Word: yablonski
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...black Chrysler, a bodyguard checks the car for a bomb. This is because Sprague, as first assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, has sought a first-degree murder conviction in 66 cases and got what he wanted in 65. Two convictions were against killers of United Mine Workers Official Joseph Yablonski, and word came from the minefields that there was a contract out on Sprague's life. Sprague doesn't take the threat seriously. The people who work...
...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...
...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...
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...