Tony Boyle was sitting at his desk only four blocks away when a reporter from Newsweek called the union’s press office to get his reaction to Jock Yablonski’s announcement. When a secretary told him the news, Boyle was incredulous.
He had met with Yablonski for almost four hours the day before to talk about mine safety legislation, and everything had seemed so normal. His old rival had been respectful and, more important, deferential, but Yablonski had fooled him.
Some in the union’s hierarchy had thought Yablonski might be planning to topple George Titler, the union’s rotund vice-president, but his bid for the top office came as a terrible surprise, especially to Boyle—who had believed all the wonderful things Yablonski said about him while they were traveling together through West Virginia’s coalfields. After he recovered from his shock, Boyle screamed at his assistants to comb through the UMWA’s cavernous file room and bring him every speck of dirt on Yablonski they could find.
Yablonski expected Boyle to wage a scorched earth campaign. He needed Lewis’s endorsement. He called him again on June 1; Lewis was still too sick to meet now, but he suggested the second week of June.
The next morning, Yablonski attended an International Executive Board meeting chaired by Boyle. The atmosphere was icy and neither man spoke to the other. That afternoon, Yablonski conferred with Rauh, who told him to send a certified letter to Boyle, reminding him of his legal responsibility under federal law to conduct a fair election.
Under the union’s constitution, Yablonski first had to win the nominations of at least fifty of the union’s nearly 1,300 locals before his name could be placed on the December ballot. In his letter, Yablonski asked Boyle to instruct all paid union staff employees to take a “hands-off” attitude, to have the union mail out his campaign literature at his own expense, and to order the United Mine Workers Journal to cover both campaigns fairly and equally.
Boyle’s reply came quickly. On June 4, he convened a special meeting of the union’s district presidents to discuss how to deal with Yablonski’s treason and insurgency. Its recommendations were draconian, ranging from circulating a recall petition in District 5 to putting him on trial for leaking confidential union information to Ralph Nader. The district presidents also discussed compiling a dossier on Yablonski’s criminal past that they could send to Nader, Rauh, and Hechler, and auditing Local 1787, his home chapter in District 5, for fraud and theft.
Two days later, Boyle fired Yablonski as the acting director of Labor’s Non-Partisan League and ordered him to return to District 5, where Mike Budzanoski, its president and a Boyle loyalist, would reassign him. Rauh threatened to sue the union immediately if Boyle did not reinstate his client, but the union leader did not respond.
Worse news came on June 11: Lewis died that morning of internal bleeding. This was a crushing blow. His backing of Yablonski’s campaign, or even his continued silence, would have greatly raised the insurgent’s chances. Boyle, meanwhile, capitalized on Lewis’s death. In a special tribute issue, the United Mine Workers Journal peddled the fiction that Boyle was Lewis’s handpicked protégé, but the two men were never close. In the 1960s, it was not uncommon at noon to walk into the opulent dining room of Washington’s Carlton Hotel and see each man eating his lunch alone.
That made no difference to the editors of the tribute issue. There were almost as many photos of Boyle as there were of the late union boss decorating its pages, including one of him on his knees, praying at Lewis’s grave.
With Lewis out of the way, Boyle rejected Yablonski’s requests to wage a fair campaign. Rauh fought back using the same strategies he used during the civil rights movement, immediately turning to the federal courts and their immense powers to dispense justice. The veteran trial lawyer’s strategies paid off: on June 20, United States District Court Judge Howard Corcoran ordered the UMWA to distribute Yablonski’s campaign literature.
Unfazed, Boyle convened another meeting of the union’s International Executive Board on June 23. He asked the board to name him Lewis’s replacement as the union trustee for the Welfare and Retirement Fund, which would give him access to millions more of the UMWA’s dollars. After it rubber-stamped Boyle’s appointment, the board took up his resolution to fire and reassign Yablonski, which Boyle told his assembled acolytes he had done because the rebel candidate opposed the union’s policies. Yablonski was the only member who did not vote in favor of the resolution. He insisted Boyle had fired him because of his candidacy, but most of his stone-faced fellow board members simply stared at him as he and Boyle shouted at one another. Three who did speak accused Yablonski of treason.
Albert Pass, who had provided the storm troopers to police the union’s 1964 convention in Bal Harbour, Florida, and who was now the board member from the UMWA’s District 20 in Alabama as well as the secretary-treasurer of its District 19, had heard enough.
He rose to his feet and glared at Yablonski through the thick lenses of his black steel-framed glasses. His face knotted in disapproval as his emotions overtook him—as if he were in the throes of one of the Sunday sermons he loved—and he spoke in the coded language of the Kentucky hills to threaten Yablonski’s life. “We have a great union and we are going to keep our union. President Boyle!” Pass shouted. “We are not gonna leave you and the other officers sitting out in that field and these damn fellas behind the bushes shooting at you out there by yourself! By God, we will run them out from behind those bushes! We are going to back you! Thank you very much!”
***
Since Yablonski’s shocking announcement, Boyle had mulled over how to punish his longtime rival.Since Yablonski’s shocking announcement, Boyle had mulled over how to punish his longtime rival. As president of the country’s wealthiest labor union, he could easily hire battalions of publicists, strategists, and lawyers to guarantee his reelection, but merely defeating Yablonski would not be enough. Yablonski was a traitor and an informant. He had been one of them, a member of the union’s inner circle. His treason was as bad as Judas Iscariot’s.
Yablonski’s treachery violated the unbreakable rules of loyalty and kinship that sustained the union’s rigid hierarchy. Equally unforgivable, he had defied Boyle and openly questioned his authority in front of the entire International Executive Board. Taking down Yablonski would send a stark message to anyone else who might be foolish or reckless enough to challenge Tony Boyle—and would also end his threats to expose Boyle’s corruption. “I’ve played every inning of this ballgame,” Yablonski had confided to one reporter. “I know what goes on. I know this game from A to Z.” He knew where the UMWA’s buried bodies were, and understood better than anyone that Boyle held on to his throne by using the UMWA’s money to buy loyalty and to spread fear.
After the board meeting ended, Boyle followed Pass and William Turnblazer Jr., the lawyerly, bespectacled president of District 19, into the hallway outside the board’s third floor conference room. “We are in a fight,” he told them. “Yablonski ought to be killed or done away with.” Pass knew an order when he heard one. He stepped forward: District 19 would do it if no other district wanted the honor. “Fine,” Boyle replied, as if he had just ordered a sandwich. The conversation took less than a minute.
***
This was not the first time Pass had stepped forward to deal with someone who challenged the union’s authority.
Albert Pass became District 19’s secretary-treasurer in 1952, just as mass mechanization began driving its miners out of work. Two years earlier, John L. Lewis had done the unthinkable. He entered into an agreement with the newly formed Bituminous Coal Operators’ Association, which owned nearly half the coal mined in the United States. In exchange for higher pay for his miners and increased royalty payments to the union’s Welfare and Retirement Fund, he promised peace in the coalfields. He also agreed that coal companies could speed up mechanizing their mines.
Steady production now meant as much to the UMWA as it did to the coal operators, and safety, such as that inside Number 9, took a distant back seat to tons of coal mined. Mechanization cost over 300,000 coal miners their jobs, health insurance, and pensions. Between 1948 and 1964, over one million Appalachians lost their primary means of support. They sank into poverty while long freight trains dragged away the wealth from their mineral-rich mountains, leaving them nothing.
Lewis’s bargain also ignited a war. In 1953, big coal operators began openly criticizing the UMWA for not organizing the northern Tennessee and southeastern Kentucky coalfields. Nonunion mines, which took advantage of this vast surplus of out-of-work miners, began to grow rapidly in numbers. By the early 1950s, they accounted for about 20 percent of the working mines in District 19, and they were winning competitive, cut-rate contracts with the government’s Tennessee Valley Authority, slicing into the profits of major coal companies, which had labor agreements with the UMWA.
Coal barons urged Lewis to unionize or drive these mines out of business. Lewis ordered Tony Boyle to organize them and “damn the lawsuits.” While most of America basked in the “normalcy” of the mid-1950s, his command ignited a guerrilla war in northern Tennessee and eastern Kentucky’s hollows and hills. To wage it, Boyle turned to his old staples of beatings, bullets, and dynamite.
He found a willing accomplice in Pass as District 19 descended into a febrile cycle of violence, revenge, and no remorse. Boyle and Pass used the UMWA’s money to threaten, brutalize, and kill nonunion men. Small coal operators, following the region’s Old Testament beliefs, retaliated by assassinating union organizers.
Bloodshed excited Albert Pass as much as a fire-and-brimstone Sunday sermon, and his frequent use of it highlighted his split personality. He was both a cold-blooded killer and a devoted family man. He could order the assassination of the owner of a small “dog hole” mine on a Saturday morning and patiently spoon-feed a daughter who had cerebral palsy that same afternoon. He sprang from an eye-for-an-eye society, which distinguished between a killing, something necessary, and a murder, which was a sin.
Pass commanded a small army of willing henchmen. William Jackson Prater was Pass’s field commander in District 19’s war against independent coal operators. He was as gifted at buying guns without serial numbers as he was at finding those who could use them. Pass always turned to him when he needed something blown up or someone terrorized. Prater’s favorite enforcer was Silous Huddleston, his close friend and a brutal mountain man who once beat a man bloody with a chain after he refused to join the union.
Among Pass’s most important duties was the care and feeding of the “Jones Boys,” his district’s terrorist wing. They were named after the legendary Industrial Workers of the World organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones.
The Jones Boys roamed the countryside in packs of cars and pickup trucks, and specialized in intimidation, destruction, and assassination. District 19 became infamous in the UMWA for its shotgun blasts in the night, for baseball bat beatings, and for automobile accidents that were not accidents. Their softer methods ranged from “cowbelling” union foes—locking a cowbell around an offender’s neck with a heavy chain and padlock—to “baptizing” recalcitrant operators by holding them face down in rocky creeks, “in the name of John L. Lewis.”
On April 11, 1955, the Jones Boys stripped naked John Van Huss, a small nonunion mine owner, and nearly drowned him in a shallow drainage ditch. After they had beaten him senseless, they drove him into the ground like a fence post and forced his miners at gunpoint to curse at him and punch him in the head.
That June, the local prosecutor tried nine UMWA members in the Campbell County, Tennessee, courthouse for Van Huss’s attempted murder. Albert Pass, his shirtsleeves rolled up and arms folded, stood in the back of the courtroom, staring at the jury. He was not alone. He had packed the courtroom with his “boys,” their coat pockets sagging under the weight of their loaded pistols. It took the jury less than an hour to acquit Van Huss’s attackers.
The Kentucky National Guard and federal judges, not intimidated by mountain mores, finally stanched the bloodshed by the end of 1959. Lewis and Boyle never worried about any of this being traced to them; they knew the union’s code of silence would shield them from being blamed for causing this death and mayhem.
The UMWA’s war against the small operators damaged more than its ethics, however. Lawsuits for property damage cost its treasury millions; by the end of June 1959, small coal operators were asking the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee alone for more than $15 million in damages. No other labor union in American history has been found liable in so many jury trials for violent conduct. It was all for nothing: the UMWA faced as many nonunion mines in 1959 as it had when its Jones Boys drove Van Huss into the ground in 1955.
Bitter and frustrated, Pass found himself presiding over a district that was losing members and drowning in fear. Nearly 20,000 coal miners had belonged to District 19 in 1947, but by 1964, it had fewer than 5,000. Poverty skyrocketed as union miners lost their pensions and health benefits. District 19’s treasury needed constant cash transfusions from the UMWA’s Washington headquarters to keep it afloat. Between 1963 and 1968, the union pumped $3,702,159 into District 19, far more money than it sent to any other.
While Pass felt his grip weakening, Theodore Quentin Wilson felt his tightening. Wilson, a lawyer and one of the UMWA’s most strident foes, founded the rival Southern Labor Union in 1955 and served as its general counsel. The SLU was friendly to coal companies, tailored its contracts to individual mines, and had no hefty Welfare and Retire Fund to support. By 1966, it was growing in strength in District 19, while the UMWA’s continued to fade.
As Pass ruminated over what to do about this threat, one of his two sons was killed in a car wreck. Denny Pass was only eighteen years old. Shattered, Pass withdrew from the world, deep in grief, and threw himself more and more into his union work to escape his sadness. He convinced himself that only the UMWA had treated him fairly in life. He renewed his dedication to ridding it of its enemies.
Pass returned to his old ways. In the spring of 1968, he ordered William Prater and Silous Huddleston to blow up the SLU’s headquarters. After that, he compiled a list of its officials to assassinate. Wilson’s name was first.
He directed Prater and Huddleston to oversee Wilson’s assassination. Huddleston asked Lucy Gilly, his favorite daughter, to help him find a killer. She lived in a tough East Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood populated by Appalachian refugees, and it did not take her long to find one of them desperate enough to do it.
Robert Gail Tanner was a short-order cook who devoted himself to making chicken-fried steaks by day—he had perfected that skill as a prison-trained cook—and breaking into people’s houses at night. An out-of-work coal miner from Clarksburg, West Virginia, with a belly full of bleeding ulcers and pockets stuffed with Rolaids, Tanner had turned to cooking and stealing when he moved to Cleveland. He was chronically short on cash to support his wife and children, and readily agreed to murder Wilson when Lucy offered him $10,000 and the use of a car to do it.
Tanner’s appetite for stolen goods derailed his big payday. The police arrested him after he broke into a house in a Cleveland suburb and a housewife came out of the shadows and sprayed him with buckshot from her shotgun. A judge sentenced him to serve two years in prison.
Tanner’s arrest and Boyle’s request to kill Yablonski sidetracked Pass’s plans to kill Wilson. His new plans to assassinate Yablonski were almost scuttled in late June 1969 by another Boyle loyalist who had his own plans to kill the insurgent.
***
Four days after Boyle gave the order to kill him, Yablonski flew to Springfield, Illinois. His strongest support lay in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but he knew that nearly 10,000 miners lived in Illinois’s southern coalfields. George Morris, a local union president, invited him to meet with a group of union field representatives and miners at the State House Inn. Though he promised Yablonski a friendly audience, it was anything but. What Yablonski did not know was that Morris and four others who attended were on Boyle’s personal payroll.
The meeting the next morning attracted only fifteen UMWA members. It lasted for almost an hour in the suite Yablonski had reserved. As it was breaking up, the insurgent candidate was leaning on a table talking to one of the miners about his campaign when a vicious karate chop from behind him landed just below his right ear.
The blow knocked him out for nearly a half hour. When he woke up, his arms were numb. He rolled over on his stomach and crawled to a chair. Morris, who claimed he did not see the attacker, urged Yablonski not to call the police. The bad publicity would hurt his campaign. Yablonski, who wanted out of Springfield as quickly as possible, reluctantly agreed.
When he arrived home in Clarksville, he told one of his brothers what had happened. “They are trying to kill me. They are going to continue trying to kill me,” he said as Marg held a bag of ice over his badly bruised neck. The karate chop had smashed into the third and fourth vertebrae of his spinal column; a quarter-inch closer would have killed or paralyzed him from the neck down. Yablonski’s doctor concluded that the attack was the handiwork of an expert. The blow had been aimed directly at a major nerve center, causing numbness in Yablonski’s right hand and right foot.
Joe Rauh lodged a complaint with the Department of Justice, but the government’s lawyers were reluctant to investigate Yablonski’s claims. Justice officials told the New York Times that they were aware of “the political situation” in the UMWA and were determined “not to be used” to promote any candidate. No one was ever prosecuted for the assault.
When a reporter asked him about Yablonski’s injury, George Titler smirked. He derided the attack as a hoax the rebel candidate had staged for political purposes. He said the truth was much less dramatic: Yablonski was drunk and tumbled down a flight of stairs. Boyle echoed his vice-president’s snide comments, claiming that one of his foe’s own supporters had knocked him unconscious.
Boyle was not done with his strong-arm tactics. The next day, a squadron of his hooligans, each paid $20, stormed into a meeting of Yablonski’s supporters in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, and broke it up. Yablonski, confined to his bed in Clarksville, accused Boyle of employing “fascist tactics.”
Yablonski was well enough by July 4 to attend a rally for mine health and safety legislation at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. There he saw Suzanne Richards, one of Boyle’s top aides, standing nearby, and he shouted at her that the union would have to kill him to get him out of the race. Five hundred miles away, Albert Pass was planning to do just that.
***
Tony Boyle and Albert Pass met on July 14 at the UMWA’s headquarters. As the two men sat alone in Boyle’s cavernous office, the diminutive president told his violent lieutenant not only that Yablonski had to be killed, but that it had to be done as quickly as possible. As the two men sat across from one another, Boyle spun a web of lies that appealed to Pass’s conspiratorial mind. Big oil companies, he claimed, were plotting to take over the UMWA. Yablonski was their Trojan horse: he was going to disclose that the union had funneled dues money into the election campaigns of Hubert Humphrey and other friendly politicians, which violated the federal Corrupt Practices Act. Yablonski’s admissions could cost Boyle the election and send him to a federal penitentiary.
Pass certainly had no use for the gravelly voiced insurgent. Yablonski had complained to Boyle during the 1964 convention about District 19’s heavy-handed storm troopers, and he had offended Pass even more the next year when he came to Knoxville as part of a UMWA fact-finding team. Yablonski, troubled by Pass’s failure to add any new members to District 19’s dwindling membership rolls, accused him of being lazy and lying to union headquarters about his poor efforts. District 19’s strongman was enraged and embarrassed by Yablonski’s biting criticisms, and now jumped at the chance to strike back.
Besides, Yablonski was a traitor and a tool of Washington and New York City outsiders—a greater menace than the SLU’s Ted Q. Wilson. Killing him would be an honor and a down payment on the enormous debt District 19 owed the union’s headquarters. It would also prove to Tony Boyle that he could always rely on Albert Pass, a loyal union man.
Pass knew the plot to assassinate Yablonski would have to be tightly compartmentalized and ruthlessly executed. He believed there was only one man he could trust to see it through. Pass summoned him as soon as he arrived home in Middlesboro.
William Prater was Pass’s right hand, but he never felt comfortable around his mercurial boss. He considered himself better educated—he had attended Purdue University for four months after he got out of the Navy in 1945—more polished, and more businesslike than Pass, who always wore white socks with his dark suits. He also did not like Pass’s explosive temper tantrums or his rapid mood swings, which by the summer of 1969, had only gotten worse.
Pass repeatedly berated Prater and his other field representatives for their poor organizing results. He began threatening them with losing their jobs. Only he, Pass warned them, stood between them and poverty. Prater made $10,000 a year as one of District 19’s organizers and troubleshooters, which he used to support his wife and seven children. Pass’s threats made him a scared and worried man.
His fears and anxieties rose after Pass summoned him in mid-July for a private meeting at District 19’s Middlesboro, Kentucky, headquarters. Pass, afraid of being overheard, talked to Prater in his car as the red-faced field representative drove through the district’s back roads. Pass told him Yablonski had to be “knocked off.” He was in the hands of Big Oil, which wanted to destroy the union. Yablonski also knew too much about the union’s corruption. They would both go to jail if he became the union’s president.
Pass asked Prater if he knew anyone who would kill Yablonski for $5,000. Prater did not, but he agreed to think it over. He had never questioned Pass, and he was not about to start.
As Prater drove back to his home in LaFollette, Tennessee, he thought about what Pass wanted. While he agreed Yablonski was a treacherous turncoat, murdering a member of his own labor union was something even he had never done. This would require a professional killer, an outsider who could not be traced to the UMWA.
This would require a professional killer, an outsider who could not be traced to the UMWA.Prater could not go to the Mafia with his problem. The UMWA had no connections to organized crime—it was too xenophobic for that. He could turn to only one man, a retired miner who knew hard men with no ties to the union. Prater had worked with him before to find an assassin willing to murder Wilson. They could work together again to find someone to kill Jock Yablonski.
Silous Huddleston was as rough as the tree-clad hills he came from. He joined the UMWA in 1933 at the age of twenty-five and mastered using dynamite to open up thick, cord-like seams of soft coal. He did not confine his newly learned skills to coal seams, however; he applied his knowledge aboveground to terrorize the union’s enemies. He worked at various times as a miner and an organizer; in between, he became one of the UMWA’s fiercest advocates and most bloodthirsty enforcers. His organizing philosophy was simple. He once lectured a relative that there were two things that kept a man from working in a nonunion mine: “principle and stark fear.” He believed in deploying plenty of the second if the first failed.
Huddleston’s zealotry nearly cost him his life. In July 1946, coal company guards tired of his pro-union proselytizing waylaid him, shooting him in the thigh. While he recovered, he bought and ran a small café. Short of money, he robbed one of his own customers that fall. A judge sentenced him to serve three years at the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary near Petros, Tennessee. He “pulled” twenty-four months of it. (James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., would later serve time at Brushy Mountain.)
Huddleston was released for good behavior in 1948, and returned to the mines until 1963, when his coal dust–coated lungs finally forced him aboveground for good. Prater had helped Huddleston get his pension when he retired, and the two men became close friends and often traveled together across District 19.
While digging coal was behind him, beating up the union’s enemies was not. In 1965, Huddleston, now the president of a UMWA local composed solely of retirees, and a pack of union toughs bloodied Steve Kochis in a Wheeling, West Virginia, parking lot. Kochis had run unsuccessfully against Tony Boyle the year before, and he still opposed the union president.
Pass and Prater were disappointed that Robert Gail Tanner had gone to jail before he could kill Ted Q. Wilson, but they were pleased by Huddleston’s initiative in finding him. As a reward, Pass sent Huddleston to the UMWA’s September 1968 convention in Denver, Colorado, as part of District 19’s delegation, and assigned him to “maintain control” of two microphones on the convention’s floor.
Huddleston’s proudest moment came when he joined a receiving line to meet Boyle, and a union photographer snapped a picture as the beaming hatchet man shook the UMWA president’s outstretched hand. He bought three copies and never tired of showing them to his family.
Prater never doubted Huddleston would help him assassinate Yablonski: the old man had a religious faith in his leaders, and he worshiped Boyle. Huddleston carried the ballpoint pen Boyle gave him at the 1968 convention like an amulet. He believed what Pass and Prater told him about Yablonski’s conspiring with the big oil companies to destroy the union. The rebel leader threatened Huddleston’s way of life. He had to go.
In early August 1969, a stooped, grandfatherly-looking man with a hacking cough boarded a “Hound”—Appalachian shorthand for a Greyhound Bus—for Cleveland. The bus company did not keep passenger manifests; Huddleston wanted to cover his tracks. He was going to see his favorite daughter, Lucy, and talk her husband into finding someone to kill Jock Yablonski.
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