Late in the night of New Year’s Eve in 1969, Jock Yablonski, his wife, and their daughter were brutally murdered in their Pennsylvania farmhouse. He had been defeated by incumbent Tony Boyle in an election for President of the United Mine Workers of America, but he was asking for a Department of Labor investigation of the election and suing the union for fraud. The election was eventually declared invalid and in 1972 Arnold Miller, like Yablonski a reform candidate, defeated Tony Boyle. Two years later, Boyle was convicted of conspiracy to murder Yablonski’s family, becoming the seventh man to be convicted in connection with the murders. "An absorbing, brilliant account of one of the most tragic murder stories in modern labor history, Blood Runs Coal judiciously uncovers the hidden layers of a brutal crime in the last moments of the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, and recovers the legacy of the heroic movement for democracy in the coal fields that remains an urgent, powerful, and hopeful cautionary tale for today."― Jeff Biggers. "Blood Runs Coal is impossible to put down. Mark A. Bradley has nailed his subjects in every possible way, from his chillingly cinematic handling of a breathtaking triple homicide to exciting courtroom dramas to a cast of villains from the violent gangs of the Hillbilly Underworld, and to the true-life heroic crusade to reform a murderous coal mining labor union. Mr. Bradley skillfully presents a world no reader will ever forget."― Charles Brandt. "Mark A. Bradley’s Blood Runs Coal skillfully presents the story of an American tragedy, a reminder that greed and violence, perpetrated by those in power, has always been a threat to our society, and that we must always be prepared to fight it."― John Sayles. The author, Mark Bradley, is a lawyer who has worked for the Department of Justice and the CIA, and now works for the National Archives.
New York: W.W. Norton, a 2021 paperback edition of a 2020 release. 334 pages with an Index, A Note on Sources, Notes, and photos. Trade paperback.