TOBACCO BLUES

THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY HAS NEVER LOST A LAWSUIT. BUT A NEW BILLION-DOLLAR LEGAL ASSAULT, AND A HIGH-RANKING DEFECTOR, MAY CHANGE THAT

ONE 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 he learned about the...

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