Coal Survivor I 3. Strike with All Thy Will

Speaker 1 Campsite media.

Speaker 1 If you wanted to make an announcement in Washington, D.C. in 1969,

Speaker 1 and you wanted to make it bold, something the press would pay attention to, you did it at the Mayflower Hotel.

Speaker 1 Stuffy chic, peppered with chandeliers and floral moldings.

Speaker 1 Basically, imagine the kind of hotel your grandparents would think is classy.

Speaker 1 And so, Jock Jablonski sat in the Pan-American room at the Mayflower Hotel on May 29th, waiting for the media to arrive.

Speaker 1 Today, Jock would announce that he was challenging Tony Boyle for the presidency of the United Mine Workers.

Speaker 1 Ralph Nader, the celebrity consumer advocate, had invited his many press contacts, but refused to say what the press conference was about. That seemed to be top secret.

Speaker 1 Not a single person knew what was about to happen.

Speaker 2 We weren't certain whether or not the word would leak out and that there might be an effort on the part of the mine workers to try to crash it.

Speaker 1 Chip Jablonski, Jock's son, a high school football player, turned lawyer, was there that day.

Speaker 2 My cousin Stephen and I were dressed in suits at the door looking for press credentials to admit people.

Speaker 1 As 11 a.m. neared, a parade of journalists made their way in.
NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, all the big outlets, all curious as hell.

Speaker 1 As they walked in, each reporter was stopped at the door by one of the two Jablonski boys, pretending to be bouncers.

Speaker 1 Ralph Nader stood quietly in the back. He was just there to show that Jock had his all-powerful seal of approval.

Speaker 1 The room neared capacity. There was a palpable buzz in the crowd as Jock walked in and sat in front of a U-shaped table, microphones from every broadcaster before him.

Speaker 1 No sign of nerves, Jock began to speak. Chip recited Jock's speech for me.

Speaker 2 Today I am announcing my candidacy for the presidency of the United Mine Workers of America.

Speaker 2 I do so out of a deep awareness of the insufferable gap between the union leadership and the working miners.

Speaker 1 Jock outlined his platform. It was all about health and safety, financial reform.

Speaker 1 And finally, he vowed to return democracy to the union, to turn over the power to the rank and file.

Speaker 1 Jock finished the announcement, put his paper down, and looked up.

Speaker 1 Reporters stared back, shocked.

Speaker 1 No one had contested the mine workers' presidency in almost half a century. If Jock had been feuding with Tony Boyle, that feud was private.

Speaker 1 And reporters were also skeptical.

Speaker 1 For three decades, Jock had stood by Tony and his predecessor. So perhaps the question was inevitable.

Speaker 1 Hands shot up, and a reporter from the Washington Post asked, Why have you been silent for so long?

Speaker 1 The room got still.

Speaker 1 Reporters studying this rugged miner's face. And out of Jock's mouth came poetry.
Literal poetry.

Speaker 2 He quoted some Scott poet,

Speaker 2 When ye be an anvil, lie ye very still.

Speaker 2 When ye be a hammer, strike with all thy will.

Speaker 1 An anvil is what a blacksmith lays a piece of steel on to be able to pound it into shape.

Speaker 1 But now, no longer able to tolerate the decline of this union, Jock would become a hammer, shaping a union future without corruption.

Speaker 2 That was sort of erudite and sophisticated and gave him a level of respect from the press in attendance that, like,

Speaker 2 well, this guy's not exactly a country bumpkin.

Speaker 1 However, he got the line, it did the trick. The reporters streamed out of the Mayflower, and the headlines started to appear.

Speaker 3 And there has been a revolt within the miners' union.

Speaker 6 The leader of the revolt, Joseph Jablonski, is challenging union president Tony Boyle in a coming election.

Speaker 1 The revolution had begun.

Speaker 1 And in true 60s fashion, it had begun on television for everyone to see.

Speaker 1 But the United Mine Workers leadership, who Jock had just put on notice, preferred to answer its most serious challenges in the shadows. Something everyone involved in this drama would soon find out.

Speaker 1 From crooked media and campside media, this is Shadow Kingdom, Cole Cole Survivor. Episode 3, Strike with All Thy Will.

Speaker 1 I'm your host, Nicola Mainoni.

Speaker 4 Royal is buying television time billboards and enjoys the powerful machinery of the union.

Speaker 8 Harley Joe Jablonski is Julie Africanus.

Speaker 2 When he got karate chopped at a meeting that was a a setup. It was like, oh, this is really pretty bad.
I will not stand still to see him return by the likes of a young Blonsky.

Speaker 2 I will answer these ugly charges.

Speaker 8 The membership of our union wants this organization to lift up its membership ahead of everything else to hell with the officers.

Speaker 1 Jock's insurgent campaign hit like a shockwave across the country.

Speaker 1 The events of the previous year, the Farmington explosion and Ralph Nader's crusade against the union leadership, these things had made America sympathetic to coal miners.

Speaker 1 So now, Jock's face was splashed across newspapers and into millions of TV screens on the evening news.

Speaker 1 A few days after announcing his candidacy, he appeared on Pittsburgh Radio, KDKA, during the 6-8 evening drive.

Speaker 1 Prime time. In Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 1 The first reporter to reach Tony Boyle's team was from Newsweek. The reporter was told, no comment.

Speaker 1 But that was the no comment before the storm.

Speaker 1 That was before Jock started making pointed, public, specific accusations, saying out loud the things the unit had only ever discussed behind closed doors and knowing handshakes.

Speaker 1 Jock did not mince words. Here he is speaking to a reporter about Tony's lax mind safety record.

Speaker 1 He was questioning the whole Tony Boyle apparatus.

Speaker 1 And you just didn't question Tony. Remember what had happened to the people at the convention who asked questions? Tony got his cronies and loyal-to-boy hard hats to savagely beat people up.

Speaker 1 Tony was temperamentally unprepared for a public rebellion. So, shortly after Jock's press conference, Tony came out swinging.

Speaker 1 He gave Jock a pithy new nickname: Holy Joe Yablonski, this puny Apatonis crazed by dreams of power.

Speaker 1 Holy Joe Yablonski.

Speaker 1 While Jock sketched a vision for the future, Tony admonished miners, saying that they ought to cling to their glorious past.

Speaker 1 That any attack on the union was an attack on their beloved former president, Jock and Tony's old boss, John L. Lewis.

Speaker 10 Every time Yablonski smears the retirement fund,

Speaker 10 he smears John L. Lewis, not Tony Powell.
And because I will not stand still to see him besmirched by the likes of a Jablonski, I will answer these ugly charges.

Speaker 1 Notice him leaning on Jock's last name there.

Speaker 10 By the likes of a Javlonski.

Speaker 1 A dog whistle reminder. Jablonski is a foreign name.
Polish.

Speaker 1 But holy Joe Jablonski didn't back down.

Speaker 1 He pointed out publicly that Tony had earmarked himself a secret pension that would pay him 20 times what the miners would would receive.

Speaker 1 Not a good look, and Tony seemed to know it.

Speaker 1 So, shortly after that, less than a month into the campaign, Tony manipulated a board of trustees' vote, a move that allowed him to effectively take full control of the union's massive pension fund.

Speaker 1 And in less than 24 hours, I had representatives of the fund in my office, and that's when pensions were increased from $115

Speaker 8 to $150.

Speaker 1 He raised pensions by 30%

Speaker 1 instantly, which the union definitely could not afford. But that was a problem for later.
In that moment, Tony knew the pensioners were a huge voting block.

Speaker 1 And now he had them eating out of his hand.

Speaker 1 And that's the thing about the fight between Jock and Tony. Tony owns the playing field of this election.

Speaker 1 and he was happy to tip it in his favor. Sure, Jock was getting the headlines in the New York Times, but that's not what miners read.

Speaker 1 A lot of them only read the United Mine Workers Journal, the union paper delivered to every hollow in Appalachia, that journal that Ralph Nader read at the DC Press Club.

Speaker 1 And who controlled the Miners Journal in its entirety?

Speaker 1 Tony Boyle.

Speaker 1 The UMW Journal became a loyal to Boyle journal now, filled with articles about Tony's great leadership and smearing the campaign of that Polish hypocrite, Jock Jablonski.

Speaker 1 And keep in mind, while Jock had to finance his insurgency with his personal life savings, Tony, he could draw from the union's $300 million bank account for his campaign.

Speaker 5 Boyle is buying television time, billboards, and enjoys the powerful machinery of the union in this campaign.

Speaker 5 He also has 80,000 voting pensioners who probably see Boyle as the man who signs their pension checks. Jablonski can only hope the sentiment for reform will outweigh all this.

Speaker 2 We knew that

Speaker 2 there was going to be one hellacious fight.

Speaker 1 And not just a fight to win this thing. First, they had to fight just to get on the ballot at all.

Speaker 1 Tony had changed the election rules. They used to require just five nominations to get on the ballot.
He changed that to 50. To get to 50, he'd have to fight creatively.

Speaker 1 And the thing is, this fight was happening at a specific point in time, 1969.

Speaker 1 The end of a decade filled with protest marches, sit-ins, information warfare, anything goes guerrilla tactics.

Speaker 1 Tony, he didn't grasp any of that.

Speaker 1 He fought like autocracies were still invincible, like the British Empire and its soldiers lined up in their neat little rows with the rules of war, unprepared for the American rebels that were coming at them from the trees.

Speaker 1 Tony was unprepared for an actual election.

Speaker 1 He'd never run in one before. He was appointed by Fiat.

Speaker 1 So he probably thought he could just change the nomination rules and that would kill Jock's chances.

Speaker 1 But Jock gassed up his old Ford and set out on the campaign trail with his ragtag campaign team.

Speaker 1 His son Chip at headquarters, Margaret, his wife, who wrote the campaign literature, daughter Charlotte, liaising with miners on the ground. It was a family campaign.

Speaker 1 And so Jock began traveling across the coal fields, making his case. He waded into bathhouses, which is where the miners clean up after shifts.

Speaker 1 He met with miners in their homes, in coffee shops, in local high schools, flexing his primary advantage. He liked people.
He was good with them. Tony, not so much.

Speaker 7 For years, Boyle has never been any closer to miners than the stage at union rallies.

Speaker 4 Yvlonsky's challenge has forced Boyle to do some personal politicking.

Speaker 7 It has not been easy for him.

Speaker 4 Sometimes he's been heckled, other times ignored.

Speaker 1 When they first started out, Chip was like, 50 nominations? That doesn't seem all that high.

Speaker 2 I thought, oh, well, we can get 50 easily. I mean, hell, there are more than 50 locals in District 5, where Jock is very well known.
But my dad kept saying, you don't understand.

Speaker 2 These local union people are frightened of the district. They'll try every trick.

Speaker 1 Jock reminded Chip that Tony Boyle had taken over the majority of the union districts, handpicking their leaders, controlling all of their money.

Speaker 1 So if a local went for Jock, those guys, they stood to lose everything.

Speaker 1 So Jock, having really nothing to lose at this point, did what union leaders had never really done before.

Speaker 1 He was direct with the miners.

Speaker 12 Now I can understand a lot of these fellas not being for me.

Speaker 12 This is what they're being told.

Speaker 1 He said, remember the fight for black lung laws? Remember how when tens of thousands of you went on strike in defiance of Tony, we won? We got life-saving black lung laws?

Speaker 1 Remember how I stood with you in that fight? And remember how Tony opposed you? If we stand together, we can beat Tony.

Speaker 1 Slowly, signs of support started popping up. Letters showed up at Jock's house with $1, $10.

Speaker 1 Some miners started self-organizing on his behalf. A group of them in West Virginia started an informal campaign outpost at a coffee shop near their mine.
Chip remembers this.

Speaker 2 We began to develop a sort of skeleton operation of

Speaker 2 trusted people in different places.

Speaker 1 The leader of the black lung reform movement in West Virginia gathered local unions from his state.

Speaker 13 We talked to Jablonski for two hours and of the nine locals represented there, he got nine local nominations.

Speaker 1 Nine nominations down, 41 to go.

Speaker 1 Jock met with men of District 29. And he said that he had decided to run and would we back him? And we told him that he definitely would.

Speaker 1 Support even trickled in from what they thought were Tony Boyle strongholds like Kentucky, home of the infamous Harlan County.

Speaker 2 We got maybe six or eight nominations out of western Kentucky that we never dreamed of.

Speaker 1 It was happening. More nominations were pouring in in defiance of Tony.

Speaker 6 Until word reached the insurgent candidate, Jablonski apparently has enough support to force the union hierarchy to certify him as a candidate.

Speaker 1 It was official. In the brutal August heat, Four days before the Woodstock Music Festival of 1969, Jock had captured the right to challenge Tony.

Speaker 1 The election was just four months away, in December, the last month of the 1960s.

Speaker 1 Tony was getting nervous. He stripped Jock of his remaining union positions at a board meeting where his cronies threatened to fight Jock like they did down in Harlan County.

Speaker 1 He made hundreds of vinyl records of speeches where Jock had praised Tony in the past and mailed them to the minors.

Speaker 1 Jock could feel the threat. He understood that Tony, always paranoid, was increasingly unhinged.

Speaker 1 But he kept making his way out to the miners.

Speaker 1 Sometime that summer, he landed in Illinois. He'd been promised a big crowd, but weirdly, only 15 people showed up.
The vibe in the room felt hard to pin it down, but just off.

Speaker 1 But he delivered his usual speech anyway.

Speaker 12 Now you know and I know.

Speaker 11 Too many guys given lousy jobs stuck in dog holes pushed around by management.

Speaker 1 As the meeting broke up, Jock walked over to a minor to chat. He was talking and leaning against a table when someone tugged at his sleeve.

Speaker 1 Jock turned around, felt a powerful blow to the back of the head, and then everything went dark. Jock fell to the ground, unconscious.

Speaker 1 He'd lie on the ground for 30 minutes, completely out.

Speaker 1 Doctors would later assess that Jock would have been paralyzed if he'd been hit just a few inches either way.

Speaker 1 When Jock came to, he staggered to a chair. The remaining miners claimed they just didn't recognize the assailant.

Speaker 1 They encouraged him to leave town quickly and said reporting this to the police might not be a good idea.

Speaker 1 In many ways, Jock had been expecting something like this. He'd been trying to tell people, but they dismissed his fears.

Speaker 1 Even for his son Chip, who knew how dirty the other side was fighting, this was a wake-up call.

Speaker 2 And if I thought he was being melodramatic when he got karate chopped in a meeting that was a setup, at that point in time, it was like, oh, this is really pretty bad.

Speaker 1 And it kept getting worse.

Speaker 1 A couple of men broke into his campaign office late at night, throwing open doors and searching for Jock.

Speaker 1 Fortunately, he wasn't there.

Speaker 1 At one campaign stop, Jock's staff found dead leaves stuffed into the gas tank of the propeller plane Jock had been using. A week after that, someone broke into a key supporter's house.

Speaker 1 They rifled through his bedroom and slashed his wife's clothing with a spear.

Speaker 1 Jock's wife, Margaret, suspected they'd had break-ins too.

Speaker 1 She could swear food had been moved in her pantry.

Speaker 1 Jock asked the Department of Labor for protection, an investigation. They were the ones in charge of union elections.
They said, we only investigate after the election. Call us when it's over.

Speaker 1 Then Ralph Nader seemed to all but disappear shortly after the announcement. They'd call the Nader people, and the response time got slower and slower, till nothing.

Speaker 1 Ralph Nader said, well, that's how he works.

Speaker 2 We just launched. We can't stay with these people.
Otherwise, we would reduce the number of issues that we would be advancing.

Speaker 3 I was absorbed in all kinds of other things.

Speaker 1 So Jock's celebrity backer was gone, along with the protective spotlight he brought. The federal government was gone.

Speaker 1 Jock was on his own.

Speaker 1 Jock bought himself a gun, several guns, even though he hated guns. Ever since childhood, when a friend of his was shot, he asked his nephew, a former Marine, to be his bodyguard.

Speaker 1 This nephew started coming with him everywhere. They had people on the ground to meet and escort them wherever they went.

Speaker 1 Jock didn't want to be paranoid, but he felt like he had eyes on him, everywhere.

Speaker 1 At home, at his campaign office, at his rallies.

Speaker 1 And he wasn't wrong. Because standing in those crowds among his supporters was a killer.
The man from episode one who'd been sent to murder Jock Jablonski, Paul Gilly.

Speaker 1 He'd been stalking Jock for months all over the campaign trail, even at home.

Speaker 1 Remember, Paul showed up at Jock's house. Jock was nearly shot through his living room window, but the hitman left when he heard Jock's wife.

Speaker 1 While Jock had been building his campaign, Paul Gilly was building his own.

Speaker 1 It was a campaign to stop Jock's revolution. To stop Jock Yablonski.

Speaker 1 If you needed an assassin and you had any other option, you probably wouldn't choose Paul Gilly.

Speaker 1 And Paul Gilly would agree with you.

Speaker 2 Because I've never dealt in any criminal activity in my life.

Speaker 2 Now, you can believe that or not, but

Speaker 2 that's where it stands. I have no records,

Speaker 2 never been accused of nothing like that.

Speaker 1 But Paul Gilly's father-in-law would not leave him alone. He pestered Paul.
He begged. At one point, he even asked politely.

Speaker 2 He said,

Speaker 2 sure, help out if we get rid of him.

Speaker 2 Him,

Speaker 1 Jocky, Blonsky.

Speaker 1 A man Paul had never heard of before this.

Speaker 1 And Paul, he was just a house painter, a restaurant owner in Cleveland.

Speaker 1 But the thing is that Paul's father and his father-in-law, they were old miners,

Speaker 1 old union men.

Speaker 1 And his father-in-law, Silas, kept saying that Jock was trying to ruin the UMW.

Speaker 1 That was blasphemy in Coal Country.

Speaker 1 Silas couldn't say exactly where this order came from, but he kept pestering Paul.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he kept asking me, why didn't I do it? I said, no,

Speaker 2 I've not killed nobody.

Speaker 1 Paul said, why don't you ask your own sons? I don't trust them, replied his father-in-law. It went on like this for a while.

Speaker 1 Even Paul's wife, Lucy, chimed in. Her dad had been diagnosed with black lung.
She pleaded, do it for my sick old dad. She threatened that if Paul didn't do it, she would.

Speaker 2 Only reason I went into that was to keep her out of it. But she's the type of person you can't keep out of nothing.

Speaker 1 He told his wife, just as he'd told his father-in-law, no way.

Speaker 1 So she said, fine, I'll find someone else to do it.

Speaker 2 So she started talking to these other guys.

Speaker 1 Guys who said yes. A couple of guys who were willing, who had guns, guys who had everything

Speaker 1 but a car.

Speaker 1 This didn't bother Paul's wife.

Speaker 2 And she said, well, if you won't take them, I'll take them.

Speaker 1 She told Paul she'll drive them herself.

Speaker 1 But Paul wasn't going to let his wife drive a couple of crazed killers with guns. So he conceded.
Paul told her, no,

Speaker 1 he'll drive the guys himself.

Speaker 1 It was supposed to be just one trip. And Paul was just supposed to be the wheels of this.
It was a flimsy operation from the start. The men his wife had recruited were drunks and outlaws.

Speaker 1 The only photo they had of Jock was a grainy image on newsprint.

Speaker 2 The picture I had was

Speaker 2 kind of fuzzy, like it wasn't a real clear picture. It was in a newspaper, you know, a little cheap paper.

Speaker 1 The first time they tried to kill Jock, they drove to D.C. to a restaurant where Jock often ate.
But Jock wasn't there.

Speaker 1 And he wasn't in the campaign offices the night they barged in looking for him.

Speaker 1 He wasn't home the day they drove to Clarksville, Pennsylvania, to Jock's home and broke in.

Speaker 2 We've been in the house once before looking for the Mississippi Vodchkin and tried to catch him by himself.

Speaker 1 It wasn't until November that Paul and his cohorts first laid eyes on Jock at a campaign rally.

Speaker 1 Jock was crisscrossing Appalachia, and the the hitmen had finally tracked him down to Pineville, a town nestled in the southern mountains of West Virginia.

Speaker 1 Paul stood at the back of the rally, listening to Jock,

Speaker 1 who was flanked on stage by a congressman and black lung activists.

Speaker 1 It was a sunny but chilly November day.

Speaker 1 People in the crowd sprawled on the grass, sipping whiskey as they listened.

Speaker 11 The membership of our union want this organization to lift up its membership ahead of everything else.

Speaker 4 The hell with the officers.

Speaker 1 And when Jock finished his speech and got in a car, surrounded by his bodyguards and a state senator, Paul and his men followed close behind, guns at the ready, looking for a good shot.

Speaker 2 But they had just too much traffic at the time when he drive by, and besides, he had all them people in there with him.

Speaker 1 Another useless trip. Except for one thing.

Speaker 2 But at least I got to see him and the guys with me got to see him, know who he is and what he looks like.

Speaker 1 They were ready now. They knew what he looked like.
They'd studied his patterns. They knew how he usually drove in and out of the small town of Clarksville.
They'd been in the house.

Speaker 1 But then, shortly after the rally, Paul Gilly got a phone call. His father-in-law said the murder was off.
Too risky. The campaign was too widely publicized.

Speaker 1 If one of the candidates was found murdered, that would be too suspicious. Stand down, Paul was told.

Speaker 1 And a few months earlier, Paul would have felt nothing but relief at this order. In fact, he would have given anything for a way out.
But not now.

Speaker 1 Because as he'd been hunting Jock,

Speaker 1 people had promised Paul a lot of things.

Speaker 1 So much so that the rational part of his brain seemed to turn off.

Speaker 1 His father-in-law promised to get Paul's real dad a big union pension.

Speaker 1 His wife promised to pay more attention to him. Their marriage had been on the rocks.

Speaker 1 And he was promised money. A lot of money.
He'd even been given an advance from Silas's local union district.

Speaker 2 My father-in-law was our president of District 19 there in Kentucky, and the money was collected through District 19.

Speaker 1 District 19, nestled there in Harlan County. Remember that? The rough corner of the union?

Speaker 13 Well, I got a request there from your president. He asked me for a song called Harlan County Boys, but I sing it.

Speaker 1 Silas lived there.

Speaker 10 Any Harlan County public there?

Speaker 1 And remember Tony's convention where the men in the white hats beat people up?

Speaker 13 Which side are you on?

Speaker 1 Silas was one of those men throwing the punches. Silas wasn't quite the president of Harlan, but he was a go-to enforcer in one of the most violent corners of the union.

Speaker 2 Her dad was mixed up in a lot of stuff over the years. Illegal stuff.

Speaker 2 You know, like blowing up my machinery and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 So when Paul Gilly got word that the murder was off, that he should stand down, his reluctance had disappeared, replaced now by desperation to please his wife and replaced by terror because he'd already spent their money and he knew their secrets.

Speaker 1 Right now, Paul is thinking, are they coming for me next?

Speaker 1 So Paul Gilley did not stand down. Paul Gilley went rogue.

Speaker 1 It was now Thanksgiving of 1969. The election was just two weeks away.

Speaker 1 Paul jumped in his car with his accomplice, a man named Claude Vealy, and sped from Cleveland to Clarksville.

Speaker 1 When they arrived, Jock was the only car in the driveway. At last, they'd found him alone.

Speaker 1 Paul walked to the door and knocked. Jock answered.
Paul looked at Jock, his linebacker's neck, his bushy eyebrows, his imposing presence. Paul was nervous, stuttering as he recited his lines.

Speaker 2 We're from Tennessee and we were told that you knew a lot of mine operators and

Speaker 2 might be an opening where we were getting a decent job in the mines.

Speaker 1 Paul tried not to glance down the porch at Claude Vealy as he silently hoped Claude would act. The agreement was always, Claude Vealy does the dirty work, Paul would just drive.

Speaker 2 And I thought Vealy would go ahead and rush in the door or something because there's nobody there but him and

Speaker 2 Veely didn't do a damn thing.

Speaker 1 Jock stared at Paul and kept glancing at his hands. Paul mumbled something, stalling for time.

Speaker 1 He didn't like how Jock was staring.

Speaker 1 His mouth was dry, his knees began to shake. He kept glancing at Claude Vealy, thinking, why doesn't he shoot the gun?

Speaker 1 Paul had a gun in his pocket too.

Speaker 1 But there, looking into the eyes of the man, who'd just been a face circled in a newspaper until now, Paul froze. He left the gun in his pocket.
The conversation fizzled.

Speaker 2 So, run out of something to talk about? And it looks suspicious, tell you the truth about it, because it was that awkward. But I guess Yuvanski didn't pay that much mind to it.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 So Paul and Claude, utterly defeated, drove straight to a local bar.

Speaker 1 From Jock's point of view, though, this was not over.

Speaker 1 Jock knew what these men were here for. He knew he'd just come face to face with the threat he'd flagged to Ralph Nader in those smoky first meetings when he said, they'll kill me, Ralph.

Speaker 1 For coal miners, these two sure had some awfully clean hands. And these men claimed to be from West Virginia, but had Ohio license plates.

Speaker 1 When the family returned home, Jock told them, two men were just here to kill me.

Speaker 1 By now they knew to take him seriously, that they were on their own, and that they had to take matters into their own hands. So Jock and his other son, Ken, hopped in their car.

Speaker 2 My brother and a friend went into the little town of Clarksville, and they found the car that Gilly and Vealy were riding around in and took down the license number.

Speaker 1 Ohio, CX457.

Speaker 1 They phoned a police friend who lived near Cleveland. He did some digging and came back to them with a a name.

Speaker 2 It was a car owned by Paul Gilley Painter, Cleveland.

Speaker 1 The officer gave him Paul's address.

Speaker 1 And so imagine Jock and a friend going into his little study just off the kitchen, a room filled with campaign pamphlets and papers from 30 years in the Union.

Speaker 1 They picked up the phone. And they dialed the number for 1846 Penrose Street, East Cleveland.

Speaker 1 All this time, Paul Gilly had been stalking Jock.

Speaker 1 Now Jock was on his trail.

Speaker 1 Someone on the other end of the line picked up.

Speaker 1 Hello, this is Lucy Gilly.

Speaker 1 That's Paul's wife. Jock's crew was one person away from proof.
One phone call away from getting to Paul Gilly before Paul Gilly gets to him.

Speaker 1 Jock's friend clears his throat. Hello, Mrs.
Gilly.

Speaker 1 We need to talk.

Speaker 1 That's next time on Shadow Kingdom.

Speaker 1 Shadow Kingdom is a production of Crooked Media and Campside Media. It's hosted and reported by me, Nicola Mainoni.
The show is written by Joe Hawthorne, Karen Duffin, and me.

Speaker 1 Joe Hawthorne is our managing producer. Karen Duffin is our story editor.
The associate producers are Rachel Young and Julie Denesche.

Speaker 1 Sound design, mix, and mastering by Erica Wong. Our theme song and original score are composed by me and Mark McAdam.

Speaker 1 Cello performed by Linnea Weiss with additional sound design support from Mark McAdam. Studio Engineering by Rachel Young and Iwan Leitramuen.
Fact-checking by Amanda Feynman.

Speaker 1 Our executive producers are me, Niccolo Mainoni, along with Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, Mary Knopf, and Allison Falsetta from Crooked Media.

Speaker 1 Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, Matt Matt Scher, and Vanessa Gregoriadis are the executive producers at Campside Media.