BLOOD RUNS COAL

Cat-and-mouse account of the murder of a union activist battling corruption in the coal fields.

Attorney and former CIA officer Bradley recounts the 1969 murder of Joseph Yablonski, who rose through the ranks of the United Mine Workers of America to become a lieutenant of John L. Lewis, a champion of miners’ rights. Yablonski, writes the author, was “stunned” when Lewis selected an empty suit named Tony Boyle to become his vice president. While Lewis took his union members out on a long strike and denounced coal companies for ignoring worker safety, Boyle was an accommodationist who, after a terrible mine accident, went out of his way to absolve the owner of responsibility and “reminded the families, as if they did not already know it, that coal mining was a very dangerous way to make a living.” Clearly Boyle wasn’t the right man for the job, but when Yablonski mounted a campaign to replace him as union president, Boyle arranged for his murder. When hired killers infiltrated Yablonski’s home, they killed his wife and daughter as well. It took years of courtroom tedium, coordinated by prosecutor Richard Aurel Sprague, to arrive at the facts of the killing. Readers may feel that justice was not fully served when they learn that a couple of the principals, including a manipulative woman who betrayed her own father, were allowed to slip away into the witness protection program. Still, like Sprague, who had a remarkable winning record (“He had sought first-degree murder convictions in sixty-four cases and got what he asked for in sixty-three”), Bradley sets forth a methodical, step-by-step account of the vicious murders and Boyle’s fall from power and life imprisonment. Yablonski loyalists were able to effect some of the reforms he’d argued for, including a more effective pension plan and overall stronger union.

A well-paced, thorough investigation of a half-century-old crime whose effects are still felt in the Appalachian coal fields.