Coal Survivor I 7. Storming the Bastille

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Nearly three years after Jock ran against Tony in a sham election, the miners went to the polls again to decide this time between democracy or dictatorship.

It was also a vote on Tony's fate.

Not just whether he would remain president, but also perhaps whether he would go to jail for the Oblonsky murders.

If Tony lost power, his inner circle might be willing to turn on him and give prosecutors the evidence they needed to prove he'd ordered the killings.

So everything was on the line as miners went to the polls in early December, 1972.

Some 200,000 miners began eight days of voting.

Perhaps the most bitterly fought election in the long and stormy history of the United Mine Workers Union.

All indications are that it will be a close election.

A close election and a heavily monitored one.

More than a thousand men from the Labor Department are overseeing the election to see that it's fairly conducted.

The most closely supervised election in labor history.

Tony painted the government oversight as interference, accusing Chip and his crew of bringing in outsiders to steal the vote.

We must prepare now

and reject these outsiders and these people who know

what's best for you who never belonged to this union their lives.

But Tony had lost the fight with the regulators, and now it was the miners' turn to decide.

For eight days, miners from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Ohio, from all across the coal fields cast their vote.

And then all the ballots were gathered at a central location, and a greyhound bus full.

was placed on the bus and each side had two observers.

Eddie Burke there, the feisty miner and ship's crew.

In addition to the feds, Tony and Shipside each had their own election monitors across the country.

Eddie was handling votes specifically in Charleston, West Virginia.

Once those were collected, Eddie climbed aboard that Greyhound bus alongside Tony's men.

The driver slammed the storage compartment shut, made sure everybody was buckled in, and hit the gas.

It was almost a six-hour journey to Silver Spring, Maryland, where the ballots would be counted.

As ever, Eddie spent the long ride taunting the monitor from Tony Boyle's team.

When Tony's monitor said he needed to use the bathroom, I immediately said, well, I'll have to go back there and make sure you don't steal any ballots like you did the last time.

It went on like that for 300 miles.

And when the bus pulled into Silver Spring and Tony's men unbuckled, Eddie unbuckled.

If Tony's men offered to carry boxes, Eddie offered to carry boxes.

He wasn't taking his eye off the other side.

The Labor Department guy is probably sitting there saying, oh gosh, yeah, here I am being the caretaker of these children.

They loaded the ballots onto table after table at the DOL building.

And little by little, votes trickled in from other corners of the country.

Through the day, the sealed and closely guarded boxes arrive from the coal fields across the nation.

And then...

12 teams of men from the labor department start counting the results, with observers like Eddie watching, both sides on edge.

There's this air of we're going to kick your ass mentality from the other side.

I mean, I'm sitting there saying, well, we'll see.

We will see.

And,

you know, everybody's tense.

For five long days, ballots were counted.

Daily tallies covered every day on the evening news, with the lead swinging wildly between the two candidates, Tony Boyle and Arnold Miller.

Scattered early returns showed Boyle ahead of his opponent.

The Labor Department count now gives Miller a lead over Boyle.

No one could tell which way this would tilt.

Would the Rebels win?

Or would scandal-ridden Tony pull off yet another victory?

It was only on day five that Eddie spotted the first sign of clear hope.

He was counting ballads on one side of the room.

and an infamous Tony Stooge named Leroy Patterson was on the other side.

They were both bleary-eyed, hopped up on caffeine, when Tony's guide, Leroy, suddenly turned to leave.

He says, well, I've got to go.

I'm going to switch out with so-and-so.

Eddie counted for another hour or so, and then went back to the hotel himself to catch a little sleep.

So I'm walking to the holiday inn where we're all stationed, and Leroy Patterson is at the front of that hotel with his bags.

He's going to the airport.

I went, we got their ass good now because he was skipping town.

That's a, I mean, I knew then it's going to be a wipeout.

And sure enough, on December 16th, the election was called.

The reform candidate, Arnold Miller, is in, and the president of the mine workers, Tony Boyle, is out.

There is a sense that something new has happened and that this union has opened up to its rank and file.

Chip absorbed the news in shock, in joy, with a touch of grief for the family he wished was watching with him.

He had done it.

His father's dream come true.

Across town at Union headquarters, Tony's officials were deep in bunker mentality.

One observer said it was like Hitler during the fall of Berlin.

Fear was coursing through the ranks.

But now, Chip and his crew had the keys to the castle.

They were so close to finding evidence that would prove that Tony had ordered the family murders.

They just needed to get to it before Tony's men.

From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom, Cold Survivor, episode 7: Storming the Bastille.

I'm your host, Niccolo Mainoni.

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A week after the election, Chip and his conquering heroes approached the big brass front doors of the United Mine Workers.

Until that moment, the building in the heart of DC had been like a palace, home almost exclusively to union royalty, with the lowly miners rarely allowed in.

Not anymore.

Tony's old staff looked through the blinds as hundreds of miners gathered outside.

The union heads had tried to delay the transfer of power up until the last possible second.

So literally that morning, Arnold Miller took matters into his own hands.

He waltzed into court and got his official election certificate.

For their part, the miners had driven from across the coal fields to be there.

They'd been waiting a long time for this, and they didn't want to wait anymore.

While Arnold Miller waited for the federal courts to certify his election as union president, hundreds of happy miners were crowding into the UMW headquarters to witness.

They burst through the front door, their coal-stained shoes meeting the marble floors in a scene that would have exceeded Jock Hiblonski's wildest dreams.

Here's almost a priest head.

When we took the building, people just flocked, flooded into the building.

There were no checks.

I mean, there was no front desk check.

Everybody just came in, anybody who wanted to.

It was like a peaceful storming of the Bastille.

Rank and file miners penetrated a sanctum they had never seen.

The miners who came here for this installation shouted, this place is open now.

We were running through the building, looking in offices, trying to figure out what's where, how it worked.

It was like the 1970s had invaded a medieval castle.

The place reeked of tradition, tradition, of aristocracy, and the miners, they were, well, miners.

Boots, hard hats, calloused hands.

And the first thing they saw as they stormed in was a massive bust of John L.

Lewis, Tony's predecessor.

The president people compared to God.

Bob the Kidd was in awe as he walked through the union's huge wood-paneled entrance.

It's a marble lobby with a set of marble steps leading up to the second floor and this big brass gate across the steps.

And shortly after we got in, the rank and file members tore down the brass gate.

Unsurprisingly, the rabble rousing was led in part by the feisty Eddie Burke.

We bust through the stairwell.

You know, women are opening doors.

There are people crying in the halls, running back to their office and thinking we're a bunch of savages coming up there.

And we started, you know, going all over the place.

This is our building.

This is our building.

Yelling as they tore through the hallways and up flight after flight of stairs.

On the second floor, they found the offices of Tony and his legendary assistant, Suzanne Richards.

A news camera trailed behind.

This was Moyle's old office, and the other one was Suzanne Richards' old office.

Neither lives here anymore.

They took turns sitting in Tony's chair, mocking his big oak desk, and even pretending to write checks to the coal companies.

Tony Boyle's assistant was still in the building, so they helped ensure her speedy exit.

Boyle's assistant, I helped carry her shit out and a couple of our folks.

Er, let it be a help.

I'll get it out for you.

Eddie and the miners kept climbing the marble stairs until they reached the sixth floor.

So we go all the way up to to the top floor and we bust out all this shit's up there.

We're saying, what?

What's this?

What they discovered on the top floor confirmed everything they'd suspected.

While the miners were struggling for their mere existence, union leaders were living large.

Even dead union leaders.

John L.

Lewis, Jock and Tony's old boss, had died during the first election without endorsing either candidate.

Now, Eddie Eddie burst into an entire suite of decadent rooms for the former president.

Here's a guy that's been dead for, what, three plus years, and it's still there like he left it.

Even John L's assistant was still there.

She showed them proudly around the suites.

There was a stately dining room and a kitchen with cupboards still full of John L's favorite food and a bedroom.

where the assistant showed them the imprint still in the bed from where John L used to nap.

They found echoes of this opulence and aristocracy everywhere.

They learned that Tony's inner circle had a full fleet of Cadillacs and chauffeurs.

The phone systems were wired to send all calls through Tony Boyle's assistant, so Tony could spy on everyone.

They also discovered piles, and I mean piles, of oil paintings that Tony's crew had commissioned of themselves.

The paintings cost up to $50,000 each, more than six times a miner's yearly salary.

There were so many of these portraits, it took four truckloads to haul them out of the building.

As the miners finished touring the building, they got word that Arnold Miller had gotten his official election certificate.

Paper in hand, he was about to walk into the union.

The first challenger ever to beat a mine union incumbent paused at the entrance.

When they saw him, the miners went wild.

The rowdy miners made their way down to the basement as a popular West Virginia folk band played in the background.

Twangy miners' music echoing across the marble halls.

Today's swearing-in ceremony was more like a celebration.

One old union man in the crowd said it had been a long time since he had heard singing in this building.

Arnold Miller called for the crowd to still.

He stood and raised his right hand.

A miner from his hometown administered the oath.

This was the first freely elected president in generations,

taking charge of a huge national union.

I now pronounce you president of United Manworkers of America.

Then the crew held a moment of prayer for Jock Yablonski, the man who'd started this all.

It was a moment Jock had dreamt of and died for.

His grieving son, Chip, had fought for it too.

It was thrilling.

But there was also an emptiness, a Jock-sized hole in that day.

Chip struggled constantly with the loss of his family.

He won the selection in no small part for his father.

And Chip's mother and sister, they were the ones who really pushed Jock to run.

They were mainstays of that first campaign.

Margaret and Charlotte, they should have been there too.

Yet rather than sitting still, Chip wanted to get right back to work.

And so after the inauguration, after the celebrations wound down, the adrenaline of it all began to wear off and reality settled in.

These 20-somethings had barely, by the skin of their teeth, pulled off a short campaign.

Now these kids had to run one of the most powerful institutions in the country, a union that could shut down the U.S.

power grid.

And a union that, they knew now better than ever, was rotten to the core.

We just caught the car.

What do we do with it?

We had no idea.

I mean, we didn't know how the inside worked.

So it was...

Go in and find out.

From then, it was just, you know, it's sort of a blur after that.

They gave the the remaining staff a few days off for Christmas.

Meanwhile, Chip and his crew, they all sat around a huge conference room table.

They talked about how the hell they'd actually run the union.

And Bob the Kid felt uniquely qualified to advise them as only a teenager could.

I was off to the side, sitting cross-legged on a table against the wall.

And I kept putting my opinion in.

And like, even Ed and Don weren't saying that much.

And they were like looking at me saying, shut up, kid.

It felt important to send a sign, even if symbolic, that they weren't going to operate like Tony's regime.

So one of the first things they did was invite reporters and hold an auction for all of Tony's Cadillacs.

In the headquarters today, they were opening the bid.

It says here, I wish to withdraw my bid.

I am not interested in a car that large.

The rule was that only union members could bid,

since it was their dues that paid for the cars.

I am a retired coal miner.

I would like to drive it around in southwest Virginia to show what Tony Boyle, that rascal, did with our money.

That one went for $1,500.

P.S., please have all Boyle's germs exterminated at my expense.

Getting rid of the fancy cars and the oil paintings, that was an important, symbolic gesture.

But even more importantly, Chip's crew had cleaned up the union's finances.

Bob the Kid coordinated an audit of the UMW and he found millions of dollars in checks and bonds just sitting in the UMW offices.

So he personally brought the money into a bank where it could be regulated.

Because I was the, I could run an adding machine, I knew numbers better than anybody else, and there was nobody else.

Chip's supporters went on to prove that the union had been violating federal law.

They cut off the UMW stakes in the coal mines.

That way, the union would no longer literally be invested in the coal companies it was supposed to negotiate against.

The union promised to put worker safety over company profit.

Fresh off the election, members of Chip's campaign crew were now reassigned, each with their own corner of the union to clean up.

Professor Don would run the comms department.

Almost a priest Ed would organize new mines.

Chip would run the legal department with help from Clarice.

Meanwhile, federal detectives were getting close to Tony.

They were close to flipping his lieutenants from Harlan County.

But Chipscrew had to prove that they could hold the union.

They had to prove that Tony's power was gone for good.

The 20-year-olds were just getting settled in.

And they didn't know it, but their first big challenge was about to arrive.

A carload of men from Harlan County, the Harlan County, Tony's base, where the murder plot started.

They drove to the Washington headquarters and showed up and said, you know, we're from Harlan County.

We want to talk to somebody.

That's after the break.

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Bernie Aronson was another key member of Chip's crew.

And he was sitting on the sixth floor, John L.

Lewis' old floor, when the Harlan men arrived.

Somebody called me.

I had lived in East Kentucky, so I knew the area a little bit, so they figured, okay, that maybe maybe Bernie can talk to these guys.

Of course, Harlan County was the rough area of the Union.

It was where the Yblonsky murders had been set in motion.

Some areas of Harlan were fiercely loyal to Boyle, but more than half of the Harlan County mines were actually non-union, even anti-union.

The UMW had been trying to unionize those corners for decades.

These particular miners, the ones who'd shown up at the UMW headquarters, weren't part of the union.

But they were galvanized by Chip's crew.

They wanted in.

They wanted the UMW.

But when Chip's guy, Bernie, brought them into his office, they told him, We haven't heard anything from you, the union.

You know, we heard all these promises of what was going to change under Miller and

what's happening.

What happened to all those...

You know, we need help.

They told Bernie, the coal company that owned their mine was refusing to let them join the UMW.

So the miners went out on strike, basically saying, we want to be in your union.

So like, give us a little help here, please.

But in the chaos of trying to figure out how to run the union, Chipscrew hadn't been paying much attention to that strike.

So, you know, I talked to him and I just was, you know,

embarrassed that we weren't helping them more and got involved that way.

Unionizing new parts of Harlan County would be one of the first big tests of their nascent leadership.

And it would be a tough one.

When reporters pulled in, the town looked like it was at war.

Striking miners on one side, scabs trying to cross the picket line on the other.

That strike, all hell broke loose.

An atmosphere of violence is growing in Harlan.

As the strike drags through its seventh month, gunfire is beginning to be heard in the hills.

Everyone was in the fight.

To keep the mines closed, women have lain down in the streets and physically attacked non-striking workers.

After one incident, the women and their children, as young as age five, spent 36 hours in jail.

All of this was reminiscent of 40 years earlier, when John L.

Lewis had tried to unionize Harlan County and actual wars were fought down there.

Coal companies hired private armies to fight the union, and there were hundreds of casualties.

Chip and his crew didn't want this to happen on their watch.

They needed to sit somewhere between sending the signal they wouldn't back down and getting to a resolution as quickly as possible.

So the young reformers agreed to pay the miners' salaries and health benefits while they were out on strike.

They personally went down to Harlem County to stand beside the miners.

Chip and his crew called for a massive rally in the middle of summer.

By then, the strike had become national news.

Reporters followed as miners from all over the country showed up in solidarity by the busload.

People flooded into the streets, shaking oversized American flags and waving pro-union banners.

At the front was a sign that read, fight like hell.

More than 3,000 were in the audience as Chip stepped to address the striking miners.

It may have been one of the biggest crowds ever gathered in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Practically the entire national leadership of the union was on hand.

He was staking his reputation and the movement his father had inspired on this strike.

If his crew could organize miners in Harlan County, they could organize miners anywhere.

If they failed here, they would fail on every TV channel in America.

Chip took the stage.

The United Mine Workers of America had returned to Eastern Kentucky.

Well, we're here today

to tell everybody that we intend to stay here.

Chip leaned his body forward over the podium, slowly swinging his head around the hall.

Carl Horn and Duke Power aren't going to run us out.

Harlan County coal operators aren't going to run us out.

The mine in Harlan County was owned by a power company named Duke Power.

Duke refused the union demands outright.

So Chip's UMW did something unusual.

They took the fight out of of coal country.

Today, the miners brought their case against the mine and the power company, which owns it, to Wall Street.

They're not picketing in Harlan County.

They're marching up and down before the front door of the New York Stock Exchange.

While putting on a public show, they went to work behind the scenes, fighting the way they'd been accustomed to, guerrilla, scrappy style.

Let's not just fight the way unions usually do, picket lines at the mines.

Let's go to the coal company's natural habitat.

Here's Bernie again talking about the mine owned by Duke Power.

It was run by very hardline anti-union people who were never going to accept a union contract.

So we had to bring the fight to the corporate parent.

Bring the fight to Duke Power.

Duke was a national power company that happened to own a mine.

Chip and his crew discovered in an obscure government filing that Duke had recently been begging the government to let them raise their rates, saying their finances were in dire trouble.

But Duke was also filing papers to become a public company and sell stock.

So on one hand, they were telling the government, we're on thin ice.

On the other hand, they were telling Wall Street, our business is booming.

Invest in us.

So

we ran full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal, which said, you know, thinking about buying Duke power stock, better think again.

And then we quoted the language that they had submitted to the public utility, which badmouthed their own finances.

That's when the reformed UMW sent their troops from the heart of the coal fields to the heart of Duke Power.

We brought coal miners to Wall Street and picketed the stock exchange with them in their full mining gear.

As Tripp's crew hoped, reporters couldn't resist the spectacle.

Miners in full gear marching up and down Wall Street, while anxious bankers in three-piece suits zigzagged between them to get to work.

What I say to the potential buyers of Duke stock, if you buy it, it's going going to be pretty risky.

Their message broadcasts not just in the Wall Street Journal, but now on the evening news day after day.

This got a lot of publicity and Duke Power actually had to pull the offering, which was a big deal for them.

A huge deal.

This was a potential loss of millions of dollars.

And so after 13 long months of strikes, Duke Power finally caved.

They let the UMW unionize their mind.

The United Mine Workers got a contract this morning.

Strike by the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky was settled today.

They folded and signed sometime between three and four in the morning.

We were all bleary-eyed and left here and couldn't even find a place to grab a bite to eat.

Chip's crew had won the election, stormed the UMW castle, brought the union to the heart of Harlan County.

They'd fulfilled Jock's revolution, and they were going beyond his wildest dreams.

But as big as that was, Chip had a more personal fight on his mind.

The hope that once they beat Tony at the polls, took away his power, his lieutenants would finally feel safe to turn on him.

That they'd reveal if and how Tony had ordered the murders.

And right on queue, it was happening.

You could see the fact that he could not command that total loyalty anymore.

Here's a government official who was keeping tabs on Tony.

People were willing to say, well, you know, I better look after myself.

Boyle looks like he's about to take a dive in Washington.

It's not that almighty leader that we had once known.

They started looking away from their loyalty to the UMW and more to me and my family.

You know, I may go to jail.

You know, I'm not going to jail for Tony Boyle.

And then it happened.

The very highest lieutenants turned, and Chip got the phone call he'd he'd been waiting for.

It was the prosecutor for his family's murders.

He told Chip, we found the smoking gun.

Tony is going down.

That's next time on Shadow Kingdom.

Shadow Kingdom is a production of crooked media and campside media.

It's hosted and reported by me, Niccolo Majoni.

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 Denis.

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 Laitramuen.

Fact-checking by Amanda Feynman.

Our executive producers are me, Niccolò 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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