While Pinkey Mullens was in chemotherapy, Gov. Jim Justice’s business empire kept him from medication he needed to live.
“That really makes you feel bad,” said Mullens, 70, of Wyoming County.
Mullens endured years of interruptions in his prescription drug coverage that Justice’s business empire was responsible for after he retired from Justice’s Double-Bonus Coal Co. in 2007.
“I worked for him like a dog,” Mullens said, recalling two-week periods where he put in 30 hours of overtime.
Mullens is among the 250 to 300 recipients of prescription drug coverage for whom the United Mine Workers of America says Justice’s coal companies have failed to provide contractually promised coverage intermittently in recent years. Four retirees of Justice coal companies and the UMWA sued those companies in 2019 to enforce an agreement covering prescription drug coverage in an unresolved lawsuit.
For Mullens and his wife Cathy, that has meant going without coverage for up to three weeks. The Glen Fork couple has gone up to a week without some medications. They say Renegade Pharmacy in nearby Oceana has given them four to five days’ worth of the most critical medications to sustain them until their coverage is restored.
On top of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, bouts with diarrhea and the onset of diabetes, Mullens had to worry about the availability of drugs keeping him alive. Mullens has tried to pick up antibiotic medicine used to control diarrhea stemming from his bone marrow transplant only to find his coverage has been dropped.
Prescription payments through a third-party administrator sometimes have been unavailable, Steven Ruby, a lawyer for the companies, has claimed. In those cases, Ruby said, the companies have paid the cost.
Ruby has said he could not explain the cause of repeated critical prescription health coverage lapses.
United Mine Workers of America International spokesperson Erin Bates said coverage lapses haven’t been an issue since last year.
But for Mullens, who is now in remission from leukemia, Justice’s yearslong failure to ensure his company retirees had prescription drug coverage when they needed it already took its toll.
And now that the U.S. Senate candidate’s business empire is crumbling with key assets in peril to satisfy hundreds of millions of dollars of unpaid personal and company debts, Mullens has no sympathy for his former boss.
“I do not feel sorry for him,” Mullens said. “I hope he has to pay every penny, plus penalties. That’s what I hope.“
Debts dogging Justice’s personal and company finances have led to grievances from banks, far-flung businesses and real estate owners with access to amenities unavailable to the public at the Greenbrier Sporting Club, an asset imperiled by Justice debts that looms large in his business portfolio.
But Justice’s debts also have directly impacted some of West Virginia’s most vulnerable communities.
Justice delinquencies cut off property tax revenue
Nearly 300 West Virginia properties owned by Justice or his businesses — on which they owed almost $400,000 in delinquent taxes — went up for sale in public auctions in June.
Roughly 95% of those properties sold to other buyers for just over $500,000, according to a Gazette-Mail review of state Auditor’s Office data.
Of the 281 properties secured by other bidders, 95 were in Justice’s own name, selling for just over $75,000. Another 15 properties on which roughly $241,000 was due didn’t receive a bid.
The properties in McDowell, Raleigh and Wyoming counties were included in public auctions held in those counties.
Most in Justice’s name were in McDowell County, which collected $9.92 million in property taxes in calendar year 2023, according to the county.
In McDowell County, Justice was listed as owner of 89 properties totaling over $65,000 due. Justice and properties he listed in his 2023 state financial disclosure statement owe approximately $75,000 in McDowell County.
Thus the delinquencies of Justice and properties he controls were delinquent on 0.75% of McDowell County’s entire 2023 property tax collection haul.
Property taxes are a source of revenue for local tax bases, helping fund infrastructure, libraries, parks, public safety and schools.
Every last bit of revenue could help in McDowell County, whose property tax base has dwindled sharply amid the decline of the coal industry there. McDowell County’s 37.6% poverty rate in 2023 far exceeded the national poverty rate of 11.5% the year before.
Delinquent coal permit an environmental threat
A gathering the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection hosted Thursday evening provided fresh evidence that Justice coal company damage in and beyond McDowell County has been environmental as well as fiscal.
The DEP hosted an informal conference on a permit renewal application for the Justice-controlled Bluestone Coal Corp.’s Poca No. 11 Contour Auger No. 2 surface mine, which has a long history of environmental violations that conservationists say threaten an endangered species.
“Bluestone has an extensive record of ignoring the law and its obligations to society,” Perrin de Jong of the Center for Biological Diversity said during the conference, at which DEP officials took comments on and answered questions about the permit renewal application.
De Jong cited the Bluestone’s record of violations on the permit to urge the DEP not to turn a blind eye to what he called the company’s “documented record as a devil-may-care renegade.”
The DEP has issued Bluestone 46 notices of violation and 26 cessation orders on the permit since 2016, according to agency records. That includes four violation notices and two cessation orders issued last month.
In its violation notices last month, the DEP cited failures to clean out a sediment control structure, certify a drainage system was constructed and installed per an approved plan, maintain diversion ditches used to prevent erosion, and submit groundwater protection plan fees.
The DEP ordered Bluestone to cease all mining activity last month after finding Bluestone failed to apply for permit renewal in a timely fashion or submit whole effluent toxicity and biological assessment station testing data.
Matt Hepler, Central Appalachian environmental scientist for Appalachian Voices, said his conservationist nonprofit “has been seeing a large record of noncompliance” from Justice’s companies.
“That kind of record needs to be taken into account, seeing those same kind of compliance issues across many different Justice permits across multiple states,” Hepler said.
Hepler and others urging the DEP to allow reclamation only on the permit fear further Poca No. 11 Contour Auger No. 2 mine operations could cause the extinction of the Guyandotte River crayfish.
The crayfish is an endangered species for which, along with the Big Sandy crayfish, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service designated 446 stream miles of critical habitat in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia in 2022.
“This is a real and present extinction threat for the Guyandotte River crayfish,” de Jong said.
The DEP issued two demands last month to Roanoke, Va.-based Bluestone Coal Corp. for delinquent civil penalties totaling $1,528. The demands say the agency is prohibited from issuing any permit or permit revision to the company or any company or person owning or controlling the property as long as the penalties are delinquent.
But the DEP has still renewed mine permitting on which there are delinquent penalties, and opponents of Bluestone and other mining operations in the area have no faith in the DEP to protect them under Justice’s administration.
“I do believe it is a huge conflict of interest for y’all to be over this permit that’s owned by y’alls boss,” Junior Walk of Raleigh County-based anti-mining group Coal River Mountain Watch told DEP officials during Thursday’s conference. “I think that’s pretty damn dirty.”
Thirteen of Justice’s coal companies agreed in November they’re liable for abandoned mine land-related debts in a case pressed by federal prosecutors.
Water quality a concern
Justice’s coal company footprint has figured into water quality concerns mounting in Wyoming County.
Community advocates say drinking water in the area has been emerging in shades of gray, brown and black, smelling like paint thinner and causing skin rashes.
Driving health worries has been water the DEP has said has come from an old well head on property owned by Bluestone Resources Inc., a coal company controlled by Gov. Jim Justice, next to Indian Creek. The water has been artesianing, or being forced to the surface by pressure underground.
DEP spokesman Terry Fletcher said a house well stopped artesianing in July after the DEP was issued a preliminary injunction requiring Pinnacle Mining Company — to which the DEP had traced the water — to perform site mitigation. Bluestone has denied responsibility for the water discharge, saying it doesn't own the mining rights.
Fletcher said Pinnacle-submitted quarterly discharge monitoring reports have been submitted as required and in compliance other than a December 2023 reading showing elevated total iron levels. The DEP is looking into that issue and will collect its own sample, Fletcher said.
Terra Vance, who hails from Logan and is one of many generations of coal miners, set up a GoFundMe page at bit.ly/waterfund raiser to raise money to buy safe drinking water for Wyoming and McDowell residents.
The West Virginia Department of Health’s Office of Environmental Health Services said in an email Tuesday it investigated drinking water complaints and determined none of the local public water systems were affected.
But Vance said independent tests have shown lead, arsenic and aluminum levels hundreds of parts per billion over allowed limits.
“The coal and natural gas industries have created horrifying living conditions for West Virginians who have suffered exploitation and poverty to power the country and keep the lights on for over 150 years,” Vance’s GoFundMe page says.
Woes keep mounting for Justice businesses
By not shuttering them, Justice has said he has done a favor to those invested in his companies’ success.
“[We haven’t done] what a lot of coal companies just did when things got tough. They bailed,” Justice said at a November news briefing. “They wrote off billions and billions of dollars. I didn’t do that ... I didn’t want all these people to be stiffed.”
Many of Justice’s business partners say they’ve been stiffed anyway and are coming to collect.
Last week, a federal judge ordered one of Justice’s coal companies to surrender a helicopter in response to the company failing to pay a roughly $13 million judgment against it in favor of a British Virgin Islands firm.
That firm, Caroleng Investments Limited, said Justice’s Bluestone Resources didn’t meet its obligations under a 2015 agreement under which it sold coal-producing property and assets to Bluestone in exchange for a cash payment and future royalty payments.
Last month, a Virginia circuit court judge formally denied attempts by Justice, his family and businesses to set aside documents admitting over $300 million of debt owed to Carter Bank & Trust, a Virginia bank trying to collect that debt.
Also last month, a Greenbrier County Circuit Court judge scheduled a hearing for April on motions in a case in which Greenbrier Sporting Club companies that loom large in Justice’s business empire have moved to block a Carter Bank-planned auction of key club properties to collect on debt they say they’re owed through a 2015 trust deed.
The Greenbrier Sporting Club is a private equity club that offers memberships to those who buy real estate at The Greenbrier resort, which is owned by Jim Justice.
Some club members have disputed Justice family ownership interest in the club, saying they hold that interest instead.
Last month, Indiana-based 1st Source Bank listed 45 property items it’s looking to possess as collateral from Bluestone Resources that 1st Source says secured unpaid loans in a $4.5 million-plus lawsuit it filed against Justice’s company.
The list consisted mainly of Caterpillar and Ford construction equipment.
Listed were 18 fuel, lube, haul and rock trucks; 12 wheel loaders; five dozers and tractor dozers; and four motor graders at unspecified values.
In December, a federal court entered a $1 million-plus judgment against Justice’s Bluestone Coal Sales Corp. in favor of a Cyprus-based ship-chartering company in a case stemming from a cargo loading dispute.
But while Justice and his businesses face losing assets to banks and foreign companies elsewhere, from a helicopter to dozers, Pinkey Mullens is stuck at home more than he’d like to be.
His health won’t allow him to hunt, fish or even cut the weeds at his Glen Fork home.
His memory won’t allow him to feel sorry for the man for which he used to do so much more.
“He deserves everything he gets,” Mullens said.
