Publication Date
January 1997
Abstract
The story of the Brown and Williamson Cigarette Papers reads like a screenplay inspired by a John Grisham novel. Scene 1: In late 1992 Kentucky attorney J. Fox DeMoisey receives a bombshell, a banker's box full of documents stolen from the state's largest law firm, Wyatt Tarrant and Combs, by his client Merrell Williams. While working as a paralegal assigned to a project indexing secret documents of his firm's client, the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company, Williams had furtively copied documents he thought demonstrated that the cigarette maker had deliberately hidden its knowledge of tobacco's lethal qualities, qualities that he believed were the cause of his current heart problems.