Hazy Shade Of Winter: Chicago Mob’s ’83 Allen Dorfman Hit Continues To Hang Over Skipper Albie Vena’s Head Four Decades Later
https://gangsterreport.com/hazy-sha...per-albie-venas-head-four-decades-later/January 22, 2023 — Alleged Chicago mafia street boss Albie (The Falcon) Vena remains the top suspect in the murder of powerful Windy City insurance magnate and mob associate Allen Dorfman, a notorious gangland slaying carried out 40 years ago this week.
“They want Albie for the Dorfman hit, they’ll never get ’em though,” said one former US Attorney familiar with the case file and prosecutorial approach to the case. “There’s knowing someone did something and then there’s being able to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt against a guy proven to be very elusive in regards to the law in relation to how much dirt he’s done and how much harm he’s inflicted. Albie knows that and he’s emboldened. He walks around Chicago without a care in the world. The rumors have been flying for years and nothing has ever happened. The whole thing was a tickle-the-wire operation by the FBI and it failed miserably.”
The infamous Dorfman killing, immortalized for the Big Screen by the legendary Martin Scorsese, is currently unsolved, but part of a long-gestating FBI investigation into Vena for racketeering and a string of cold-case homicides, according to sources familiar with the probe which began in the early 2010s.
Dorfman, 60, was gunned down on the afternoon of January 20, 1983 in the parking lot of the Lincolnwood Hyatt Hotel by a two-man hit team to prevent him from potentially cooperating with authorities in a bribery case he was about to report to prison to serve a five-year sentence for. He oversaw the Teamsters union’s fat and immensely-corrupted pension fund and was at the center of the two Operation Strawman cases that rooted out mob casino-ownership in Las Vegas. His slaying was depicted in the 1995 film Casino.
Dorfman’s killers walked up behind him and unloaded several shots into his head, neck and torso as he left the “Purple Hote’s” Tessy’s Restaurant following a business lunch with fellow Chicago mob associate and bail-bondsman Irving (Red) Weiner. Both hitmen were wearing masks and wielding silencer-equipped weapons. Weiner was with Dorfman during the attack, but came away unharmed.
Investigators believe a composite sketch of one of the triggermen based on an eye-witness description resembles the 73-year old Albie Vena, the leader of the Outfit’s Grand Avenue crew and is called by some the most dangerous man in Chicago. The diminutive and dapper Vena has beaten a pair of murder raps in his mob career, most recently being acquitted in the slaying of low-level Outfit associate Sam (Needles) Taglia at a 1995 trial.
Witnesses described one of the masked assailants in the Dorfman hit hollering, “This is a robbery,” and the other immediately opening fire on Dorfman with a 22-caliber pistol. Emergency medical technicians pronounced him dead on the scene.
The two hitmen fled on foot to a waiting getaway car and sped off. A few blocks down the road, the killers abandoned the original getaway car and got into yet another waiting vehicle. The gun that fired the fatal shots was recovered inside a dumpster bin on the grounds of nearby St. Cornelius Elementary School.
Then-Chicago mob capo Joseph (Joey the Clown) Lombardo was convicted in the bribery case with Dorfman and had already reported to prison to begin serving his 10-year term. Lombardo, who would eventually rise to be the Outfit’s consigliere in the 1990s, had been Dorfman’s protection. He was found guilty of murder in the sprawling Operation Family Secrets case at the historic trial in 2007 and died of throat cancer in prison. Vena, per sources, replaced Lombardo as “Godfather of Grand Avenue.”
At the time of Dorfman’s killing, Vena was part of the Outfit’s North Side crew, since merged into the Westside’s Grand Avenue regime. Lombardo’s longtime bodyguard and enforcer Frank (The German) Schweihs died of cancer in 2008 facing his own Family Secrets charges a suspect in dozens of mob-related homicides, including the Dorfman slaying. Per multiple sources, Schweihs “taught Albie how to kill.”
According to FBI records and Lincolnwood Police crime-scene files, there were two different getaway cars used in the Dorfman hit: a silver-colored Cadillac stolen from Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood months earlier and a green-colored Dodge sedan. The killers allegedly followed Dorfman and Weiner from Dorfman’s office to the Lincolnwood Hyatt where they ate at Tessy’s in the green two-door Dodge.
