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A gigantic mine explosion catches the eye of a 60s celebrity. He reveals a conspiracy at the heart of the union, and pleads for Jock’s help.

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TRANSCRIPT

[voice over]: Campside Media.

[news clip]: This is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Good evening. More than 70 miners are trapped in the deep tunnels of a soft coal mine in northern West Virginia following a series of explosions and fires that began more than 12 hours ago. Hopes are fading for their survival.

Nicolo Majnoni: It was November of 1968. All eyes in America were on Farmington, West Virginia. Smoke was billowing out of a mountain after a coal mine explosion. Dozens of men now trapped inside the mountain. Tony Boyle had been president of the United Mine Workers Union for about five years. It would be on him to respond to this disaster, to give miners comfort and aid. He scrambled to find the fastest way to Farmington, plane, helicopter. Jock Yablonski, the man who’d lost to Tony, lived just a few dozen miles from the scene, across the border in Pennsylvania. He rushed there too. The American Red Cross was also on the scene. Mining families gathered at the company store, waiting for word, all of them working against a ticking clock. The men were trapped inside dozens of tunnels that burrowed deep inside the mountain, sometimes up to 13 miles in. One man described being a coal miner a little bit like being an astronaut. You go where no man has gone before. And really, it’s about as easy to get to the moon as it is to get inside a mountain that’s exploded, because all the entrances get blocked by these roaring fires that keep rescue teams out. This turns any rescue mission into a waiting game.

[overlapping voices]: Just sitting around waiting, and that’s all we can do is wait and pray. / I just hope he comes out alive. / And I just have a feeling that he won’t come out. / Yeah, I have great hopes. Our family has great hopes that maybe God will be with us and bring all these men out. [crying]

Nicolo Majnoni: Television crews captured the grief of the families above. For the first time ever, millions of Americans watched and waited with the miners. There’d been mine explosions before this, but nothing at this scale since TVs became a staple across American homes, which meant that Tony Boyle’s first major mine safety catastrophe would also be the nation’s first ever televised one. CBS was there, ABC, NBC, all the papers. That had never happened before. America was about to learn what the miners of America had always known, which is that although coal had given America its industry, it could take the lives of those who mine it in an instant.

[news clip]: All last night, rescue workers drilled small holes down through where many of the men are thought to be trapped. Rescue workers then dropped a sensitive microphone into the chamber and listened for signs of life. Hello.

Nicolo Majnoni: This hello echoed through the labyrinth of tunnels and snaking fires past the rubble all the way to the mine’s number seven section.

Gary Martin: We were in number seven and the power went off. Just power went off. Everything. And I thought, what in the world is going on?

Nicolo Majnoni: Gary Martin was a Farmington mine mechanic. And in that moment, Gary was a confused mine mechanic, here he is in an oral history from the CDC.

Gary Martin: I stepped back into the intersection, and just, man, it was like somebody hit me in the face with a bucket full of dirt. I mean, you couldn’t see, you can’t breathe. So I just pulled my shirt up over my face and just sat down.

Nicolo Majnoni: The thoughts start. Is this a power outage? Is it something worse? A minute passes. Two minutes. Three. Trying not to panic.

Gary Martin: You cannot panic in a situation like that. If you do, you’re a dead man. You get one mistake and that’s your last.

Nicolo Majnoni: As Gary’s eyes filled with dust, his mind clears just long enough to have one thought. Go toward the new air shaft.

Gary Martin: In every weekly safety meeting that we had, we always said, if anything happened, go to the new air shaft.

Nicolo Majnoni: Gary started to feel around in the darkness, and he found a cable connected to a coal buggy, which is like a half go-kart, half wagon that you use to carry coal. And he holds onto the cable like the literal lifeline that it is, and he starts to make his way to the new air shaft. Grab, pull, walk, grab, pull, walk. Underground, time was passing like a countdown clock. If the fires didn’t get to them, the deadly carbon monoxide would. Gary looked around. All the equipment, the blocks of concrete and steel, they’d been ripped apart and scattered like toys. This is when Gary realized his team lead wasn’t there. He looked at the crewmate standing next to him as if asking with his eyes, should we go after him?

Gary Martin: It’s a hard way to put it. You may know where that guy is, but you don’t know what the conditions are where he is. And if you don’t have the right equipment to go look for him safely, then you better not go.

Nicolo Majnoni: But this wasn’t just a guy, it’s their guy. Some miners talk about being in the mines like being in The Army. It’s a dangerous profession, by far the most dangerous in America at the time. And when you’re underground at the mercy of the mine, your lives are in each other’s hands. It’s brotherhood. So Gary secured his mask, and along with a crewmate, they set out to find Paul.

Gary Martin: And we looked all up and down the empty and loaded track, all around the belt drive, we couldn’t find him.

Nicolo Majnoni: Nothing. No trace of him in the dark tunnels.

Gary Martin: I think he panicked and went the wrong way.

Nicolo Majnoni: They’ll be leaving at least one of the brothers behind today. The pain of that dawned on Gary, who reached to unbuckle his mask, his rescuer, to try to catch a deep breath. Five other men in the group had taken theirs off.

Gary Martin: Looked over at Bud, and Bud shook his head no. And within 30 minutes, the five guys that had taken their rescuers out of their mouths were on the pavement. They were down.

Nicolo Majnoni: Three men left standing, five behind Gary, on the ground, unconscious. At that moment, from on high, down the shaft—

Gary Martin: They dropped the telephone down to us. I put the earphones on.

Nicolo Majnoni: On the other end was a mine inspector. The first good news. The inspector told them they were gonna hang a bucket from a crane and drop it down the shaft to haul them out. Gary stood at the bottom of the shaft and he looked up and through the darkness, he saw it. The bucket. It was getting closer, closer.

Gary Martin: And the construction budget got about 20 foot from the bottom and stopped. And I said let it down about another 20 feet John. And he said we’re out of cable.

Nicolo Majnoni: The bucket hung, taunting them. Close enough to see, but not nearly close enough to touch. They watched as it disappeared back into the darkness. They waited. Another hour passed. When the bucket reemerged, this time it reached them. One by one, they stepped into the bucket and slowly they ascended back into light. As they emerge from the ground, a sea of photojournalists snap a picture that reverberated around the country. The five unconscious miners were sped to the hospital, and Gary returned home, almost sheepish that he’d survived. He opened his door, breathing clean air. His brush with death was over, but there were still 78 men trapped underground and hundreds of people above ground, anxious for news. As Gary sat with his wife at home that night—

Gary Martin: The lady that lived next door’s son rode to work with me and he had just drawn his first paycheck, Jerry Iannaro. And she come over to the house and she said, are they gonna get my son out? And I said, yeah, Mama Iannaro, they’ll get him. Well, they did years later.

Nicolo Majnoni: The next 10 days were a blur. The mine was rocked by a chain reaction of explosions, making the rescue mission a stop and start affair.

[news clip]: There was another explosion today in the mines / Today there was another explosion and smoke was seen coming from yet another entrance. / And the explosion forced rescue workers out of the mine. / Most of the rescue squads waited helplessly. / The rescuers said they saw no signs of survival. / The mining company officials announced tonight that all rescue efforts have been exhausted and the mine will be sealed.

Nicolo Majnoni: Concrete was poured over the entrance to shut off oxygen that fed the underground fires. This turned the mine into a tomb. The men were buried with the coal they gave their lives for. Over 200 children lost their dads that day. Reports started to emerge that this mine was recently cited for over a dozen violations. Coal company officials scrambled to respond. And when they step to the microphone to address the devastated town.

[news clip]: We’ve had a tragedy here as we’ve had many times before, but still we must recognize that this is a hazardous business, the mining, and that what has occurred here is one of the hazards of being a miner.

Nicolo Majnoni: Miners across the coal fields of America, glued to their TVs, watched as the coal company told the widows and fatherless children of Farmington that, pretty much, shit happens. There had only been a few hundred people in town. In a week, a huge fraction were dead. The local economy, dead the moment the mine was sealed. Charity from the coal company would dry up too. They had a bottom line to protect, liability to avoid. And eventually, the government would move on to the next disaster site. The only people who would stay with the miners were the union. And so, a day after the explosion, Tony Boyle landed at Farmington in a helicopter, a helicopter owned by the coal company. He stepped to the microphone with a sea of journalists in front of him. America was watching. His rival, Jock Yablonski was watching, most importantly, his people, his miners, were watching. Tony looked into the camera and said—

Tony Boyle: As long as we mine coal, there’s always this inherent danger connected with mining of coal.

Nicolo Majnoni: Exactly what the coal company had said. And that’s it. No calls for reform or change. No going after the coal companies. No, in fact, Tony wants people to know that this company, the one with the previous safety violations where 78 men just died—

Tony Boyle: This happens to be, in my judgment, as president of the United Mine Workers of America, one of the better companies to, as far as cooperation and safety is concerned, to work with.

Nicolo Majnoni: Tony stared ahead, tilted his fedora, and left. Rank-and-file miners who for the first time got to see their leader on TV were stunned.

Chip Yablonski: I just remember my dad being really angry about it when my dad, I’ll refer to him as Jock, just was livid about Boyle showing up there and making a fool of himself and tarnishing the image of the United Mine Workers.

Nicolo Majnoni: Over the next few months, Tony Boyle would actively oppose safety measures, especially ones that could have prevented Farmington. He would continue to fight against Black Lung laws. He would do things that directly contradicted the entire purpose of a union. If a union didn’t push back when its workers were dying, then what was it even there for? Tony would do all those things because Tony Boyle had a secret. A secret that would soon be exposed because a celebrity was about to stumble on it. From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom; Coal Survivor, Episode 2: The Secret. I’m your host, Nicolo Majnoni. [music plays]

[overlapping voices]: Tony Boyle was doing nothing, literally nothing. / He was treading into perilous territory. / Some people claiming to be friends of labor have brought down upon us a vicious attack. / Everybody was saying help us. / My uncle’s response was, well Ralph, if I do, they’ll try to kill me.

Nicolo Majnoni: The 1960s produced a lot of different movements. Civil rights.

[news clip]: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed at the White House—

Nicolo Majnoni: Anti-war.

[news clip]: 150 groups had included—

Nicolo Majnoni: The student movement.

[news clip]: —students, even children—

Nicolo Majnoni: Women’s Liberation

[news clip]: Women are persons. Women are people—

Nicolo Majnoni: It’s easy to forget that there was also a revolution in, wait for it, consumer rights. Now it doesn’t quite pop like wars and civil rights, but I assure you, the leader of this of one-man movement was a bonafide celebrity.

Ralph Nader: Well, at Harvard Law School I wrote my third year paper on unsafe automobile design and the lack of any regulatory standards.

Nicolo Majnoni: In a bit of a nerdy way.

Ralph Nader: Turned it into a book, came out in November 1965.

Nicolo Majnoni: This is Ralph Nader. Yes, that Ralph Nater, the guy that will one day lose Al Gore the presidential election. But back then, he was just a consumer advocate. Ralph went from writer of snoozy law school paper to celebrity in large part because when he released his book, General Motors was not happy. They hired detectives to follow him, including to the Capitol building when he was testifying to Congress. That’s a federal crime. Tempering with witnesses is frowned upon. Here’s Ralph again with me on the phone.

Ralph Nader: The minute the detective story hit the GM hired detectives, the minute that happened, I was one of the best known people in the country.

Nicolo Majnoni: Shortly after that, GM withdrew their dangerous car from the market, and Congress passed the first law regulating car safety in American history. And very shortly after that Ralph Nader’s phone started ringing and never quite stopped. He dominated TV airwaves. [TV host speaking in background]

Ralph Nader: I was on Phil Donahue 31 times.

Nicolo Majnoni: Phil Donahue, the Oprah Winfrey of his day. You could also find Ralph on the cover of every major magazine, or appearing on talk shows with John Lennon, or meeting with the president of the United States.

Ralph Nader: Everybody was saying, help us, you’re now in the news, you gotta help us with flammable fabrics, gotta help with hazardous pharmaceuticals.

Nicolo Majnoni: So Ralph cracked his knuckles and dove in. He tackled pesticides, nuclear power. He went to war with the Federal Trade Commission and won. If you had any form of political or corporate power and Ralph Nader knocked on your door, it probably wasn’t good news. Ralph had no formal office. He camped out in a small room at the Washington Press Club, four blocks away from the White House and the United Mine Workers headquarters. He had three typewriters on his desk. Nothing on the walls.

Ralph Nader: I didn’t believe in anything on the wall.

Nicolo Majnoni: Why not? What do you mean?

Ralph Nader: Distraction and bourgeois.

Nicolo Majnoni: Undistracted for 16 hours a day, Ralph would dive into piles and piles of esoteric magazines, books, and press releases that were delivered to the press club every day. And Ralph had a specific obsession. He loved a good trade magazine.

Ralph Nader: Insurance trade journals, trucking trade journals. Women’s Wear Daily was there, I would read that. Learn about the textile industry.

Nicolo Majnoni: The more I talked to him, the more I imagine Ralph pouring over People magazine, not for the gossip, but for the entertainment law violations.

Ralph Nader: I would go through 30 trade journals a month, I would skim through them.

Nicolo Majnoni: Think insurance is boring? I dare you to try to read a trade publication about insurance. I did, and it didn’t make me want to start a consumer revolution. It made me want to cry. And I’ve been a corporate lawyer for 10 years, so my tolerance for dry reading material is high. But in those obscure journals, in the footnotes that not even the specialists read, that’s where Ralph Nader lived.

Ralph Nader: Because that’s where a lot of the tips came from.

Nicolo Majnoni: And there, in late 1968, at the Washington Press Club, he stumbles upon the United Mine Workers Journal. [music plays] This was the trade journal, and often primary news source for American coal miners. Like everyone else in the country, Ralph had watched the Farmington mine disaster in horror. He’d been totally stumped by Tony Boyle’s weird apology for the coal companies. And in the Farmington media frenzy, Ralph remembered hearing about another big danger for miners, Black Lung.

Ralph Nader: And I thought, oh here is their union publication. I’m going to get a lot of information about the disease, how frequent it is, how many fatalities, what the coal mine barons were doing to protect the workers.

Nicolo Majnoni: He sits down at his typewriter-filled desk and starts reading an older issue of the journal, flips through page after page, no mention of Black Lung.

Ralph Nader: I said, well, you know, maybe they didn’t have any news about it at the time.

Nicolo Majnoni: So he reads more issues, and more, until he’s gone through 10 years of the journal, because that’s how Ralph Nader operates. And in a decade of issues of this mining trade publication, he couldn’t find a single word about Black Lung. Not one. Instead—

Ralph Nader: It was full of pictures, of dinners, of awards, praise of the union leadership. Page after page, a story of what a glorious union it was.

Nicolo Majnoni: Pictures of Tony with musicians, Tony at dinner galas, Tony with coal execs. There were a lot of pictures of Tony Boyle.

Ralph Nader: After a while, I smelled something.

Nicolo Majnoni: If only Tony had pretended to care about the coal miners. If he had responded with force at the Farmington press conference, if he’d given even the smallest of nods to health and safety in the journal, if only Tony has done any of that, his secret might have remained a secret. Alas, Ralph Nader had come upon what felt like a front, like propaganda. But for what? Ralph made his way to the federal archives, where Tony secretly buried. And here, the scent picked up. Clerks brought him reports on the inflow and outflow of the union’s money, filled with inscrutable footnotes, with charts. In other words, Ralph’s happy place. Here’s what Ralph Nader found. The union had amassed over one and a half billion dollars in today’s money in what they called a welfare fund for the miners’ healthcare and retirement. This is objectively good, right?

[news clip]: The miners’ welfare fund is indeed a trailblazer in this industrial age.

Nicolo Majnoni: The issue is how they got money for that fund. For every ton of coal the miners produced, the coal company agreed to put, let’s say, a dollar into that fund. Dig me a ton of coals, you get a dollar to the fund. Dig me two tons, you got two bucks into the fund. The more the miners work, the more money goes into that welfare fund. Tony supported his old boss when President Lewis set this system up. But there were several problems with this. First, let’s a mine is unsafe, like Farmington. If you shut it down it keeps the miners safe, yes. It also means no money into the welfare fund from that mine. Remember, every ton of coal mined is a buck into the fund. No mine, no money into the fund. And the second problem is that when Tony took power, he wanted that welfare fund to keep getting bigger. More, it seems, than he wanted the miners to be safe. And that’s because of where he’s invested the money in that fund.

[news clip]: For the United Mine Workers own the National Bank of Washington, second largest in the city.

Nicolo Majnoni: The union owns a bank, a very large bank. Their fund sits in that bank and Tony controls that bank. Here’s the problem with that. Tony’s head of a welfare fund and functionally head of the bank. Those are two very different kinds of money.

[news clip]: Federal law requires that a union’s pension fund be a separate corporation totally divorced from a union operation.

Nicolo Majnoni: Pensions. So that welfare fund, that’s sacred money. It’s held tightly in reserve only for health care and retirement. Bank money is playing around money. Bankers take risks, they’re supposed to. But the union had started taking that sacred welfare fund and essentially taking it to Vegas, making these very risky bets. They bought 30 old merchant ships and started a shipping line. Then they bought majority positions in local utilities. They could lose a ton of the miners’ money on all those investments. And sure enough, they did. They secretly lost millions and millions of the miner’s money. But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that most of the union’s money was actually being loaned out. And it was being loan out to maybe the last place you’d expect. The union was loaning money to coal companies.

Ralph Nader: The union had investments in coal country. They fraternized with the owners.

Nicolo Majnoni: The union had even bought two coal companies outright. In other words, Tony was as invested in coal companies as the coal companies themselves.

Ralph Nader: I mean, that was total sabotage.

Nicolo Majnoni: Now Tony Boyle made sense to Ralph. Of course he’d oppose Black Lung laws that would require coal company payouts to miners. Of course, he’d lobbied against safety regulations that would shut down mines and hurt coal profits. Tony had even signed an agreement with one coal company. That if a miner had Black Lung, they could fire him.

Ralph Nader: You know, it’s one thing that they were abandoned by the law. It’s one they were abandon by the legislatures. It’s the one thing they were abondoned by the media. But to be abandoned by their own union?

Nicolo Majnoni: And to add insult to injury, there was also just a whole bunch of petty fraud, ways Tony had used his power to benefit himself.

Ralph Nader: The more I looked at it, they had special pension plans.

Nicolo Majnoni: The miners were getting an annual pension of just over $1,000. But Tony had allocated himself a $50,000 pension for life. And he wasn’t just piling up benefits for himself.

Ralph Nader: They put their relatives on union payroll.

Nicolo Majnoni: Tony gave his daughter a job as a union lawyer in Montana. A state, by the way, with almost no miners. A tiny outpost. But her salary was bigger than the top union lawyer, the guy over the whole country. Ralph grabbed his chin from the floor, rushed out of the archives, and did what Ralph does. He called the press.

[news clip]: Boyle said he could not describe specifics of the union’s $160 million a year pension fund. / As far as I’m concerned it’s all ridiculous.

Nicolo Majnoni: And with that, Tony’s secrets were no longer secret. Ralph Nader’s accusations spread like wildfire. Tony punched back, almost literally. When he ran to Ralph during all this, he challenged him to a fist fight. Somehow, Ralph declined. Instead, he fought back in typical Ralph style by tipping off the press to something new, something that had started happening all over coal country. Tony Boyle’s miners were losing their benefits in health care. The media started to put two and two together. Miners were losing their benefits and the union was making risky investments. Were those two things related? They cornered Tony Boyle and asked him. Tony went on the offensive in the most Tony way.

Tony Boyle: But they have rules and regulations in order to be eligible for certain benefits and some of them don’t qualify.

Nicolo Majnoni: It’s not that we took away everyone’s benefits, Tony said. It’s just that not everyone qualifies for all of them. And then in a classic Tony pivot, he brought it back to himself.

Tony Boyle: But that doesn’t bother me because I know that the mass majority represented in the Denver Convention, no later than last September, won to elect this president for life. I don’t think I have too much to be concerned about.

Nicolo Majnoni: I’m not worried about these pensioners and dying miners, he said. Look, the delegates put up a proposal to elect me for life. Never mind that Tony had handpicked those delegates himself. It’s a bit like Vladimir Putin doing a victory lap for his landslide re-election.

Ralph Nader: Boyle had such a sense of his own power, and he’d gotten away with so much in his past roles in the UMW that he disregarded that the 1960s were a new age.

Nicolo Majnoni: Ralph Nader had a plan. It was a big federal law that would clean up a lot of the tragic business happening in the mines. Mines like Farmington that were swallowing up dozens of miners a month. But none of it, not one part of that dream, would work without a clean UMW on his side. If the UMW blocked him, he was toast. It was simple. Ralph needed to end the reign of Tony Boyle. [music plays] And as luck would have it, there would soon be an opportunity to get rid of him. That year, 1969, he was up for reelection. The election should have happened the year before, but when Tony was crowned at the 64 convention, he extended his own term. And so, just as Ralph Nader wanted him replaced, Tony gave him a vehicle to do so. Thank you, Tony. And as luck would have it, 1969 was an election year in the Union. Call it fate, call it what you want, but in that same moment, Ralph Nader was helping a law firm on cases related to his auto safety crusade. A law firm where this guy worked.

Steven Yablonski: My name is Steven Yablonski.

Nicolo Majnoni: Jock Yablonski’s nephew. You heard from him in a previous episode. Steven and his uncle Jock were very close. Jock was actually the reason Steven was even at that law firm. Jock, as you may remember, had taken the crowning of Tony Boyle a little bitterly, but he’d resigned to do what was best for the union and just be loyal. He was inches from retirement anyway. When the news of Ralph Nader’s findings broke, Jock wasn’t surprised. He was aware of a lot of that corruption. Tony and Jock’s boss, John L. Lewis, he’d fought dirty too. The difference was John L. had bent the rules for the most part on behalf of the miners. And so Jock, with the miners’ interests in mind, had done some complicated ethical math to excuse it. But Tony’s ethics were different.

Steven Yablonski: And it tore him apart, having to see Tony Boyle was doing nothing, literally nothing.

Nicolo Majnoni: Jock watched as Tony deserted miners dying of Black Lung and then Farmington exploded and 78 men died in a mine riddled with safety violations and still Tony did nothing. By now, Tony had pushed Jock so thoroughly into a corner of the Union bureaucracy that he couldn’t do anything about it. And so, with one foot out the door to retirement, Jock started to turn around. To look back down a road he thought he’d long since abandoned.

Steven Yablonski: My uncle thought about it running against Boyle over and over again, but there was no way. There was just no way it could happen. You had to know that Boyle controlled all the machinery, simply couldn’t happen.

Nicolo Majnoni: But it couldn’t happen for another, scarier reason. One that had nothing to do with Tony stealing the election, which he was sure to do. In the UMW, he didn’t oppose the boss. It wasn’t done. Jock knew that all too well. He’d been in those rooms when hushed conversations were had about how to silence enemies of the union. Jock Yablonski knew what the UMW was capable of. So this was neither a fight Jock could win, nor a fight that was advisable to take on. But then Ralph Nader started to shine a light on the UMW and with the sunshine came hope. Once loyal miners were pushing back on Tony. And now with the Nader press blitz, the entire Washington press court was tracking Tony’s every move. Could change finally be possible? Jock confided all of this in Steven.

Steven Yablonski: At that point, Nader was a hero to my uncle. I mean, he simply couldn’t get beyond, how was it that a young 30-year-old lawyer could take on General Motors and beat them the way he did?

Nicolo Majnoni: Steven figured, why not introduce these two? Remember, Steven’s law firm was working with Ralph Nader on a big auto industry case. He pulled Nader aside and told him Jock’s story.

Ralph Nader: I said, well, let’s meet yesterday. So they came to Washington, D.C.

Steven Yablonski: For my uncle, this was a big leap.

Nicolo Majnoni: A leap that would throw Jock into the fight of his life. Getting Jock Yablonski and Ralph Nader in the same room was no small task. Ever since Nader started leaking his findings to the press, Tony Boyle had become even more paranoid than usual. Union leaders were looking for a mole connected to Nader.

Steven Yablonski: The Union had no idea where Nader was getting this information, and so they had to be suspicious of everybody. And if they saw or knew that Nader and Jock were on the same block together, they would leap to that conclusion.

Nicolo Majnoni: Jock wasn’t ready to throw his hat in the ring just yet. He didn’t want to risk losing his job or being targeted. In Washington D.C., it might be the nation’s capital, but it’s also, in so many ways, a small town. So they came up with a plan. On May 3rd, 1969, the Yablonsky men drove through D. C.’s quiet downtown. Jock parked in a garage blocks from the White House and swung out of the car. The men wore dress slacks and shirts, as if to blend with the Saturday night DC evening crowd. Cherry blossom season had just ended, and the last flowers were being swept away. Jock’s crew scoped out their surroundings as they walked up to Steven’s sixth floor office. Once up there, Steven immediately walked to the window, overlooking the lights of St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and closed the blinds for an added measure of security. And then at roughly 10 p.m., Ralph Nader, from the magazine covers and TV, that Ralph Nater walked in wearing his classic suit and tie. It felt surreal, like all of this was some kind of dream.

Steven Yablonski: It was intense. I mean, you could see here were two men taking a measure of each other. Nader didn’t show much expression, and Jock tried not to show expression.

Nicolo Majnoni: Nader doesn’t remember this specific meeting, so this is all according to his biographer and Steven. Shortly after 10, Jock lit a cigarette and started talking. Steven turned to look at Ralph, and he noticed him getting quieter and quieter.

Steven Yablonski: About 20 minutes into the meeting, I looked at Nader and he was turning green. And then I realized he was not a smoker. He was dying.

Nicolo Majnoni: Jock took one last puff before Steven opened the windows. They continued. Ralph Nader studied Jock, trying to gage, is this the guy? If I put my weight behind this David, can he beat the Goliath of Tony Boyle? Ralph Naders kind of guy was a man of the people, not a bureaucrat. Jock passed that test easily.

Ralph Nader: He had borne the scars of being a coal miner. He was no union or bureaucrat. He came up from the ranks.

Nicolo Majnoni: They started talking, with Ralph testing the waters.

Ralph Nader: I wanted to see how determined he was, and he showed me he was very gutsy. And he showed he had followers. He showed me that he was going to go all out. He showed he knew how to speak to his fellow coal miners.

Nicolo Majnoni: It was also clear that Jock understood what Ralph Nader was asking him to do.

Ralph Nader: He knew he was treading into perilous territory. The most perilous career choice of his life, which was to take on Tony Boyle. He had courage written all over him.

Nicolo Majnoni: And so, as the meeting wrapped up, Nader turned to Jock.

Steven Yablonski: Nader asked my uncle if he would consider running against Tony Boyle and my uncle’s response was, well Ralph, if I do, they’ll try to kill me. And Nader’s response was, they wouldn’t dare. You’ll be in a goldfish bowl.

Nicolo Majnoni: Meaning, look. With the kind of spotlight we’re gonna get you, no one would be crazy enough to attack you. Jock looked at Nader, and he said, I’ll think about it. And he does. It’s all he can think about as he tries to go about a semblance of his life. The very next day, he has to fly somewhere to introduce Tony Boyle at an event where Tony ranted about his enemies and people trying to split the union into a divided house. He meant, in large part, Ralph Nader. Or Tony’s pet name for Ralph. Some people.

Tony Boyle: Some people claiming to be friends of labor have brought down upon us a vicious attack.

Nicolo Majnoni: Jock does his best to keep his head down as his head is spinning. Should I run? Should I do this? What would Tony do if he knew I just came from an eight hour overnight meeting with Nader? Then Steven started to get one, two, three phone calls from Ralph Nader.

Steven Yablonski: Nader kept pulling me aside and saying, is he going to run? What’s he thinking? It was over and over again.

Nicolo Majnoni: Meanwhile, Jock is showing up at Steven’s office after work.

Steven Yablonski: What do you think I should do? Can I trust him? How is this gonna work out? What do think? What do you think Chip would think?

Nicolo Majnoni: Jock’s son, another young lawyer like his cousin Steven. Chip absolutely worshiped his dad and Jock adored him. Jock was close with his wife and three kids. He cared about their opinions, but how would they feel about him diving into the fray?

Chip Yablonski: He canvassed the entire family, what did each of us think?

Nicolo Majnoni: Chip and his brother were a no.

Chip Yablonski: I thought it would be just very difficult to win. I had no idea what lengths Boyle and company would go to to keep him off the ballot and ultimately try to destroy him.

Nicolo Majnoni: Jock’s wife and daughter, on the other hand, they were a strong yes. His wife, Margaret, was a playwright, a woman much more cosmopolitan than himself. She took Jock, the rough coal miner, and turned him into a voracious reader, a man who loved opera. She was lively, sprinkled her conversations with profanity just for fun. She had bigger dreams than her suburban neighbors, and Jock knew it. She turned down an offer to be a screenwriter in New York to stay with him and the kids in Pennsylvania. He wondered if he could make it up to her by becoming the union president. Margaret was all for it. She’d read Ralph Nader’s accusations and she’d heard Jock rail privately against Tony for years by then. She told him, stop being Tony’s minion and just jump into this race. His daughter, Charlotte, she piled on too. Charlotte was a social worker in West Virginia, which meant that she saw the poverty and plight of the coal miners firsthand. She told her dad, this could be your chance to turn the union into an institution that could fix all of that. Some combination of the miners whose homes he’d spent so much time in, the father he’d nursed until his death from a mining accident, his wife and daughter, probably a heavy dose of spite toward Tony, and the huge reassurance of the spotlight and power of Ralph Nader. The sum total of all of these made the difference. And finally, in May of 1969, Jock Yablonski, the first man with any real shot of cleaning up America’s richest union, said, I’m in. And by saying, I’m in, Jock broke an ancient code, a code as old as the coal that ran under the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, a code of brotherhood and obedience. The union was holy. Its orders were holy orders of the brotherhood, not to be questioned. And Jock had just betrayed the brotherhood. Word of this would ripple through the coal fields and through the hollows of Appalachia. Men would secretly meet in parking lots and literally deliver messages in the dark. The brotherhood mobilized from deep within the Shadow Kingdom to stop the threat. And in the months after Jock announced, a man drove to Clarksville, Pennsylvania. The man parked on a hill just in sight of a beautiful old farmhouse. From his vantage point, he could see the home’s long driveway, which was lined with fir trees. That man was Paul Gilly, and he had found his mark. The bushy, eyebrowed man that his father-in-law wanted him to kill. Jock Yablonski. Shadow Kingdom is a production of Crooked Media and Campside Media. It’s hosted and reported by me, Nicolo Majnoni. 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 Yang and Julie Denesha. 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 Yang and XXX. Fact Checking by Amanda Feinman. Our executive producers are me, Nicolo Majnoni. Along with Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, Mary Nauf and Alison Falzetta from Crooked Media. Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, Matt Shaer and Vanessa Grigoriadis are the Executive producers at Campside Media.