Coal Survivor I 4. A Ticking Clock

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Chip Yablonski sat in his father's campaign office, going over the campaign strategy one last time.

It was the fall of 1969.

The election was just around the corner, December 9th burning a hole in his calendar.

The attacks on his father were never that far from his mind.

They tracked down the phone number of that man who came to the house saying he needed a job.

A man who the Oblonskis suspected might actually be stalking Jock.

Jock and a friend had called that number and when a woman picked up, they'd pretended to be cops.

They said her husband had witnessed an accident and they were looking for him.

What's your husband's name?

They asked.

What does he do for a living?

She said he's a house painter.

He was in Pennsylvania today looking for work.

And that story tracked.

So maybe Jock had just been paranoid after all.

Maybe the guys at the door really were just looking for a job?

I mean, why would a house painter from Cleveland be after him?

Jock hung up.

And pretty soon, that paranoia about the mysterious men, it was overshadowed by the urgency of the election itself.

Miners would start casting ballots at the beginning of December.

Jock had clearly ignited something in the miners.

Every day, more and more support was coming his way.

But Tony had all the leverage in this campaign, money, resources, inertia.

And Tony had one huge advantage, which was the final obstacle facing Jockenship.

We weren't told where the election was going to be held.

That's right.

The election would happen in days, but Jockenship didn't know exactly where or even when it would take place.

That's because miners vote in large part at their local union offices, locals for short.

These locals can organize voting anywhere, from a high school to a courthouse to a church, and each local gets to set its own voting hours.

But the only person with a list of these locals and how to contact them was Tony.

And Tony was not in a sharing mood.

Chip desperately needed that list for all the obvious reasons.

to know where to campaign, for example.

But also, importantly, so he could send election observers in.

He knew Tony might try to mess with the election, intimidate people, or worse, tamper with votes.

So Chip took this really, really dry administrative issue to the silliest person he knew, someone he knew could help him get creative.

His partner in crime and mischief, his sister Charlotte.

Chip is warm, but serious.

His friends call him the general.

Charlotte, on the other hand.

She was always the character in the family.

She's someone that would drape a napkin around her arm like a faux server and mimicking things.

She's just a delight.

And remember, Charlotte was a social worker in the coal fields, so this fight spoke to her directly.

It wasn't just polls and projections to her.

These were faces and families.

And it was her commitment to them that helped tip Jock into running in the first place.

So there they were, were, brother and sister manning their dad's tiny campaign office in downtown DC.

Chip scanning stacks of reports, Charlotte lightening the mood.

Together, they got creative about compiling their own list of locals.

They took a national almanac of coal mines, the union's public financial records, and the Department of Labor's reports.

That gave them the addresses of some place close to each local.

And then they dug up phone numbers and made cold calls, posing as reporters.

I imagine Charlotte making up a reporter's voice, like, Hi, this is Charlotte Charlotteson from the Charlotte Observer.

Yes, I'm calling about the time and place of the upcoming election.

I can see her shooting a knowing glance over at Chip on the other side of the office, as if to say, Okay, we got another one.

1,200 more to go.

By the time election day neared, the brother-sister duo had 345 locals pinned down, which was only about a quarter of them.

But this meant they got to send in observers to those locals to make sure Tony's people didn't pull any funny business.

Union elections before this had been predetermined, very often rigged, which also meant there hadn't really been election observers in the past.

Which brought Chip and Charlotte to their next problem.

Would locals even allow observers in the room?

So the Oblonsky siblings got crafty again.

This time literally.

Chip and Charlotte designed and printed a series of formal-looking credential papers.

It looked like a marriage certificate or a certificate of admission to the bar or something like that.

We wanted it to look official so that our observers could come in there and say, here, it's like my credentials.

The The Oblonsky kids sent hundreds of observers to the locals they'd hunted down and gave each a piece of paper certifying they were official.

You have to let us monitor.

They were feeling optimistic.

They were as ready as they'd ever be.

Meanwhile, Jock and Tony made their closing arguments.

A bitter campaign for the presidency of the United Mine Workers Union is winding up tonight.

The membership of our union want this organization to be the great trailblazer that it once was.

Tomorrow, the membership of 190,000 will cast their ballots to determine whether Tony Boyle retains control of the union.

You're the union.

You can do what you want with it.

And you can do it at the ballot box on December the 9th.

At stake was nothing less than Jock's revolution.

He was in a race against Tony and a hired killer.

From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom, Cole Survivor.

Episode 4, The Ticking Clock.

I'm your host, Niccolo Mainoni.

This is the most corrupt goddamn election in the history of the labor movement.

Oh, Lord, we pay.

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Martin was evil, constantly evil and cunning.

Well, the coal miners in this country are damn sick and tired of having a national president of its organization that's in bed with the coal operators.

He said he was going to put all those sons of bitches in jail.

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The morning of December 9th, 1969, was a chilly one.

Jock woke up, put on one of his many suits, and made his way down the dark wooden stairs of his Clarksville farmhouse.

He'd returned home so he could be with his family on Election Day.

Jock was restless.

He was anxious.

He was stoic.

He was ready.

Jock made his way to his local union and voted, just like tens of thousands of miners across the country.

From the mines tucked away in the Rocky Mountains to the rolling hills of Tennessee and the haulers of West Virginia, American coal miners were voting, truly voting, something they hadn't done in half a century.

And Chip's volunteers, armed with their credentials, also made their way to the polls to monitor the election, watching miners vote in churches, high school basements, local community centers.

Charlotte assigned herself to monitor the belly of the beast.

She parked herself at Mine Workers' Headquarters in DC,

watching union officers in suits and ties casting their ballots.

just two floors below Tony's office.

Chip sat in their tiny campaign office just a few few blocks away, taking in reports from monitors as they poured in from around the coal fields.

Very quickly, the phone started ringing.

We were getting reports from observers all over the place.

Chip was calling Jock, filling him in on reports throughout the day.

Jock waited with his wife, Margaret, back at home.

Margaret, I imagine, just as anxious as Jock.

She'd pushed him hard to do this.

A CBS crew was filming as they waited.

This was national news in the making.

Jablonski and his wife spent the evening in their neat-as-a-pin 200-year-old homes and watched the news.

He boasted of his wife's literary talents.

She wrote plays and stories, he said, but never got to Broadway.

You can feel Jock nervously deflecting.

Forget me, my wife's the real story.

I picture Margaret not falling for it and deflecting right back.

They were different, Margaret and Jock, but they really loved each other.

As the sun started setting, observers started to call into Jock's headquarters with the real news: vote tallies.

A diehard Jock supporter recorded some of these calls.

This is what we've got now.

We've got 46 locals reporting.

This is 17 and 29.

Out of 31 locals reporting at, say, 9:30.

Yablonski is 2,794.

What they were seeing on the ground looked good.

They started getting excited.

I've got 169 for Jabronski, 112 for Borough.

Oh, Lord, we paid.

Thank God.

That's fine.

It felt like an exhale.

Like all this work, all this risk they'd taken to do this, they might just pull this off.

Oh, my goodness gracious.

But then the official results started to come in.

Numbers delivered by the union, since, after all, that's who was in charge of this election.

And those tallies, they showed a different picture, one that looked good for Tony.

Report after report with Tony on top.

And the tallies just kept piling up, as Colorado reported, and Kentucky, then Ohio.

And it started to become clear this was shaping up to be not just a loss for Jock, but a beating.

Finally, just after 2 a.m., the election was called.

Jabonski suffered a crushing defeat.

The final national tally gave Boyle over 80,000 votes to Jablonski's 46,000

in healing the wounds created during the bitter campaign.

Tony appeared on TV in the middle of the night, telling reporters, it's over.

It's time to move on.

He was jubilant.

This tape recording is a bit warped, but you can hear Tony's enthusiasm.

And we won.

All that time, all that money, all that risk for nothing.

Jock sat in a dining room table chair facing the TV, Margaret behind him on the couch.

His bushy eyebrows furrowed as if he could change the results by being angry enough at the TV screen.

The Oblonskis turned off the TV and walked upstairs to bed.

They'd taken a beating.

They felt lost.

But back in DC,

Chip wasn't all that sure they'd actually lost.

He'd been taking in reports from observers throughout Election Day, and things sounded off.

Here's one observer reporting her experience.

There was one guy who was the secretary of that local.

He used force to keep us from observing anything, would not let us talk to anyone, threatened to kill me during the day, threatened to throw me outside, have me beaten up.

Also, Chip kept hearing that the pensioners strangely voted in droves.

These were retired men, no longer actually in the mines.

Remember, Tony had raised their pension by 30% after Jock had announced his candidacy.

On election day, Tony had used union funds to provide buses, even taxicabs, to make sure those pensioners got to the polls.

Digging through vote tallies, Chip saw that some districts had voted 80, 90, 100% for Tony Boyle.

The tallies were impossible.

I mean, it just didn't make sense.

You've got to figure that in any election, you know, if you put a dog on the ticket, the dog is going to get three or five votes.

And those tallies just didn't make any sense at all.

Those results, strangely, coalesced around places where Tony had bussed in pensioners and where Jock hadn't been able to locate the polling places to send in his observers.

We have no idea whether or not there was actual an election that was held because they never told us the polling places.

But most suspicious was the information coming from places where they did have observers.

Here's one observer in West Virginia.

He carried our local big, big, but when the votes was counted up in Washington, D.C., why he had lost our local.

Places where Jock had won, they were mysteriously disappearing.

Like the union's local didn't exist.

Chip would get the observer's results.

They'd say things like 80% Jock, 20% Tony.

But then he'd turn to his TV and he'd hear the national report come in for that same district.

That 80-20 had miraculously become a 50-50 split.

One election monitor saw a union official vote 30 times.

Another local office received less than 100 votes total, but curiously, reported that Tony had won by 140.

In District 19, which is Tony's base, the vote total came in before the polls opened.

That same week, Chip took those reports to his dad, basically saying, I'm not so sure we actually lost this election.

And as Jock absorbed the reports and the data, he turned to Chip and said, this is the most corrupt goddamn election in the history of the labor movement.

It was at this moment that something started to change in Jock Yublonsky.

He started to go over in his mind all the forces that had betrayed him in this fight.

There was the Department of Labor, which is supposed to police you in elections.

When Jock had told them he feared for his life, they did nothing.

There was celebrity consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who'd convinced Jock to run and then appeared to desert him for newer projects.

And then there was Tony,

fixing an election so brazenly.

I think there's something about feeling abandoned in a moment like this, going this far out on a limb, only to be deserted.

To have sacrificed so much for what feels like nothing.

It's a moment that can actually make you double down on your cause.

His passion remained intact, but was now colored by something darker.

He would push for a new election.

Sure, Chip was working on the legal case to make that happen.

But the fight wasn't just about that anymore.

It wasn't just about getting Tony out of office.

Now, this was about getting even with Tony.

Making him answer for his crimes.

So, when reporters called Jock for comment, United Mind Workers presidential challenger Jock Jablonski has refused to concede this defeat despite the claim of a smashing re-election victory by Tony Boyle.

Jablonski says that he doesn't believe everything reported from the UMW election headquarters in Washington.

Jock chose to poke the bear again.

It would be the riskiest decision of his life.

December December 14th, less than a week after the votes came in.

It was a snowy morning.

Chip and his father made their way back to the coal fields, down to a high school in tiny Sophia, West Virginia.

Father and son walked into the high school gymnasium.

They would not be alone in this fight.

Hundreds of supporters packed the room, people from all over coal country.

They were there to rally behind Jock.

Chip and Jock knew these people were risking everything by being there, because their continued support for Jock would not go unnoticed by Tony.

Chip stood at the back and listened as Jock made his way to the front, his gravelly voice ringing out across the room.

In his speeches, Jock seemed to have entered a new state.

Well, the coal miners in this country are damn sick and tired of having a national president of its organization that's in bed with a coal operator.

There it was, Jock calling out Tony's secret, the union's secret, that they'd been financing coal companies with coal miner money.

And when we conclude this fight,

we're going to establish a union that again is going to be considered as the great trailblazer in the American labor movement, not the trailer like it is today.

As he spoke, suspicious-looking men started to slink in and line the walls of the gym, sipping whiskey and making their presence known.

As if to say, okay, Jock, we let you have your run at it.

It's over.

You lost.

Time to fall in line.

That's what a union man does.

But those goons were now staring down a different Jock Yiblonski.

And so, as he stared out from the podium, past the goons, past his supporters, Whether he knew it or not, Jock spoke the words that would change his life.

He said he was going to put all those sons of bitches in jail.

A loss didn't silence Jock Yblonsky.

It made him stronger.

Jock wasn't going anywhere, not until Tony went to jail.

For election fraud, for corruption, for the rot at the heart of the union.

Jock's fighting words immediately made their way to the man who'd been told to kill Jock, Paul Gilley.

The house painter turned reluctant assassin.

Unbeknownst to Jock, in the weeks before the the election, Paul had been told to stand down.

He was told the murder was off.

Too suspicious for a candidate to be killed right before an election.

So the killers were going to drop it.

Move on with their lives, maybe for good.

But then Jock refused to drop it.

After Jock's fighting words in the Sophia gymnasium, Paul Gilly got another phone call from his father-in-law, who'd roped Paul into the murder plot.

And paul's father-in-law told him the murder's back on do it quickly by new year's day no mistakes this time or else

with the sofia rally behind them and a difficult year coming to a close the oblonsky family gathered a few days after christmas chip piled his wife his son and his saint bernard in the car we drove there that christmas with demetrius in the back seat with Jeffrey.

Demetrius would have taken up most of the back seat.

He was a big dog.

And the four made their way up from DC through a vicious snowstorm to his brother Ken's house in Pennsylvania.

It was no night for driving.

But the Oblonskis had been through so much that year.

They didn't just want to be together for the holidays.

They needed to.

Finally, around 9 p.m., Chip and his wife walked in.

Everyone he loved was finally within arm's reach.

My mother in the kitchen with a huge laugh,

joking, no doubt, about something.

Jock sat regally by the Christmas tree.

A huge tree, decorated by everybody in the family.

Well, except my dad, who would be in a chair just orchestrating,

just directing us what to do.

And from his director's chair, Jock looked proudly at Chip, the son who'd left a fancy job in D.C.

to run his campaign, who'd given it all up to join Jock's fight.

My dad, he was not touchy-feely, but he took so much pleasure in my successes, whether it was winning a moot court competition or clerking for a federal court of appeals judge, he would just bust the buttons off his shirt.

in terms of his pride.

And

I think I was the favorite, but probably ticked my brother and sister off.

Jock puffed on a cigar as Margaret rocked one of the grandkids.

They were empty nesters now and had talked about selling their house in Pennsylvania, maybe moving to a city like DC or Pittsburgh, somewhere where Margaret could finally pursue her career.

They talked about going to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

They discussed the war in Vietnam.

They tried to lure Jock into a break, maybe a Caribbean vacation.

They tried to talk about things besides the election.

About a week earlier, after the West Virginia rally, they'd met with the Department of Labor and it had gone terribly.

The DOL acknowledged some fraud, but said Jock had to first exhaust all union channels to resolve it.

In other words, asked Tony to investigate Tony.

It was just...

an ugly meeting and we walked out of there saying, well, we know one thing, they're not going to do a goddamn thing.

thing.

So

we have to strap it on and be ready to go to war.

As the night wore on, Jock poured himself a drink and another, and his mood darkened.

The bitterness of the defeat was now washing over him.

Maybe I made a fool of myself, he announced to the room.

Maybe it was all a mistake.

Chip let his dad pour out his feelings, his anger.

As the clock passed midnight, he got up and offered to take his parents back to Clarksville.

We said our goodbyes and our Merry Christmases.

Chip drove his parents home, and he decided he'd crash at their house that night.

As he walked his parents inside, Chip stood in the kitchen, surrounded by all the familiar touchstones of his childhood.

The kitchen booth where he'd cram in with his teenage buddies as Margaret made pork chops.

Margaret's old typewriter just off the kitchen in the den, the click-clack of her typing the soundtrack of his youth.

The TV, where Jock had learned of his questionable election loss.

But as his parents shuffled upstairs to bed, Chip also noticed new things, chilling hallmarks of his parents' new life.

I saw two guns in their bedroom.

And

I saw a streetlight that had been attached to the house to provide provide greater light at night.

I didn't know about those things,

and

it was shocking.

His dad had always hated guns, never even allowed them in the house.

Chip couldn't help but think his childhood home looked more like a fortress now.

His parents had had floodlights installed outside the house to ward away danger.

It was unsettling.

Bleary-eyed, Chip made his way to the couch and collapsed there.

As they slept, the Oblonsky family was unaware of the countdown clock ticking in the distance.

It was just four days to New Year's Eve.

As the Oblonskys were celebrating together that night, Paul Gilly, the reluctant killer, was still processing his father-in-law's call that the murder was back on by New Year's Day or else.

Paul was feeling desperate.

His father-in-law had paid him up front to do the job, and he'd already spent the money.

Also, he'd promised his wife he'd get this done.

She'd hinted that things would get better between them once he did, if he did.

Problem was, Paul Gilly just couldn't do it.

He tried seven times already.

He couldn't get a shot, or his his car broke down, or Jock wasn't where he thought he was.

A few times, Jock had been home, but his family was there too.

But Paul kept thinking, if he could just find the right partner, he could be done with this horrible nightmare.

So he'd gone recruiting at the restaurant he ran in East Cleveland.

To Paul's great annoyance, his restaurant had done poorly.

and instead had become the happening hangout for Cleveland criminals.

Reluctantly, he'd struck up a kind of relationship with a few of them, including one guy named Claude Vealy, who Paul had taken with him on a few of the previous murder attempts.

He was just a stupid bastard to start off with.

Claude was a guy who, if someone asked him what he did for work, he'd just tell you, I steal for a living.

He was a heavy drinker, perpetually unshowered.

You'd easily mistake him for a vagrant if you passed him on the street.

But, like Paul, Claude wasn't built for murder.

A few times where they could have gotten Jock, they didn't, simply because Claude wouldn't pull the trigger.

But Paul had heard of someone who could pull this off, a man named Buddy Martin.

I didn't like Martin because I'd run him out of her restaurant a couple times for drinking and

rowdy, you know,

making noise and aggravation.

So I'd run him out of there a couple times and wouldn't let him come back in there.

Most of the men from Paul's restaurant were nickel and dime thieves,

but not the unhinged 21-year-old Buddy Martin.

Here's how one person described the difference between Claude Vealy and Buddy Martin.

Vealy's more of a

lethargic criminal,

almost a criminal because there's nothing else to do, either that or pump gas.

Whereas Martin is that bad seed type of criminal was evil, consummately evil and cunning.

Previously, Buddy had agreed to kill a black nationalist, throwing a lit bottle of gasoline through the man's window.

A nine-year-old girl in the house had died.

Buddy thought that was funny.

He'd laughed about that.

Buddy Martin had a tattoo on his wrist that said, little Satan.

He had wavy blonde hair slicked back, and you might think, at first glance, a baby face.

But that was before you looked into his pale blue eyes, vacant when they weren't menacing.

Buddy had once sprayed a bar with machine gun fire because a bouncer had called him a sissy.

So Paul, he didn't like Buddy Martin.

He didn't trust Buddy Martin.

But he did think Buddy Martin would pull a trigger when asked.

So on December 29th, two days after the Oblonsky family party, Paul Gilly decided to ask Buddy Martin and Claude Vealy to meet him at a local restaurant.

He explained the situation to Buddy, said he'd get $2,000 if he joined them.

Buddy wondered how idiotic these guys had to be to mess this murder up seven times, but he said yes.

Paul told them, if we don't get this done by New Year's Day, we lose all the money.

And maybe more, he thought.

Paul Gilly went home to tell his wife he'd finally hired a real bona fide killer.

She didn't respond, just kept her eyes on the TV.

They watched the sitcom together in silence.

Outside the Gillies' home, the country was revving up for New Year's Eve.

Not just the end of another year, but the end of a tumultuous decade.

Outside, people fretted about their New Year's Eve plans, bought last-minute champagne, debated whether to get dressed up or stay home.

But Paul Gilley wasn't thinking about about any of that.

He got up from his couch and walked to a mahogany dresser below his bay window.

He opened the bottom drawer, which was full of ammunition, took out a fistful of 38 millimeter bullets and a round of 30 millimeter caliber slugs, and he began to wipe each one.

For Paul, a different kind of countdown to New Year's Eve had begun.

On December 30th, 1969, Paul Gilly picked up Buddy Martin and Claude Vealy in a blue Chevy Impala he'd borrowed from his brother.

He'd worried people were starting to recognize his car in Jockstown.

He'd been there so much by then.

The men barely talked for the next few hours, stopping only to buy beer, whiskey, and some sandwiches.

Around 6 p.m., Paul pulled into Clarksville and drove down the streets that had become so familiar by then.

This time, he told himself, this time I'll do this.

We parked way up on the hill above where you could get a plain view of the house.

Anything going around the driveways, so you could see everything.

Both cars was there.

So we knew that his wife was there.

Jock had been out late.

attending to union business until the very last moment of the 60s.

When he got home a little after nine, he and Margaret shuffled off to their bedroom.

Charlotte tucked herself into bed in her room next door.

The men sat in the car.

They talked about firebombing the house, Buddy Martin's preferred method of killing.

But it was pouring rain by then.

Might not work.

The trio continued to drink.

Around 11.30, Jock turned off his reading light, and the house fell quiet.

It was time.

Claude and Buddy threw their beer cans out the window.

Paul took one long drag off a Marlborough.

He put his car in gear and slowly drove down the hill over a small bridge and creek, rolling to a stop near Jock's tree-lined driveway.

The three men got out of the car and walked toward the house.

The minutes ticked closer and closer to midnight, their own New Year's Eve countdown.

Five,

four,

three,

two.

Time's up.

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.

Joe Hawthorne is our managing producer.

Karen Duffin is is our story editor.

The associate producers are Rachel Young and Julie Denische.

Sound design, mix, and mastering by Erica Wong.

Our theme song and original score are composed by me and Mark McAdam.

Cello performed by Linnea Weiss with additional sound design support from Mark McAdam.

Studio Engineering by Rachel Young and Ewin Leitrimuen.

Fact-checking by Amanda Feynman.

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

Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, Matt Scher, and Vanessa Gregoriadis are the executive producers of Campsite Media.

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