Tobacco Insider Interviewed -- Wigand Meets With U.S., State Lawyers

PASCAGOULA, Miss. - State and federal lawyers who are questioning a former researcher at the third-largest U.S. tobacco company won't say what information he is providing.

"The judge has the deposition under seal. I don't want to say anything that could be interpreted as talking about the deposition," Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore said yesterday.

State Chancery Judge William Myers ordered that Jeffrey Wigand's testimony be sealed until further notice in a lawsuit the Mississippi attorney general's office brought to force 13 tobacco companies to pay for smoking-related illnesses.

Wigand, who was fired in 1993 as vice president of research at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., refused to talk to reporters during breaks in his testimony. He left Pascagoula last night to return home to Louisville, where he is a high-school chemistry and Japanese teacher.

Moore said it could be several weeks before Wigand finishes his testimony to state and tobacco-company lawyers and the attorney general can ask the court to make the depositions public.

Tobacco-company lawyers, including Brown & Williamson representative John Banahan and R.J. Reynolds attorney Joe Colingo would not comment.

Earlier yesterday, Wigand met for several hours with attorneys from the Justice Department's antitrust division for an investigation into whether tobacco companies conspired to suppress development of safer, self-extinguishing cigarettes.

The Justice Department refused to discuss the nature of its questions.

A federal criminal investigation also seeks to determine whether tobacco-industry executives lied to Congress and regulators about smoking and the addictiveness of nicotine.

The subpoena Moore issued for Wigand said state lawyers' questions would also touch on nicotine addictiveness and alleged falsification of tobacco-company records.

"Jeffrey Wigand's testimony will be very devastating," Moore predicted. "This is a man who had been on the inside for four years, a man who knows where all the bodies are buried, and, frankly, we're trying to find out where those bodies are."

Brown & Williamson, based in Louisville, Ky., sued Wigand last week, saying he violated an agreement not to divulge "competitively sensitive" information when he talked to "60 Minutes."

Kentucky's Court of Appeals yesterday upheld an order prohibiting Wigand from divulging company information. He faces a Jan. 26 contempt hearing in Jefferson County, Ky., Circuit Court, Brown & Williamson said.

The company got a gag order from a Kentucky judge to stop Wigand's testimony in Moore's lawsuit, but a Mississippi judge ruled this week that the Kentucky court had no jurisdiction in Mississippi.

Wigand, the highest-ranking tobacco executive ever to cooperate with the industry's critics, reportedly told "60 Minutes" that Brown & Williamson scrapped plans to make a safer cigarette and continued to use a flavoring in pipe tobacco that was known to cause cancer in laboratory animals.

The program canceled a broadcast of the interview.