re: Edward Grady Partin was a rat.

Sleepytime, I was a timekeeper/purchasing agent for Jacobs Engineering on a job in Borden Chemical in 1980-1982. We took over a contract from another contractor. There was a dispute over a warehouse jurisdiction between the Teamsters and the Pipefitters. Pipefitters won. Teamsters withdrew our crew and sent in the bad guys. Buddy York was the Teamster foreman. We were scrambling to find material and since I was the purchasing agent, I got a Teamster driver to send into BR and surrounding ares to pick up punch list items. I did them many favors and they told us we would be protected. We were working 6 12 hour shifts and I made a deal to not dock them for being late if they got our material.

Buddy decided to get revenge on the PF steward. They lured the steward into their trailer on a Saturday. They were drinking little Millers, sent a teamster to warn uus to go stay in the office trailer for the next 15 minutes. We see the PF steward flying out of the trailer into the mud. Here comes Buddy and hits him a few more shots. Buddy walks to the trailer so he can be fired and get his last checks. We quickly drove him and the rest of the teamsters to the gate.

We got them out just in time before the Pipefitters came looking for blood. Local 5 changed out the Teamster crew the next week to cool things down.

Luckily the job ended about 3 weeks later before we had any more problems.

All construction and driving trades were union everywhere in the nation except Texas which was open shop.

They had shooting in Lake Charles in the late 70's The reporting by American Press newspaper every Sunday about union lawlessness got legislation to pass no longer forcing workers to join unions.

I was in school and working as a waiter then. Bob Kerley of Kerley Industries (where the gates were crashed by union baws riding dozers and graders with deer rifles) met with Hugh Shearman, head of the paper every Friday for lunch where Kerley would hand over a large brown envelope to Shearman full of info from his private investigation team. Shearman was the type of guy who would fight anyone, suit on or not, if need be. He wanted to take out the unions badly.
So every Sunday, writer Jim Beam would have a several page article with photos of union misdeeds.

Buddy was neck deep in crime his whole life. He shot a guy in a bar before he was 18 IIRC, went to Angola and was a boxing champion while he was in there. He knocked a guy out on live national TV. He’s one of of the few people to shoot a cop and not go jail and was involved in everything from drugs to counterfeiting and there were many suspicious deaths of people around him. I don’t think he could read very well, he gave me a book about Hoffa that mentioned him and he marked several pages but couldn’t tell me much about the rest of the book. Despite his lack of education, the SOB was as cunning, charismatic and smart as any politician when it came to social skills and reading people. He remembered everyone, everything about them, everything they said and was able to put it all together effortlessly. I’m convinced he was one of rare people that are natural lie detectors or truth wizards as Paul Ekman calls them because absolutely nothing got past him, I remember him calling out some guy on some mundane detail in a passing conversation about where he went. The guy fessed up that he lied and later on, I asked him how he knew the guy was lying. He remembered where the guy worked, deduced his pathway home, recalled a conversation with one of the guys friends about where the guy was staying at or something and mashed all that stuff up in his mind in the blink of an eye. The guy was just an acquaintance of his too! If he sniffed out someone was lying, he would use them like a pawn in chess and the person would never have a clue until the it was way too late and most of the time, he could convince them it was someone else or due to some unforeseeable circumstances. Buddy could have been a world class interrogator or CIA operative with his God given abilities but he had a bad streak unfortunately.