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The People v. the Coal Baron

A coal conveyor at Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va., where 29 men died in a 2010 explosion.Credit...Jeff Gentner/Associated Press

Don Blankenship always knew exactly what he wanted during the years he ran Massey Energy, once the sixth-largest coal company in the United States. He had specific and emphatic ideas about how to operate mines, how to treat employees and how to deal with regulators. When he issued instructions, he wanted them followed to the letter, and this wasn’t just true about his business.

It was also true about his breakfast.

His former maid, Deborah May, discovered this when she was dispatched one morning to McDonald’s to pick up an egg-and-cheese biscuit for her boss. What she returned with had bacon in it, and that was a problem. Mr. Blankenship flung the bacon, Ms. May recalled in a deposition, part of a lawsuit over unemployment benefits.

“He grabbed my wrist,” she said, and gave her a quick lecture: “Anytime I tell you to do anything, I want you to do exactly what I tell you to do and nothing more and nothing less.”

That was a well-known directive at Massey Energy. Middle managers would occasionally find cans of Dad’s Root Beer on their desks — a mnemonic for “Do as Don Says.”

Mr. Blankenship’s quasi-dictatorial management style as chief executive produced spectacular results for Massey, transforming it from a relatively modest business dominated by a single family into a corporation that operated more than 150 mines and brought in more than $2.6 billion in revenue. And Massey’s success lifted Mr. Blankenship out of an impoverished speck of Appalachia to a perch as one of West Virginia’s most feared and powerful figures. When he encountered politicians and judges who stood against his free-market, anti-regulatory views, he spent millions of dollars to end their careers or thwart their initiatives.

But on April 5, 2010, Mr. Blankenship’s singular role in West Virginia changed. That day, an explosion at the Massey-run Upper Big Branch coal mine in Montcoal, W.Va., killed 29 men; it was the deadliest disaster in the industry in 40 years. A government task force would ultimately determine that corners had been cut on important safety measures and that managers had hoodwinked regulators by tipping off miners about imminent inspections.

Federal prosecutors came to the conclusion that Donald L. Blankenship, 65, was behind what they described as misconduct, and last November a grand jury indicted him on four criminal counts, including conspiracy to violate mine safety standards and conspiracy to impede federal mine safety officials. He could face up to 31 years in prison. The trial, originally scheduled to start in January, has been pushed to Oct. 1. Mr. Blankenship has pleaded not guilty.

The indictment was hailed in The Charleston Gazette as a breakthrough, and denounced by Mr. Blankenship’s allies as politically motivated and grossly unfair. On one point, there was agreement: Federal authorities had taken a step without precedent in West Virginia.

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Don Blankenship, scheduled to stand trial in October, spoke to reporters on April 6, 2010, a day after the disaster, as crews worked to rescue miners.Credit...Mike Munden/Reuters

“The fact that he was indicted is absolutely amazing,” said Ronald Eller, author of “Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945.” “For well over a century, men like Don Blankenship had control over jobs in this region and, as a result, had control over almost every other aspect of life. They used their wealth and their resources to assure that they were not challenged.”

What changed? How did Mr. Blankenship become the first coal chief in the region to face charges that could put him in prison? One answer is that the tragedy of Upper Big Branch was of such a scale and its apparent causes so mercenary — prosecutors say the explosion stemmed from a hellbent emphasis on production at the expense of safety — that a criminal case may have been inevitable. It came, too, at a time when economic shifts have reduced the power of coal kings, who now rule over fiefs in decline.

Then there is Mr. Blankenship himself, a man who can come across as a cartoon of a corporate villain. He tangled with inspectors and buffaloed rivals. He is a Republican in a state that was long a Democratic redoubt, and he seemed to relish making public officials his enemies.

“He almost walked out there with a neon sign that said ‘I’m a bully, and I dare you to do something about it,’ ” said Larry V. Starcher, a former state Supreme Court of Appeals justice, who often clashed with Mr. Blankenship. “Ultimately, enough people were saying, ‘Good God, how can we let the man get away with that?’ ”

40 Million Tons of Coal

Mr. Blankenship is free on a $5 million bond and restricted by a judge to southern West Virginia and parts of Kentucky, as well as trips to Washington to see his lawyers. He lives in the tiny community of Sprigg, W.Va, in a green house with white trim behind a locked metal gate. Considering his means — he was paid $17.8 million in 2009 in salary alone — the place is hardly grand. When I pulled up to the gate in March, the phone beside it was out of order, but perhaps some surveillance equipment worked. Within minutes, a man pulled up in a car and politely asked what I wanted. I said that I hoped to interview Mr. Blankenship. He took my contact information and said, “I know he’d like to tell you his story, but I’m not sure he can.”

He can’t, his lawyer William W. Taylor III said in a phone call the following week, citing the coming trial. Friends and supporters either won’t return calls or request anonymity before talking. We’re a long way from the Don Blankenship who scolded Washington politicians in a speech before thousands of people at a rally starring Ted Nugent, held on a mountaintop mine site in 2009.

Mr. Blankenship, Massey’s C.E.O. since 2000, built the company into an industry behemoth that employed some 6,000 workers and mined about 40 million tons of coal a year. Unlike other business leaders, he never dazzled with charisma or charm. Six-foot-3 and husky, he speaks so softly in public that he’s almost mumbling. His voice is as flat as a dial tone.

Silence, however, has never suited him. Last year, Mr. Blankenship commissioned a documentary, now posted on YouTube, called “Upper Big Branch — Never Again.” In it, he and a group of consultants contend that the cause of the explosion at Upper Big Branch was a freak inundation of natural gas.

“We do have instances that are geologic anomalies,” Gary D. Aho, a geologist, says in the documentary. “It’s unpredictable, unanticipated, and it’s simply an unfortunate accident when it happens.”

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A memorial to the fallen miners in Whitesville, W.Va.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

(Mr. Aho and others in the film later said they had no firsthand knowledge of Upper Big Branch and no idea who had funded the documentary.)

“Never Again” was a rebuttal to an investigation, commissioned by the state, that came to very different conclusions. At Upper Big Branch, the report found, the ventilation system, which is essential to keeping the air clear of combustible gases, was woefully inadequate. In June 2009, for instance, federal mine inspectors found airflow of 147 cubic feet per minute in an area where regulations called for 9,000 cubic feet per minute. Just as bad, explosive coal dust released by coal-cutting equipment in underground mines wasn’t neutralized with sufficient amounts of pulverized limestone, called rock dust.

Jason Stanley was 18 years old and working with a crew pumping water out of the mine the day of the disaster. His shift was over, and he was heading out on a mantrip, a type of shuttle that transports workers. About 20 minutes from the exit, he later told a lawyer for the United States Labor Department, the air suddenly became a white fog so thick he couldn’t see his outstretched hand.

With the mine filled with gas and coal dust, all that was missing was a spark, and that was created just after 3 p.m., according to the state’s report, when a device called a longwall shearer cut into the sandstone mine’s roof. What sounded to many like a single explosion was actually a succession of mile-long blasts, milliseconds apart, with airborne coal dust serving as a fuse and feeding the inferno. Fireballs erupted in multiple directions, incinerating some men, crushing others. It felt to one survivor like the moment “when the world came to an end.”

To Mr. Stanley, who was about a thousand feet from an exit and more than a mile from the explosion, it felt “like a swarm of yellow jackets stinging me,” he said, sitting in the office of his lawyer one recent morning.

“Rock, dust, debris. I remember just trying to find a way out.”

The mantrip that came out of the mine behind him was loaded with bodies, he said, the first group of corpses he saw that day.

“Eyes filled with dirt, mouths filled with dirt, ears filled with dirt,” said Tommy Davis, another former Upper Big Branch miner, who was sitting with Mr. Stanley, describing those corpses. “Say I stick you in a room and pump dirt in on you while you stood there, until you can’t take no more. That’s what it was like.”

Mr. Davis lost a son, a brother and a nephew in the disaster.

Code Words and Cover-Ups

It took effort to sustain the hazardous conditions inside Upper Big Branch, according to prosecutors, investigators and depositions in cases related to the disaster. Guards at the gates of the property would alert managers when federal safety inspectors showed up unexpectedly, and those managers would then call foremen who were underground. Code words like “It’s a cloudy day” meant that surprise visitors were on their way.

Miners would be instructed to cover up safety violations, like accumulations of coal dust and inadequate ventilation. Gary May, who was a superintendent at Upper Big Branch, told investigators that Chris Blanchard, who was president of the Massey subsidiary Performance Coal Company, said, “I don’t want no inspectors going to the working sections unannounced.” More than 100 Upper Big Branch employees were in on the advance warning system, said Mr. May, who was later sentenced to 21 months in prison on a federal conspiracy charge.

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The ID tag that Jason Stanley wore while working in the Upper Big Branch mine. Mr. Stanley survived the 2010 explosion there.Credit...Ty Wright for The New York Times

Above them all stood Mr. Blankenship. According to former employees, he was sent production updates from Massey mines every 30 minutes, a torrent of information that he studied like a stockbroker watching a ticker. The indictment says that when he learned of slowdowns — for construction or repairs, for instance — he peppered managers with memos. “We’ll worry about ventilation issues or other issues at an appropriate time,” he wrote in 2008 to an Upper Big Branch executive, referring to two sections of the mine. “Now is not the time.” The same year he wrote a memo with the heading “High Costs,” in which he complained, “Children could run these mines better than you all do.”

This kind of micromanaging is key to understanding Mr. Blankenship’s legal peril.

“One reason that Blankenship is being prosecuted is that he was different than other top coal executives,” said Patrick McGinley, an author of the state’s report on the disaster and a professor at West Virginia University College of Law. “Most C.E.O.s don’t get production records every half-hour by fax. That places him right in the mine, hands on. That makes him vulnerable.”

Mr. Blankenship is also the reason regulators were unable to improve safety at Upper Big Branch, according to prosecutors. As they dryly noted in the indictment, none of those hurry-up memos made any reference to safety, even though the mine was cited about 500 times by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration in the year before the disaster. Many of the citations were for “significant and substantial” violations, defined by the agency as “reasonably likely to result in serious injury or illness.” The ventilation system was a consistent target, yielding 61 citations in the two years before the explosion.

Mr. Blankenship states in the “Never Again” video that the ventilation system at Upper Big Branch was the only one that the agency would approve, and that it was far inferior to the one that he and his engineers had wanted to install. M.S.H.A. vehemently denies this. Records filed in court in early May suggest that Mr. Blankenship was privately relieved that the agency was trying to impose its will. The filings revealed that Mr. Blankenship had secretly recorded hundreds of hours of conversations in his office. During one of those conversations, in November 2009, he told Massey’s chief operating officer: “Sometimes I’m torn with what I see about the craziness we do. Maybe if it weren’t for M.S.H.A., we’d blow ourselves up.”

No matter what caused the disaster, the details of it left experts stupefied. It sounded to them like a fiasco from another era.

“We haven’t had a coal dust explosion in 20 years,” said Celeste Monforton, a former M.S.H.A. policy adviser who now teaches at George Washington University. “They are completely preventable, and everybody knows it. Coal dust explosions happen in the Ukraine and China. Not the United States.”

‘Massey’s Way’

Mr. Blankenship was raised in Delorme, W.Va, an unincorporated railroad-depot town straddling the Tug Fork river. His mother, Nancy McCoy, conceived him while her husband was at war in Korea and he never met his biological father, according to an account in “The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption,” a book by Laurence Leamer about an epic lawsuit against Massey. The couple split, and Ms. McCoy used money from the divorce settlement to buy a small gas station and convenience store. Don and his siblings were raised in an unfinished cinder-block home so close to the railroad tracks that he could almost touch the trains.

“As the saying goes, we were poor and we didn’t know it,” Mr. Blankenship wrote on an autobiographical website. “We had an outhouse that was nicer than the one most of our neighbors had. We always had shoes.”

His mother worked 90 or more hours a week and taught her children to mind the store in her absence. There was no cash register, which meant acquiring some facility with numbers, and Mr. Blankenship would later sail through Marshall University in three years, with a major in accounting. He joined Massey in 1982, as an office manager at a subsidiary called Rawl Sales & Processing. Married, with two children, he eventually moved into the superintendent’s house, the same house in Sprigg where he lives today.

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Josh and Kaitlyn Kilgore, residents of a nearby town, paid their respects in April to the fallen miners at a memorial made of helmets and crosses near the Upper Big Branch mine.Credit...Ty Wright for The New York Times

He distinguished himself at Rawl Sales by leading a standoff against the United Mine Workers of America. The fight took more than a year, and turned violent. As a souvenir, Mr. Blankenship kept a television that he said was shot through by pro-union forces. In a documentary about the conflict, “Mine War on Blackberry Creek,” Mr. Blankenship is interviewed at a desk, wearing a short-sleeve shirt and explaining his theory of capitalism.

“Unions, communities, people, everybody’s going to have to learn to accept that in the United States you have a capitalist society,” he told the filmmakers, “and that capitalism, from a business viewpoint, is survival of the most productive.”

By 1991, Mr. Blankenship was president of a Massey subsidiary. He ran it with an unsentimental eye on the bottom line, laying off more than 10 percent of employees and slashing benefits. He also bought up smaller mine companies and parcels of land for new mines.

One of the latter was Upper Big Branch, which opened in 1994. Jerry Shelton was among the first dozen or so hired at the site. He had been a miner for 26 years, but he learned right away that Massey was different. The managers told him so.

“They said, ‘Forget about mining the way you used to because Massey does it better than anyone else,’ and everyone had to do it Massey’s way,” Mr. Shelton recalled. Nothing about the mine seemed unsafe, he said. But Massey’s way, he soon learned, did not include overtime pay or time off for lunch. There was little camaraderie and plenty of tension.

“The threat was always, ‘If you don’t like it, we’ve got men lined up waiting to work,’ ” he told me. “There were a lot of men out of work at the time.”

As Massey grew, Mr. Blankenship found his interests colliding with those of elected officials. This led him into politics, a step that can be traced to 1998, when Massey was sued by Harman Mining for machinations that a jury later decided were intended to drive the company out of business. (This was the lawsuit depicted in “The Price of Justice” and also the inspiration for John Grisham’s 2008 novel, “The Appeal.”) Hugh Caperton, who owned Harman, was awarded $50 million for tortious interference.

Mr. Blankenship appealed, but he assumed he would lose by a 3-to-2 ruling in state Supreme Court. So he spent roughly $3 million trying to improve his odds by changing the personnel on the bench, according to news reports. A judge named Warren McGraw was up for re-election, and Mr. Blankenship funneled money to a tax-exempt organization called And for the Sake of the Kids. It ran a campaign that included a TV ad accusing the judge of voting “to let a child rapist out of prison.”

At the same time, he bankrolled ads for Brent Benjamin, an unknown corporate lawyer in Charleston. Mr. Benjamin won the election, and when the Caperton case came before him, he declined to recuse himself. Instead, he sided with Massey in a 3-to-2 decision that set aside the $50 million verdict. It seemed as though Mr. Blankenship had saved $47 million by spending $3 million.

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Jerry Shelton at his home in Masseyville, W.Va. He started at Upper Big Branch in 1969 and continued working in the mines until he was hurt on the job in 1998.Credit...Ty Wright for The New York Times

(The case was heard in 2009 by the United States Supreme Court, which concluded that Mr. Benjamin should have sat out the Caperton case, citing Mr. Blankenship’s “significant and disproportionate influence” in the election. The case was sent back to West Virginia, where appeals continue to this day.)

By 2006, Mr. Blankenship had more power than most elected officials. He poured some $6 million into state initiatives and races, including $650,000 to defeat a bond plan to shore up the state’s pension system.

“There was a year when he spent millions trying to turn the state Legislature Republican,” said the former United States representative Nick Joe Rahall II, a Democrat whose district included many of what were once Massey mines. “It was like he was poking people in the chest while he was pushing them down the street.”

Praised for Competence

It is possible to find defenders of Don Blankenship if you mention his name in the right place. One of those places, it turned out, was a gun store where I went to ask directions to Mr. Blankenship’s home. A man in a maintenance uniform — matching gray shirt and pants, name stenciled on his chest pocket — explained the route and then smiled.

“I think he’s getting railroaded,” he said.

“He’s definitely getting railroaded,” said another man by a gun display, who wore a Massey Energy shirt. “You can take that to the bank.”

Neither of these men would reveal their names, the first because he does business with mine companies, and the second because he works for Alpha Natural Resources, the company that acquired Massey in 2011.

“I’m still wearing this Massey shirt because I used to work for Massey and Alpha is too cheap to give us Alpha shirts,” he said. “Alpha has no idea what it’s doing.”

Both men were sorry to see Mr. Blankenship out of the business and on trial for one reason: He was competent. Actually, they said he was much more than competent. Where other mines were closing, or have closed since his departure, he kept thousands of people employed.

“Bottom line, we worked,” said the miner, who explained that he was about to lose his job at a soon-to-be-defunct Alpha mine. “Don Blankenship made millions, and I don’t agree with that. But he’s a businessman. And when he was running Massey, we worked.”

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Jason Stanley with his wife, Stacey, at home in Eskdale, W.Va. Mr. Stanley, who was 18 at the time of the blast, had finished his shift and was on a shuttle a thousand feet from an exit and a mile from the explosion. Still, he said, it felt “like a swarm of yellow jackets stinging me.”Credit...Ty Wright for The New York Times

Still, I asked, doesn’t the explosion at Upper Big Branch suggest that Mr. Blankenship was inexcusably cavalier about safety?

No, both men said.

“How many mines did Massey have at that time?” asked the man in gray. “You’re trying to pin the blame for that explosion on the C.E.O.? He has thousands of men working for him: foremen, superintendents. And Don is supposed to control every man? That’s ridiculous.”

Besides, Mr. Blankenship was concerned about safety, the miner said. He described an incentive program at Massey where employees would accumulate points if they did not get injured. Those points could be traded in for goods like hunting gear, outdoor cooking equipment and gifts.

“You’d pick stuff out of a catalog, and they would deliver it,” the miner said. “I got fishing poles through that program. My wife has purses — Guccis, and not knockoffs. Don started that.”

Even some of Mr. Blankenship’s detractors can summon admiring words. He stayed in the community even after accumulating great wealth. Also, he doesn’t lie. Kevin Thompson brought a class-action suit against Mr. Blankenship and Massey in 2004 for poisoning rivers and wells by injecting coal waste into abandoned mines. The water caused brain cancer and high retardation rates, Mr. Thompson said in the complaint. (After a seven-year tussle, the suit was settled out of court, reportedly for $35 million.) Mr. Blankenship wasn’t at risk because he had water pumped from a nearby town directly to his house.

“When I deposed him, I asked him why he installed his own water line,” Mr. Thompson recalled. “And he said something like, ‘Because Appalachian well water can be of poor quality sometimes.’ Which is true. Now, it should be noted that the water is of poor quality because of a century of mining. But he was telling the truth.”

Like many who have fought Mr. Blankenship, Mr. Thompson said he has wondered how a man who came from nothing, and never moved far away, could appear to have so little sympathy for people in his community. One theory harks back to that “survival of the most productive” line in the documentary.

“I think he just doesn’t give credit to anyone who isn’t successful,” Mr. Thompson said. “In his mind, that’s their fault. He lifted himself out of poverty, so why can’t they? That leads to this attitude that his neighbors are just in the way of profit.”

Another theory is that he has an accountant’s view of the world, one that reduces every decision to cost-benefit calculations. Even that safety program, with the fishing poles and purses, was about saving money, said Rick Wagner, a former technician at Upper Big Branch. If you get points for staying healthy, you are less likely to report an injury, which then reduces doctor’s visits and with that, workers’ compensation premiums.

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Mr. Stanley’s tattoos. The one on his left arm is dedicated to a friend, Cory Davis, who was killed. The other, he said, represents his personal darkness from the disaster.Credit...Ty Wright for The New York Times

“I knew men with slipped disks,” Mr. Wagner said, “and they didn’t report it because they didn’t want to lose safety bonus points.”

An Ailing Industry

If the men in the gun shop voiced something that sounds like nostalgia for Mr. Blankenship, it is probably a yearning for better economic times. In the years since Mr. Blankenship left Massey, coal has been on the decline. Domestic sales for electric power generation dropped to 862 million tons in 2013 from a high of 1.05 billion tons in 2008, largely because natural gas started to displace coal at power plants, long coal’s biggest customers, according to Seth Schwartz of Energy Ventures Analysis. Exports, including coal, have been badly hurt by the strong dollar.

For these and other reasons, employment in the coal industry in central Appalachia has dropped from about 38,000 jobs in 2008 to just shy of 28,000 in 2013, according to the United States Energy Information Administration, a 27 percent decline. Estimates based on Mine Safety and Health Administration data suggest that 4,000 more jobs were lost last year.

“It’s especially bad because there is really no other employment in the area, especially at those wage levels,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Miners can earn $60,000 to $80,000, plus benefits. Nothing else there pays like that.”

Coal companies in general look anemic. Two of them, Patriot Coal and Xinergy Ltd., filed for bankruptcy protection this year, and a third, Arch Coal, said it was looking to restructure billions in debt. Alpha’s shares have collapsed to about 40 cents today from more than $100 in 2008. Maybe it is not a coincidence that the prosecution of a former coal C.E.O. coincides with a plunge in coal’s economic clout.

At the same time, federal regulators are asserting themselves in new ways, spurred in large part by the Upper Big Branch deaths. Mines operated by other companies also had terrible safety records. But M.S.H.A. inspectors were for too long content with cosmetic patches, said Ms. Monforton, the former policy adviser.

“These inspectors took their jobs seriously,” she said, “but they were at these mines all the time, and they knew the superintendents, the managers. They weren’t there to be confrontational. They wanted cooperation, some back and forth.”

In the years since April 5, 2010, M.S.H.A. has begun to cite certain mines for a “pattern of violations,” a designation that allows it to shut down operations with frequent and persistent safety issues. The agency has possessed that power for more than 40 years, but it was Upper Big Branch that emboldened it to use it.

Three Massey employees have already been sent to prison over charges related to Upper Big Branch, including lying to investigators. A conviction of Mr. Blankenship would signal a shift in the balance of power in West Virginia and other major coal-producing states. As Mr. Blankenship prepares for his day in court, little is known about “the Defendant,” as he is called in filings. A judge gave him permission in late May to attend a professional dirt track race in Ohio, where his son was competing. But he was not allowed to travel to Las Vegas for the Christmas holiday. In denying that request, a judge cited “a significant risk of nonappearance at court proceedings in the future.”

Which suggests that the judge does not know Mr. Blankenship very well. If he skipped court, it would be the first time in his life that he had ever dodged a fight.

A correction was made on 
June 28, 2015

An article last Sunday about the criminal case against Donald L. Blankenship, former chief executive of Massey Energy, described his indictment incorrectly. He was indicted by a federal grand jury, not by federal prosecutors, who presented the case to the grand jury.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section BU, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The People v. the Coal Baron . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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