A Private War

by Brenner, Marie

  * * *

  The antitobacco forces depict Jeffrey Wigand as a portrait in courage, a Marlon Brando taking on the powers in On the Waterfront. The protobacco lobbies have been equally vociferous in their campaign to turn Wigand into a demon, a Mark Fuhrman who could cause potentially devastating cases against the tobacco industry to dissolve over issues that have little to do with the dangers of smoking. According to New York public-relations man John Scanlon, who was hired by B&W’s law firm to help discredit Wigand, “Wigand is a habitual liar, a bad, bad guy.” It was Scanlon’s assignment to disseminate a wide range of damaging charges against Wigand, such as shoplifting, fraud, and spousal abuse. Scanlon himself, along with B&W, is now the subject of an unprecedented Justice Department investigation for possible intimidation of a witness. For First Amendment specialist James Goodale, the charges and countercharges B&W has attempted to level against Wigand represent “the most important press issue since the Pentagon Papers.” Goodale, who represented the New York Times during that period, said, “You counteract these tactics by a courageous press and big balls.”

  The B&W executives appear to be convinced that they can break Wigand by a steady drumbeat of harassment and litigation, but they underestimate the stubborn nature of his character and the depth of his rage at what he says he observed as their employee. A part of his motivation is the need for personal vindication: Wigand is not proud that he was once attracted to the situation he came to find intolerable. According to Wigand’s brother James, a Richmond, Virginia, endocrinologist, “If they think they can intimidate and threaten him, they have picked on the wrong person!”

  It has become a dramatic convention to project onto whistle-blowers our need for heroism, when revenge and anger are often what drive them. There is a powerful temptation to see Jeffrey Wigand as a symbol: the little guy against the cartel, a good man caught in a vise. However, Wigand defies easy categorization. As a personality, he is prickly, isolated, and fragile—“peculiar as hell” in Mike Wallace’s phrase—but there seems to be little doubt about the quality of his scientific information. Wigand is the most sophisticated source who has ever come forward from the tobacco industry, a fact that has motivated B&W to mount a multi-million-dollar campaign to destroy him. National reporters arrive in Louisville daily with questions for Wigand: How lethal are tobacco additives such as coumarin? What did B&W officials know and when? And what does it feel like, Dr. Wigand, to lose your wife and children and have every aspect of your personal life up for grabs and interpretation in the middle of a smear?

  * * *

  When Jeffrey Wigand tells the story of his life, he does not begin with his childhood. Instead, he starts with the events surrounding his forced exit from B&W and doesn’t veer too far from that theme. For most of his life, Wigand defined himself as a man of science, but a scientist in the ethos of middle management, “a workaholic,” and a hard-driving businessman. He is a corporate Everyman, part of a world of subsidiaries and spin-offs, golf on weekends and rides on the company plane. He uses phrases right out of the lexicon of business—“game plan,” “troubleshooter.” He was “director of corporate development at Pfizer,” then a “general manager and marketing director” at Union Carbide in Japan. Later, as a senior vice president of marketing at Technicon Instruments, he was responsible for “a state-of-the-art plant” that “optimized” the “manufacturing facility” for biological compounds.

  The son of a mechanical engineer, Jeffrey Wigand grew up in a strict Catholic home in the Bronx, the oldest of five children. When he was a teenager, the family moved to Pleasant Valley, a town in upstate New York near Poughkeepsie. Wigand’s father stressed independence and insisted that his sons help build their new house. Wigand had to control his anger at his parents’ strictness. According to James, their mother was “a cold individual” who had little understanding of children. “I am sure that my father will kill me if he reads this,” James said, “but I felt that my parents believed that children were more to be tolerated. I always had the feeling how much was being done for us, how much we owed for this opportunity!”

  A gifted chemistry and biology student, Jeff flourished in the quiet atmosphere of the science labs and hoped to study medicine. As a freshman at Dutchess Community College, he ran cross-country track and “worked as a scrub nurse at Vassar Brothers Hospital,” James recalled. Then he suddenly announced to his parents that he was dropping out of college and joining the air force. “It was a rebellion to get away,” James said. “My mother just about freaked out. . . . But if you make someone so suppressed, the anger kind of builds up.”

  It was 1961. Wigand was sent to Misawa, an American air base in Japan, where he ran an operating room. “I got hooked on the language and on martial arts,” he said. He volunteered as an English teacher at a Catholic orphanage. He was sent briefly to Vietnam, he told me, although he brushed off the experience: “It was 1963, and nothing was going on.” I wondered at the defensive tone in his voice. Later B&W would challenge whether he had been in Vietnam at all. (According to one investigator, he was there for about a month.)

  When he came back to the States, he wrote a master’s thesis on vitamin B12 and later earned a doctorate in biochemistry at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He was offered a $20,000-a-year job with the Boehringer Mannheim Corporation, a German health-care company. In 1970, at a judo class, Wigand met Linda, his first wife, a legal secretary from Eden, New York. Seven months after they married, in 1971, Linda developed multiple sclerosis. At the time, Wigand was still working for Boehringer Mannheim in New York, but he moved on to Pfizer and then was recruited for a lucrative position at Union Carbide. He was to form a subsidiary to test medical equipment in clinical trials in Japan. He was thirty-four years old, fluent in Japanese, basking in his new status.

  Wigand is proud of his time at Union Carbide—“I was right at the top,” he said—but Linda grew progressively weaker. “Jeff searched the world for specialists,” recalled Conrad Kotrady, a Salt Lake City doctor who has known him since graduate school. “He attacked the problem as if it were an assignment, but then her condition became increasingly difficult for him.” Wigand burrowed into his work, withdrawing from the agony of watching his wife disintegrate physically. In 1973 their daughter, Gretchen, was born.

  Wigand has a quality his brother recalled as a kind of personal shutdown—an ability to close off his emotions when things get difficult. As Linda’s condition worsened, Wigand distanced himself from her and his baby. “I really did not have a marriage,” he told me. “If I said I didn’t play around, I would be lying. Linda came back to the States, and something happened in my parents’ house. She went home to Buffalo.” Several years passed before he saw her or his daughter again, and eventually the marriage unraveled. Linda’s parents believed that Wigand had abandoned their daughter, one friend recalled. “I thought Linda was dead,” Wigand said quickly. “That’s what a friend said.” Wigand made little attempt to communicate with his daughter. It is Kotrady’s belief that Wigand did not want to upset her by taking her away from a stable home with loving grandparents.

  Wigand met his second wife, Lucretia, in 1981 at a sales conference at Ortho Diagnostic Systems, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, where he was a director of marketing. She was a sales rep. He was, he later remembered, attracted to her cool demeanor and willowy good looks. Lucretia had spent part of her childhood in Louisville, the daughter of two doctors who separated when she was eight. Lucretia’s mother, at one time on the staff of the National Cancer Institute, used to tease Jeff about Lucretia’s expensive tastes. They married in 1986.

  * * *

  Soon Wigand moved on to a grander position as a senior vice president at Technicon, responsible for marketing blood-testing equipment. Wigand was filled with ideas, but he was often testy. Bob Karlson, his mentor at Ortho, recalled pulling on his ear at meetings to tell Wigand to pipe down when he got out of hand. “I have a very bad problem—saying what’s on my mind,” Wi
gand told me. “I don’t take too much crap from anybody.”

  He was a perfectionist who kept a file of correspondence with businesses he dealt with whose products were flawed. In one instance, he returned some hardware to a catalogue company. In another, he demanded reimbursement for a cleaning bill for water-damaged items. Later this file would be detailed and used against him as evidence in B&W’s private investigation, suggesting that he had committed fraud. Wigand had a tendency not to share information, even with Lucretia. On the day before her thirtieth birthday, Wigand called her from the office: “My friends and I are coming home to celebrate.” Later that afternoon, Lucretia used his car to go for pizza. “All of his office was in the backseat.” She recalled asking, “Is there something you want to tell me?” As it happened, some of Technicon’s upper-management team, including Wigand, had been dismissed. In 1987 he was made president of a small medical-equipment company called Biosonics in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. Wigand recalled a power struggle with the owner of the company, who recently wrote an article in Philadelphia Forum about his experience with Wigand, accusing him of having bullied female employees and in one instance of having shined a light on his subordinates while he was asking about a company matter. Wigand denies both charges.

  For one year Jeff Wigand did consulting work. He finally decided to pursue his dream of being a doctor, but Lucretia convinced him he was too old. Then he approached a headhunter, who asked if he would consider working for Brown & Williamson, the tobacco company. Lucretia was puzzled by the offer: “I said, ‘Why do they want you? You know nothing about tobacco. You had—what?—seventeen years of health care.’ It did not make sense.”

  From his first meetings with Alan Heard, the head of R&D for BAT Industries (formerly British American Tobacco), the conglomerate with $3 billion in annual profits that owns B&W, Wigand shut his eyes and ignored the Faustian arrangement. Heard said he wanted to develop a new cigarette to compete with Premier, a product made by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) that had little tar. The appeal was seductive for a man who prided himself on his research skills, and Wigand’s title would be impressive: head of R&D. He would soon be paid more than he had ever earned in his life—$300,000 a year. His department would have a budget of more than $30 million and a staff of 243. Shortly after he began the interviews, Wigand took up smoking. He later said, “I was buying the routine. I wanted to understand the science of how it made you feel.”

  From the beginning, Lucretia encouraged the move to Louisville. Since her parents’ divorce, her father had remarried a couple of times. Along with his medical practice, he owned tobacco land. A move back to Louisville with Wigand in an important position in that industry would probably impress Lucretia’s father and might draw the family closer together. Besides, she had just had a baby, and she believed that life in Louisville would be a boon for the child. “I thought if I made big bucks she would be happy,” Wigand told me.

  When Wigand told his brother he was going to work for a tobacco conglomerate, James said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” But Wigand was optimistic. “I thought I would have an opportunity to make a difference and work on a safer cigarette. I talked to a lot of my friends from college. They said, ‘You know, you’re never going to be able to come back. You can’t go from tobacco back into health care.’ ”

  THE FIRM

  From Wigand’s first days at B&W, it was apparent to him that there was a contradiction in his situation. On his good days he believed he was helping the world. On the other days he was a guy with a family who earned a large salary. He had a feisty, urban, go-getter personality in an unusual city; Louisville was a Velveeta town, clannish and sophisticated, once ruled by old families such as the Bingham publishing dynasty. At B&W, Wigand’s intensity and uncongenial personality grated on many of his southern colleagues. Wigand believed that he was there to shake up the ossified atmosphere. Three months after he was hired, RJR withdrew Premier from the market because the taste was unpleasant, acrid, and synthetic. Had Wigand been shrewder, he might have thought that he was now in a trap. There was no real reason for a nontobacco man to remain at the company. But he attempted to keep his contrarian nature under wraps. He went to company parties, and Lucretia volunteered to help at the Hard Scruffle steeplechase, a charity event. It is conceivable that B&W had sized Wigand up psychologically. He surely appeared to be highly ambitious, money-hungry, a potential captive to the firm.

  In Louisville, the Wigands bought a two-story, red brick house in a pleasant suburb. There was an allée of trees in the middle of the road, giving a sense of affluence. Wigand had two offices at B&W, one at the R&D laboratory and one in the office tower. When he toured the lab for the first time, he was startled, he told me, to observe how antiquated it seemed. “The place looked like a high-school chemistry lab from the 1950s with all sorts of old-fashioned smoking machines. There was no fundamental science being done.” There was neither a toxicologist nor a physicist on staff, a fact that Wigand found very unsettling. How, he thought, could you be serious about studying the health aspects of tobacco or fire safety without the proper experts? According to documents that later wound up in the University of California at San Francisco library, even in the 1960s research had been done for B&W that tobacco activists say proved that cigarettes were addictive and caused cancer. However, Wigand says that he did not learn of those studies until after he left the company.

  Shortly after Wigand was hired, he was sent to an orientation session on tobacco-litigation matters at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, a Kansas City law firm that specializes in defending lawsuits for the industry. The firm is reputed to have its own in-house scientists and tobacco researchers. Shook, Hardy & Bacon and B&W lawyers were aware of the dangers that the company’s research could pose in a lawsuit. B&W lawyers had devised an ingenious method for avoiding discovery of sensitive information: have it “shipped offshore”—a practice one attorney referred to as “document management.” It was the suggestion of Kendrick Wells, an attorney in B&W’s legal department, that staff be told that this effort was “to remove deadwood,” and that no one “should make any notes, memos or lists.” Wigand later testified that another law firm, Covington & Burling, sometimes edited scientific information on additives.

  * * *

  Nine months after Wigand went to work, he attended a meeting of BAT scientists in Vancouver, British Columbia. The top R&D executives from BAT’s worldwide tobacco subsidiaries were there to discuss health matters and the possibility of a nicotine substitute. There was a feeling of excitement among the scientists that they could reduce health risks for smokers. By then Wigand had grown used to the euphemisms of his new industry. He understood that “increased biological activity” in reports was code for cancer and other diseases. At the meeting, Wigand would later testify, roughly fifteen pages of minutes were taken by Ray Thornton, a British scientist. A copy was sent to Wigand, who circulated copies to upper management.

  Soon after that, Wigand says, he was called into Kendrick Wells’s office and asked to sign off on a three-page synopsis of the minutes—a reduction of about twelve pages. In a recent deposition Wells testified that Raymond Pritchard, the then CEO of the company, had assigned Wigand to produce a revised set of minutes.

  Within the industry, BAT is known as “the tough guy” for its ferocious litigation strategy. As a foreign corporation, it has never enjoyed quite as much political influence as the American tobacco companies, which donate vast sums of money to organizations as diverse as the African-American political caucuses, the Whitney Museum, and the political-action committees of dozens of candidates, especially Bob Dole. In the late 1970s the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigated the advertising practices of all the tobacco companies. In a nonpublic report later read at a congressional committee meeting, B&W’s Viceroy cigarette was mentioned for a proposed test-marketing campaign that appeared to target minors. Several years later, a CBS anchorman in Chicago, Walter Jacobson, broadcast a segment about the
report. B&W sued CBS, which paid a $3 million judgment after the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. B&W also clashed with RJR and Philip Morris over Barclay cigarettes and a false-advertising charge brought by the FTC. In 1987, B&W withdrew from the Tobacco Institute, an American tobacco lobbying group, for several years.

  Although B&W employed five hundred people in Louisville, Wigand chafed at the bunker mentality. “It was an incestuous society,” he said. “Wherever you went—to dinners, to parties—the B&W people stayed together. They never mixed.” Many of the executives smoked, although in private they often talked about the risks. “Their whole corporate philosophy was ‘Shit flows downhill.’ You get paid very well. You have lots of nice benefits.” Later he recalled, “I didn’t trust anyone at B&W. I was a different animal.”

  Wigand felt that the scientific data at B&W was Stone Age, as he later told a friend. He brought new computers into the R&D facility and hired a physicist and a toxicologist. He worked on reverse engineering on Marlboros, attempting to discern their unique properties; he studied fire safety and ignition propensity.

  After Vancouver, Wigand continued to push for more information. He began to hear mysterious names at company dinners—“Ariel” and “Hippo.” “I did not drink at all then—only Diet Pepsi—and I would ask, ‘What is that?’ And suddenly people would clam up.” As the head of R&D at B&W, he should logically have been aware of every aspect of the company’s research. “There were essentially two research-and-development departments. They did the work on nicotine overseas.” Wigand says he did not discover that Ariel and Hippo were research studies on health-related issues conducted in the 1970s at BAT in Switzerland until he read thousands of pages of documents taken from a law firm in downtown Louisville by a concerned paralegal named Merrell Williams, a Faulknerian personality with a doctorate in drama. “My perspective was like night and day,” Wigand told me. “It was like being aware and not being aware. You look back on things that happened when you were present and you say, ‘Hell, they knew about that all along.’ ”