Word: huddlestone
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...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...
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...
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...
...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...
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...