Under mined: when a flood of toxic mining sludge wreaked havoc in Appalachia, how did the White House respond? By letting the coal company off the hook and firing the whistleblower

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Clara Bingham

In April 2002, MSHA levied $110,000 in fines upon Massey Energy--$55,000 (the maximum fee allowable) for each of two violations for an "unwarrantable failure" to prevent the spill. (A Kentucky administrative law judge would later reverse one of the charges, proving how weak it was, and reduce its fine from $55,000 to $5,600.) Had all the violations Spadaro's team found been included in the final report, Massey would have been subject to far heavier fines, increased legal liability, and possible criminal penalties. And MSHA would have produced a report that blamed itself for failing to adequately police the industry--an embarrassment for an administration that was fighting to loosen restrictions on coal companies.

Of coal and cronyism

Spadaro returned to his day-to-day government job as superintendent of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy. But after Martin County, he had begun to see himself as a whistleblower on a mission to draw attention to the corruptions of the Mine Health and Safety Administration. First, he continued to press the Martin County case, charging, in his conversations with reporters and in the letters he sent to the Department of Labor's Inspector General, that MHSA had covered up Massey's transgressions. Then in May 2002, Spadaro launched another sequence of letters to the IG claiming that two independent contractors had been hired by the academy without any competitive bid process. The contractors, who taught educational training programs for mining inspectors, were close friends and old business associates of Lauriski and his two deputy assistant secretaries, John Caylor and John Correll. Spadaro followed up on his two May letters to the Inspector General with another one in August in which he said that, on August 1, Caylor had threatened to fire him if he didn't stop raising questions about the no-bid contracts.

Just one month after Caylor's threat, Spadaro's government credit card and travel records were audited. It turned out that between November 2001 and July 2002, he had used his government credit card to take out 13 cash advances when he needed money to entertain dignitaries and students at the academy. The processing fees for those 13 cash advances totaled $22.60. Spadaro paid his bills on time. In October 2002, Spadaro was told that his abuse of the credit card was a "serious offense." One year later, he was informed that he would be suspended for three days for the crime of making cash advances when he wasn't on official government travel.

Ellen Smith, the editor of Mine Safety and Health News, an independent newsletter that covers MSHA, stumbled onto the story. Smith, who knows far more about this small, obscure agency than any other journalist, had been looking through the department's employee credit card violation records, which she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. She was working on a story about employees who did not pay their credit card bills, and found Spadaro's name on the very bottom of the list of 50 offenders. "Jack Spadaro's name was on that list, but it was for such a miniscule amount of charges, and he had always paid them back," said Smith. "He wasn't the kind of person I was targeting in my story. I was targeting people who didn't pay back." Then Smith discovered that Spadaro, unlike many of the more serious offenders, was being disciplined for his credit-card offenses. "After I started asking questions about Jack, they asked me to package up all of the FOIA information they had sent me and send it back to them so they could sanitize it." Smith consulted a lawyer first and refused to return the files. Fearful that the government might try to confiscate the material, she made a copy and gave it to a friend to keep safely.