Hoffa’s alleged plot to assassinate Robert F. Kennedy

Hoffa’s alleged plot to assassinate Robert F. Kennedy was a reported threat that brought the conflict between Jimmy Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy close to its most extreme possible outcome. According to Edward Grady Partin, Hoffa described possible means of killing the attorney general in a private conversation in 1962. Partin reported the remarks to investigators; President JFK later disclosed the allegation to a journalist, who withheld it. The episode also unfolded against a backdrop of contested investigative tactics and an impending trial in which the government suspected jury tampering.

The conversation in Hoffa’s office

One night in the summer of 1962, an enraged Hoffa spoke with Partin, a burly Teamsters official, in Hoffa’s office at Teamsters headquarters in Washington, D.C. The account places the two men alone, looking out the window. Hoffa asked whether Partin knew anything about plastic explosives, then said he knew where to get a gun silencer. He went on to describe Bobby Kennedy’s limited personal security: Kennedy had no security detail even at home, often traveled alone in a convertible, and took few precautions. In Partin’s account, the details made the threat sound less like a generalized expression of anger than a discussion of practical opportunity.

Partin was president of Teamsters Local 5 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was out on bail on a kidnapping charge arising from a family custody dispute involving a trucker in his local, and he was under indictment for diverting $1,659 in union funds for personal use. He also had an extensive criminal record from his youth. Hoffa, the book says, misread these circumstances as signs that Partin might be a reliable criminal intermediary: because Partin was tough-looking, from Louisiana, and on bail, Hoffa assumed he was connected to Marcello, whose base was in that state. Hoffa apparently treated Partin as a man who might arrange violence without first establishing that he was, in the book’s underworld phrase, someone who painted houses. Partin later explained that Hoffa assumed he was in Marcello’s pocket simply because he came from Louisiana. The account therefore presents the conversation as both a reported assassination threat and a serious misjudgment about the listener.

The report and the decision to suppress it

Partin took the alleged remarks to the Get Hoffa Squad, led by Walter Sheridan. Sheridan called the story incredible and asked the FBI to administer a lie detector test to Partin; Partin passed emphatically. Sheridan then reported the threat against the attorney general to Bobby Kennedy. These steps made Partin’s account part of the investigative record, although the book does not describe an attempt on Kennedy’s life or establish that Hoffa put a plan into operation.

Shortly afterward, at a private dinner in Washington, JFK told journalist Ben Bradlee that Hoffa was plotting to kill his brother. The account suggests that JFK may have hoped publication would deter Hoffa from acting. Bradlee’s journal recorded that the president seemed serious. But when Bradlee approached Bobby Kennedy for confirmation, Kennedy begged him not to print the story: it could frighten potential witnesses in the organized-crime trials he was supervising. Bradlee withheld it. The allegation thus reached a prominent journalist and was judged serious by the president, yet it did not become a public warning. Its suppression reflected a conflict between exposing a possible threat and protecting witnesses in the larger prosecution effort.

The Test Fleet investigation

The approaching Test Fleet case added another layer to the episode. Hoffa’s trial, scheduled for October 22, 1962, concerned an alleged violation of the Taft-Hartley Act and was a misdemeanor case. The Get Hoffa Squad later denied that it violated Hoffa’s constitutional rights by encouraging Partin to travel to Nashville and join Hoffa’s entourage. Partin did go: he served as a guard at the door to Hoffa’s suite. Sheridan acknowledged that the squad supplied him with a recording device for calls with Hoffa and instructed him to watch for efforts to bribe jurors.

That assignment mattered because Bobby Kennedy had already engineered three jury trials against Hoffa without securing a conviction, while jury tampering had been suspected in those proceedings. The Test Fleet charge itself carried relatively limited stakes; discovered jury tampering could elevate the matter to a felony. Partin’s position therefore joined two strands of the narrative: he was the source of the assassination allegation, and he was also placed close to Hoffa during a trial where investigators were watching for interference with the jury. The book records the squad’s denial and Sheridan’s admissions, leaving the reader to see the surveillance and the constitutional dispute alongside the threat report.

Significance and limits of the account

The episode sharpens the antagonism between Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy by giving it a reported physical form: explosives, a silencer, and an assessment of the attorney general’s security. Yet its evidentiary path remains explicit. The conversation is presented through Partin’s account, tested by the FBI, reported by Sheridan, and privately relayed by JFK to Bradlee; it is not narrated as an independently witnessed attempt. The distinction matters. The book recounts a grave allegation and the officials’ response, but the material here does not show that a killing was carried out or that a completed operational plan was uncovered.

Its consequences in the account are instead political and investigative. The president’s disclosure did not produce a published story; Bobby Kennedy’s concern for trial witnesses kept the allegation from print. Meanwhile, the same informant was placed in Hoffa’s entourage with a recording device and instructions to look for juror bribery. The threat and the investigation thus illuminate the pressure surrounding the Test Fleet trial, as well as the government’s effort to build a case against a union leader it had repeatedly failed to convict. The alleged plot remains unresolved as a claim about Hoffa’s intentions, but its telling reveals how closely the prosecution’s pursuit of him, the protection of witnesses, and the risk of violence were bound together.