Bitter fight for the whistle-blower

The May 1996 cover of Vanity Fair magazine shows a line-up of America's finest young sports stars. Shot by Annie Leibovitz, it is a striking portrait of America at its cleanest, healthiest and most optimistic. But it was not the story that caught the eye and imagination of Michael Mann, director of The Insider. The same issue carried a tale far more inspiring - that of a whistle-blower's battle with a giant tobacco company, a real-life story as murky, bitter and explosively sinister as any screenwriter could invent.

In an extraordinary 19-page feature, Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner zoomed in on the legal maelstrom then whirling around the bewildered figure of Jeffrey Wigand, a sacked chemist who took on the $500 billion industry and exposed its lies. In the process, Wigand suffered death threats, watched his family dissolve in divorce and fell victim to a viciously orchestrated smear campaign. He was also betrayed by the TV network that persuaded him to go public with his revelations. Yet his evidence changed for ever the way we now view the tobacco industry. How could Hollywood resist?

The Insider casts Russell Crowe as Wigand and Al Pacino as the CBS producer who coaxes him to confess. Perfect casting it is too, because there is more than a whiff of Mob intrigue about this saga. Wigand was the most senior and authoritative person ever to turn supergrass for the anti-smoking lobby. He revealed in court and on CBS's celebrated 60 Minutes show how bosses at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp - the US's third largest cigarette company, with brands including Lucky Strike and Kent - knew for years that nicotine was an addictive drug and even chemically manipulated cigarettes to make them more addictive. His expert evidence helped pave the way for landmark legal judgments - in 1998, the tobacco industry paid out $246 billion to settle suits from 50 states for medical care in smokingrelated illnesses.

The story begins in March 1993, when Wigand was fired by B&W. Ostensibly, the reason was that Wigand was difficult to work with and had "a difficulty in communication". The real reason was that he could not help but speak his mind. Intense, irascible and out-spoken, Wigand did not fit smoothly into the hermetic, corporate culture at the firm's Louisville headquarters. He asked too many awkward questions. And his insistent concern with the health effects of cigarette additives set him at odds with the chief executive officer, Thomas Sandefur.

When Wigand came to B&W after 17 years in the healthcare industry, he justified the decision to himself and friends by saying he was going to work on developing a safer, lowtar product. But it was a Faustian pact - he took the $300,000-a-year post as head of research and development for reasons of prestige (he had a staff of 242 and a budget of $30 million) and to draw his family closer together. His wife came from Louisville and thought it would be a good place to bring up their young children. "I thought if I made big bucks, she would be happy," he told Brenner in Vanity Fair.

What he found was "a place that looked like a high-school chemistry lab from the 1950s, with all sorts of smoking machines. There was no fundamental science being done." His own work and worries fell on deaf ears. He soon realised that phrases in reports such as "increased biological activity" were code for cancer and other diseases. Many of the executives smoked, although in private they talked about the risks. "Their whole philosophy was 'Shit flows downhill. You get paid very well. You have lots of nice benefits.'"

It was the financial muscle of the corporation that almost finally strangled him. When he was fired, he reluctantly signed a lifelong confidentiality agreement, barring him from discussing all aspects of his work at the corporation. By now on his third marriage, and dependent on welfare cover included in his severance package because of his eldest daughter's spina bifida (in the film, she has asthma), he was stifled from speaking out, despite the sense of moral outrage that Brenner and other journalists were later to uncover.

But the bullying tactics back-fired. "If Brown & Williamson had just left me alone, I probably would have gone away. I would have gotten a new job," he told Brenner. Instead, a new figure entered the scene who was to prove the catalyst for the subsequent drama.

As an award-winning investigative producer on CBS's 60 Minutes, Lowell Bergman had a Rolodex full of top-level informants and was well used to finding anonymous letters and court documents in his mail. But when a crate of papers turned up on the doorstep of his house in Berkeley, California, in spring 1993, he knew he was onto something big. The trouble was that these were from the Philip Morris tobacco company, and full of indecipherable phrases such as "ignition propensity".

Through a contact, Bergman got in touch with Wigand to ask him to make sense of the papers. It took weeks of calls and persuasion, culminating in a clandestine meeting in a hotel lobby. But Bergman's hunch proved right - Wigand's interest was sparked. He still refused to speak about his work at B&W, although he became a consultant for CBS and his name was known in anti-smoking circles.