OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. — Merrell Williams, the mole who became the tobacco industry’s worst nightmare, hardly seemed suited to the role. He had floated from one dreary job to the next, never staying very long in one place. Unfortunately for Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., after Williams was hired as a lowly document analyst with access to company secrets, he grew intensely committed to his work. For four nerve-racking years, Williams led a secret life in Louisville, Ky., stealing and copying thousands of pages of confidential records. When he funneled the documents to Congress and the press in 1994, the impact was immediate and profound.
Hardened industry critics, accustomed to thinking the worst of the cigarette makers, were shocked by the disclosures. The papers became the focus of two books and an entire issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. They triggered a perjury investigation of top tobacco executives, who had testified in congressional hearings that nicotine was not addictive, just before the documents hit Capitol Hill.
Emboldened by Williams’ audacious act, other whistle-blowers and defectors–such as Brown & Williamson’s Jeffrey Wigand and Philip Morris’ Ian Uydess–began coming forward with disclosures of their own.
In fact, Williams, now 55, and the purloined documents figure heavily in all of tobacco’s current woes–from multibillion-dollar damage suits and pending criminal investigations to the threat of regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. With the ripples still surging outward, neither Williams nor the mighty industry will ever be the same.
Read more: http://articles.latimes.com/1996-06-23/business/fi-17774_1_u-s-tobacco-industry
