Mine CEO Blankenship No Stranger to Controversy

Mine CEO Blankenship No Stranger to Controversy"The man that I know answers calls to people that arechristmas giftinTruck tarpsneed. He gives donations to about everyone who ever asks for it. He loves children," said Kessler, who "can't remember ever not knowing him, and I'm 50."

Until Monday's methane gas explosion, which killed 25 miners and left the fate of four others in doubt, the Hatfields and the McCoys may have been the most famous residents living near the Tug Fork River on the Kentucky border. Now Blankenship, who lives in a mountaintop mansion nearby, can lay claim to his own somewhat dubious place in history.

"A lot of the state's best and brightest went elsewhere, but Don didn't do that," said Bruce Stanley, a Pittsburgh lawyer who represented two widows of miners who died in a 2006 fire in the Aracoma mine that Massey owns. "That's the reason he angers a lot of West Virginians, because they're used to pointing the blame on out-of-state people. But he's a local boy who evokes strong emotions in people on one side or the other."

Blankenship and his company, the fourth largest coal producer in America, were accused of puttingTruck tarpsprofits ahead of safety long before Monday's incident.

"Coal can be mined in an environmentally responsible way," United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts said in the organization's magazine last year. "But in many respects, Massey has chosen not to do it that way, and the result has been to give the coal industry a black eye."

The Upper Big Branch explosion "isn't just of matter of happenstance but rather the inevitable result of a profit-driven system and reckless corporate conduct," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, a former coal miner, in a stinging statement this week. He went on to quote from a memo Blankenship wrote to his managers reminding them to put coal production first, because '"this memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills."

Blankenship, 60, has been chairman of Massey since 2000, when the company spun off from its parent, Fluor Corp. But he "made his name" within the company in 1984, Stanley said, when he went head-to-head with the UMWA in a labor dispute. "He broke the mine workers union in southern West Virginia," said Stanley, who oftenchristmas giftsquares off against Massey and itsTruck tarpssubsidiaries in court.