Red Dorfman

Red Dorfman appears in the book less as a figure with an independently narrated life than as a connector: a man whose union position, family partnership, and criminal associations placed him close to the machinery of Jimmy Hoffa’s power. The account links him to a Chicago waste handlers’ union, the Teamsters pension fund, and a network extending from Chicago to the East Coast. Its details come through the narrator’s recollections and reported accounts, and the article’s claims about Dorfman are best read with that perspective in view.

Chicago labor and criminal connections

The book says Red Dorfman obtained the Waste Handlers Union in Chicago in 1939, after the union’s president was killed. It reports that Jack Ruby served as another officer alongside him. That account places Dorfman at the point where union organization and violence meet: control of a labor local is presented not as a separate civic achievement but as part of a wider criminal network.

Dorfman’s connections extended beyond Chicago. The narrative links him to Sam Giancana, Joey Glimco, and Johnny Dio, describing ties both to Chicago figures and to the East Coast. These affiliations help explain why his name recurs in passages about Hoffa’s relationships with organized-crime figures. He belongs to a network whose reach depended on connections across cities and spheres of activity, rather than on a single local position.

Pension-fund business with Hoffa

Hoffa placed Red and his stepson, Allen Dorfman, in charge of union insurance policies. He then made Allen the contact for pension-fund loans. Red’s significance in this arrangement is not simply that he was related to Allen: the book presents the two as partners in a business channel linking union resources, borrowers, and Hoffa.

According to the account, borrowers brought by criminal bosses paid ten percent of a loan, with the resulting fee divided between Hoffa and the people involved. Allen collected the points and split them with Hoffa. The narrator characterizes Hoffa’s personal share as modest compared with what later Teamsters leaders took home, while emphasizing that the pension fund itself had become an important source of financing for organized crime. Red’s place in the story is therefore tied to the institutional access and family partnership behind the loan operation, even though the book assigns the direct collection role to Allen.

Red and Allen also appear together in congressional proceedings. The account says they invoked the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination a total of 135 times during one set of hearings. The number gives a concrete measure of how prominently both men figured in the inquiries, while the repeated refusals to answer leave the details of their testimony unspoken in the narrative.

Hoffa’s Washington trial and the Ruby connection

Red’s network also enters the account of Hoffa’s 1957 Washington bribery trial. With the jury selected and the trial under way, the book identifies Red as Hoffa’s Chicago underworld associate and says he arranged for Joe Louis to come from Detroit. Hoffa and the boxing champion embraced in front of the jury as old friends, and Louis remained to watch several days of testimony. The passage presents this public appearance as part of Hoffa’s effort to shape how the jurors saw him; it does not say that Red himself addressed the jury or took part in the legal arguments. Hoffa was acquitted.

The narrator also recalls meeting Jack Ruby through the circle around Hoffa and Sam Giancana. He says Ruby came to Hoffa’s suite at the Edgewater Beach Hotel with Giancana and that he encountered Ruby several times. On one occasion, the group went out to eat; Ruby brought a blonde woman from Dallas for Giancana. The narrator adds that Hoffa’s son had met Ruby at the hotel as well. He explicitly connects Hoffa’s familiarity with Ruby not only to Giancana but also to Red Dorfman. In this telling, Red is one of the ties through which Ruby was already known in Hoffa’s orbit, before Ruby became nationally associated with the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Narrative significance and limits

Across these episodes, Dorfman’s role is defined by access and mediation: he is associated with a union local, connected to figures in several criminal circles, and involved with Allen in the insurance and pension-fund structure that served Hoffa’s network. The trial episode adds a different kind of influence, linking his Chicago association with Hoffa’s carefully staged public gesture before a jury. The Ruby recollections, meanwhile, make the social connections among Hoffa, Giancana, and Dorfman concrete through meetings and shared meals rather than through organizational charts.

The book does not provide a full biography of Red Dorfman or a detailed account of his private life. It presents him through these consequential relationships and attributed actions, and its descriptions of his network should not be mistaken for a complete record of every role he held. His narrative importance lies in how many channels converge around him: union control, family business, pension lending, court strategy, and personal familiarity among men whose connections crossed the boundary between organized labor and organized crime.