Dec 2, 2014 4 min read

Donald Blankenship’s life, at least in its first half, was something of a Horatio Alger tale.

A young man, born into scarcity, was able to rise to the top of his profession and acquire enormous sums of money along the way through the dint of hard work and no small amount of moxie.

Then, somewhere along the way, Blankenship’s life took a turn that, from all indications, has made him appear more like a figure out of a Charles Dickens novel, or a character you would find in the muckraking stories Upton Sinclair published at the turn of the 20th century, like “The Jungle,” a classic stomach-churner about Chicago’s lawless meat-packing industry.

Until 2010, Blankenship was the CEO of Massey Energy, the company that owned the mine in Upper Big Branch, W.Va., in which 29 miners were killed in April of that year following an explosion that was traced to negligence and safety violations. Blankenship had built a reputation for cultivating relationships with political players in the Mountain State, and was perceived as being virtually beyond the reach of justice thanks to the connections he had forged and the weight of his wallet.

If Blankenship himself believed that, he was rudely shaken out of his slumber last month when he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Charleston, W.Va. on four criminal counts stemming from the blast. The indictment argues that Blankenship was at the head of a conspiracy to conceal safety violations and thwart the efforts of inspectors to do their jobs. Blankenship entered a not-guilty plea and his lawyer argued that the indictment was merely an act of vengeance being served up by the bureaucrats with whom he had jousted over the course of his career.

Blankenship will have his day in court and, until then, he must be accorded the presumption of innocence. But his indictment has heartened activists and West Virginia residents who were convinced that Blankenship and his fellow coal barons operated according to their own rules, and could do so with impunity.

One retired miner told The New York Times, in a story published Monday, that Blankenship’s style was “more like a dictator than a manager.” Indeed, many reports have indicated that the CEO put profit, profit and more profit above just about every other consideration. A less-than-flattering profile in Rolling Stone said that Blankenship believed “that God put coal in the ground so that he could mine it and anyone – or any law – that stands in his way needs to be beaten down, bought off or tied up in court.”

And it appears his contempt was not reserved simply for the apparatchiks he so despised. Blankenship allegedly warned one underling that “You have a kid to feed. Do your job” and told another that “your core job is to make money.”

In fact, the indictment states that Blankenship demanded updates every half-hour on how much coal was pouring out of the mine, as if it wasn’t coal but gold, and it was all going to go straight into his pockets.

If the arc of Blankenship’s life has truly followed a literary course, with the early years being Horatio Alger-like and his career summoning up Upton Sinclair, its denouement could extend all the way back to Greek tragedy, where power, greed and hubris trump all other virtues, and lead to a precipitous fall. Unfortunately, in Blankenship’s case, that tragedy has been experienced in the harshest and most horrific terms by 29 miners and the people who loved them.