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New book looks back on union battles, killing of Jock Yablonski

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Brad Hundt/Observer-Reporter

The three-story farmhouse once owned by the Yablonski family has a rich history dating back more than 200 years.

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Observer-Reporter

Police and union officials gather at the home of Joseph “Jock” Yablonski in Clarksville on Jan. 5, 1970, when the bodies of Joseph, 59, his wife, Margaret, 57, and daughter, Charlotte, 24, were found.

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Observer-Reporter

The Yablonski headstone in Washington Cemetery is adorned with flowers, American flags and a photo

In the small hours of New Year’s Eve 51 years ago, three ne’er-do-wells who had been stalking Joseph “Jock” Yablonski worked up the nerve to finish the job they had been hired to do.

Fortified by whiskey and beer, they crept into Yablonski’s 200-year-old farmhouse in Clarksville. First they gunned down Yablonski’s daughter, Charlotte, as she slept with curlers in her hair. Then, they walked into Yablonski’s bedroom, and fired at his wife, Margaret. Finally, they pumped bullets into Yablonski’s torso and head as he was fumbling with his own gun. Five days passed before their bodies were found.

The killing of Yablonski, his wife and daughter on Dec. 31, 1969 remains one of the area’s most notorious crimes. The 59-year-old Yablonski was assassinated at the behest of Tony Boyle, the iron-fisted autocrat who led the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). A few months before his death, Yablonski had unsuccessfully tried to unseat Boyle from the presidency of the union, which then had an overflowing pension fund and was so profligate that it spent the 2020 equivalent of $11.7 million on a convention in Florida. Boyle was eventually tried and convicted of masterminding the plot to kill Yablonski, and ended up dying in prison in 1985.

The story of the murders is retold in the book “Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America.” Published in October, it’s the first volume on the crime and its aftermath in more than 40 years.

“It’s almost Shakespearean, or a Greek tragedy,” author Mark Bradley explained in a phone interview earlier this month. Yablonski knew he was risking his life challenging Boyle, “and yet he moved forward. … It cost him his life, and that lesson shouldn’t be lost.”

A onetime Rhodes Scholar and CIA intelligence officer whose specialty was Pakistani politics, “Blood Runs Coal” is Bradley’s second book, following a 2014 book on Duncan Lee, another Rhodes Scholar and intelligence officer who, unlike Bradley, turned out to be a spy for the Soviet Union. Bradley is now the director of the Information Security Oversight Office for the National Archives and Records Administration, and was first drawn to the idea of exploring the Yablonski murders in greater depth when 26 boxes of legal documents on the slayings arrived at his workplace from Washington County Courthouse.

A handful of other books have examined the Yablonski murders, but Bradley believed the killings were due for another look now that a couple of generations have gone by and the 1960s have receded into history. Outside of Southwestern Pennsylvania, the Yablonski killings are only faintly recalled, particularly as the coal-mining industry and organized labor have declined.

Coming on the last day of the 1960s and following the murders of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the shooting of Yablonski was “the last bloody exclamation point on a decade where (assassination) had been normalized,” Bradley said.

“Blood Runs Coal” fascinates simply as a page-turning, true-crime thriller, where we follow the plot to murder Yablonski as it is hatched and carried out, and then in the aftermath, when investigators successfully hunt down the triggermen and their paymasters. But Bradley believes the Yablonski killings deserve attention for the part they paid in labor history.

“I thought it was time to put these murders in a historical perspective,” he said.

Two decades into the 21st century, the whole idea of the labor-union battles leading to bloodshed seems particularly alien. Today, just 11% of the workforce is unionized and the manufacturing and extraction industries that were once fertile ground for union organizing and membership have been in steady decline. But, in the 1960s, a little more than a quarter of the workforce was unionized. While Yablonski’s murder spurred long-overdue reforms within the UMWA, membership in the union was already declining from its high point in the 1930s, when it had 800,000 members. There are about 67,000 members in the UMWA today, meaning that its entire membership could fit into Heinz Field with about 1,000 seats left over.

“To me, Yablonski is a hero,” Bradley said. “His blood washed a union clean.”

But, he added, with the decline of the UMWA, “In the end, you ask yourself, what did it all mean?”

Unions might well have been declining because of economic forces, but Bradley acknowledged widespread media coverage of the Yablonski killings, the corruption within the UMWA, and skulduggery in other unions, such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, did organized labor no favors. Nevertheless, unions “played a really powerful role in the country and I don’t think it will be recaptured. You’ll never see that again. We’re a different country.”

Bradley explained, “I think it’s important to bring this story back. Labor history is just not taught anymore in our country. So to get people to understand why this is important is a lift. … The labor movement brought us the eight-hour day, the 40-hour week and sick leave.”

“Blood Runs Coal” is also a story of redemption, according to Bradley, particularly in how the killers and conspirators were brought to justice. Most of the main players in the book are now dead, but Bradley was able to talk with Yablonski’s surviving son, Chip Yablonski, who now lives outside Washington, D.C., and the younger Yablonski also allowed Bradley to go through five to seven boxes of his personal papers.

“Can you imagine what a traumatic and awful event that would be to have your parents and sister murdered?” Bradley said.

Richard Sprague, the Philadelphia attorney who prosecuted the case against Yablonski’s murderers and is now 95 years-old, was also extensively interviewed. Bradley also spent four hours at Albion state prison near Erie with Paul Gilly, the sole survivor among the gunmen. He is now 87 and still serving a life sentence, his efforts at being released having gone nowhere.

Bradley visited Clarksville, too, and the farmhouse where Yablonski lived and died.

“What you see in there is a time capsule,” he said. “It was eerie walking up the steps and following the steps of the killers.”

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