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Journal; Smoking Guns at '60 Minutes'
Reporters are human, too. If they're slapped down in public, they won't rest until they can testosterone "60 Minutes." Three months after CBS lawyers killed a Mike Wallace interview with Jeffrey Wigand, the highest-ranking tobacco executive ever to spill the ugly secrets of his own industry, "60 Minutes" will air the piece.This change of heart is only half-heroic. It was precipitated not by newfound courage from CBS's lawyers but by The Wall Street Journal, which a week ago obtained and published its own account of Mr. Wigand's allegations, thereby reducing CBS's risk of a lawsuit from Brown & Williamson, Mr. Wigand's former employer. But once liberated by their print colleagues, CBS journalists are at last running with the story.
Sources at CBS News say tomorrow night's piece will contain an updated interview and fresh reporting about the tobacco industry's extraordinary efforts to silence Mr. Wigand -- which is saying something, since it's already been reported that he has received anonymous death threats and is the subject of an often specious 500-page Brown & Williamson character attack.
That CBS is back on the story is good news. That Big Tobacco is so intent on destroying Mr. Wigand reveals how big the story is. If his key allegation is proved -- that tobacco executives knew nicotine is addictive -- it might not only mean perjury charges for tobacco chief executives who testified otherwise before Congress but may enable the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco like any other drug.
Such is the financial, legal and political arsenal of Big Tobacco, however, that it can never be counted out. It owns the G.O.P. leadership in Congress, which is eager to defeat the F.D.A.'s anti-tobacco proposals and refuses to hold hearings on the issues raised by Mr. Wigand's allegations. No matter how happy the news at "60 Minutes," Big Tobacco's efforts to intimidate journalists are also likely to persist, given how effective they've been. Just how much so can be seen in new but little-noticed revelations about the successful silencing of another network news magazine -- ABC's "Day One."
FILM REVIEW; Mournful Echoes of a Whistle-Blower
By JANET MASLIN
Published: November 05, 1999
Late in ''The Insider'' the tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand sits despondently in a hotel room and contemplates the steep price of what he has done. The setting is somber except for the bright pastoral mural on the wall behind him, looking like a window onto an unsullied, unattainable world. Then the image begins to roil and morph, and it turns into a vision of the home and family that Mr. Wigand has lost. This is a flashy visual effect, but it's also one that piercingly captures the man's state of mind. And although Michael Mann is a filmmaker whose stylistic brio has a way of overpowering his subject matter, this time he strikes a balance, and he gets it right.
Mr. Mann has directed ''The Insider'' with a pulse-quickening panache that heightens the tensions within its story. In describing Mr. Wigand's progress from a staid corporate existence into a risky and unpredictable one, the film entails both visual and moral vertigo. Once Hollywood had a favorite folk tale: that the lone truth teller battling political or corporate evil would triumph, however bitterly, when the facts became known. But in the chillingly contemporary world of ''The Insider'' it's not that simple. Almost every character in the story is compromised by business considerations. And in the film's vision of television news reporting, moral relativism is a big part of playing the game.The film centers on CBS's ''60 Minutes'' and does the kind of muckraking that would ordinarily be that program's own province. The connection between CBS and Mr. Wigand's revelations -- that the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company knew that cigarette smoking was addictive even as it sought new ways to make nicotine deliver more of a kick -- is a producer named Lowell Bergman.
In the film Mr. Bergman keeps a portrait of Cesar Chavez on display, mentions that Herbert Marcuse was his mentor (''major influence on the New Left in the 1960's'') and otherwise calls attention to his political credentials. ''How did a radical journalist from Ramparts magazine wind up at CBS?'' he is asked. He replies modestly: ''I still do the tough stories. '60 Minutes' reaches a lot of people.''
Tobacco Company Sues Former Executive Over CBS Interview
By BILL CARTER
Published: November 22, 1995
Published: November 22, 1995
The Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation yesterday sued a former executive of the company who was interviewed for a segment on the CBS News television program "60 Minutes" that was never broadcast.
CBS was not named as a defendant in the suit, which accuses the executive, Jeffrey Wigand, a former vice president of research for Brown & Williamson, of theft, fraud and breach of contract in violating confidentiality agreements that he had struck with the company. But the network said in a statement on Sunday that it would indemnify Mr. Wigand against lawsuits arising from his agreement to be interviewed, and Richard Scruggs, Mr. Wigand's lawyer, said yesterday that "CBS is standing good for it."Mr. Scruggs also said Mr. Wigand would countersue to accuse the company of fraud in the altering of documents related to the health risks of smoking.
CBS had no comment on the suit against Mr. Wigand, filed in Jefferson County Circuit Court in Louisville, Ky., where Brown & Williamson has its headquarters. Thomas Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the tobacco company, said: "The lawsuit is directed solely at Jeff Wigand. Regarding CBS, at this time we're evaluating our options."
CBS management had ordered "60 Minutes" not to broadcast the interview with Mr. Wigand precisely because it feared a lawsuit from Brown & Williamson based on his promise to the tobacco maker not to disclose internal company information.
The tobacco company yesterday was also granted a temporary restraining order that prohibits Mr. Wigand from disclosing further information about Brown & Williamson. Mr. Wigand is scheduled to give a deposition on Nov. 29 in a suit brought by Mississippi against tobacco manufacturers.
The suit against Mr. Wigand says he had two confidentiality agreements with Brown & Williamson and accuses him of breaching those agreements by speaking to CBS and also by providing documents in October to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal for articles about the company's interest in a nicotine patch manufacturer.
But Mr. Wigand's lawyer, Mr. Scruggs, said the confidentiality agreements were not valid because they had been "extorted" from him.
Mr. Scruggs said that after Mr. Wigand was discharged by Brown & Williamson in 1993, he was sued by the company "on a pretext" because "he had said some bad things about the company's chief executive, Thomas Sandefur."
The company then cut off Mr. Wigand's severance package and the health benefits he needed to care for an ill child, Mr. Scruggs said. To restore those benefits, the lawyer said, Mr. Wigand agreed to a settlement that included "a draconian confidentiality agreement."
Mr. Scruggs also said he would seek indemnification from Brown & Williamson to protect his client against anti-smoking lawsuits. "He was a vice president of a company that sells cigarettes laced with cancer-causing chemicals," Mr. Scruggs said, and so he needs such indemnification.
Mr. Scruggs said Mr. Wigand had expected Brown & Williamson's suit and was "eager to fight."
In a statement, Gary Morrisroe, a lawyer for Brown & Williamson, called Mr. Wigand "a master of deceit" and said, "Wigand attempts to portray himself as some kind of hero, when in reality he is simply out for personal gain."
Former Tobacco Executive to Begin Telling Secrets to Grand Jury
By BARNABY J. FEDER
Published: December 13, 1995
Published: December 13, 1995
The man whose secrets about the tobacco industry have become the focus of media and legal attention is scheduled to begin disclosing them to a Federal grand jury in Washington tomorrow afternoon.
Jeffrey Wigand, who was head of research for the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation from 1989 to 1993, is expected to follow up that testimony with an appearance before a Federal grand jury in New York on Monday morning. Federal investigators are conducting separate criminal investigations in the two cities.The Justice Department has declined to discuss the focus and extent of the investigations or the allegations being presented to the grand juries. In demanding that Mr. Wigand appear in New York, the subpoena indicated that the questioning would focus on possible violations of Federal laws barring conspiracy to defraud or commit offenses against the Government and on the use of the mail or wire services as part of a crime.
The subpoena from Washington listed no subject. Both subpoenas were issued on Nov. 24. That grand jury is believed by those familiar with the investigation to be focused on the narrower question of whether tobacco company executives, including Thomas E. Sandefur Jr., the former chairman and chief executive of Brown & Williamson, lied in testimony to a Congressional committee in 1994.Mr. Wigand is the highest ranking tobacco company executive to join the ranks of the industry's critics. He became the center of attention in October when CBS News canceled a segment of "60 Minutes" highlighting some of his charges in the face of a possible lawsuit from Brown & Williamson. The tobacco company says that it has a severance contract with Mr. Wigand that prohibits his publicly disclosing company information without its approval.
Brown & Williamson has sued Mr. Wigand for fraud and breach of contract in Louisville, Ky., which is where Mr. Wigand lives and the company, a subsidiary of the British company BAT Industries P.L.C., is based.
Vanity Fair
The Man Who Knew Too Much (an exert)
Angrily, painfully, Jeffrey Wigand emerged from the sealed world of Big Tobacco to confront the nation’s third-largest cigarette company, Brown & Williamson. Hailed as a hero by anti-smoking forces and vilified by the tobacco industry, Wigand is at the center of an epic multibillion-dollar struggle that reaches from Capitol Hill to the hallowed journalistic halls of CBS’s 60 Minutes.
I: The Witness
“I am a whistle-blower,” he says. “I am notorious. It is a kind of infamy doing what I am doing, isn’t that what they say?”It was never Jeffrey Wigand’s ambition to become a central figure in the great social chronicle of the tobacco wars. By his own description, Wigand is a linear thinker, a plodder. On January 30, when he and I arrange to meet at the sports bar at the Hyatt Regency in Louisville, he is in the first phase of understanding that he has entered a particular American nightmare where his life will no longer be his to control. His lawyer will later call this period “hell week.” Wigand has recently learned of a vicious campaign orchestrated against him, and is trying to document all aspects of his past. “How would you feel if you had to reconstruct every moment of your life?” he asks me, tense with anxiety. He is deluged with requests for interviews. TV vans are often set up at DuPont Manual, the magnet high school where he now teaches. In two days Wigand, the former head of research and development (R&D) at the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., will be on the front page of The Wall Street Journal for the second time in a week. Five days from now, he will be on 60 Minutes.
Wigand is trapped in a war between the government and its attempts to regulate the $50 billion tobacco industry and the tobacco companies themselves, which insist that the government has no place in their affairs. Wigand is under a temporary restraining order from a Kentucky state judge not to speak of his experiences at Brown & Williamson (B&W). He is mired in a swamp of charges and countercharges hurled at him by his former employer, the third-largest tobacco company in the nation, the manufacturer of Kool, Viceroy, and Capri cigarettes.
In the bar, Wigand sits with his security man, Doug Sykes, a former Secret Service agent. Wigand is worn out, a fighter on the ropes. He has reached that moment when he understands that circumstances are catapulting him into history, and he is frightened, off his moorings. He wears silver-rimmed aviator glasses, which he takes off frequently to rub his eyes. Although he has been on the CBS Evening News twice in the last five days, no one in the bar recognizes him. Wigand is 53. He has coarse silver hair, a small nose, and a fighter’s thick neck from his days as a black belt in judo. There is a wary quality in his face, a mysterious darkness that reminds me of photographs of the writer John Irving. Wigand wears the same clothes I have seen him in for days—jeans and a red plaid flannel shirt, his basic wardrobe for a $30,000-a-year job teaching chemistry and Japanese.
In front of us, on a large screen, a basketball game is in progress. “They kept me up until two a.m. last night. Just when I thought I was going to get some sleep, the investigators called me at midnight. At six a.m. I was gotten up again by someone from 60 Minutes telling me I should relax. How am I supposed to relax?” Wigand stares at the TV screen. “You are becoming a national figure,” I say. Wigand suddenly sputters with rage. “I am a national figure instead of having a family. O.K.? I am going to lose economically and I am going to lose my family. They are going to use the trump cards on me.”
I follow Wigand out of the Hyatt and down the street to a restaurant called Kunz’s. A light snow is falling. By this time, Jeff Wigand and I have spent several days together, and I am accustomed to his outbursts. A form of moral outrage seems to have driven him from B&W, and he is often irascible and sometimes, on personal matters, relentlessly negative: “What does your brother think?” “Ask him.” “Is your wife a good mother?” His expression hardens; he retreats into an inner zone.
“When you were in your 30s, how did you think your life was going to turn out?” I ask him. Wigand is no longer belligerent. His voice is quiet, modulated. “I thought I would be very successful. Affluent. I started at $20,000 a year and wound up at $300,000 a year. That was pretty nice.”
All through dinner, Wigand keeps his cellular phone on the table. It rings as we are having coffee. He explodes in anger into the receiver: “Why do you want to know where I am? What do you want? What do you mean, what am I doing? It’s 10 o’clock at night.… What do you need to connect with me for? I am not a trained dog. You are going to have to explain to me what you are doing and why you are doing it so I can participate.” Wigand narrows his eyes and shakes his head at me as if to signal that he is talking to a fool. He is beyond snappish now. I realize that he is speaking to one of his legal investigators, who has been putting in 16-hour days on his behalf, mounting a counterattack against his accusers. “You can’t just drop into Louisville and have me drop what I am doing. No, you can’t! i am not listening, o.k.? fine. you tell him to find somebody else.”
Wigand slams the telephone on the table. “Everyone on the legal team is pissed off because I am in Louisville. You know what the team can do! If he was going to come down today, why didn’t he tell me he was coming?” We walk out of Kunz’s and trudge back through the snow toward the Hyatt. Across from the hotel is the B&W Tower, where Wigand used to be a figure of prestige, a vice president with a wardrobe of crisp white shirts and dark suits. “I am sick of it. Sick of hiding in a hotel and living like an animal. I want to go home,” he says with desperation in his voice.
Jeffrey Wigand and I met at an anti-smoking-awards ceremony in New York on January 18. Wigand was receiving an honorarium of $5,000, and former surgeon general C. Everett Koop was going to introduce him. Wigand radiated glumness, an unsettling affect for a man who was in New York to be honored along with such other anti-smoking activists as California congressman Henry Waxman and Victor Crawford, the former Tobacco Institute lobbyist, who died soon after of throat cancer. “I am not sure I should be here,” Wigand told me moments after we met. “Something terrible has happened to me. Brown & Williamson has gotten private records from the Louisville courthouse. A local TV reporter has come to my school to ask about my marriage. They are trying to ruin my life. When I get back to Louisville, I may not have a job. A public-relations man in New York named John Scanlon is trying to smear me. I have five sets of lawyers who are representing me, and no one can agree on a strategy.” Then he said, without any special emphasis, “If they are successful in ruining my credibility, no other whistle-blower will ever come out of tobacco and do what I have done.” One hour later he was on the stage accepting his award and giving a halting history of his conflict with B&W. “My children have received death threats, my reputation and character have been attacked systematically in an organized smear campaign,” he said, his voice breaking.
When I saw Jeffrey Wigand for the first time in Louisville, he was at the end of one crisis and the beginning of another. We had been scheduled to meet for our first formal interview that evening, and I waited for him to call me. Out of necessity, Wigand has become a man of secret telephone numbers and relayed phone messages; there is an atmosphere of conspiracy around any meeting with him, with tense instructions and harried intermediaries. On my voice mail in the hotel, the messages grew increasingly dramatic. “This is Dr Wigand’s security man. He will call you at four p.m.” “Marie, this is Dr. Wigand. Some problems have developed. I am not sure I can have dinner.” At one point I picked up the telephone. “How are you?” I asked. “Let’s put it this way: I’ve had better days.” Then: “The F.B.I. is coming to check out a death threat.” Later: “My wife, Lucretia, wants me to leave the house. I am trying not to be served with papers.” Finally: “I don’t have a place to go.”
Rolling Stone
The Insider
Russell Crowe, Al Pacino, Christopher Plummer
Directed by Michael Mann
By Peter Travers
November 5, 1999
Reduced to a smartass summary, The Insider is just a bunch of white guys talking for two hours and thirty-seven minutes about how truth gets compromised in America. Snooze, sorry, call PBS, I'm outta here. But such a gloss doesn't allow for the kick of Michael Mann, a director who could make visceral cinema out of a nun's e-mail. True, Mann's work on TV (Miami Vice, Crime Story) and film (Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, Heat) usually involves violence — be it bullets or beatings. Characters shed no blood in The Insider, merely principles — those pesky intangibles that on rare and special occasions trip up the march of corporate greed. Think that's boring? Watch Mann take a crack at it — The Insider will pin you to your seat.What we have here is a volatile true story, with big-name actors playing high-profile people. There's Al Pacino, all quick wit and can-do zeal as Lowell Bergman, a producer on CBS+ top-rated 60 Minutes. Bergman, a former Sixties radical, works mostly with star correspondent Mike Wallace, who is played pricelessly by Christopher Plummer in a stunningly accomplished portrayal that takes measure of the talent and ego driving this veteran newsman. (Wallace, now eighty-one, has protested his treatment in the script.)
Mann and co-screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) begin The Insider with a sharply funny, seemingly irrelevant scene set in Iran. A blindfolded Bergman takes a meeting with a sheik to cajole an exclusive interview. Wallace, who arrives after the details are ironed out, objects when the sheik's staff demands that the American sit far away from their leader. Wallace fumes: "I'm not an assassin." Bergman whispers to Wallace ("Are you through fucking around?") and effects a compromise; the interview commences. The first question is prime ballsy Wallace: "Do you know everyone in America thinks you're a terrorist?"
The sheik has been set up for the journalistic kill. Why not? It's good, even great television. The scene sticks in the memory when Mann moves The Insider to the main event. In 1995, Bergman tells Wallace and 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall) that he's onto a bombshell. He thinks that Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), a research scientist recently fired by Brown & Williamson — the nation's third-largest cigarette company — is ready to blow the whistle on his former bosses. If Wigand puts his name on the line to expose his company's concealment of health risks, the repercussions will be huge. What a story! Never mind that Wigand will be personally screwed. To testify, he would violate a confidentiality agreement he signed with the firm that paid him $300,000 a year — his new job as a teacher pays him a tenth of that. Wigand's wife (Diane Venora) is furious that he would put the financial welfare of their two daughters at risk.
Yet Wigand persists. How come? Heroism doesn't explain it; Wigand stayed quiet for years about Big Tobacco. It isn't until his former boss (Michael Gambon, purring with toxic charm) uses veiled threats to push for a tougher confidentiality pact that anger rises in this self-confessed "plodder." The New Zealand-born Crowe, so strong in L.A. Confidential and the Aussie-made Romper Stomper, cuts to the heart of an isolated man who seems to close off his emotions for fear of what might happen if they should spill out. Crowe plays Wigand like a gathering storm. This is acting of the highest level, and fully deserving of award attention.
With Bergman's tacit guarantee to Wigand that CBS is watching his back, the crusader embarks on legal maneuvers that will accuse tobacco companies of maintaining nicotine at addictive levels and subsequently cost them $246 billion in settlements. Wigand didn't count on pressures that would break up his marriage and lead to smear campaigns and death threats. For sure he didn't count on 60 Minutes' refusing to air his interview out of fear that retaliation from Big Tobacco could kill the sale of CBS to Westinghouse. A suicidal Wigand rages at Bergman, who in turn rails against Wallace for going along with Hewitt's cringing toady offer to air a sanitized version of the interview. Says Wallace: "I'm seventy-eight years old, and I do not intend to spend the rest of my career wandering through the wilderness of National Public Radio." Ouch!
Other films, notably All the President's Men, Network and Quiz Show, have explored the politics of compromise. But Mann turns a moral issue into riveting suspense. "What got broken here doesn't go back together again," says Bergman, who quits 60 Minutes even after CBS agrees to air the Wigand interview at a later date. Accuse Mann of overlength, bombast, dramatic license; his film is still mandatory viewing. With its dynamite performances, strafing wit and dramatic provocation, The Insider offers Mann at his best — blood up, unsanitized and unbowed.
The Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal Article regarding the
smear campaign on Dr. Jeffrey Wigand
February 1, 1996
smear campaign on Dr. Jeffrey Wigand
February 1, 1996
In December 1992, before he became the highest-ranking defector in the history of the tobacco industry, Jeffrey Wigand had a problem with some wet luggage.
In a letter to Aviaco Airlines, he complained his bags had been lost and then returned soaking wet. The result: a $95.20 cleaning bill he wanted the airline to repay.
Today, that letter is exhibit No. 27 in a huge dossier Mr. Wigand's former employer Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. has compiled in an all-out bid to challenge his credibility. Facing Mr. Wigand's explosive allegations of company wrongdoing, the big cigarette maker is fighting back by combing through nearly every imaginable detail of its former top research executive's past.
The B&W camp has paid a blue-chip private-investigation firm to hunt for misstatements in Mr. Wigand's past resumes, driver's-license applications and his complaints about various personal purchases. It hired a scientific consultant to pore over Mr. Wigand's doctoral dissertation, searching for signs of plagiarism. It even got hold of a videotape of a mock interview he made with an outplacement firm that was helping him find a job after B&W fired him -- and checked out the accuracy of every assertion he made on the tape.
Representatives of B&W offered the fruits of their investigation to The Wall Street Journal: a 500-page file bearing the title "The Misconduct of Jeffrey S. Wigand Available in the Public Record." Subheadings include "Wigand's Lies About His Residence," "Wigand's Lies Under Oath" and "Other Lies By Wigand."
A close look at the file, and independent research by this newspaper into its key claims, indicates that many of the serious allegations against Mr. Wigand are backed by scant or contradictory evidence. Some of the charges -- including that he pleaded guilty to shoplifting -- are demonstrably untrue.
Still, B&W did locate testimony in which Mr. Wigand previously told Justice Department investigators he knew of no wrongdoing at the company -- a seeming contradiction with later testimony. And B&W identified several cases of incorrect dates and some exaggerated claims in his resumes and the outplacement interview, misstatements that Mr. Wigand now concedes. Among the most inflated claims: He falsely stated, albeit in his taped rehearsal for a job interview, that he was once on the Olympic judo team.
B&W's tactics aren't unheard of in high-stakes litigation, but the vivid details seldom come to light. And, whatever they turn out to prove about Mr. Wigand, they provide sometimes-chilling insight into how much a company can find out about a former employee -- and the lengths it may go to discredit a critic.
In this case, the tobacco company, the nation's third biggest, is responding to a series of extremely serious charges Mr. Wigand made in pretrial testimony last November in a lawsuit against the industry by the state of Mississippi.
Mr. Wigand, 53 years old, who holds a doctorate in biochemistry, was B&W's $300,000-a-year research director until he was fired under disputed circumstances in 1993. In his sealed deposition, which this newspaper obtained and reported on last week, Mr. Wigand accused former B&W Chairman Thomas Sandefur of lying under oath to Congress about his views on nicotine addiction -- a charge Mr. Sandefur has denied. Among other things, Mr. Wigand also said that B&W in-house lawyers repeatedly hid potentially damaging research.
In November, after the publication of excerpts from a transcript of a "60 Minutes" interview with Mr. Wigand in which he made some similar charges, B&W sued him for fraud, theft of secrets and breach of contract. B&W, a unit of London-based B.A.T Industries PLC, vehemently denies Mr. Wigand's allegations against it.
In its dossier on Mr. Wigand's past, B&W includes his gripe about wet luggage in its litany of his 18 complaints mostly dealing with damaged or lost consumer goods, including golf clubs, sunglasses, a fountain pen and the like. A B&W representative says the company found these complaint letters in Mr. Wigand's office. The dossier brandishes these as exhibits A through R under the heading "Possible False or Fraudulent Claims."
But, as with some other allegations in the dossier, evidence of actual wrongdoing isn't presented. While B&W outside counsel Jerome C. Katz acknowledges that the company couldn't prove that any of the 18 complaints was fraudulent, he says the large number of letters provides "circumstantial evidence" that Mr. Wigand was fabricating claims. A lawyer for Mr. Wigand says all the complaints were made in good faith.
B&W also cited a 1987 police report providing Mr. Wigand's name as a suspect in a flood at Biosonics Inc., a former employer. B&W's conclusion: "Wigand may have flooded Biosonics' offices over the weekend of October 3-4, 1987."
A handwritten report in the B&W dossier from the Mount Laurel, N.J., police department says Mr. Wigand was suspected because he was due to be dismissed around the time of the flood and was considered "vindictive" by Biosonics. The police report doesn't describe any effort to investigate Mr. Wigand and concludes that "it is impossible to determine if a crime occurred." Richard Scruggs, Mr. Wigand's lawyer, says Mr. Wigand doesn't know anything about the flood.
Mr. Scruggs calls B&W's overall effort a "smear campaign" aimed at "punishing a whistle-blower and a defector." He adds: "If you subjected any citizen of the United States to this sort of scrutiny, they would probably fare far worse than Jeff Wigand has."
As for the January 1994 testimony in which Mr. Wigand told the Justice Department he knew of no wrongdoing by the company, Mr. Scruggs says his client may not have known at the time that some of the conduct he allegedly witnessed constituted a crime. Moreover, Mr. Scruggs says, because Mr. Wigand had just finished a messy fight with B&W over his firing and was accompanied at the testimony by a B&W lawyer, he was "testifying with a gun to his head."
B&W could have a tough time getting many of its findings -- particularly those involving personal matters -- admitted as evidence in a trial. Normally, evidence of past falsehoods is tightly restricted unless directly relevant to the subject of the testimony -- in this case, alleged wrongdoing in the tobacco industry.
"The defense is going to have to work very hard to link up these events with his testimony," says Arthur Miller, a Harvard law professor and authority on civil-court procedure who isn't involved in the case. "The very fact that Brown & Williamson is circulating this as a doomsday book suggests that they know they can't get it all in, and they are engaging in a form of character assassination to get some media impact."
Mr. Katz, a New York attorney representing B&W, acknowledges that a court may not admit all the company's evidence, but adds, "I can tell you this: All of it is admissible in the court of public opinion." He calls B&W's dossier "accurate in every material respect" and declares: "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."
To build its file on Mr. Wigand, Brown & Williamson assembled a formidable team. It includes lawyers from the big New York firm Chadbourne & Parke and Atlanta's King & Spalding, and top New York public-relations adviser John Scanlon. They are working with the Investigative Group Inc., a leading Washington-based detective firm whose New York office is run by a former New York City police commissioner, Raymond Kelly. This is the firm Ivana Trump hired to investigate her rival Marla Maples and that Sen. Edward Kennedy used to check into an opponent in his 1994 campaign.
The team has cast an extremely wide net. For instance, it sifted through Mr. Wigand's phone credit-card records, which he had submitted to B&W for reimbursement as part of a severance deal that covered job-hunting expenses. Using these records, the dossier highlights two calls from a hospital as exhibit No. 50 to back up two anonymous letters with alleged details about Mr. Wigand's medical history.
B&W also made extensive use of the videotape of a job-interview rehearsal by its former executive, a fact that may prove chastening to any number of U.S. corporate employees making use of outplacement firms as they arrange career moves.
On April 21, 1993, a month after he was fired, Mr. Wigand took part in a role-playing session with Neil Hindman, president of The Hindman Co., the Louisville, Ky., firm the company paid to help Mr. Wigand find another job. With a video camera trained on him, Mr. Wigand participated in a mock interview in which he pretended to be applying for a job at a fictional beverage company.
Mr. Hindman says B&W, with court approval, subpoenaed his firm's files on Mr. Wigand, and he turned them over. "I am not about to keep the results of a lawful subpoena from a court of law," Mr. Hindman says. James Challenger, president of Chicago outplacement-firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., says he has never heard of another such subpoena and adds that he would resist it.
With the mock-interview tape in hand, B&W seized on a few of Mr. Wigand's statements and added them to two lists in its dossier: "Lies on Wigand's Resumes" and "Other Lies by Wigand."
In one instance, Mr. Wigand said on tape that he was a "'64 Olympian in judo" and "an alternate to the Munich games." In a 1993 resume, Mr. Wigand also called himself a 1966 "founder" of the United States Judo Association and a member of its "Medical Committee." B&W's dossier quotes a judo-association representative as saying the group was founded in 1954 and has no medical committee.
In an interview, the association's former president, Philip S. Porter, lends general support to Mr. Wigand's view of judo history. Mr. Porter says a predecessor organization, the Strategic Air Command Judo Society, was founded in 1954. It went through several name changes and, in the late 1960s, became the United States Judo Association. Mr. Porter says the association had numerous committees that came and went, although he doesn't remember the medical committee specifically. He also says he remembers Mr. Wigand as one of the association's earliest black-belt members.
Mr. Wigand's statements about the Olympics, however, appear to be inaccurate. People in Mr. Wigand's camp say he was at the Olympics in Tokyo in 1964, but only to spar with U.S. athletes, and that he helped train athletes for Munich in 1972. His lawyer, Mr. Scruggs, emphasizes that his comments were made in a mock interview that wasn't intended to be shown to anyone.
Mr. Wigand also said on tape and in one resume that he once was a surgical nurse. B&W adds this to its catalog of alleged lies, saying New York surgical nurses must be certified as licensed or registered practical nurses, and "research to date" has found no such record for Mr. Wigand.
But this charge, small as it is, doesn't withstand scrutiny. The human-resources department of one of the hospitals listed on Mr. Wigand's resume, Our Lady of Victory in Buffalo, confirms that he did, indeed, work there in the 1960s as an operating-room technician, an unlicensed attendant who stands by the surgeon and handles instruments. Back in the 1960s, the distinctions between attendants and surgical nurses were much looser at some hospitals than they are today, according to the New York State Nurses Association.
In search of other possible misstatements, the B&W team engaged the services of Shakalyn Enterprises Inc., a Chicago "scientific consultation" firm. On Jan. 12, 1996, its president, C. Murray Ardies, submitted his "discussions and analysis of cv and publication record of J.S.W." Mr. Ardies reported that he had trouble tracking down some of the publications Mr. Wigand listed on his curriculum vitae and concluded that "there appear to be at least a couple of fraudulent entries in the C.V. that I was given."
He added: "Whether they are deliberate, or simply a `mistake or typo,' as no doubt anyone in these circumstances would claim, is difficult to determine."
Mr. Ardies also read Mr. Wigand's biochemistry Ph.D. dissertation and wrote that, "for 1970-1972, the scientific work appears to be reasonable and well done," adding a parenthetical note: "I have actually performed a very similar purification procedure for a steroid-binding protein from yeast while at Stanford."
The B&W team also went looking for Mr. Wigand's name in the files of the Jefferson County District Court in Mr. Wigand's Louisville hometown. There, it found the scientist had two run-ins with the law, and both occupy prominent places in the B&W dossier. "Wigand was arrested for and pleaded guilty to shoplifting," asserts the document, adding that he "pleaded guilty to the shoplifting charge and completed 20 hours of volunteer work."
But that isn't the way the state judge who presided over the case remembers it. Mr. Wigand had been charged in 1994 with shoplifting a bottle of Wild Turkey at a local liquor store. However, the judge, Deborah Deweese, says in an interview that Mr. Wigand didn't plead guilty in the case. Rather, the charge was dismissed after he completed volunteer work. Mr. Scruggs, Mr. Wigand's lawyer, says the incident was the result of a misunderstanding that occurred when Mr. Wigand went to his car to retrieve some money.
The second charge was even more volatile. An Oct. 23, 1993, a complaint by Mr. Wigand's wife to the police makes an allegation of spousal abuse. The court's docket sheet indicates that Mr. Wigand attended "weekly anger-control counseling and continued psychotherapy" before the charge was dismissed.
It isn't clear from the court papers in the B&W dossier whether the counseling was required to get the charge dismissed. Indeed, the dossier doesn't even include any judge's order finding that he committed the offense. However, B&W declares in the document: "Wigand beat his wife."
Mr. Scruggs, speaking for Mr. Wigand, adamantly denies the charge. "He did not beat his wife," Mr. Scruggs says. "It's just not true." He says Mr. Wigand volunteered to go into counseling after a dispute with his wife, and the move wasn't related to the charge's dismissal. Mr. Wigand's wife didn't return a call seeking comment.
The company also took a close look at any awards Mr. Wigand said he received -- and the dossier claims to have caught a fabrication. Under "Lies on Wigand's Resumes," entry "S" says Mr. Wigand "falsely claimed" he won a YMCA National Service to Youth Leadership Award in 1971. The dossier states that the YMCA's "Don Keiser" had never heard of the award. Neither had a representative from the YMCA's office in Buffalo, where Mr. Wigand had lived.
But Don Kyzer, head of the YMCA's Teen Leadership Program, says he doesn't remember being asked about the award. He says he only arrived at the Y in 1991 and wouldn't necessarily know about awards in the 1970s. "This is the first I've been contacted on this issue. . . . Had they asked me that, I would have said I have no clue. I have no clue at all."
YMCA's Buffalo chief executive John Murray says the branch there does hand out a Service to Youth Leadership Award to active volunteers and did so in 1971. He says, however, that the files for the 1970s were largely destroyed by a basement flood so he can't look up the 1971 awards.
A B&W lawyer says the company may have to take another look. "If there is a mistake in the evidence-gathering, we would be the first one to correct it," says James E. Milliman, an outside lawyer for the company in Louisville. "Our goal is to be as accurate as we can possibly be."
Today, that letter is exhibit No. 27 in a huge dossier Mr. Wigand's former employer Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. has compiled in an all-out bid to challenge his credibility. Facing Mr. Wigand's explosive allegations of company wrongdoing, the big cigarette maker is fighting back by combing through nearly every imaginable detail of its former top research executive's past.
The B&W camp has paid a blue-chip private-investigation firm to hunt for misstatements in Mr. Wigand's past resumes, driver's-license applications and his complaints about various personal purchases. It hired a scientific consultant to pore over Mr. Wigand's doctoral dissertation, searching for signs of plagiarism. It even got hold of a videotape of a mock interview he made with an outplacement firm that was helping him find a job after B&W fired him -- and checked out the accuracy of every assertion he made on the tape.
Representatives of B&W offered the fruits of their investigation to The Wall Street Journal: a 500-page file bearing the title "The Misconduct of Jeffrey S. Wigand Available in the Public Record." Subheadings include "Wigand's Lies About His Residence," "Wigand's Lies Under Oath" and "Other Lies By Wigand."
A close look at the file, and independent research by this newspaper into its key claims, indicates that many of the serious allegations against Mr. Wigand are backed by scant or contradictory evidence. Some of the charges -- including that he pleaded guilty to shoplifting -- are demonstrably untrue.
Still, B&W did locate testimony in which Mr. Wigand previously told Justice Department investigators he knew of no wrongdoing at the company -- a seeming contradiction with later testimony. And B&W identified several cases of incorrect dates and some exaggerated claims in his resumes and the outplacement interview, misstatements that Mr. Wigand now concedes. Among the most inflated claims: He falsely stated, albeit in his taped rehearsal for a job interview, that he was once on the Olympic judo team.
B&W's tactics aren't unheard of in high-stakes litigation, but the vivid details seldom come to light. And, whatever they turn out to prove about Mr. Wigand, they provide sometimes-chilling insight into how much a company can find out about a former employee -- and the lengths it may go to discredit a critic.
In this case, the tobacco company, the nation's third biggest, is responding to a series of extremely serious charges Mr. Wigand made in pretrial testimony last November in a lawsuit against the industry by the state of Mississippi.
Mr. Wigand, 53 years old, who holds a doctorate in biochemistry, was B&W's $300,000-a-year research director until he was fired under disputed circumstances in 1993. In his sealed deposition, which this newspaper obtained and reported on last week, Mr. Wigand accused former B&W Chairman Thomas Sandefur of lying under oath to Congress about his views on nicotine addiction -- a charge Mr. Sandefur has denied. Among other things, Mr. Wigand also said that B&W in-house lawyers repeatedly hid potentially damaging research.
In November, after the publication of excerpts from a transcript of a "60 Minutes" interview with Mr. Wigand in which he made some similar charges, B&W sued him for fraud, theft of secrets and breach of contract. B&W, a unit of London-based B.A.T Industries PLC, vehemently denies Mr. Wigand's allegations against it.
In its dossier on Mr. Wigand's past, B&W includes his gripe about wet luggage in its litany of his 18 complaints mostly dealing with damaged or lost consumer goods, including golf clubs, sunglasses, a fountain pen and the like. A B&W representative says the company found these complaint letters in Mr. Wigand's office. The dossier brandishes these as exhibits A through R under the heading "Possible False or Fraudulent Claims."
But, as with some other allegations in the dossier, evidence of actual wrongdoing isn't presented. While B&W outside counsel Jerome C. Katz acknowledges that the company couldn't prove that any of the 18 complaints was fraudulent, he says the large number of letters provides "circumstantial evidence" that Mr. Wigand was fabricating claims. A lawyer for Mr. Wigand says all the complaints were made in good faith.
B&W also cited a 1987 police report providing Mr. Wigand's name as a suspect in a flood at Biosonics Inc., a former employer. B&W's conclusion: "Wigand may have flooded Biosonics' offices over the weekend of October 3-4, 1987."
A handwritten report in the B&W dossier from the Mount Laurel, N.J., police department says Mr. Wigand was suspected because he was due to be dismissed around the time of the flood and was considered "vindictive" by Biosonics. The police report doesn't describe any effort to investigate Mr. Wigand and concludes that "it is impossible to determine if a crime occurred." Richard Scruggs, Mr. Wigand's lawyer, says Mr. Wigand doesn't know anything about the flood.
Mr. Scruggs calls B&W's overall effort a "smear campaign" aimed at "punishing a whistle-blower and a defector." He adds: "If you subjected any citizen of the United States to this sort of scrutiny, they would probably fare far worse than Jeff Wigand has."
As for the January 1994 testimony in which Mr. Wigand told the Justice Department he knew of no wrongdoing by the company, Mr. Scruggs says his client may not have known at the time that some of the conduct he allegedly witnessed constituted a crime. Moreover, Mr. Scruggs says, because Mr. Wigand had just finished a messy fight with B&W over his firing and was accompanied at the testimony by a B&W lawyer, he was "testifying with a gun to his head."
B&W could have a tough time getting many of its findings -- particularly those involving personal matters -- admitted as evidence in a trial. Normally, evidence of past falsehoods is tightly restricted unless directly relevant to the subject of the testimony -- in this case, alleged wrongdoing in the tobacco industry.
"The defense is going to have to work very hard to link up these events with his testimony," says Arthur Miller, a Harvard law professor and authority on civil-court procedure who isn't involved in the case. "The very fact that Brown & Williamson is circulating this as a doomsday book suggests that they know they can't get it all in, and they are engaging in a form of character assassination to get some media impact."
Mr. Katz, a New York attorney representing B&W, acknowledges that a court may not admit all the company's evidence, but adds, "I can tell you this: All of it is admissible in the court of public opinion." He calls B&W's dossier "accurate in every material respect" and declares: "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."
To build its file on Mr. Wigand, Brown & Williamson assembled a formidable team. It includes lawyers from the big New York firm Chadbourne & Parke and Atlanta's King & Spalding, and top New York public-relations adviser John Scanlon. They are working with the Investigative Group Inc., a leading Washington-based detective firm whose New York office is run by a former New York City police commissioner, Raymond Kelly. This is the firm Ivana Trump hired to investigate her rival Marla Maples and that Sen. Edward Kennedy used to check into an opponent in his 1994 campaign.
The team has cast an extremely wide net. For instance, it sifted through Mr. Wigand's phone credit-card records, which he had submitted to B&W for reimbursement as part of a severance deal that covered job-hunting expenses. Using these records, the dossier highlights two calls from a hospital as exhibit No. 50 to back up two anonymous letters with alleged details about Mr. Wigand's medical history.
B&W also made extensive use of the videotape of a job-interview rehearsal by its former executive, a fact that may prove chastening to any number of U.S. corporate employees making use of outplacement firms as they arrange career moves.
On April 21, 1993, a month after he was fired, Mr. Wigand took part in a role-playing session with Neil Hindman, president of The Hindman Co., the Louisville, Ky., firm the company paid to help Mr. Wigand find another job. With a video camera trained on him, Mr. Wigand participated in a mock interview in which he pretended to be applying for a job at a fictional beverage company.
Mr. Hindman says B&W, with court approval, subpoenaed his firm's files on Mr. Wigand, and he turned them over. "I am not about to keep the results of a lawful subpoena from a court of law," Mr. Hindman says. James Challenger, president of Chicago outplacement-firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., says he has never heard of another such subpoena and adds that he would resist it.
With the mock-interview tape in hand, B&W seized on a few of Mr. Wigand's statements and added them to two lists in its dossier: "Lies on Wigand's Resumes" and "Other Lies by Wigand."
In one instance, Mr. Wigand said on tape that he was a "'64 Olympian in judo" and "an alternate to the Munich games." In a 1993 resume, Mr. Wigand also called himself a 1966 "founder" of the United States Judo Association and a member of its "Medical Committee." B&W's dossier quotes a judo-association representative as saying the group was founded in 1954 and has no medical committee.
In an interview, the association's former president, Philip S. Porter, lends general support to Mr. Wigand's view of judo history. Mr. Porter says a predecessor organization, the Strategic Air Command Judo Society, was founded in 1954. It went through several name changes and, in the late 1960s, became the United States Judo Association. Mr. Porter says the association had numerous committees that came and went, although he doesn't remember the medical committee specifically. He also says he remembers Mr. Wigand as one of the association's earliest black-belt members.
Mr. Wigand's statements about the Olympics, however, appear to be inaccurate. People in Mr. Wigand's camp say he was at the Olympics in Tokyo in 1964, but only to spar with U.S. athletes, and that he helped train athletes for Munich in 1972. His lawyer, Mr. Scruggs, emphasizes that his comments were made in a mock interview that wasn't intended to be shown to anyone.
Mr. Wigand also said on tape and in one resume that he once was a surgical nurse. B&W adds this to its catalog of alleged lies, saying New York surgical nurses must be certified as licensed or registered practical nurses, and "research to date" has found no such record for Mr. Wigand.
But this charge, small as it is, doesn't withstand scrutiny. The human-resources department of one of the hospitals listed on Mr. Wigand's resume, Our Lady of Victory in Buffalo, confirms that he did, indeed, work there in the 1960s as an operating-room technician, an unlicensed attendant who stands by the surgeon and handles instruments. Back in the 1960s, the distinctions between attendants and surgical nurses were much looser at some hospitals than they are today, according to the New York State Nurses Association.
In search of other possible misstatements, the B&W team engaged the services of Shakalyn Enterprises Inc., a Chicago "scientific consultation" firm. On Jan. 12, 1996, its president, C. Murray Ardies, submitted his "discussions and analysis of cv and publication record of J.S.W." Mr. Ardies reported that he had trouble tracking down some of the publications Mr. Wigand listed on his curriculum vitae and concluded that "there appear to be at least a couple of fraudulent entries in the C.V. that I was given."
He added: "Whether they are deliberate, or simply a `mistake or typo,' as no doubt anyone in these circumstances would claim, is difficult to determine."
Mr. Ardies also read Mr. Wigand's biochemistry Ph.D. dissertation and wrote that, "for 1970-1972, the scientific work appears to be reasonable and well done," adding a parenthetical note: "I have actually performed a very similar purification procedure for a steroid-binding protein from yeast while at Stanford."
The B&W team also went looking for Mr. Wigand's name in the files of the Jefferson County District Court in Mr. Wigand's Louisville hometown. There, it found the scientist had two run-ins with the law, and both occupy prominent places in the B&W dossier. "Wigand was arrested for and pleaded guilty to shoplifting," asserts the document, adding that he "pleaded guilty to the shoplifting charge and completed 20 hours of volunteer work."
But that isn't the way the state judge who presided over the case remembers it. Mr. Wigand had been charged in 1994 with shoplifting a bottle of Wild Turkey at a local liquor store. However, the judge, Deborah Deweese, says in an interview that Mr. Wigand didn't plead guilty in the case. Rather, the charge was dismissed after he completed volunteer work. Mr. Scruggs, Mr. Wigand's lawyer, says the incident was the result of a misunderstanding that occurred when Mr. Wigand went to his car to retrieve some money.
The second charge was even more volatile. An Oct. 23, 1993, a complaint by Mr. Wigand's wife to the police makes an allegation of spousal abuse. The court's docket sheet indicates that Mr. Wigand attended "weekly anger-control counseling and continued psychotherapy" before the charge was dismissed.
It isn't clear from the court papers in the B&W dossier whether the counseling was required to get the charge dismissed. Indeed, the dossier doesn't even include any judge's order finding that he committed the offense. However, B&W declares in the document: "Wigand beat his wife."
Mr. Scruggs, speaking for Mr. Wigand, adamantly denies the charge. "He did not beat his wife," Mr. Scruggs says. "It's just not true." He says Mr. Wigand volunteered to go into counseling after a dispute with his wife, and the move wasn't related to the charge's dismissal. Mr. Wigand's wife didn't return a call seeking comment.
The company also took a close look at any awards Mr. Wigand said he received -- and the dossier claims to have caught a fabrication. Under "Lies on Wigand's Resumes," entry "S" says Mr. Wigand "falsely claimed" he won a YMCA National Service to Youth Leadership Award in 1971. The dossier states that the YMCA's "Don Keiser" had never heard of the award. Neither had a representative from the YMCA's office in Buffalo, where Mr. Wigand had lived.
But Don Kyzer, head of the YMCA's Teen Leadership Program, says he doesn't remember being asked about the award. He says he only arrived at the Y in 1991 and wouldn't necessarily know about awards in the 1970s. "This is the first I've been contacted on this issue. . . . Had they asked me that, I would have said I have no clue. I have no clue at all."
YMCA's Buffalo chief executive John Murray says the branch there does hand out a Service to Youth Leadership Award to active volunteers and did so in 1971. He says, however, that the files for the 1970s were largely destroyed by a basement flood so he can't look up the 1971 awards.
A B&W lawyer says the company may have to take another look. "If there is a mistake in the evidence-gathering, we would be the first one to correct it," says James E. Milliman, an outside lawyer for the company in Louisville. "Our goal is to be as accurate as we can possibly be."
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