Tobacco Firm Lawyers Try to Smoke Out Possible Mole : Cigarettes: Obscure paralegal is suspected of leaking to the media documents embarrassing to the industry.

It’s unlikely that Merrell Williams is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame.

Tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, the maker of Kool and Viceroy cigarettes, among others, effectively put out an all-points bulletin for Williams, a hitherto unknown paralegal, after he failed over the weekend to appear in Louisville, Ky., for a court-ordered deposition.

The subject: His connection, if any, to explosive company documents leaked over the last few weeks to news media and anti-smoking leaders in Congress--documents that will be the subject of congressional hearings set for today and Friday in Washington.

The tobacco company and the law firm for which Williams used to work have sued him, alleging theft and fraud in connection with the secret papers. Among them is a 30-year-old memo in which a top Brown & Williamson executive stated that nicotine is addictive, a conclusion industry officials publicly deny to this day.

Other documents they accuse Williams of stealing concern plans to defeat smokers’ lawsuits by hiding industry health research from plaintiff’s lawyers. Still others show Brown & Williamson hard at work on a safer cigarette it never marketed--apparently to avoid liability in the sale of conventional smokes.

While health and anti-smoking groups have a field day with these disclosures--and members of Congress use them to push limits on public smoking--Williams is hiding out, reportedly in Mississippi. Thomas E. Royals, a criminal defense attorney in Jackson, Miss., confirmed Monday that Williams has retained him, fearing he may face criminal charges over release of the documents.

Williams, who could not be reached for comment, apparently has never given an interview--his obscurity freeing observers to speculate whether he is an intrepid whistle-blower, as his lawyers claim, or merely a thief, as Brown & Williamson alleges.

Support for both views is found in filings in Jefferson County, Ky., Circuit Court that tell Williams’ peculiar story.

A 53-year old Ph.D. in literature, Williams early in 1988 took a job as a document analyst for Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs, Kentucky’s largest law firm--and counsel to Louisville-based Brown & Williamson. B&W;, a subsidiary of British tobacco giant BAT Industries and the third-largest U.S. cigarette maker, had retained the Wyatt firm to sort and analyze thousands of memos, cables, reports and other documents that might figure in cases involving the deaths of smokers.

By his account, outlined in court pleadings, Williams soon was deeply troubled by the contents of the documents, which he believed contradicted many of the industry’s public pronouncements on smoking and health. A longtime smoker who had favored Brown & Williamson’s Kool and Richland brands, Williams said he quit smoking in disgust.

After being laid off by the Wyatt firm in 1992, Williams says he underwent quintuple bypass heart surgery. He blamed the heart condition on his smoking habit and stress that he said was the result of unwittingly joining a conspiracy of lies.

Last year, Williams retained Louisville attorney J. Fox DeMoisey to sue Wyatt and B&W; over damage to his health. He told DeMoisey he was already in possession of internal documents that would support his damage claim.

DeMoisey dropped the bombshell in a letter last July to the Wyatt firm.

Without naming Williams, DeMoisey said he represented a client with a smoking-related health claim who also happened to have worked for Wyatt on the documents project. The client had copied and removed documents, DeMoisey wrote, because he was “shocked at the fraud and hoax being perpetrated upon the government and the American people.”

Recognizing that the documents could be covered by attorney-client privilege, DeMoisy said he had advised his client to return them, but wanted Wyatt to keep them handy. If the health claim could not be settled, DeMoisey said, “it is my intention to file suit and immediately demand production” of the documents.

Outraged that a member of their defense team would take their documents for a health claim of his own, Wyatt and B&W; struck first. They filed a lawsuit and obtained a court order requiring the “Unknown Defendant”--they later substituted Williams’ name--to return all documents, and barring him from discussing them.

Ultimately, Williams returned two boxes of documents, also handing over his personal computer and an inch-thick narrative describing the documents. B&W; believed, or at least hoped, that its materials were safe until 10 days ago, when the first report on the documents appeared in the New York Times.

Since then, B&W; has been trying to depose Williams, hoping to prove he illegally retained and distributed copies of the documents in violation of the court order.

They have portrayed Williams in court papers as anything but principled--claiming that he had signed two agreements vowing never to disclose client documents. They also filed affidavits in which former Wyatt co-workers described Williams as “devious and dishonest” and as “a conniving opportunist with an ulterior motive for everything he does.”

DeMoisey dismisses that character sketch, calling Williams “very bright,” with an “encyclopedic kind of mind.”

Williams “is very concerned about his kids,” DeMoisey said. He “has always been concerned he was going to get whacked by the fringe elements of the tobacco industry . . . so he’s been really torn up by the whole thing.”

DeMoisey said it is unclear if the documents Williams took are the same as those recently disclosed. Tobacco officials “are trying to make it sound like these things were kept in a vault,” the lawyer said. In fact, he said, they were stored in a large warehouse and “obviously the security wasn’t much.”

Some of the documents have been obtained by the Los Angeles Times. One, authored by a B&W; scientist in 1965, reported that animal tests had shown tobacco smoke to be “weakly carcinogenic.” The scientist wrote that finding could be considered significant, because the industry--which publicly denied a link between smoking and cancer--had done the research itself.

Another memo took stock of the industry’s position on the eve of the landmark Surgeon General’s report of 1964 that tied smoking to lung cancer.

Dated July 17, 1963, the long memo by B&W; general counsel Addison Yeaman stated that nicotine, while beneficial, was addictive--something industry executives denied as recently as last month, when they appeared before the House health and environment subcommittee chaired by U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles).

“We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug effective in the release of stress mechanisms,” the memo said

Yeaman also advised--unsuccessfully, it turned out--that the industry relax its defensive posture about the safety of smoking. By acknowledging a possible cancer link, Yeaman wrote, the industry “might worsen our situation in litigation,” but would be freer to work with health groups in discovering and removing the cancer-causing elements of cigarette smoke.

B&W; on Monday released studies commissioned by its sister firm, British-American Tobacco Co., that it said showed nicotine is not addictive and corrected “erroneous reports about nicotine research attributed to the company.”

The firm also said it had obtained a court order Monday in Louisville requiring Waxman and various news organizations to allow B&W; to review documents in their possession. Officials with the subcommittee--and with the New York Times and Washington Post, two of the news organizations named in the order--could not immediately be reached for comment.