The Fall of Tony Boyle

The killers slipped into the house at night, cut the telephone wires and set to work. The daughter was shot first, then the wife, who was trying to hide under the bedclothes. Snapped awake by the shots, the husband was reaching desperately for his own gun when he was cut down by a deadly volley of five bullets.

The man killed in Clarksville, Pa., that December night in 1969 was Joseph ("Jock") Yablonski, 59, a tough, gravel-voiced man who had been bold enough to challenge the rule of United Mine Workers President W.A. ("Tony") Boyle. He had charged that Boyle was ignoring miners' health and safety problems, that he had committed fraud and embezzlement, and that he ran "the most notoriously dictatorial labor union in America." The miners had listened favorably to Yablonski's call for reform --and then, three weeks before the murders, they had re-elected Boyle by a margin of nearly 2 to 1. The immediate widespread suspicion, almost impossible to prove, was that the killings were related to the bitter election fight and that Tony Boyle himself might have been involved.

Grumbling Locals. Boyle is a little man, pale and bald, quirky and tempestuous, often riven with anger. He has a habit of jerking his head around to look over his right shoulder. Born in a coal camp near Bald Butte, Mont., he came from a mining family, and recalls how his miner father, an Irish immigrant, "died in my arms" of consumption. Boyle inevitably went into the mines himself and, with his fiery temper, became a strong union man, eventually a top official of the Mine Workers in the West. But when U.M.W. President John L. Lewis summoned him to the union's Washington headquarters in 1948, he became the great man's caddy--a "glorified clerk," as he put it.

After Lewis' retirement, Boyle became president in 1963, and soon had to confront the fact that the U.M.W.'s fortunes had declined with the lessening demand for coal. The membership was down from 600,000 in Lewis' heyday to around 200,000, the locals were grumbling, and out in western Pennsylvania Jock Yablonski was calling for Boyle's scalp.

After the killing of the Yablonskis, the FBI, checking fingerprints left at the scene, quickly arrested three men: a house painter named Paul Gilly and a pair of young drifters, Aubran Martin and Claude Vealey, all from Cleveland.

Richard A. Sprague, the first assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, got Vealey to confess and then won convictions of Martin and Gilly. But Sprague was determined to find out who had organized the murders. He got Gilly's wife to implicate her father, a minor U.M.W. official named Silous Huddleston. Huddleston in turn said that the plot had been conceived in Washington, and that his boss in the scheme had been Albert Pass, a member of the U.M.W.'s international executive board.

Last spring Pass was convicted of first-degree murder, but he refused to accuse Boyle (who had lost the union presidency to Reformer Arnold Miller in a federal court-ordered re-election last December).

Minutes after the Pass trial ended, Sprague called a meeting in his motel room of the team that was pursuing the case: five FBI men, two Pennsylvania investigators and two of his own assistants. Sprague came up with some 20 leads to check out, including Pass's boss, William Jenkins Turnblazer, 52, president of the union's District 19 in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Turnblazer was a good friend of Boyle, who had given him his job, but Sprague had a hunch that the mild-mannered unionist was a troubled man who knew something. Sprague asked FBI Special Agent Henry Quinn to go after Turnblazer very carefully: "Take all the time in the world."

It took Quinn a month and a half of gentle persuasion. Sometimes the two men would drive off together on the lonely Tennessee and Kentucky roads, talking for hours about every phase of the case. In mid-August, Turnblazer declared that he had something to say and agreed to talk while a lie detector monitored his replies. Told that "the box" showed that his account was incomplete, Turnblazer said. "O.K., here's the whole story."

Shouting Match. Turnblazer said that he had been present at a meeting on June 23, 1969, in the U.M.W.'s national headquarters, when Yablonski and Boyle had staged a shouting match that ended with each calling the other a crook. After Yablonski had left, Boyle took Pass and Turnblazer aside and told them: "This guy is going to murder us." Boyle then said that Yablonski "ought to be killed or done away with."

Three months later, said Turnblazer, Pass returned from a trip to Washington to say that Boyle had confirmed the slaying contract and that the two had figured out a way of embezzling $20,000 of union funds to finance the killing. Last week William Turnblazer made a formal confession of his own guilt and charged his old friend with masterminding and setting in motion the murder plot.

When they came to get Tony Boyle, now 71, he was giving a deposition in Washington on another union case. As it happened, he was being cross-examined caustically by Joseph ("Chip") Yablonski, the younger of the family's two sons, who was living away from home at the time of the killings. Since then, Yablonski has been helping to lead the pursuit of Boyle. "It's been a long wait," said Yablonski after watching the arrest. With an FBI agent lightly holding each of the little man's arms, Tony Boyle was led away.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.