The Yablonski Contract

"Murder is as institutionalized with the United Mine Workers as it is in the Mafia. The order to kill--to kill our whole family if necessary--was as routinely transmitted and carried out as an order to call a strike or settle a grievance." Thus Kenneth and Chip Yablonski gave vent to their anguish last week when they learned more of the gruesome details of why their father had been killed. Pleading guilty to murder, a minor U.M.W. official named Silous Huddleston confessed that the union had arranged the assassination of Rebel Miner Joseph Yablonski, along with his wife and daughter; only the sons escaped. It was a story that had all the elements of an Appalachian blood feud: robbery, violence, revenge and no remorse.

As Huddleston, 63, unraveled his story, he appeared to be an unlikely killer. A white-haired, gentle-looking Tennessean who is suffering from emphysema and has been given only a year to live, he claimed that he had taken part in the brutal scheme only out of loyalty to his union. Word had gone round that the U.M.W. was threatened by Yablonski's campaign to unseat President W.A. ("Tony") Boyle in 1969. Yablonski had promised to take union voting rights away from all the U.M.W. pensioners, who were the major source of Boyle's power. Said Huddleston: "I believed that Yablonski was controlled by outsiders who wanted to destroy the union."

Soggy Cigar. The plot, said Huddleston, was hatched in Washington, site of the union headquarters, where a special $20,000 "research and information fund" was set up to pay for the murder. Albert Pass, a Kentucky official who is a member of the U.M.W.'s international executive board, was in charge of the operation. He contacted Huddleston, who recruited his son-in-law Paul Gilly, 38, a gaunt, sallow-faced house painter who was only too eager to do the job. Gilly, in turn, hired two other lean and lethal Appalachians who had been in and out of scrapes with the law for most of their lives.

Strictly amateur assassins, "the boys," as Huddleston called them, wondered whether to blow up Yablonski's house with dynamite or put arsenic in his food or cigars. They even experimented with injecting rat poison into a cigar with a hypodermic needle, "the kind you use to vaccinate hogs." But, as Huddleston reported, the cigar "got all wet and soggy." Albert Pass nixed those schemes. Said Huddleston: "Albert said not to use dynamite because it would probably kill the family and only give Yablonski a headache. He said not to use arsenic because Yablonski would only get sick and the family would die. He said that the only way to kill Yablonski was to shoot him."

At first, the order was to murder Yablonski before the election, but then, said Huddleston, the union brass had second thoughts: it would surely look as if someone was trying to keep Yablonski from getting elected. The job would have to wait until the election was over. It was just as well. Even with their marching orders, the boys bungled just about everything they had to do. They went to Washington to stalk their man, but they could not even find the union's national headquarters, where they were supposed to shoot him. They drove to Yablonski's home in Clarksville, Pa. When they went to the door, however, they found more people at home than they expected. Instead of firing, they asked Yablonski if he could find them jobs. They visited the house once again; this time finding nobody home, they made themselves a sandwich. "I told them that was dumb," said Huddleston. "But they said they put everything back." Following Yablonski another time, they found him with a Congressman and a Senator--and considered killing all three.

Pass was getting impatient, Huddleston recalled. While the boys marked time, they robbed a few houses to keep in shape. Finally, they accomplished their mission, entering the Clarksville house at night and shooting the family as they slept--but so sloppily that they left fingerprints around. Within days, police had identified them. On top of that, said Huddleston, the boys did not even get all the money they had been promised. As was the custom, various officials had taken their cut as the money was passed down the line from headquarters. As Prosecutor Richard Sprague observed, "you had a kind of discount price for murder."

Huddleston's confession exploded the U.M.W.'s claim that it had nothing to do with the killing. Although Boyle's name was not mentioned by Huddleston, Sprague said there was "certain information" that the "research" fund had been set up in a conference between the president and Pass. For Sprague, it was a gratifying development in a case that he is determined to pursue to the upper reaches of the U.M.W. hierarchy. A dogged, methodical assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who has sought a first-degree conviction in 66 murder cases and won it in 65 of them, Sprague devised a "game plan" to smoke out all the conspirators.

He nabbed and isolated the little men first. When he won a first-degree murder conviction against one of the gunmen, he used it as a weapon to frighten others into talking. Faced with the possibility of the electric chair, three of the conspirators confessed, implicating officials higher up the union ladder. It was Huddleston's own daughter, Annette Gilly, a stooped and sad-faced housewife, who fingered him in the killing. In exchange she received a deal for a life sentence instead of death for her role as an accomplice. Huddleston was prompted to confess for the same self-serving reason. "I am a firm advocate of the death penalty," says Sprague. "If you did away with the chair, you would lose your bargaining position. Maybe these people would not be willing to talk."

The martyred Yablonski was vindicated last week when a U.S. District Court set aside the 1969 election won against him by Boyle. Citing the mass of irregularities that had occurred during the voting, the court instructed the U.S. Justice Department to order another election. Despite all the convictions, it will still be an uphill battle for the dissident miners to unseat Boyle's entrenched minions. But the fight will be led by men with a mission: Yablonski's two sons.

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