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AT ABOUT THE TIME Wigand was fired, a veteran CBS producer with 60 Minutes named Lowell Bergman was looking for some expert advice on a story he was doing about fire-safe cigarettes. The tobacco companies had played with the idea, somewhat half-heartedly, of producing a cigarette that would burn at lower temperatures and extinguish itself if not puffed. If such a cigarette could be found, it could have a far-reaching effect in preventing the thousands of fires attributed each year to cigarettes. It could also be promoted as a socially responsible cigarette, and it might even be a commercial success. Philip Morris had started such a program, called Project Hamlet (to burn, or not to burn), but had abandoned it. 60 Minutes was doing a segment, and Wigand knew about the issue. When he was at B&W he had been on a federal commission that included industry scientists looking into the possibility of developing such a cigarette.
Wigand agreed to help CBS and negotiated a fee of $12,000 for his services. He would help CBS decode the technical language and tell them what he knew of the federal commission on a fire-safe cigarette. He thought B&W would not consider that he was violating his agreement because his knowledge stemmed from a government commission, not from company work. In any case, the story was about a rival, Philip Morris, which had been far ahead with a fire-safe product in 1986–87 and had abandoned it.
Over time, however, Bergman and Wigand would discuss more than fire-safe cigarettes. Bergman saw there was another story entirely—about Wigand as a high-ranking tobacco research executive becoming frustrated about his work, the reluctance of the company to pursue the low-tar cigarette, his conversations with Sandefur about addiction, and the coumarin additive in pipe tobacco.
Wigand did not deflect Bergman’s enthusiasm and his apparent willingness to cooperate was soon the talk of the antitobacco forces. In the spring of 1994, the FDA made contact and he started to tutor David Kessler about the way ammonia in cigarette tobacco can help boost the nicotine absorbed by the smoker. He was also approached by the Justice Department about fire-safe cigarettes and possible antitrust violations by the tobacco companies. He was contacted by Henry Wax-man’s congressional office. Would he appear before Waxman’s committee on smoking and health? Then came the threatening phone calls.
Wigand says that in April 1994, he received two anonymous phone calls at his home in Louisville. “Don’t mess with tobacco,” warned a voice and hung up. The second call threatened his children unless he left town. A male voice said, “You have three children, how are they doing? Leave or else you’ll find your kids hurt.” A few days later he found a live bullet in his mail box. He called in the FBI and they traced the next two anonymous calls, one from a shopping mall and the other from a hospital. There was no suggestion that B&W was involved in these calls, but Wigand was frightened about what could happen if some thug were convinced that he was jeopardizing people’s jobs or their welfare.
“From that moment the safety of our children became a cornerstone of our environment,” he said when I interviewed him in the summer of 1996. “We changed the way we went to school. We followed them to school. I had a gun in my car. It was always legal.” He was frightened, permanently on edge and sometimes erratic. Once a drinking man, who had given up alcohol when he joined B&W, now he started again. Two days after the threatening phone calls, he dropped into a liquor store while driving his two daughters home from school. He was in a hurry. He grabbed a bottle of Wild Turkey off the shelf and put it into one of the big pockets of his jacket, but when he got to the checkout he found he had left his money in the car. So he went out to get it. Thinking he had left without paying, the store owner called the police and held him until they arrived. Wigand showed the police he had $300 in cash in the car and paid for the bottle. No charges were pressed, and he thought the incident was closed. But it would come up again as a nasty surprise.
Meanwhile, he had given up hope of getting another management job. In January 1995, Wigand took a job at a high school in Louisville, teaching Japanese and chemistry at $30,000 a year, one-tenth of his tobacco company pay. Bergman was pressing him to be interviewed for a 60 Minutes segment. Wigand agreed, but only if CBS would protect him if he were sued for breaking his confidentiality agreement. Bergman thought that was fine. As a TV producer for a muckraking program, he had often persuaded people to talk when their companies didn’t want them to. The interview was taped, but as the program reached broadcast time in the fall of 1995, things went haywire.
Philip Morris had shown what could happen if you got part of a tobacco story wrong. ABC had just paid out $15 million in legal costs to settle their case. Also, CBS was about to be bought: Westinghouse was negotiating a $5.4 billion merger and there was a lot of money riding on the deal for current CBS shareholders. They would not appreciate a legal liability overshadowing the deal and possibly squelching it. Last but perhaps not least, Andrew Tisch, the chairman of Lorillard, was the son of the CBS chairman, Laurence Tisch. Might the CBS chairman not have strong opinions about Wigand’s antitobacco stance?
In the end, after a lot of harumphing at CBS headquarters, the lawyers ruled the day. The 60 Minutes interview with Wigand, who had not yet been publicly identified as the source of the segment, had been done and was due to run in early November, but CBS general counsel Ellen Kaden called the whole thing off. She said there was a problem of “tortious interference”—persuading someone to break a contract with a third party. CBS was “at grave risk,” she said, and could face a multibillion dollar lawsuit.
CBS had to announce the segment had been pulled. The network was accused of wimping out. Mike Wallace claimed the ABC lawsuit had a chilling effect on CBS legal advisers. Media critics blamed lawyers for turning back the clock on real investigative reporting. First Amendment lawyers said CBS could have gotten away with it. But then CBS revealed that the decision had been somewhat more complicated than it had first appeared. They had a deal with Wigand to indemnify him in the event of a lawsuit on the 60 Minutes segment. They had also hired him before as a consultant on their fire-safe cigarette story and given him a fee for that story of $12,000. That might look like financial inducement to a jury, if the network were sued. As for the merger with Westinghouse and its possible influence on the decision to drop the interview, chairman Tisch said he had not known anything about the 60 Minutes program until he read about the affair in the newspapers. The merger went ahead.
But the story was far from over. Someone at CBS leaked a transcript of the Wigand interview to the New York Daily News, which identified Wigand for the first time as the CBS industry source. In the parts of the interview that the Daily News printed, Wigand claimed that Brown & Williamson lawyers had doctored documents and had been using coumarin as a flavoring in its pipe tobacco. B&W denied the charges and immediately sued Wigand for breach of his confidentiality agreement. In the first of a series of vicious personal attacks on Wigand, the company said he had “appalling disregard for the law. He attempts to portray himself as some kind of hero, when in reality he is simply out for personal gain.… He is a master of deceit.”
Wigand himself, after searching for months for a lawyer willing to champion his cause as well as protect him, found Dick Scruggs, who agreed to take him on as a client pro bono. Scruggs quickly deposed Wigand for the Mississippi case. Scruggs also charged that B&W had “coerced” Wigand into signing a draconian confidentiality agreement. “They’ve put ten rolls of tape around his mouth,” said Scruggs, adding, “I’m sure they’re going to do everything they can to shut the guy up.” But even he would be surprised at the lengths to which the company would go to silence their former employee.
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TO PUBLICIZE the darker sides of Wigand’s private life, B&W hired John Scanlon, a sociable New Yorker of Irish descent who had a list of high-fee-paying clients. He was no stranger to tobacco companies, having worked for Philip Morris and Lorillard during the Rose Cipollone trial in 1989, briefing journalists with the company line at the end of each court session. Brown
& Williamson wanted to portray Wigand as an unreliable witness. For Scanlon it was “business as usual,” as he would say later. The company’s investigators started digging—first into government files. The pickings were meager. They found Wigand’s testimony about a fire-safe cigarette was somewhat inconsistent. He had talked to the Justice Department about the issue in January 1994, saying it was a “very, very complex” issue and one for which no reliable tests yet existed. However, a year and a half later, in July 1995, Wigand had given an affidavit in a Boston case against Philip Morris, saying that for a tobacco company to produce a cigarette with a “reduced ignition propensity … would be a simple matter.” A B&W lawyer, Gordon Smith, concluded, “This guy is Jekyll and Hyde; he’ll do whatever he needs to do for whoever is paying him.” Scruggs came to the rescue. He pointed out that in the 1994 Justice Department testimony, Wigand was simply saying there was no reliable test to measure a fire-safe cigarette. At the time, he had also been accompanied by a B&W lawyer, a stipulation of his confidentiality agreement, and was “testifying with a gun to his head.” By the time of the Boston case, said Scruggs, Wigand had learned more about the possibility of reducing a cigarette’s potential for setting fires.
But the company’s investigators kept digging. They eventually would accuse him of shoplifting, not paying child support, and spousal abuse. Each time, Scruggs rushed in to limit the damage. The shoplifting charges had been dropped, Scruggs protested. That was true. (The company investigators had unearthed the incident with the bottle of Wild Turkey.) The child-support charges had resulted from his divorce from his first wife and were eventually settled. The spousal-abuse charge was brought in October 1993, seven months after Wigand had been fired by B&W and was going through a “stressful time with his family.” The charge was later withdrawn. Nevertheless, the company was relentless. The B&W lawyer Gordon Smith told The Washington Post, “Scruggs has been painting Wigand as a hero. These things suggest he’s not credible. They suggest he can’t be believed. Eventually he will be subjected to a thorough cross-examination and his Jekyll and Hyde personality will come out.”
To which Scruggs replied, “If this is all they have on this guy after investigating him for several months, I’ll sleep pretty well at night.” But there was more.
Smear campaigns, however trivial, always work to a certain extent. The victim never fully clears himself. If B&W kept going the way they had started with Wigand, they could severely reduce his credibility as a witness. If CBS had run their 60 Minutes program, Wigand would be looking much better. He would have told his side of the story, and with the backing of a big corporation. As it was, he was out there—alone.
One way to counter the smear was to leak the court-sealed deposition Wigand had given Scruggs and the Mississippi attorney general, Mike Moore, at the end of November. For two and a half hours in Pascagoula’s tiny courthouse on November 29, Wigand had, almost uninterrupted, told his own story about his time with B&W. He was not cross-examined—that would come later—so his allegations went unchallenged. But leaking them would put B&W on the defensive.
Toward the end of January 1996, Alix Freedman of The Wall Street Journal received a copy of the transcript. It was a terrific scoop. Freedman, who would win a Pulitzer prize that spring for her reporting on the tobacco industry, turned in an article of more than 3,000 words. In it, she laid out Wigand’s allegations one after the other. He accused his ex-boss Tommy Sandefur of lying under oath to Congress about his views on nicotine addiction. He charged that B&W in-house lawyers repeatedly hid potentially damaging scientific research, including altering the minutes of the Vancouver meeting. And he said that top company officials had insisted that coumarin remain in pipe tobacco, even though he had told them he was concerned about its safety.
Freedman included key sections of the transcript. One was Wigand’s allegation that Sandefur had lied about nicotine addictiveness. The questions were asked by Ron Motley, the plaintiffs’ trial lawyer from Charleston. By this time, Motley had maneuvered his way onto the plaintiffs’ roster of several tobacco lawsuits. In the transcript, Motley had asked:
Q: How many conversations would you say you had between 1989 and 1993, when you were dismissed by Mr. Sandefur, about cigarette smoking and the addictive nature of nicotine?
A: There have been numerous statements made by a number of officers, particularly Mr. Sandefur, that we’re in the nicotine delivery business.
Q: The nicotine delivery business?
A:—and that tar is nothing but negative baggage.
Q: Tar is negative baggage? And so, were you in the presence of Mr. Sandefur, the president of the company, when he voiced the opinion and belief that nicotine was addictive?
A: Yes.
Q: And did he express that view on numerous occasions?
A: Frequently.
Motley then asked about the addition of ammonia. Wigand answered that it is the “primary method of managing or manipulating the nicotine delivery.” He said the company also used an additive called acetaldehyde as an “impact booster” to enhance nicotine’s effects.
Finally, Wigand spoke for the first time about Y1, the high-nicotine crossbred tobacco plant publicized earlier by David Kessler at the Waxman hearings. Yes, Wigand said, he knew about it, and he also knew the company had sent seeds to Brazil for planting there. They had been taken by a company employee in a cigarette pack to hide them from customs officials.
“He hid them?” asked Motley, incredulously.
“He hid them,” answered Wigand.
The company was furious and complained bitterly about unscrupulous plaintiffs’ lawyers leaking documents at will to bolster their cause. Gordon Smith was again put up by B&W to defend the company. He denied the allegations, calling Wigand’s account “absolute fabrication” in some instances and simply “not true” in others.
A week later, the company played the Scanlon card, but it backfired disastrously. Scanlon released a five-hundred-page dossier attacking Wigand. It was titled “The Misconduct of Jeffrey S. Wigand Available in the Public Record.” Subheadings included, “Wigand Lies About His Residence,” “Wigand Lies Under Oath,” and “Other Lies by Wigand.” The report portrayed Wigand as a liar, a petty thief, and a “wife beater,” and generally a thoroughly dislikeable and dishonest person. As the media, led again by The Wall Street Journal, quickly discovered, however, many of the assertions in the report were petty and some of them simply were not true.
The list of Wigand’s “misconduct” included that he once complained to an airline that they had somehow got his luggage wet and he wanted $95.20 in compensation for a cleaning bill. The item was apparently supposed to show Wigand as small-minded and capable of possibly fraudulent recriminations. Among other such charges, he was said to have complained about damaged or lost golf clubs, sunglasses, and a fountain pen—all listed under “Possible False or Fraudulent Claims” and all without substantiation.
Wigand was said to have “falsely claimed” he won a YMCA youth award in 1971. The tobacco investigators had interviewed a “Don Keiser” of the YMCA, who said he had never heard of the award. The Wall Street Journal found a Don Kyzer, who was head of the YMCA’s Teen Leadership Program, who said he couldn’t recall being asked about Wigand, and if he had been, he would have said he didn’t have a clue because he only arrived at the Y in 1991.
The incident with his second wife was listed under the heading “Wigand Beats His Wife.” The court docket said Wigand attended “weekly anger-control counseling and continued psychotherapy” before the charge was dismissed. Scruggs pointed out again that the story had been distorted. First of all he didn’t beat his wife, that was not charged in the court files. She did call the police after an argument and afterward he volunteered to go into counseling. The counseling move was not related to the charge’s dismissal.
The company looked sinister and ridiculous, both at the same time. (And Scanlon had shocked his fashionable friends in Manhattan and the Hamptons for havi
ng had anything to do with Brown & Williamson. In a sympathetic profile of Wigand in Vanity Fair, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt told Scanlon, “Next time you want to break somebody’s legs, hire a capo.” Scanlon was unrepentant. In a profile of him in New York magazine, prompted by the Wigand affair, Scanlon said, “It’s embarrassing, but it was a one day story. The camel shits. The caravan moves on.”)
Of course, true or false, the charges in the dossier were to leave a stain on Wigand’s character. He was accused of making inflated, or false, claims about himself and his résumé in job hunting. And he had exaggerated his past in a mock job interview: when he left B&W, the company paid for an outplacement firm to help him find another job. In a videotape that Wigand made as a mock interview with a prospective employer, he had said he was a “’64 Olympian in judo” and “an alternate to the Munich games.” Lies, said B&W. In fact, Wigand was at the Olympics in Tokyo in 1964, but only to spar with the U.S. team. And he did help train athletes for Munich in 1972. In any case, as Scruggs said, it was a mock interview and not the real thing. It wasn’t supposed to be seen by anyone. B&W had it because they paid for it.
The tobacco company investigators even hired a firm of scientific consultants in Chicago to look over Wigand’s Ph.D. thesis. The firm reported back that it had had difficulty tracking down some of the publications Wigand had listed on his curriculum vitae. “There appear to be at least a couple of fraudulent entries,” the firm noted, but went on to say it was hard to judge whether they were deliberate or “mistakes or typos.” By then, the damage to Wigand’s name had been done, of course.
Would any of this evidence be of use in trashing Wigand in court? One of B&W’s attorneys contacted by the Journal said that was not the point. “All of it is admissible in the court of public opinion,” he declared. “What it adds up to is that Jeffrey Wigand is a pathological liar. His entire life, as best we can tell, has been a tissue of lies.”
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