Coal Survivor I 8. Trial

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Campsite media.

Chip Yablonski got the call he'd been waiting for for three years.

On the other end of the line was prosecutor Richard Sprague, who'd been building the case against Tony.

He told Chip, they finally had enough to prosecute Tony Boyle.

And he also asked for Chip's help. The prosecutor was trying to figure out exactly when and where to make the arrest.
And

Sprague was concerned Boyle might take off or might do something to try to evade arrest.

And I said, well, I can tell you where he's going to be on such and such a day at such and such a time because his deposition is being taken.

After losing the election, Tony and his supporters were getting hit by a ton of lawsuits. He was being called to testify left and right.

And by mere mere coincidence, Chip, now the top lawyer for the union, was scheduled to depose Tony the same week as the planned arrest. Chip told the DA,

I wouldn't be upset if you interrupted Tony's testimony.

So Chip and Clarice coordinated time and place with the prosecutor. And

they swore us to secrecy. They said, we're going to come in and we're going to arrest him, but you may not tell anybody.
Do not tell anybody.

On the morning of September 6th, 1973, Chip, an eight-month pregnant Clarice, Tony, and his lawyer sat down in a DC conference room.

They began the deposition, which was just down the street from the union headquarters. It was tense.

Chip hurled questions at the man he was sure had his family killed. A man seated just feet away from him.

But for Chip, it was tense also with anticipation of what he knew was about to come. As the clock approached 11.30, there was some noise down on the street.
Tony seemed to ignore it.

He just continued to deflect Chip's questions. So we're sitting in there and we're deposing Tony Boyle.

And all of a sudden... Two United States Marshals knocked on the door at this law office.
And he said, Tony Boyle? And I said, yeah, he said, you're under arrest for the murder of Jack Yablonska.

And Boyle's lawyers

said, you can't interrupt this. This is a legal proceeding.
And they basically said, watch us. Federal Marshall said, I'm pretty sure this takes precedent.
So they led him away.

This was the moment Chip had been working toward. The moment that he'd set aside his entire life for.

A moment that required him to fight and then win a labor revolution. All of that building toward this moment.

And here it was, right in front of him.

Tony Boyle in handcuffs, arrested for his family's murder. So Chip and I gather up our papers and we walk outside.
The whole street is full of reporters and cameramen and everything.

We're waiting outside when FBI agents, towering over Boyle, led him out of a downtown office building into their car.

And it may or may not have been a coincidence that one of the attorneys in the room at the time was Chip Yabonski, the son of the man Boyle is accused of murdering.

Reporters approached Chip and asked him what had happened. BI agents came into the room and announced that he was under arrest.

Chip, not the world's most expressive person, but there, there, I think you can catch a glimmer of the smile, of the excitement Chip was feeling in that moment.

Though, he quickly reverted back to strict, general chip when they asked him what Tony was arrested for. Did they say for what? Violations of the United States Code.

But when reporters approached Tony, he made it clear that he was stunned by these allegations.

Even after years of Chip pointing the finger at him, Boyle said he was shocked.

Never expected that that was going to come through anything like this. Why? Oh! Because I had no forewarning.

I'd love to have smacked him around,

but I knew I couldn't do that.

So they led him away. It was a moment of great satisfaction.
From Crooked Media and Campsite Media, this is the Shadow Kingdom, Cole Survivor, Episode 8, Trial.

I'm your host, Niccolo Mainoti.

The government will seek to prove that Boyle paid for the killings with $20,000 in union funds. Boyle said that he and Joseph Jablonski have become close friends over the years.
Oh, come on, Mr.

Boyle. You're the head of the union.
You certainly read the notes to make sure they're accurate. I didn't touch them.

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After several months of legal prep, Chip walked into a Pennsylvania courthouse on the morning of April 1st, 1974.

It was the moment he'd been working toward for nearly four and a half years. Today, trial proceedings began against Tony Boyle himself on charges that he authorized the payment for the killings.

The courtroom felt like a circus when Chip entered. Lawyers in power suits and retired miners in their cleanest bibs and overalls.
There were 60 reporters and a patrol of armed officers.

One of Tony's fans complained that the feds were railroading their man. the same way they were conspiring against Nixon for Watergate.

And finally, there was prosecutor Richard Sprague. He drove to the courthouse each day in an all-black Chrysler muscle car.

Loaded with police electronics, complete with an antenna on the top. Journalists nicknamed it the Batmobile.

Everyone settled in for what was expected to be a lengthy trial. Both the prosecution and defense have predicted that it will last at least a month.
The witness list is long, the issues complex.

And with first-degree murder in the balance, the stakes are very high. Chip took his seat just behind the prosecutor.

Then, Tony Boyle was pulled into the courtroom, flanked by U.S. Marshals.

He smiled weakly and waved to his wife and daughter, who was, remember, also named Tony.

Chip glared at the man who he knew had murdered his family. It looked like the short time Tony had spent in his holding cell had taken a real toll.

He was so incapacitated, he was in a wheelchair. And I'm saying, hang on, you son of a bitch, because I want you to get your just desserts from this jury.

Once everyone was inside, the courtroom was locked. Armed guards stood outside the door.

Richard Sprague stood up. Knowing this would be all over the evening news, he began to lay out his case.

The government will seek to prove that Boyle paid for the killings with $20,000 in union funds and that he tried to protect himself by channeling his order through eight other people, all of whom have now confessed or been found guilty.

Prosecutor Richard Sprague knew that at their core, trials were theater.

He talked to me here from his law firm, where he practiced law well into his mid-90s.

I love the courtroom. To me, in handling a trial, I'm really a Broadway producer.
I'm producing this story.

And he opened that story by laying out the murder weapons on his table in full view of the jury.

Then he started at the lowest rung of the ladder with the murderers themselves. Richard Sprague called in the most ruthless character, Buddy Martin, the first shooter.

I had the sheriffs like pull him into the courtroom.

And as he came right by where I was, he spit on me,

which I thought was great.

In fact, the lawyer working with me wanted immediately to wipe the spit off and said no,

because I wanted the jury to really see the wild animal here.

Then it was Paul Gilly's turn. He went through all the logistics of the crime.
D.A. Sprague turned to Paul and asked him,

Where did this hit come from?

And Paul told him about the orders from his father-in-law. Question, did he say why? Gilly, as I recall, it was for the welfare of the UMW.

His father-in-law was one step closer to Tony.

He was one of the Boyle loyalists in Harlan County, one of the most violent men in the most violent corners of the Union. A man who once beat a minor bloody with chains.

for refusing to join the union.

He treated the UMW like a religion, almost like a cult, and was happy to kill Jock at the pleasure of the union leaders.

Paul's father-in-law had also turned state's evidence and now also testified at Tony's trial. Said he and two other men met in 1969 to discuss killing Jablonski.

The two other men Paul's father-in-law had pointed to were one more rung up the ladder.

One of them was the president of the union down in Harlan County, a man named Bill Turnblazer. And he was the clincher in all of this.

For as long as Tony had been in power, Bill Turnblazer had refused to turn on Tony.

But after Tony lost the election, as Chip's crew had predicted, as they'd hoped, members like Turnblazer finally did turn. Were you present when the order was given? The prosecutor asked Turnblazer.

Yes, sir, said Turnblazer. Who gave that order? Mr.
Boyle.

Bill Turnblazer testified that shortly after Jock announced his intent to run for president, Tony had stormed out of a union board meeting at the UMW headquarters. Bill Turnblaser followed Tony.

Tony looked at Bill and said, quote, take care of Jablonski.

He let that sit in the air for a moment, Jock's life hanging in the balance.

Tony must have known that if anyone would kill for him, if anyone would take that order and run with it, it would be someone from Harlan County.

With Bill Turnblazer's testimony, they were standing at the very top of the ladder. They'd climbed from Gilly, Veely, and Martin, the murderers, all the way to the man who'd ordered the murder.

Checkmate.

Or so they thought.

As the trial stretched on into the evening and the defense hammered away at the witnesses, it became clear that this game wasn't over at all.

Because the case against Tony Tony Boyle ultimately rested on the testimony of those underlings. Almost all, as the defense pointed out repeatedly, confessed criminals.

And almost all of these witnesses were trying to cut a deal for leniency with the DA.

They'd give up Tony to save their own skins.

So for all this testimony, for all the witnesses, Tony knew there was still no physical evidence linking him to the crime.

And with the trial almost over, there was more than a chance Tony could walk free.

The next morning, when Chip and the lawyers and the miners and the reporters, when they all filed back in the courtroom, they noticed a change in Tony.

The old president's eyes were more alert.

He began to take notes on a yellow legal pad. At two o'clock, he stood up to testify and slowly walked to the witness box.

He began to smile and turn to the jury like a kindly old man. The 72-year-old deposed president of the mine workers said that he and Joseph Yablonski had become close friends over the years.

Tony leaned toward the jury and told them how devastated he'd been to hear that his close friend Jock had been murdered.

He explained how hard it was to run a big union and how he had to trust so many people below him.

and that he simply couldn't believe that anyone at the union was involved.

And when his attorney closed by asking him if he had anything to do with the killing, Tony forcefully replied, Did I have anything to do with it? Absolutely not.

His attorney again, did you ever talk with Mr. Turnblazer about killing the Yablonskys? Mr.
Boyle, even more emphatically now, I did not.

Then, Tony's lawyer laid out an alternate theory. Yes, those men you've heard testify did plot to kill the Jablonskis.

But Tony had nothing to do with it. They murdered Jock because Jock was about to expose them for misusing union funds.
Now they were all pointing to Tony to cover up their own crimes.

In his testimony, Tony was cagey, sometimes even confused. So he came off as suspicious, sure, but not necessarily a killer.
Maybe the stammering was just that he was, after all, a fragile old man.

By the time the defense rested, it was not clear which way this trial would tip.

Or at least, it wasn't clear to Tony.

The prosecutor had one final card to play.

That's after the break.

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Unbeknownst Unbeknownst to the public, investigators had zoomed in on Harlan County's Union District.

There, they found records of a, quote, research committee with a $20,000 budget.

That budget was supposed to go towards researching new minds to unionize.

But investigators found that it didn't. It went to the murderers.

UMW officials had even created false records to make the committee seem legit.

And Tony allegedly gave these false records to his lieutenant, Bill Turnblazer, as part of the cover-up.

And Boyle arranged to have those notes sent to each of these mine workers with what was supposed to be the story. Prosecutor Richard Sprague again.

When he says mine workers there, he means the union.

We found with one of the mine workers the notes that were sent to him

and on those notes were the fingerprints of Tony Boyle.

Now Tony Boyle did not know that we had recovered one of the actual notes.

Back in the courtroom, Richard Sprague went to his desk, still full of all the murder weapons, and produced a piece of paper. One of those meeting minutes.
But I made it look like we only had a copy

because I was thinking that if Tony Boyle knew that we had the actual notes, when he took the stand, big deal, he'd say, so what?

I go over the notes, my fingerprints on them, what difference does it make?

Richard Sprague stepped toward Tony Boyle and said, Mr. Boyle, you heard this in sending the notes.
That's true, isn't it, that you sent those notes? No way.

Come on, Mr. Boyle.
You're the head of the union. You certainly read the notes to make sure they're accurate.
I didn't touch them.

He must have asked Tony a half dozen different ways to confirm that he'd never seen, knew about, much less touched this document.

Tony was then excused from the stand.

And Richard Sprague, I imagine now bursting with trial lawyer giddiness, called an FBI agent to the stand.

The notes that Tony Boyle had just insisted he'd never touched, this agent had dusted for fingerprints. So Richard Sprague asked the agent, do we have not a copy, but the original note?

Do we recover the notes? Yes. What do you find on them? The fingerprints of Tony Boyle.

After four and a half years of hoping, hunting, trying to trace the murder back to Tony Boyle, there it was,

the smoking gun.

Tony Boyle had his hands on a document intended specifically to make sure union officials could cover up their role in the murder.

This was the final act of the theatrical production Richard Sprague had expertly directed. He was hopped up.
Richard Sprague's summation was impassioned and bitter.

He begged the jury to think in terms of Boyle's motivation. He called Boyle's testimony cunning and pious.

In his summation, Sprague gave Boyle a chilling name, the originator.

The slaughter of the family, the cover-up, the hiring of Paul Gilly and his men, it had all come from the originator, Tony Boyle.

I demand a verdict of guilty, said Sprague.

With that, the jury filed out to deliberate. And just a few hours later, they returned with their verdict.

Tony Boyle, former head of the United Mine Workers, was convicted of murder today. He displayed no emotion when the jury came in with its verdict.

It was a distant second to the thing Chip really wanted. His parents, his sister back, his family together again.

But watching Tony Boyle escorted out of the courtroom that day, stripped of every last ounce of his power,

Chip felt justice had been served. Do you remember the moment where the jury read out the verdict? We were under a microscope.
We weren't going to yell and hoorah.

It was

another brick in the wall. We went to a dinner with all the FBI agents and the state policemen, and we thanked them.
And we hoped that that was the end of it. We always knew that

we could never really get closure.

And now, with all the murderers and the originator behind bars, Chip was left with one final mission, to give the union back to the miners.

In other words, not just put his father's murderer behind bars, but also fulfill his father's dream.

The dream his father preached on the campaign trail still rang in Chip's head. The membership of our union want this organization to be the great trailblazer that it once was.

They want this organization to lift up its membership and for this membership to be considered ahead of everything else.

Chip's supporters cleaned up the union's dark money, and they even created a credit union for miners in remote areas. That was a long time mission of Jocks.

In 1974, right after the big strike in Harlan, they went to the negotiation table for the first time, and they bargained for a new contract, one that would determine the miners' pay, pension, and safety for years to come.

It was Chip's crew versus the coal industry, which did not expect big things of these young guys. They were obnoxious, like, this is collective bargaining 101.

Why don't you guys come and we'll teach you how to collectively bargain. The coal industry quickly discovered they were the most prepared bargainers in a generation.

They came to the table with all of their demands laid out in a stack of thick, spiral-bound books, based almost entirely on minor input, by the way. And they won.

Big time.

One of the biggest contracts in union history.

We got huge changes in working conditions, safety, wages, retirement benefits, paid days off,

all those things.

They got an unprecedented 37% pay increase over three years, the highest pensions the miners had ever seen.

They got sick days, the right to walk out if you felt unsafe, safety training paid by the company. After that, 40,000 new jobs were created, and fewer coal miners died on the job than ever before.

They enshrined union democracy in a groundbreaking new constitution. Their work served as a model for the cleanup of the Teamsters in the 80s when they booted out the mob.

As recently as 2020, Chip's crew served as a model for the United Auto Workers, which had a similar rank-and-file revolution.

I asked Chip what his parents would think of his crew and how things turned out. They would probably tell us, tell me, well, there's more you could have done.

And they'd be right.

Don't get full of yourself.

And this is actually something Chip has thought a lot about.

There's so many things he's learned, things he'd like to pass on.

There is

a book to be written about our

group of 20-somethings that assisted the miners in their revolution.

I like to imagine that book being written one day. A book or podcast about a group of forgotten kids who brought democracy to an old American dictatorship.

Kids who had no fancy tools, so they pioneered their own.

From information warfare to relentless use of the courts. Kids who campaigned for every vote, boldly storming past death threats.

And it turns out, this weird little class of 20-somethings went on to become leaders of American labor and politics.

People that went on to have remarkable careers.

It boggles the mind what folks have gone on to do. That makes me proud.

Eddie the Miner and Bob the Kid went on to help incite that cleanup of the Teamsters. Bernie became an assistant secretary of state.

Almost a Priest Ed went on to represent thousands of American airline pilots. Professor Dawn became the director of public relations for the massive United Auto Workers.

Clarice became a DOJ lawyer, prosecuting people who helped Nazis during World War II. Another member of Chip's crew, Rich Trumka, even became president of the AFL-CIO.

And Chip, their general, he stayed in the labor fight for the rest of his career.

His eyes light up to this day when he recounts the enormous settlements he got for widows of people killed in the mines.

But as varied and illustrious as all their careers were, every single one of them traces their work back to that one movement in the coal fields.

All of us look back on those days as being the greatest days of our lives. And this felt like a chance to learn a bunch of things and to try to help fix something that was broken.

I was thinking of it as an internship. You know, when you go to an internship, what do you expect? To learn something, to meet some new people, have some new experiences.

And this felt like a chance to learn a bunch of things and to try to help fix something that was broken.

It's very, very rare, a small group of people with no real resources going against this union, the entrenched bureaucracy, the National Bank of Washington. And we did it.

When you think about it, how many times has that happened?

50 years later, several of them still go on vacations together, still gather for Thanksgiving every year.

Eddie Burke has had a full career. He's been trying to retire for years, but his phone keeps ringing.
Another union needs him. One last job, he always says, but it never is.

As I was reporting the story, Eddie took me on a road trip around Coal Country.

And we ended up at a cemetery in West Virginia where miners are buried.

There's this one particular grave here that Eddie really wanted me to see, one that he's helped restore. We're looking for Sid Hatfield's grave.

Sid Hatfield was a local union supporter who died in a shootout 100 years ago.

We passed by obelisks and mausoleums for the wealthier residents of the town.

Do you want a something like this for you?

No, hell no.

I want to scatter my ashes around

some of my opponents so I can keep an eye on them.

Finally, we got to Sid Hatfield's grave, and Eddie read me the inscription.

In the memory of Sid Hatfield, defender of the rights of working people,

gunned down on the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse during the Great Mine Wars. During the early 1900s, as unions were just getting established, there was a war in the coal fields.

Hundreds of men like Sid died fighting the coal companies to let the miners organize. He was shot down by the coal company's private guards, but he succeeded in getting the union to his town.

The union,

you know,

the union came and stayed after that, you know.

The union stayed because of people like Sid.

And then it was driven out again, and then it came back again. The cemetery is filled with men like Sid, who in a sense handed the baton to Jock,

who handed it to people like Eddie and Chip. One more generation and a long line of people fighting this fight.

When I started this story, I wanted to know how one of America's most powerful bullies was ousted by a group of broke kids.

And as I stood there between Eddie and Sid that day, the answer hit me.

Sid had fought the company bullies and brought the union in.

And right before being being gunned down, Sid had thrown the torch to people like Jock,

who then ran through Appalachia telling the miners about democracy.

Before the bullies killed him on New Year's Eve 1969, Jock passed the torch to his son, Chip, who then broadcast his father's message on television for a new generation to hear.

Chip's crew is a link in a chain that runs from the early coal miners all the way to the civil rights leaders of the 60s, every new movement building on the lessons and sacrifices of the last.

Chip's crew was never alone in their fight against Tony.

They were standing on the shoulders of giants. And so, as we drove away from the cemetery, Eddie turned to me.

I can't get this Amazon thing out of my head. Wait, so you're saying

the Amazon people who have unionized. Exactly.
Yeah.

Just a few weeks before this road trip, Amazon workers in Staten Island had voted to to unionize, which had seemed impossible.

You know, a bunch of young 20-somethings trying to start a new labor revolution.

They're entering at such an exciting time,

and I just hope they don't get waylaid by a bunch of union bosses.

The Amazon kids sound like you guys in 74th. Exactly, exactly right.
It's almost same opportunity.

And these guys really went out and

ran an excellent campaign. And if they could, somewhere or another, just

put that in a real

organized fashion.

Do what Eddie, Chip, the whole crew wanted to do, what they tried to do. I would love to talk to them.
I would love to, and you know, hey, I come cheap.

So we started strategizing. How do we connect Eddie to the Amazon kids?

How do we take the baton that Jock handed him and hand it to the next revolution

in the hopes that they will carry the lessons forward? And

they've got to put together the proper teams, they've got to put together plans. You can't have 20, 50, 100 page white papers.

You got to have bulletproof bullet points that workers can say, huh, that's right. One of their most important decisions will be who is going to develop develop

their

communications and their research. Those two separate functions are a must.

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 our story editor.
The associate producers are Rachel Young and Julie Denische.

Sound design, mix, and mastering by Erica Huang. 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 Ewan Leitramuen.
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 at Campside Media. Additional help from Doug Slawin, Ashley Warren, and Anthony Puchillo.

Mark Bradley's book, Blood Runs Coal, was especially helpful when researching this series. Thanks to Mark for talking with me over these many years and answering my many questions.

Thank you to all the people that spoke with me for this story, especially Chip Yublonski.

And finally, a special personal thanks from me to Ed James, Strauss Zelnick, Matt Lieber, Avery Truffelman, Jake Warga, and George Welbeck.