The Man Who Nailed Tony Boyle

...The defense attorney immediately established that the potential juror’s husband had been a state policeman for 19 years before that, and he consequently used one of his peremptory challenges to disqualify the juror...

...About a month before he was murdered, Jock Yablonski noted a suspicious-looking car watching his home...

...Pass, unlike those who had been convicted earlier, would not name any higherups...

...Many people who would never suggest that a criminal be punished for punishment’s sake came to believe that in the President’s case there were certain infractions so serious that to let them go unpunished would be to erode the whole system of values and responsibilities that defines acceptable and unacceptable conduct...

...One of these was William Turnblazer, Pass’ nominal superior on the local level...

...Yablonski’s sin was that he had challenged Boyle’s leadership of what was then the most corrupt union in the country...

...To him this seemed like a compromise between life imprisonment (“too strong”) and probation (“too weak...

...Leaning across his cluttered desk, five stories above center city Philadelphia, Sprague, probably the best local prosecutor in the country, recalled the time he convicted a 14-year-old boy for first-degree murder...

...One of his lawyers won a major corruption case against a local official...

...When the car turned out to be owned by the wife of one of the gunmen, an effort was made to find someone to corroborate that the car had actually been in the neighborhood prior to the murders...

...as they were...

...Although Sprague recognizes the ineffectiveness of railing against the Warren Court decisions themselves, he loves to tell stories that illustrate what happens when these decisions are applied too rigidly on the local level : t “A 19-year-old boy picked up an axe and killed his mother, grandmother, and sister,” Sprague began in the same kind of voice one might use to tell a bedtime story...

...His voice is nondescript, with the kind of modified tough-guy accents that you could find in any city hall from Baltimore to Jersey City...

...Sprague is a small man with a bulbous nose and the kind of face that might be called slept in...

...I had, however, wanted the order of the trials reversed...

...In each of the Yablonski trials, Sprague surrounded himself with a battery of local officials-politicians, state troopers, courthouse regulars- who usually could peg the orientations of each potential juror who came before him for pre-trial interrogation...

...Williams testified that he broadcast the news of the discovery of the Yablonski bodies at 26 seconds past 6:lO on the evening of January 5, 1970...

...Here was a man who was convicted because of his own confession...

...At times this wealth of information allowed Sprague to employ little gambits to save his peremptory challenges (which enable him to disqualify jurors) and get the defense to waste their own...

...Turnblazer’s story did not guarantee that Boyle would be convicted of murder...

...As Vealey himself acknowledged, one of his primary reasons for talking was his fear of Sprague’s ability to obtain the death penalty if he did not cooperate...

...There was virtual agreement that Turnblazer should either be placed on probation or receive a token prison sentence...

...It took a year of police work to assemble the material which Sprague used to prove that the victim was a woman of such steady habits that it was implausible that she had just disappeared voluntarily...

...But he remembered the incident and used it to remind the jury of the kind of people with whom Tony Boyle was linked...

...At no point does Sprague spare the feelings of those involved...

...Later, another attorney makes the same sort of ritualistic report on a less successful case: “I gave it all I had...

...When he was questioned by police, the boy confessed...

...What happened in the first trial was just what Sprague had feared...

...But I am a believer-and this is perhaps because my parents were psychoanalysts-that growing youths are subconsciously motivated by the standards they see in the community around them...

...But, instead of attacking those causes directly, liberals have too often attempted to make up for them by altering the rules and condemning a person like Sprague for enforcing them...

...Turnblazer’s pivotal confession stemmed from a mixture of his own guilt (“It got to the point where I couldn’t sleep anymore”) and the two patient and skillful FBI agents who obtained his voluntary statement...

...And that the evidence against him arose solely out of his own voluntary statement...

...Instead, he held it by two fingers, an arm’s length from his body, as if he was revolted by touching it...

...When Sprague picked up one of the murder weapons, he did not cradle the revolver in the palm of his hand like most people would...

...I was influenced by the fact that Turnblazer seemed truly repentent...

...Always calm...

...Take the role which capital punishment played in unraveling the Boyle case...

...insistence that both of Yablonski’s sons, Kenny and Chip, listen to and verify a line-by-line recital of a 26-page confession by one of their father’s murderers...

...Sprague told one of his assistants in 1970, “It will probably be four or five years before we get to Boyle, but the telephone company generally destroys records of long-distance calls after about six months...

...He originally had been expected to testify for Prater and claim that the dummy union committee set up to pay off the murderers had been established back in 1968, long before Jock Yablonski was perceived as a threat to Tony Boyle...

...Take the typical homicide,” he explained, “it’s a husband and wife arguing over the lumps in the mashed potatoes or a pork chop...

...Hacking Away at the Courts Sprague’s views about the proccdural safeguards and “exclusionary” rules proclaimed by the Warren Court also run counter to liberal opinion...

...For Whom Ma Bell Tolls An example of this compulsiveness about even the smallest details was Sprague’s effort to obtain the longdistance phone records of seven key people in the investigation...

...He was one of those people you find in any corrupt enterprise, the sort who tolerated the actions of those who surrounded him, but instigated little of it...

...During the Pass trial, Sprague badly sprained his ankle playing tennis...

...And amazingly enough, she had a piece of paper from around Thanksgiving with the same license number that had been noted by Jock Yablonski...

...It would have just been another piece of evidence to justify the cynical world view that the hidden Mr...

...The morning after the verdict was delivered in the Pass trial, rep resentatives from all these groups met in a room at the Holiday Inn that had been serving as the command post for the trial...

...We had gotten pretty far up in the union hierarchy with the conviction of Pass...

...They found the conduct of the trial itself to be proper...

...t There was a young woman intern at a local hospital who wasraped in a particularly brutal fashion (and here Sprague went on to provide a few of the unpleasant specifics...

...My parents are psychoanalysts,” Sprague said, “and they wouldn’t talk to me for a week after this one...

...Instead, Sprague has the imperturbable veneer of total calm...

...Lacking strong enough evidence against Boyle to get a conviction and frustrated by Albert Pass’ refusal to talk, they decided to continue the investigation by reinterviewing a number of union officials who might be implicated in the murders...

...But because of Richard Sprague, it was different with Tony Boyle...

...We’ve gotten enough results to justify our efforts.’ ” If the Yablonski trials had ended with Pass, the public would have shrugged and said, “That’s just the way those things work...

...What Sprague had known all the time was that the woman’s husband had beerl discharged from the state police for misconduct, and both she and her husband were still bitter about it...

...The result is a lack of respect for law enforcement that liberals perceive as serious only when there’s someone like Richard Nixon they really want to get...

...As a consequence, Sprague recommended that Turnblazer receive a 15-year sentence with the possibility for immediate parole...

...Another of his trademarks is terse and narrow questions that leave little room for cross-examination...

...By asking just one question, Sprague convinced the defense attorney that he was trying to hide that the juror’s husband had been with the state police...

...Sprague’s success is based as much on his laborious preparation as it is on his courtroom abilities...

...She argued that it had taken her three years to emotionally recover from the rape and the first trial, and she didn’t want to risk the progress she had made by testifying again...

...The Man Who Nailed Tony Boyle by Walter Shapiro Told in a flat, emotionless voice, the story was vintage Richard Sprague...

...Ron Malone, the chief federal government lawyer at the Boyle trial, recalled, “I had been living with this case for three years, but when Sprague went into his closing argument, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up...

...He speaks spontaneously in the courtroom, rarely referring to or taking notes...

...Rather, it is meant to be the starting point for the examination of a man whose primary concern is preserving the fabric of the community...

...Instead, Turnblazer suffered pangs of conscience and testified for the prosecution...

...It would have been easy to say, ‘Tony Boyle’s an old man...

...Sprague, who has been this route hundreds of times before, asks, “How do you feel...

...Within two months after the Pass trial, Turnblazer had changed his story again...

...At the Pass trial, for example, Sprague asked a potential juror just one question, “What does your husband do for a living...

...To which the answer was, “He has been driving a cab for the past five years...

...The key event in the Boyle trial was when the ex-union president testified and enabled Sprague to demonstrate to the jury that Boyle had lied about a number of minor matters related to the murders...

...It is easy to forget the power and the respectability that surrounded Boyle when Sprague began to prosecute the murders in 1970...

...We all have to know that if we pull a gun on someone else, or take his property, or resort to violence, sanctions will inevitably follow...

...Delegations of lawyers file into his office to report the verdicts in their trials...

...It is not surprising that the most persistent criticism of Sprague as a prosecutor is the gingerly way he handles police brutality and corruption cases...

...There are endless stories about the rigor of Sprague’s “prep” sessions where he goes over everything with prosecution witnesses...

...The defense stressed the terrible home life of the 17-year-old and used this as a wedge to win an innocent verdict for reasons of temporary insanity...

...Members of the jury, there is nothing to be spit upon...

...But I force them into court...

...But that still didn’t make what he did right...

...Pass’ lawyer was so satisfied with his discovery that he never probed further to find out about the misconduct charges...

...In Sprague’s mind these exculpatory arguments had to be balanced against several other factors...

...Turnblazer, who was a lawyer and in the upper echelons of the union, could have taken steps to prevent this murder...

...The moral example point weighed heavily with Sprague, who envisioned the public responding to the Turnblazer sentence by saying, “They’re tough cookies, that prosecution...

...They said the interrogation was proper, they said the seizure of the physical evidence was proper...

...This, Sprague said, handicapped him in trying Edwards’ case because the defense “should have Walter Shapiro is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...But the major reason Sprague has won the right to have his views on the law and justice taken seriously is that last April 11 he obtained what may well have been the most important murder conviction in recent American history...

...Turnblazer, an attorney himself, had declined to be represented by a lawyer before he confessed...

...It is the underworld “kingpins” who stay out of jail, while the “numbers runners” bear the brunt of crusades against the mob...

...Sprague, who does not lack an appreciation of his own talents, put the matter in perspective: “A number of prosecutors would have said by the time we got the Pass conviction that things had gone far enough...

...Sprague disputes the notion that “if you work closely with someone you ought not to investigate them,” but his counter-arguments are weak...

...Then Sprague said something that summed up almost perfectly his attitude towards his life’s work, the prosecution of criminals: “In my speech to the jury, I had to make them feel that I was as sympathetic to the poor kid...

...Sprague then produced phone company records demonstrating that Prater had made a long-distance call to Pass within five minutes of the announcement of the murders...

...I gave a lot of thought to what sentence to recommend,’, Sprague said...

...I’m not saying that punishing this murderer will prevent anyone from ever blowing up over a pork chop again...

...After four-and-a-half hours of deliberation, a Media, Pennsylvania, jury found former United Mine Workers Union president Tony Boyle guilty of ordering the assassination of Jock Yablonski, who was brutally murdered along with his wife and daughter on the last day of 1969...

...Because such terms as “law,” “order,” and “stability” have been appropriated by the right wing, too many in the liberal community have forgotten that there is such a thing as the social fabric, and that its preservation demands that certain rules of conduct be understood and observed...

...Another illustration of the values which Sprague brings to his work as prosecutor is his treatment of William Turnblazer...

...Through tactics like this Sprague never let the jury forget the brutal realities of the three Yablonski murders...

...This kind of thoroughness depends on a close working relationship with the police...

...Curtis Edwards was convicted of first-degree murder...

...He could barely stand, let alone walk, but refused to allow the jury to see him being wheeled in and out of the courtroom...

...It took four years and five murder trials for Sprague to climb the ladder from the “local thugs” who carried out the actual murders to Tony Boyle, the “puppeteer” who had ordered them...

...It is hard to imagine a prosecutor of a more liberal Fast convincing the police that they ought to spend a year preparing for a trial where there was not even a body to prove a murder had taken place...

...been able to develop even more sympathy for the 14-year-old7 after all his father had been executed...

...But when the policeman was reading the lengthy card informing the boy of his rights, the policeman made the mistake of saying, “Do you understand that anything you say can be used for or against you at your trial...

...And I forced the witness stand and her doctors said that if she continued, it would cause permanent psychological damage, so I had to drop the case...

...Turnblazer was an easy-going man in his late forties who had inherited his union position from his father...

...Sprague is also noted for his ability to call for the next witness even before the preceeding witness has left the stand...

...It is easy to understand their horror...

...Here was a man who helped them get Tony Boyle...

...The boy was tried and convicted in local court, but the State Supreme Court threw out the confession and the conviction because the policeman had used the phrase “or or against you...

...Like Judge John Sirica’s success in getting James McCord to talk, Sprague’s handling of the Yablonski trials was a combination of tough prosecutorial tactics and attitudes toward the rule of law that make many liberals who applaud the results uncomfortable about the means...

...The murder prosecutions were in state court, but Sprague was assisted at every level of the investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department...

...Sprague would be the first to admit that triumph in the Boyle case was far from his alone...

...Because Sprague has beliefs like these, William Turnblazer is currently serving a 15-year sentence under which the judge stipulated that Turnblazer will not be eligible for parole until he has served five years of his sentence...

...But much of his national recognition comes from having prosecuted more than 70 firstdegree murder cases and having lost only once, when the charges were reduced to second degree...

...This time he acknowledged being present during a conversation in July, 1969, in which Boyle ordered Pass “to take care of Yablonski...

...But his attitude toward Turnblazer in particular-and punishment in general-stems from a set of basically conservative ideas about community values...

...The two boys conspired to murder the 17-year-old’s father, but it was Edwards who actually pulled the trigger, an act of vengeance that he believed was justified since “the state killed my father because he was a bad man...

...Nothing happens in the courtroom which in any way undermines Sprague’s aura of command...

...Sprague obviously personally relishes being regarded as “a tough cookie...

...He once shocked, but fascinated, a largely liberal law class at the University of Pennsylvania by lecturing them on how to pick a murder jury that would invoke the death penalty...

...In his 16 years in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, Spraguewho as the top appointed official is number two in the office behind the elected DA-has tried more than 10,000 cases...

...Under a temporary appointment as special federal prosecutor, Sprague convicted Turnblazer of violating Jock Yablonski’s civil rights...

...There is almost nothing about Richard Sprague’s appearance, his voice, or his manner to suggest that he would be an almost legendary courtroom lawyer...

...Take his use of the testimony of Kathy Rygle, a 14-year-old neighbor of Yablonski...

...And impressions like these operate on them in later life...

...Prater, a union field representative, and Pass, a member of the union’s executive board, had arranged the murders and set up a dummy union committee to pay for them...

...The moral sensibility that allows Sprague to express his physical disgust at having to handle the murder weapon springs from Sprague’s conception of the social role of the tough prosecutor...

...At last count, Sprague, one of the country’s most outspoken supporters of capital punishment, had asked for the death penalty 22 times-and got it in 19 of the cases...

...It is important to understand that gestures like these d e more than just courtroom pyrotechnics, or good stories to swap around the bar at the next prosecutors’ convention...

...But the trial should not be viewed in isolation -it was the culmination of Sprague’s almost monomaniacal pursuit of the case since 1970...

...But as the jury was leaving the courtroom, the judge said, ‘May God guide you in your deliberations.’ ” Three years later the State Supreme Court ruled that the rapist was entitled to a new trial because “God had been called in as the 13th juror...

...But if we don’t punish someone like this merely because he is not likely to be dangerous again, we lose the feeling that some acts are considered taboo by the community...

...Think and put yourself in the place of the law enforcement officers who had to start untanghng, finding the chain of evidence, the law enforcement officers that had to come up against a person like Martin, and to apprehend him...

...His testimony was limited, however-he challenged Prater’s testimony about the union fund, but denied my knowledge of a murder plot...

...But following the conviction of Pass in June, 1973, the chain stopped...

...A Philadelphia Lawyer...

...And then, after allowing the lawyer to let out his emotions for a few seconds, he is all business, instructing his subordinate to “make sure” certain motions “are filed within 15 days...

...He is unfailingly courteous, introducing a visiting reporter to everyone from a rotund medical examiner to a CBS producer filming a documentary...

...They learn that when you kill someone wrongfully you go to prison...

...One of the most dramatic moments in the Boyle trial came when Aubran Martin was brought in, chained to two state policemen, to be identified by Paul Gilly, another of the gunmen...

...Sprague-like an old-time baseball player who refused to rub where he had been hit by a pitch-didn’t even deign to wipe the blob of spittle that was running down his coat...

...But I’m almost certain that we will hear from that kid again...

...Behind the liberal distrust for law and order tactics there is, of course, the important understanding that social forces and economic injustice are the deepest causes of many crimes...

...Sprague said, “I often get the same kind of response from parents when their children are required to testify in court...

...Little Kathy Rygle” became a fixture at the Yablonski trials as a prosecution witness, even though she was a mature 18 by the time she testified at the Boyle trial...

...It is a grisly little story, but it is not cited as evidence that prosecutors in general-or Richard Sprague in particularare totally devoid of compassion...

...Six months later the same rapist attacked a 12-year-old girl...

...Sprague believes that later confessions by Annette Gilly, the wife of one of the triggermen, and Silous Huddleston, a minor union official who arranged the actual murders, were also stimulated by their horror of the electric chair...

...One would almost expect to find such obvious manifestations of tension as Captain Queeg’ssteel balls or the kind of Calvinistic solemnity of Ralph Nader accompanying his relentless drive...

...The conviction represented the culmination of almost unprecedented local, state, and federal cooperation...

...Sprague then came to his point, “When the newspaper headlines read ‘State Supreme Court Says Constitutional Rights Violated’ everyone was relieved, they had thrown out an illegal confession...

...Yet many of Sprague’s courtroom victories would have been impossible without yeoman efforts of the Philadelphia police...

...Now the high court agreed that the arrest was proper,” said Sprague, warming up to the story’s climax...

...For the survivor, these tensions are not likely to recur...

...Get them now...

...During the trial of Aubran Martin, the most vicious of the three hired Yablonski killers, Sprague presented his entire case, with more than 35 prosecution witnesses, in just one court day...

...He’s not going to blow up over a pork chop again...

...Take one of his most famous cases, in which he obtained a murder conviction although the body was never found...

...Before the Boyle trial, when his attorney suggested that he retract his confession (an obvious effort to arrange a last-minute “deal”), Turnblazer refused...

...On September 6, 1973, Tony Boyle was indicted for murder...

...His method of granting an interview is to allow you to sit in his office as he cwies on the business of administering the district attorney’s office around you...

...Since the murders were committed in a small town about 50 miles south of Pittsburgh, Sprague was involved in the case only at the request of the Washington“ County district attorney...

...People who witnessed Sprague in the courtroom during the Yablonski trials used phrases like “total control” to describe his manner and approach...

...Even his manner is somewhat surprising...

...And “this was a case that was being observed nationally” and might have some sort of subliminal deterrent effect on the larger community...

...Kathy Rygle was discovered by the police to be in the habit of recording the license numbers of all passing cars...

...Screaming obscenities as he was led toward the jury, Martin came face to face with Sprague and spat on the shoulder of the prosecutor’s suit...

...Often there are more than 50 prosecution witnesses waiting to testify, yet Sprague is always mentally juggling his witness list, striving to create the right psychological impression on the jury...

...They say that reenacting the crime would be just too traumatic for their children...

...A brutal murder had been committed...

...A Law and Order Man One may disagree with Sprague’s views about the death penalty and the Warren Court’s ruling while still admiring what is most remarkable about his career-the absolute passion with which he dedicates himself to seeing that rules are enforced...

...Sprague: “Better luck next case...

...The clearest illustration that this is not a reactionary view was the growing national sentiment about Richard Nixon up until the hour of his resignation...

...But the law was the law, I had to do my duty, and they had to do theirs...

...Although few of these murderers have been executed, Sprague is the kind of man who can say (and probably mean), “I’ve never lost any sleep over a killer I helped send to the chair...

...Edwards’ closest friend was a 17-year-old with a father so vicious that his mother had become deaf from repeated beatings...

...In the Prater trial, Turnblazer had appeared as a surprise prosecution witness...

...Preparing for the new trial, Sprague was faced with a major problem- the woman didn’t want to testify...

...He wrote down the license plate number, which was the first clue police discovered after the murders...

...Big s of life rarely get caught...

...Although there was evidence corroborating Turnblazer’s statement, it was a classic “one on one” case-Turnblazer’s word against Boyle’s...

...Typical was Sprague’s...

...The basis for the conviction was Turnblazer’s voluntary confession, the same one which provided the key evidence against Tony Boyle...

...In between were the 1973 murder convictions of two intermediariesWilliam Prater and Albert Pass...

...At the Pass trial, three-and-a-half years later, Sprague called as a prosecution witness Carl Williams, a newsman at WBIR-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, near Prater’s home...

...The rapist had a prior record and was tried and convicted...

...The boy, Curtis Edwards, had endured the trauma of his father’s execution for murder...

...Before he recommended sentencing for Turnblazer, Sprague polled everyone who had been involved with him on the Yablonski cases...

...Another factor in his decision was, Sprague acknowledged, that if Turnblazer had come to him with a deal (immunity in exchange for evidence against Boyle), Sprague would have accepted it immediately...

...The first breakin the case came when Claude Vealey, one of the three gunmen, confessed after his arrest...

...In his final summation to the jury, Sprague said, “People jumped up when we had that fellow Martin in the courtroom, and you saw him as he spit on me...

...This kind of meticulousness is Sprague’s hallmark as a prosecutor...

...Tony Boyle was a pillar of the American labor movement, with such powerful connections that figures like Clark Clifford graced the board of directors of a unionowned Washington bank...

...When the jury came in together, I knew...

...The 17-year-old was tried first,” Sprague said, “but I didn’t try the case...

...Choosing a jury is another area in which Sprague excels...