Torch Without Song

In St. Joseph's Mercy Hospital at Pontiac, Mich., a receptionist glanced up one night last week to see "a zombie" stagger hunched and stiff-legged through the main door. The man wore shoes, socks, and a checked cotton bathrobe; his body was charred, his eyes swollen, his mouth puffy. "Can you get me to the emergency room?" he groaned. As doctors gave him blood and plasma but no hope, the man insisted he was "John Doe from Washington," would say no more.

Fingerprints quickly fingered "Doe" as Frank Henry Kierdorf, 56, bull-voiced business agent of Flint's Teamster Local 332 and one of Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa's 40-odd crooked business agents (i.e., personal representatives). Eventually, Kierdorf gave his own explanation of his burns. He was home alone in Flint, he said, when two workmen appeared, invited him to a secret organizing meeting. At their plea for haste, he tossed bathrobe over T shirt and trousers, climbed into their old Packard. Outside Pontiac, 40 miles away, his hosts stuck a gun at his neck, doused him with fluid and lit a match. Then they dumped him at the hospital.

Pillows & Salve. Such brutality was plausible. Kierdorf had an arm-long arrest record, once served 27 months for armed robbery. On parole he had been made, at Jimmy Hoffa's insistence, a Teamster official like his ex-convict uncle, Herman Kierdorf (impersonating a federal officer, armed robbery), before him. As business agent of the 5,000-member Local 332, Kierdorf used brutal methods and produced satisfactory results. Once he tried to run over a stubborn employer. Said another: "You don't give him arguments." By brutal methods (see box) and by picketing until employers anted up money, Kierdorf was successfully negotiating one way or another with every type of company, from sausage makers to rug layers. He might have enemies angry enough to roast him alive.

But another explanation soon turned up. Studying Kierdorf's dreadful burns, pathologists concluded that the victim wore no bathrobe when he was hurt. Moreover, he had been dabbed with salve before he arrived at the hospital. A neighbor remembered a Cadillac at Kierdorf's house the night he was burned; another saw a similar car and Kierdorf's green station wagon return two hours later, watched Kierdorf and a companion make four trips to the car with pillows and packages. Police found charred flesh in the station wagon and house.

"There'll Be Another." More flesh and a fire bomb's fragments were spotted at a suburban Flint dry-cleaning shop mysteriously burned out the same evening; a passerby said he saw flames in the shop, noticed two men running, heard screams inside. Police decided that Kierdorf was accidentally burned during an arson job, taken home for first aid, finally dumped at the hospital. All this they put to Patient Kierdorf, who had already been told that he had no chance for life. From Kierdorf came a huskily whispered obscenity --no more. A few hours later he died.

By week's end police suspected that missing uncle Herman Kierdorf, 68, was another of the Teamster arson squad, and fellow Local 332 Business Agent Jack Thompson was the third. Uncle Herman, before disappearing, had left with a neighbor, among other mementos, a silencer-equipped Luger, a device useful for only one function: assassination. The Kierdorf burning had suddenly become the grimmest indictment so far of Jimmy Hoffa and his Teamsters. To Flint businessmen, this proved small comfort. Predicted one grimly: "Don't worry. There'll be a new business agent to replace Kierdorf."

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