Word: wigand
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...NIGHT A FEW MONTHS AGO, Carl Alfarano returned to his Westchester, New York, home after work to discover that he had just missed a visit from two private detectives. They told his wife they wanted his help with a "personality sketch" of Alfarano's old friend Jeffrey Wigand. The pair claimed they had come in person only because they did not have Alfarano's telephone number--something Alfarano insists is not true. "I found it rather unnerving," says Alfarano, who worked with Wigand at two medical-device companies in the 1980s and who gave the men no information. But when...
That would explain why the team from Investigative Group Inc., a high-powered Washington detective agency, was so assiduous in its investigation that it also paid visits to Wigand's first wife and tried to track down his 22-year-old daughter from that marriage. B&W lawyers even subpoenaed Wigand's personnel record from the Louisville, Kentucky, school system, where Wigand now teaches science and Japanese. The investigators may have thought they would turn Wigand's fellow educators against him. They were wrong. "Not all of us agree with what [Wigand] is doing," says Barbara Fendley, who supervises Wigand...
...Wigand, with his allegations that B&W manipulated nicotine levels in cigarettes, knowingly used a carcinogenic additive to make pipe tobacco taste better and covered up research into "safer" cigarettes, has begun talking to lawyers, grand juries and the media at an inopportune moment for tobacco. The Food and Drug Administration has proposed to regulate nicotine as a drug in cigarettes; teen smoking rates have taken an alarming jump; and five grand juries are looking into possible perjury and malfeasance by industry executives. At the same time, a novel legal strategy, which would hold the tobacco industry responsible to taxpayers...
...colleagues have jumped the wall to support Wigand; in fact, none have even contacted him to offer words of encouragement. That is understandable: Wigand, who says he received two telephoned death threats after he began cooperating with investigators, has been reduced to traveling with a security guard, and another guard watches over his two young daughters. His corporate career in the biomedical field, which until he worked at B&W had been on a steady upward trajectory ("I wanted to be CEO of a company," he confesses), has foundered. His marriage hit the rocks owing, he says, to the stress...
...allies believe Wigand is just the man to bring a jury into tobacco's inner sanctum. "Wigand can personalize the story and give...firsthand evidence...as to how the industry was conducting its business and what its motivations were," says Scott Ballin of the Coalition on Smoking OR Health, which includes the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association and the American Heart Association. "The efforts that they are going through to discredit him are directly proportional to the damage they know his testimony can do," says Richard Scruggs, the Mississippi lawyer who is shepherding Wigand through the courts...