Hoffa's alleged threat against Bobby Kennedy

Hoffa's alleged threat against Bobby Kennedy was a reported conversation in which Jimmy Hoffa described killing the attorney general and spoke as though the official listening might help carry it out. The account came from Edward Grady Partin, a Teamsters official who reported it to investigators. Its consequences reached the White House, yet the story was not published: Bobby Kennedy feared disclosure would frighten witnesses in the organized-crime trials he was supervising.

The conversation in Washington

One night in the summer of 1962, an enraged Hoffa and Partin were alone in Hoffa’s office at Teamsters headquarters in Washington, D.C., a building nicknamed the marble palace. Looking out the window, Hoffa asked whether Partin knew anything about plastic explosives, then said he knew where to obtain a gun silencer. According to Partin, Hoffa declared, “I’ve got to do something about that son of a bitch Bobby Kennedy. He’s got to go.”

Hoffa then described why he believed the attorney general would be vulnerable: Kennedy took no personal safety precautions, had no security detail even at home, and often traveled alone in a convertible. The reported remarks thus moved between a stated desire to remove Kennedy and a practical description of how an attack might be accomplished. Partin understood them as more than anger alone—as part threat, part invitation to do the job.

The listener and his report

Partin was president of Teamsters Local 5 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At the time, he was out on bail on a kidnapping charge arising from a family custody dispute involving a trucker in his local, and under indictment for diverting $1,659 in union funds for personal use. The book also describes his youth as marked by an extensive criminal record and presents him as a large, tough-looking man. Hoffa apparently took these features, along with Partin’s Louisiana origins, as signs that he was connected to the underworld.

Partin later explained Hoffa’s assumption this way: “Hoffa always just assumed that since I was from Louisiana, the home state of Carlos Marcello, the man must have been a guy who paints houses.” But Hoffa had not asked whether Partin was involved in such activity before making the remarks. The account therefore presents the exchange as a misjudgment as well as a threat: Hoffa treated Partin’s background as evidence of allegiance without first establishing that allegiance.

Partin reported the conversation to the Get Hoffa Squad, headed by Walter Sheridan. Sheridan called it “an incredible story” and asked the FBI to administer a lie detector test. Partin passed emphatically. Sheridan then reported the alleged threat to Robert F. Kennedy. The episode entered the government’s investigation not as a public accusation at first, but through Partin’s account, its testing by investigators, and Sheridan’s communication to the attorney general.

A story withheld

Shortly afterward, President John F. Kennedy told journalist Ben Bradlee at a private dinner party that Hoffa was plotting to kill his brother. The book presents the leak as a possible attempt to deter Hoffa by making the alleged plot public. Bradlee recorded that “the President was obviously serious.” When Bradlee approached Robert F. Kennedy for confirmation, however, Kennedy pleaded with him not to publish the story. He was supervising organized-crime trials and feared that publicity would scare away potential witnesses. Bradlee withheld it.

The threat consequently had a political afterlife without an immediate public one. The president’s disclosure reached an influential journalist; the attorney general’s request stopped publication. That sequence leaves a significant distinction between the reported conversation and its public record: the account describes a serious allegation relayed through officials, but also explains why it did not become contemporaneous news. The book further notes that Kennedy was leading what it calls the nation’s largest drive against organized crime, placing the episode within an escalating conflict between the attorney general and the Teamsters president.

Later accounts and evidentiary limits

The book recounts the threat retrospectively in a chapter on Hoffa’s legal battles. Its account attributes the conversation to Partin and describes the lie-detector test and Sheridan’s report, but the supplied narrative does not establish that an attack was attempted or that Hoffa issued a formal operational order. The event remains an alleged threat, with the distinction between Hoffa’s reported words, Partin’s interpretation, and the investigators’ response central to how it is presented.

The book’s broader account is also shaped by interviews and later confessions, but those materials concern separate claims and should not be mistaken for independent confirmation of this 1962 conversation. The author says the first interview with Frank Sheeran took place in 1991 and stopped after Sheeran had disclosed more than he wanted; the interviews resumed in 1999 and continued for four years. Sheeran read and approved each chapter and later stood behind the book’s account of his role in what happened to Hoffa in 1975. Those details describe the making of the book and its treatment of a different event, not corroboration of Partin’s report about Kennedy.

That distinction matters because the book itself frames its larger subject as a historical account assembled through interviews, while the alleged threat rests here on a particular chain of reported speech and response. Later, Michigan prosecutor David Gorcyca described the unresolved Hoffa case as having “the markings of a great ‘whodunit’ novel without the final chapter.” The phrase captures the wider book’s unresolved investigative setting, but it does not settle the status of the 1962 allegation. What the account firmly narrates is the chain: Hoffa’s reported words, Partin’s report, Sheridan’s escalation, and the decision not to publish.