were a Louisiana legacy, and half of Baton Rouge had worked for Big Daddy at some point, driving trucks to ship Louisiana’s agriculture products across the country to ships in the ports of Baton Rouge and New Orleans to be sent up the Mississippi river or out the Gulf of Mexico and across the globe. The burgeoning petrochemical industry along Chemical Alley upriver of the capital building depended on Teamsters to ship gas and plastic pellets along the purpose-built I-110 that connected the chemical plants and Baton Rouge airport to the cross-country I-10 that spans from Florida to the Santa Monica pier, passing the port of New Orleans so Teamsters can drop off or load up oproducts that are on every shelf in every town and keep America’s economy afloat. And, like Hoffa funded Hollywood films, Big Daddy brought the movie industry to Louisiana, using Teamster trucks to haul equipment and Teamster trailers to house actors and workers, and to employ local people and get them to star in Hollywood films.
The 1988 film “Everybody’s All American,” an epic football tale spanning 25 years of a celebgrated football player’s life, staring Dennis Quaid, Jessica Lange, Timothy Hutton, and John Goodman, was filmed in Baton Rouge the winter two years before it was released, and in it you can see a handful of my classmates and some of my teachers as uncredited extras in a stadium of 10,000 Baton Rouge people dressed up in 1950’s garb; ironically, I was not in the film, because I was with my dad in Arkansas over Christmas, but if you squint at the screen, you can see Lea and a couple of wrestlers cheering in the stands when Dennis Quaid runs for a touchdown.
In one scene, a crowd gathered around the state capital was reshot because of a snowfall so rare in our warm southern city that, though surreal and magical, would have been too fantasatstic for a serious film set in the warm south, where people wore short sleeve football jerseys and rode around in convertibles even in autumn. But it was because of the rare snowfall that everyone in town talked about the first shooting and their small part in it, and Everybody’s All American was still daily chatter by the time I wrestled Hillary Clinton. The film’s name was an obvious shout-out to Big Daddy, who, because of Bobby and Look! and Life, many people mistakenly thought was an all-American hero.
I never talked about my Partin family. I was one of the few people who knew that Big Daddy was a rapist, murderer, thief, adulterer, lier, bearer of false witness, racketeer (I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew it could send you to prison), embezzler, drug addict, betrayer of teammates, collaborator with Fidel Castro, and a man who, according to Mamma Jean, alerted her to his lifestyle when he stopped going to church on Sundays. She was a woman who could quote the bible and the U.S. Constitution, especially the 5th Amendment and Warren’s Miranda Rights that remind us we have the right to remain silent, a right few people practice with her diligence.
It was because of Big Daddy that I asked to be assigned to the 82nd Airborne, my ultimate test of nature versus nurture. The 82nd sported an patch on their left shoulder with two A’s under an Airborne tab that stand for the All Americans, a name given to them when they were created as the 82nd Infantry to fight what was called The Great War before we began calling it World War I. The Great War began only a generation after the civil war, where brother fought brother, and someone noticed that the 82nd was the first time in American history that a military unit had soldiers from every one of the United States, and the army assigned the moniker All Americans to the 82nd in an effort to inspire unity among former enemies. When Hitler began using paratroopers in WWII, the 82nd became America’s first paratroop’ unit, the forefathers of our special forces, and the Airborne tab was added above the AA on our shoulders.
The All Americans were as famous as Big Daddy was when I was a kid. The Christmas and New Year of 1989-1999, when I was already signed up for them and training to wrestle Hillary Clinton, they were on the news every day after President Bush Senior sent them to Panama as a continuation of Reagan’s war on drugs. They flew there overnight in a fleet of C-130’s, nicknamed the Hercules, and C-141 Starlifters skimmed over the jungle trees at 4am, then piled out of the side doors and filed the air with parachutes, machine guns, and testosterone. They overtook Panama within a few hours, and surrounded President Noriega’s compound until other American forces joined.
Over Christmas and New Years, I skipped rope and cut weight and watched international news follow the 82nd and two platoons of .50 cal machine gunners from the 504th anti-armor company, and show them holding Noriega captive by surrounding his compound for weeks. To capture him alive, guys I’d grow to know well brought in speakers big enough to host a music festival and blared heavy metal 24 hours a day, depriving Noriega and his personal guard of sleep with songs taken from Van Halen’s 1985 album played all day and night for weeks, songs that so ironic that not even Hollywood could contrive the scene, like “Jump!” and “Panama.” I suspect Noriega is the only person other than David Lee Roth who knows the lyrics to Panama better than I do.
The news was so detailed that we noticed no 82nd paratroopers died, yet a handful of the then newly-known Navy SEALS did, and so did two Delta Force anti-terrorism commandos, a team we suspected existed after Chuck Norris’s cheesy 1986 film, “The Delta Force,” the first in an equally cheesy three-part franchise based, in part, on the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the 1979-1980 Iran Hostage crisis where 53 Americans were held aboard an airplane for 444 days, part of the reason Carter lost to Reagan in 1980, in addition to the resulting oil crisis that led Teamsters to lining up for miles to fill their rigs.
The 82nd was the president’s quick-reaction force: 12,000 paratroopers on call to deploy anywhere in the world within two hours without congressional approval for up to thirty days. Before Panama, the 82nd was on the news for Grenada in 1985, the Dominican Republic in 1983, and Honduras in 1979; before that, they were one of many units in Vietnam for more than a decade. In WWII, the 82nd was known for five combat jumps behind enemy lines in Europe that turned the tides of war, and celebrated by actors as big as John Wayne, a little guy Big Daddy knew from when the actor filmed civil war movies around Louisiana and Mississippi’s plantations, shown wearing their maroon berets, coincidentally the color of the Capital Lions singlets. But, what stuck in my mind more than the maroon beret was their nickname, The All Americans, and the sarcastic taunt Jimmy Hoffa used about Big Daddy in news and in his autobiography. I wanted to test nature versus nature by becoming a real All American, not an actor playing one or a false god worshiped as one.
On 16 March 1990, two weeks after Hillary Clinton broke my finger, I rode a Honda Ascot 500cc shaft-drive motorcycle to my grandfather’s funeral, a small and low-maintenance machine that a teammate lent me and that got around 55 miles per gallon and let me take trips to New Orleans, where I performed card tricks near Jackson Square for tips, modifying my methods to accommodate my broken left finger. My two left middle fingers were buddy-taped; for the funeral, I applied two fresh strips of bright white cloth tape, not because the fingers still needed it, but because I liked the way it looked and how it made me feel, and I hoped someone would ask about it so I could tell them about wrestling and what I was doing after I graduated high school.
I was wearing a white helmet airbrushed with blue letters that said “c/o 1990?,” a jab at overzealous seniors who wore shirts that said, “Class of 1990!” and a form of psuedo-apathy about my abysmal grades from 9th and 10th grade that made my graduation uncertain; had it not been for Coach asking me to try my best in academics, I probably would have had to attend summer school and forfeit my army contract, but I would graduate with a 1.87/4.00 GPA and make the requirement by 0.37 points; my senior GPA was a respectable 3.20/4.00, and I was proud of that.
I sported my cherished but gaudy fuzzy orange letterman jacket with blue sleeves a big blue letter B on the left chest, and I had meticulously adorned the orange fluff over my heart with 36 small gold safety pins, grouped in clusters of five for easy counting. The letter B had an admittedly awkward looking wrestling letterman pin, the one modeled after an old Greco Roman statue with one man down and the other grasping him from behind. For cross-country track, I had Mercury’s winged feet; for chess, a rook; and for theater, the comedy and tragedy faces of theater. Though I swam for practice, catching a ride to Catholic High’s pool, I was an abysmal swimmer who sank like a rock and didn’t letter.
Across the back of my jacket was a sprawling black-colored “Magik” that I had splurged on and had embroidered at a t-shirt and nick-knack shop on Florida Boulevard in a run down strip mall walking distance from Belaire, nicknamed Little Saignon because of the flood of Vietnamese who moved there after Saigon fell in 1975; like southern Louisiana, southern Vietnam was a humid, muggy agricultural and seafood region that the French had colonized and spread foods like French baguettes and pate, so the muggy port town of Baton Rouge – Red Stick in French – was a logical move for thousands of Vietnamese who had supported America and had to flee the communist takeover. They advertised their bon-migh sandwhiches as “Vietnamese Po’Boys.”
To blend in, and after a few of their kids dressed as GI Joe for Halloween trick-or-treating were shot by Vietnam veterans living in Belaire’s cheap apartments, the Vietnamese-owned businesses in strip malls along Florida Boulevard began selling heavy metal patches and veteran shirts with Airborne wings and berets that said things like “Death from Above” and “Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out,” and not checking ID’s when selling cigarettes and cheep beer. I never drank alcohol, a trait I picked up from Big Daddy, who said it loosened lips. But Lea and I often hung out at the heavy metal t-shirt shop that also sold glass tobacco pipes and ornate desk lamps that most kids knew were bongs, and I dropped quarters into a few stand-up video games they kept near the cigarette machine. Below my black embroidered nickname was a hand-sized black and white skull wearing what looked like a magicians hat, but was actually a character of Slash, the guitarist for a new band called Guns and Roses, who wore a top hat he stole from a Los Angeles thrift store wherever he went and that became his signature look on M-TV.
I spent all of my money on Pac-Man and Galaga, the embroidery and Guns-N-Roses patch, and a Vietnamese Po’Boy to celebrate not cutting weight for a while, so I didn’t have enough to pay the tailor to add the skull and top-hat. Lea lent me a sewing kit, and I painstakingly hand-sewed the patch under my nickname. The patch was prophetic, and I’d learn that – though not known by news crews – when the side doors of my future team’s C-141 Starlifter opened and the hot muggy air whooshed inside, someone slipped the Guns-N-Roses “Appetite for Destruction” cassette into the speaker system and blared Slash’s quintessential guitar riff; for the first time, 123 paratroopers on a one-way trip heard Axl Rose’s wailing voice scream “Welcome to the Jungle.” Sometimes, real life is more fantastic than fiction.
I slowed the motorcycle down and rode along the shoulder of Airline Highway, the small engine barely audible over the traffic jam of cars and idling 18 wheel trucks headed towards Greenwood Funeral Home. I slowly braked onto the grass beside a paved parking spot and as close as police would allow, turned off the bike, and draped my helmet on the handlebars and my jacket on the seat. There was a slight rumble from idling 18 wheelers on Airline, and a breeze that smelled of springtime azaleas made the pins on my jacket tinkle like tiny wind chimes. My face shone from lingering pride at media coverage and a small award from Coach and the team that they presented in front of all 383 Belaire seniors. Most athletic. Coach’s award. A few others. We had just lost three of our elected senior representatives to a drunk driving accident when they were thrown from the back of an open pickup truck and split their heads open on Florida Boulevard, so everyone was emotional and teachers wanted to focus on something positive; my using a helmet despite Louisiana’s lax laws was mentioned. So many kids applauded my brief moment on stage that I was still riding the high, and after all of that attention I was unimpressed by the crowds of people and reporters clustered outside of the funeral home.
I strolled past the rows of police and federal marshals dressed like Men In Black wannabes, a lingering effect of men loyal to Hoover’s archaic dress code, and I walked up to Aunt Janice. She bent down to hug me, and we went inside.
Besides Grandma Foster, Big Daddy’s mother and the only other tiny person in our family, there were twenty or thirty Partins, mostly from Big Daddy’s marriage after Mamma Jean, who stayed nearby at her sister’s house and was waiting for us to join later. There must of been two hundred people I didn’t know, but there were a handful I either knew or recognized. The former Baton Rouge mayor was there, and so was the entire Baton Rouge police department, reporters from every major newspaper, a hell of a lot of huge Teamsters, a gaggle of FBI agents, and Walter Sheridan, former director of the FBI’s Get Hoffa task force and a respected NBC news correspondent, and a surprisingly long lineup of aging brutes from the 1954 LSU football national champion team who had served as Big Daddy’s entourage.
Billy Cannon, a veteran of the 1954 team and LSU’s first Heismann Trophy winner, was there. He was a two time All American, former pro for the Houston Oilers, and the biggest celebrity on the biggest float in the Spanish Town Mardi Gras parade. Growing up, I saw Billy’s handsome smiling face was on billboards all along I-110, between downtown and his home in Saint Francisville, his bright white smile advertising his dental business on their way to and from work in the chemical plants north of downtown. When Hollywood filmed Everybody’s All American, people in Baton Rouge felt it was a movie about Billy; the fictitious film was based on a Sports Illustrated writer’s book of the same name who would have remembered Billy, so there’s probably some truth to that, and part of the reason they set the film in Baton Rouge. Of course Billy would be Big Daddy’s pallbearer; it made Big Daddy seem bigger than life, even after death.
After everyone finished speaking, Billy, Doug, Kieth, and three other Teamster brutes heaved to pick up Big Daddy’s casket and carry it past all the reporters to be laid in Greenwood cemetery. With all of those celebrities at the funeral home, it’s no wonder no one asked about my letterman jacket or buddy-tapped fingers, not even the reporters and television crews supposedly focusing on things like that. The New York Times simply listed me as one Edward Grady Partin Senior’s grandchildren; they mistakenly said “and great-grandchildren,” but I was the second oldest and knew all of my cousins from both Big Daddy’s marriages, proving that even the NY Times makes mistakes, just like Life magazine and The Warren Report.
Only Walter asked about my fingers. Most people wouldn’t recognize him; he had a small role in “Blood Feud,” too, as the head of the FBI’s Get Hoffa task force, but it was uncredited and no one knew what he looked like, anyway. Hoover oversaw around 6,300 FBI agents, and at one point 500 of them were under Walter with only one goal: Get Hoffa. They were, until America’s efforts to get President Noriega and Osama Bin Laden, the most expensive and extravagantly resourced American effort against an individual.
Walter was, in my mind, team captain of the Get Hoffa Task Force. Hoover was his coach. Bobby Kennedy, whom I didn’t understand yet, hand-picked Walter to rejoin the force and get Hoffa. Yet he was a humble man, and he didn’t take credit for his role in finally ending the pursuit. He was known to be truthful and diligent, which is probably why NBC sought him to cover the New Orleans trials against men charged in President Kennedy’s murder in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s rally against what many people believed – and still believe – was a conspiracy involving senior members of the CIA and FBI.
I barely knew Walter, but he was a friend – of sorts – of Mamma Jean and Grandma Foster, and for all of the 1990 wrestling season he kept checking with Aunt Janice and asking what Big Daddy had been saying. He seemed interested in anything a Partin said or did, and I told him I broke my finger wrestling in city finals. I didn’t use Hillary’s name, because I didn’t know yet how funny it would sound if I said Hillary Clinton broke it; I spent a lot of summers and holidays with my dad in Arkansas, but I wouldn’t know that Bill Clinton was governor and that his wife was named Hillary for another two years. Walter congratulated me and seemed interested in whatever I had to say, and I talked his ear off about how I was headed to the 82nd.
The mayor and the football players said a lot of words, and so did a few of my younger cousins. Tiffany, Janice’s daughter and the only cousin older than I was, spoke. She was 18, almost six feet tall, and, like my dad, Janice, and me, had Mamma Jean’s dark brown eyes instead of Big Daddy and Grandma Foster’s sky blue eyes. Tiffany was gorgeous, like Mamma Jean and Janice, and had been homecoming queen in a Houston high school. She and all of my aunts and most of my cousins lived near the house Bobby bought for Mamma Jean in exchange for her silence. Tiffany was a remarkable public speaker, and she held the hundred or so people listening captive. She told stories about Big Daddy’s sweet smile and dotting affection for his family, and everyone was already in tears when Jennifer took her turn.
Jennifer was Cynthia’s oldest daughter and a high school sophomore in high school, but she was still taller than I was. Jennifer had written a letter preparing for the funeral in January, when we knew Big Daddy only had months or weeks left to live. She read it in front of everyone and put it in Big Daddy’s pocket before they closed the casket. Aunt Cynthia would send a copy to Doug after the funeral, scribbling a note to explain it and saying:
Uncle Doug,
Jennifer, my daughter, wrote this in school almost 2 months ago. She put it in Daddy’s pocket, along with Janice’s letter.
In his autobiography, Doug photocopied Jennifer’s hand-written letter, which said:
I never really knew my grandfather. His whole life is a mystery to me. For he ended up being a bother to Hoffa and a good friend to Kennedy. The only way I learned about his part was from reading Life magazine and books. Now time is flying by so very fast, and I am afraid I will never look at his tender and loving eyes again. For he is extremely ill and near death. Lord, when he dies, his new life will begin. So give him mercy, for he tried his best. I know he’ll go to the heavens above and look down upon me and feel my love.
To Big Daddy from your loving granddaughter,
Jennifer
January 1990.
Jennifer sobbed as she read her letter, and when she finished everyone was bawling; not even I wanted to point out the understatement of being a “bother” to Hoffa, nor did I want to tell my cousins that the Big Daddy they knew from Life magazine and books wasn’t the one I knew from growing up with him in Baton Rouge rather than with our close-lipped Mamma Jean in Houston. She and Tiffany were the only two of about a dozen of my cousins to speak. I did not because no one asked me to, and neither did my cousin, also named Jason Partin, a football star for the Zachary Broncos who was younger than I was but already over six feet and around 190 pounds; his father, Joe, was Zachary’s football coach and principal, the only Partin not a Teamster. Jason and Joe had a mumbly southern accent like I did back then, and we lacked Big Daddy’s charming drawl or our female cousin’s soft appeal, which may be why none of us were asked to speak.2
After the funeral, when most people got up and flocked around Billy and the aging Tigers, I leaned over and told Walter – who didn’t seem to care about football – that I had joined the 82nd. He smiled, but didn’t pry. I then told him what Edward Partin’s final words were, and I chuckled as I said it: “No one will ever know my part in history.” He agreed that it sounded funny when said out loud, and that my grandfather was probably right.
Not satisfied, I added, “He taught me how to throw a punch.”
Walter was unfazed.
“It’s all about your stance,” I said. “And long arms – it lets you surprise someone.”
Walter said nothing, but he had a kind smile and I continued.
“And stay calm,” I said, holding up the lanky knobby forefinger on my right, untaped hand. “Pay attention to your heartbeat.” I lowered my finger and said, “That’s how he beat the lie detector.”
I smiled, letting Walter know I knew that secret. Hoover, when he was Walter’s boss, had put a photo of Big Daddy, strapped to a lie detector machine and surrounded by federal scientists in white lab coats, in Life Magazine. They showed the squiggly lines of his results, and Hoover said that was proof that a year before President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed, Jimmy Hoffa had plotted with Big Daddy to kill his little brother, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy by obtaining military C4 plastic explosives from New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, who would probably get them from Fidel Castro, and blowing up Bobby’s house with Bobby and his wife and children inside; that scene was so well known by then that it was a key part of 1983’s film “Blood Feud,” emphasizing how Big Daddy risked his and his family’s life to come forward against Hoffa. But we all knew Big Daddy could fool any lie detector test by remaining calm and practicing whatever he wanted to say so that no machine could detect the little hiccups between feelings and thoughts and words, like how a wrestler practices a move until it’s a habit. Walter smiled back, and I knew I was ready for whatever the 82nd could throw at me.
I left Louisiana two months later and began basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the U.S. infantry and Airborne schools, with Big Daddy and his part in history on my mind.
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- Chief Justice Earl Warren mentions Big Daddy 147 times in his three page missive attached to Hoffa vs The United States; my grandfather’s disripute was public knowledge, which confused and infuriated Jimmy Hoffa, and is why he, his lawyers, and many pundits believe Bobby Kennedy or J. Edgar Hoover influenced the supreme court to weaken America’s 4th Amendment and send Hoffa to prison.
This is an excerpt from Warren’s missive:
“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.
Warren reiterated Big Daddy’s history to his fellow justices again and again, with the frequency and force of Hillary’s kicks, yet Warren did not break through to his peers. I don’t know why. Here’s a taste you can sample and ponder how anyone believed Big Daddy:
“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.
↩︎ ↩︎ - On 11 March 1990, The Baton Rouge Advocate reported:
Edward Grady Partin, a teamsters’ union leader whose testimony helped convict James R. Hoffa, the former president of the union, died Sunday at a nursing home here. Mr. Partin, who was 66 years old, suffered from heart disease and diabetes.
Mr. Partin, a native of Woodville, Miss., was business manager for 30 years of Local 5 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters here.
He helped Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy convict Mr. Hoffa of jury tampering in 1964. Mr. Partin, a close associate of Mr. Hoffa’s, testified that the teamster president had offered him $20,000 to fix the jury at Mr. Hoffa’s trial in 1962 on charges of taking kickbacks from a trucking company. That trial ended in a hung jury.
Mr. Hoffa went to prison after the jury-tampering conviction. James Neal, a prosecutor in the jury-tampering trial in Chattanooga, Tenn., said that when Mr. Partin walked into the courtroom Mr. Hoffa said, ”My God, it’s Partin.”
The Federal Government later spent 11 years prosecuting Mr. Partin on antitrust and extortion charges in connection with labor troubles in the Baton Rouge area in the late 1960’s. He was convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice by hiding witnesses and arranging for perjured testimony in March 1979. An earlier trial in Butte, Mont., ended without a verdict.
Mr. Partin went to prison in 1980, and was released to a halfway house in 1986. While in prison he pleaded no contest to charges of conspiracy, racketeering and embezzling $450,000 in union money.
At one time union members voted to continue paying Mr. Partin’s salary while he was in prison. He was removed from office in 1981.
Survivors include his mother, two brothers, a sister, five daughters, two sons, two brothers and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Like The Warren Report and Life Magazine, The New York Times is sometimes mistaken: Big Daddy had no great-grandchildren yet. I was his second oldest grandson, and I was only 17 and I knew my cousins from both marriages and a few suspected from possible extramarital affairs – he was exceptionally handsome and charming, a devil in disguise. ↩︎