The Silencers

Seven shots fell Allen Dorfman

Allen Dorfman, above all else, was a survivor. Introduced to the young Jimmy Hoffa in 1949, when the future Teamsters boss was but an ambitious union leader in Detroit, Dorfman parlayed that friendship into a multimillion-dollar insurance empire whose most lucrative account was the union's Central States Health and Welfare Fund. From 1958 to 1971, when Hoffa headed the Teamsters, Dorfman emerged as his powerful lieutenant. Before Hoffa was led off to jail in 1967 for jury tampering, he told subordinates, "When Dorfman speaks, he speaks for me."

Hoffa was presumably murdered in 1975, when he disappeared without a trace. But Hoffa's successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, continued to allow Dorfman to control the union's pension fund, and Dorfman prospered in the murky, billion-dollar swamp of Teamsters loans and land deals. A dapper dresser fond of a round of golf and the company of old cronies, he lived with his wife Lynn in a $750,000 home in the Chicago suburb of Riverwoods.

In 1972, Dorfman was convicted of accepting a kickback of $55,000 on a pension-fund loan and served nine months in jail. Last December, as a result of an FBI probe dubbed "Operation Pendorf' (for penetrate Dorfman), he and Teamsters President Roy Williams were convicted of conspiring to bribe former Democratic Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada in return for his putative help in blocking a trucking deregulation bill. Scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 10, Dorfman, 60, faced up to 55 years in prison.

Last week, as Dorfman and Irwin Weiner, his former partner in Mob-connected enterprises, walked to lunch through the parking lot of the suburban Hyatt Lincolnwood Hotel near Chicago, two men wearing ski masks ran up behind them. "This is a stickup!" yelled one. But obviously it was not. The man opened fire immediately with a .22-cal. handgun, hitting Dorfman in the back of the head seven times. As the attackers fled, Dorfman lay dying in a pool of blood. Weiner was uninjured.

Law enforcement authorities speculated that somebody was fearful that Dorfman might seek to cut his jail sentence by telling Teamsters or underworld secrets. Said Patrick F. Healy, executive director of the Chicago Crime Commission: "A lot of people in the criminal world will sleep better tonight knowing that Dorfman is silenced." Silence comes often around Chicago: this was the area's 1,081st gangland-style killing since the commission began keeping records in 1919. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.