Widdick v. Brown & Williamson
"The Tobacco Conspiracy Trial"
Tobacco CEO Bennett LeBow: Big Tobacco Knew About Smoking's Dangers and Tried to Hide It
(May 21) Big Tobacco knew about the risks of smoking and undertook an elaborate measures to hide its knowledge from the public.
This was videotaped testimony of Bennett LeBow, the head of the Liggett Group, Inc., as the family of Roland Maddox attempted to bolster its theory that the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company and the rest of Big Tobacco knew about smoking's health risks and conspired hide their findings from the general public. During his deposition, which was given in September 1997, LeBow indicated that tobacco companies had documents that illustrated the addictiveness of tobacco and that he could not understand how tobacco officials could maintain their position that smoking has not been proven addictive and that it does not cause health problems.
LeBow has been settling suits against his company since March 1996. He bought Liggett in 1986 with no knowledge of the tobacco industry. LeBow had little involvement in the company's day-to-day activities until 1995, when two events piqued his interest in smoking's health hazards and the tobacco industry's history. First, Liggett's outside legal counsel dissolved, and tobacco giant Philip Morris offered to pay $8-9 million per year for Liggett's legal fees if the company agreed to be represented by Philip Morris' own public relations firm, Latham & Watkins. LeBow accepted the arrangement but thought it was strange that a competitor would want to pay his company's legal fees.
The second incident, said LeBow, involved R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which was involved in a proxy dispute at that time. It had been widely reported that company shareholders wanted to break up R.J. Reynolds' food and tobacco divisions. However, ongoing tobacco litigation prevented the shareholders from proceeding with this move. LeBow said that industry leaders had assured him the lawsuits were inconsequential, but they were still influencing corporate decisions.
According to LeBow, various tobacco attorneys had told him the industry's official opinion of the addictiveness of nicotine and the alleged link between smoking and cancer: that it has never been proven conclusively by medical research that smoking is addictive and that it causes cancer. LeBow was also bothered by the fact that his company's attorneys were working together with his competitors' lawyers to combat various tobacco suits and suspected that Big Tobacco was trying to hide its scientific findings on its product.
LeBow explained how this led his quietly approaching a law firm he trusted and asking its lawyers to analyze several tobacco suits. Talks with the plaintiffs convinced LeBow that tobacco companies had been lying about their information on cigarettes and led to his settlement of various suits and agreement with investigators to help their cases against Big Tobacco.
"I started to find out more about the issue of nicotine being addictive and people not being warned about it," LeBow said in his deposition. "This was one of the main issues the other side was talking about, and I started to get concerned about it. I thought, 'Maybe there's something here...Let's sit and talk and maybe make a settlement if we could.'"
LeBow also indicated that he began to think that tobacco companies were trying to hide their knowledge about cigarettes when various company lawyers kept hammering him with the industry's official stance on smoking while continuing to tell him that the lawsuits had no basis. He wondered why Big Tobacco worried so much about the suits if they really had no basis. According to Liggett's CEO, tobacco companies hid documents about the hazards of smoking through their lawyers for several years.
"They [Big Tobacco] just haven't told the truth for the past 30, 40 years, and they've been hiding the documents through their lawyers pretty much," LeBow said. "The lawyers have been hiding them under the guise of attorney-client privilege, a lot of these devastating documents." (LeBow would later break this attorney-client privilege and agree to release company documents relating to tobacco litigation.)
During cross-examination in the deposition, tobacco lawyers focused on LeBow's financial incentive to settle the suits. Liggett was the smallest of the tobacco companies, and its market share had dropped from 3.5 to 2 percent over a ten-year period. In 1995, Liggett was $150 million in debt, and it looked like the company would have to file for bankruptcy protection. The settlements, however, made Liggett an attractive buyout opportunity for a larger tobacco company.
The day's proceedings also saw the 1997 written deposition of Irwin Tucker, a former researcher for Brown & Williamson, read to the jury. Tucker's testimony gave insight into a December 1953 meeting of tobacco company executives who discussed ways to refute the health scare allegations against cigarettes. According to Tucker, medical doctors, statisticians, and epidemiologists were not present at this meeting. He also described how the tobacco industry structured its effort to combat the helath hazard allegations through a new organization, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC).
According to Tucker's testimony, a physician chosen by the TIRC for its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) researched the hazards of smoking and concluded in 1959 that there was a causal link between smoking and lung cancer. However, Tucker claimed, the tobacco industry never accepted or recognized the results. To this day, the industry denies that smoking causes lung cancer and only concedes that it is a risk factor. However, during his cross-examination, Tucker admitted that no one at TIRC or Brown & Williamson ever tried to influence his research. But Tucker's deposition did support the Maddox's family allegations of an industry-wide tobacco conspiracy. (Nevertheless, it still remains to be seen whether Tucker's testimony, as well as other evidence, succeeds in linking the tobacco conspiracy particularly to the late Roland Maddox.)
After presenting LeBow's testimony, plaintiff attorney Norwood Wilner brought pulmonary expert Dr. Allan Feingold to the stand. Dr. Feingold only gave jurors a glimpse of his views on the addictiveness of nicotine and the link between smoking and lung cancer. He is expected to give extensive testimony when testimony resumes Friday morning.
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