Cornered
Authors: Peter Pringle
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CONTENTS
14. The Man on the Pink Bicycle
Epilogue: An Illusion of Surrender
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For Victoria,
and her generation
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IN THE SUMMER
of 1994, when a handful of American journalists were being sued for possession of stolen company documents by the British tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, I was given access to these papers for my reports to
The Independent
in London. When, finally, the U.S. courts ruled the documents were in the public domain and the unprecedented legal assault on the tobacco industry began, I found myself in the middle of the battle, and this book was born.
Nathan Abse was my invaluable researcher, who began in 1995 cataloging and annotating the vast amount of material that had suddenly become available. His inside knowledge of the medical-science libraries, his dissection of dense scientific argument, and his sharp analyses were outstanding contributions to this work. His ability to travel long distances on next to nothing, and still fulfill his goals, became legendary. After the first year of the project,
The Washington Post
lured him away to be their National News Researcher, but he gave the book his support until the end. His reading of drafts was most helpful, and I am grateful for his work and his friendship.
My hope, as always, was to talk to both sides in the war. Alas, this was not possible. The tobacco industry retreated into its bunker; rejecting repeated attempts over three years, during which I also made a documentary for British television, to discuss the view from the corner in which the industry had become trapped.
The anti-tobacco lawyers were only too eager to tell their story, of course; propaganda is one of their key weapons. But, even so, I could not have completed my task without hundreds of hours of interviews with members of the plaintiffs' bar; I shudder to think what the billable time would add up to, had it not been freely given.
In Mississippi, my thanks to Don Barrett, Dick Scruggs, Mike Moore, Charles Mikhail, Steve Bozeman, and Lee Young, and the staffs of the Barrett Law Offices in Lexington, the attorney general's office in Jackson, and of the Scruggs law firm in Pascagoula. Charlene Bosarge was magnificently patient with the demands of my film crew, as was Sally Barrett, who should have been a star in the documentary. In Lexington, thanks also to Ella Horton, Earline Hart, and the staff of the Lexington Courthouse, who gave up part of their weekend, and to Tom and Jerry Ann Gant, who gave up their shop for an afternoon. Morton Mintz kindly lent me his valuable file on the Horton case.
In New Orleans, Wendell Gauthier was especially helpful and, for some reason, spared me from being a victim of his practical jokes. Presumably, my turn will come. John Coale was so friendly as Castano's publicity chief I often forgot he was a lawyer. Elizabeth Cabraser always shared a special insight. Also in New Orleans, Suzy Foulds answered innumerable document questions, and Sherill Horndorff, Russ Herman, Calvin Fayard, Joseph Bruno, Walter Leger, Ken Carter, Danny Becnel, and Christine Cox went out of their way to help.
In Minneapolis, Roberta Walburn interrupted her own punishing schedule to answer a flow of queries about the Minnesota case, and Mike Ciresi made himself available on a trip to London. Attorney General Skip Humphrey took time to explain his position. David Phelps of the Minneapolis
Star Tribune
and David Shaffer of the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
provided background material.
In Charleston, South Carolina, Andy Berly probably now has more confidential documents on the British tobacco giant BAT Industries than the company has itselfâat least in one place.
In Louisville, Kentucky, Jeff Wigand said whatever he was allowed to say without breaching his confidentiality agreement, and Fox DeMoisey helped disentangle the web the industry had spun around its troublesome dissenter, Merrell Williams. And Williams himself spoke at length of his curious odyssey.
In Washington, D.C., David Kessler gave two long interviews in the midst of his very personal battle with the industry, and FDA officials Jim O'Hara, Jeff Nesbitt, and Mitch Zeller filled in the blanks. Phil Barnett and Ripley Forbes (before they moved on) and Alison Waldman were extremely helpful in Congressman Henry Waxman's office.
Thanks to Susan Sherman at the Labor Department for help during the OSHA hearings; also to Sherri Watson of the American Lung Association and to Rhett and Suzanne Klok for their assistance with OSHA transcripts. Matt Myers gave me a long historical overview of the confrontation between the health groups and the industry.
At the Advocacy Institute, Karen Lewis opened the institute's files. Also in Washington, a special thanks to Claudia MacLachlan for guiding me to a variety of legal sources. Muriel Sanford at the University of Maine Library, Special Collections, and Douglas Macbeth at the Jackson Library were guides to the Clarence Cook Little papers. Karen Miller offered her excellent dissertation study on Hill & Knowlton.
At three Mealey Tobacco Conferences, Ron Motley, Andy Berly, Charles Mikhail, Susan Niall, Hugh McNeely, and Madelyn Chaber helped simplify the complexities of tort law in unusually palatable ways. Separately, so did Don Garner and Carl Bogus. Clifford Douglas invariably had new information. And it was always a pleasure to bump into Gary Black, of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., and check the latest price of Philip Morris stock. Sam Crawford guided me on Wall Street investment procedures.
In Boston, Dick Daynard, Mark Gottlieb, and the staff of the Tobacco Products Liability Project invited me to their own invaluable conferences and gave me access to their files. At Harvard Law School, my thanks to Laurence Tribe and also to Jon Hanson, who put on the most useful postâJune 20 settlement conference. Tom Sobol was very helpful on company law.
In Jacksonville, Florida, Woody Wilner and Ginny Steiger explained the intricacies of their guerrilla tactics. In San Francisco, Stan Glantz and Chris Patti documented the industry's assault on the University of California at San Francisco.
The staff at the Centers for Disease Control provided many reports. The library staffs of the National Institutes of Health, the Library of Congress,
The Times-Picayune,
Minneapolis
Star Tribune,
Louisville
Courier-Journal,
and the National Formulary were most helpful, as were, especially, Edward Abse, Bryson Clevenger, Elizabeth Crocker, and Sajjad Yusuf at the Alderman Library in Charlottesville, and George Griffenhagen at the American Pharmaceutical Association.
In London, Martyn Day and Martin Jervis provided insights into the British civil action, and in Oxford, Sir Richard Doll recalled the strange beginnings of the scientific understanding of the harm smoking can do.
A few weeks before he died of smoking-related cancer, Victor Crawford, a former industry lobbyist in Maryland, told me how tobacco lobbyists work at the state level.
Julian Norridge, the producer of my television documentary, gave helpful advice for the book, as well.
For their hospitality, I am indebted to John and Barbara Pringle, Curtis Wilkie, John and Mary Acton, Alexander and Susanna Chancellor, and Philip and Ann Jacobson.
My agent, Robert Ducas, persevered when publishers told him either that they did not have the resources to take on the tobacco industry or that the Third Wave litigation would come to nothing.
My editor, Marian Wood, said neither of those things, and it was a pleasure to work with her again. She was as inspiring and progressive as ever, despite her eccentric boycott of computers. My thanks also to Nancy Clements, Kenn Russell, and Chuck Thompson for their professional calm during the accelerated production schedule.
My family put up with an apartment stuffed with documents for longer than was fair. Eleanor Randolph, as always, lent unwavering support throughout the project and read the first draft, inserting her magical touches. Whatever mistakes my small band of helpers missed are, of course, my own.
New York
November 19, 1997
PROLOGUE
DINNER AT ANTOINE'S
B
EFORE HE LEFT
his native Marseilles in 1840 for the steamy New World on the mouth of Mississippi, Antoine Alciatore learned the secrets of such rich, buttery delights as
pommes de terre soufflées
from the great French chef Collinet. Armed with this knowledge, he opened a small pension on the Rue St. Louis in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which over the years became one of the South's most famous restaurants. A lush, extravagant place, run for the city's finest, richest, and most notorious citizens, the menu changed to suit the era and the clientele. At the turn of the century, when there was a shortage of snails from Europe, Antoine's son, Jules, introduced oysters Rockefeller; sometime later there appeared a new dessert called omelette Alaska Antoine, or baked Alaska. This wobbly mass of meringue, pound cake, and ice cream can be created in monstrous proportions, if the occasion warrants, up to two feet long by one foot wideâall served on a gleaming silver platter. Such an occasion occurred shortly before Christmas in 1994 when the tobacco lawyers came to dinner.
It was December 13, and Antoine's large open dining area was bulging with preâChristmas party revelers. The private President's Room at the back had been booked by a local lawyer of Cajun descent named Wendell Gauthier, known to his friends as “the Goat.” His list of some fifty guests included many of the most famous and feared members of the plaintiffs' bar, that despised group of personal injury lawyers who make their vast fortunes off human catastrophe. Gauthier's list included “the King of Torts” (Melvin Belli from San Francisco); Stanley Chesley, “the Master of Disaster,” from Cincinnati; John “Bhopal” Coale of Washington, D.C.; Russ “the Girth” Herman of Louisiana; and “the Asbestos Avenger” (Ron Motley of Charleston, South Carolina).
Over cocktails in the President's Room the question was who from Gauthier's honors list of legal warriors was actually going to turn up.
Stanley never comes to dinners, they had said of Chesley. He's far too grand. He makes contributions to the Democratic Party, and he's always talking about his latest visit to the White House. Melvin Belli couldn't come. At the age of eighty-seven, he was too frail. Pity, they sighed. Belli had the big name, the flair, the memory. The irrepressible Ron Motley, who could sniff out a corporation causing harm to the citizenry from half a continent away, was coming in his private jet, but he would be late. He was busy arranging a party for his fiancée on his yacht in Florida.
“Who cares about them?” muttered “Bhopal” Coale, sipping his Diet Coke. “All of them basically hate each other.”
Some of them hated him, too. Or they used to. Russ Herman had once called Coale a “cesspool.” In print.
