Moore Scores Again Against Big Tobacco

The $3.4-billion legal settlement between cigarette makers and the state of Mississippi is the latest coup for state Atty. Gen. Michael Moore, whose role in the giant tobacco truce has thrust him onto the national stage and assured his place in legal history.

A master of the sound bite, the telegenic Moore has spent the last three years vilifying the cigarette makers to whip up support for his cause. That Moore, with his separate peace, now will join with those he has accused of killing “millions and millions of people” in trying to sell the global deal to Congress is but one irony of the historic accord.

Another is that it all started in Mississippi, where Moore filed the first of the state lawsuits in 1994, and then helped turn his improbable crusade into a mass movement that drove the industry to the bargaining table.

A state with a tradition of consumer activism--say, California or New York--might logically have fired the first shot. Mississippi, historically high in rates of poverty and tobacco use and low in educational attainment, did not figure to become Big Tobacco’s worst nightmare.

It began in Mississippi because that’s where Moore was attorney general.

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Whatever happens as the tobacco deal moves through Congress, it will be a magnificent springboard should Moore, 45, make a run for governor or Congress. And detractors like Joe Colingo, an R.J. Reynolds lawyer in Pasacagoula, Miss., contend that Moore’s earnest and idealistic persona is the thin veneer of a calculatingly ambitious politician.

Moore is “an excellent politician” and “as good at manipulating the media as anybody I’ve ever seen,” Colingo said.

“I don’t think his motives were to save the youth . . . like he professed. I think his motives were to aspire to higher office.”

Among observers of Moore’s career, however, this seems a minority view. And given the adversity he faced in attacking the $50-billion-a-year industry, Moore could not have known how well things would turn out.

“His chances [were] at least 10 to 1 of falling on his ass, rather than being interviewed by the ‘Today’ show and ‘McNeil-Lehrer,’ ” said Joseph B. Parker, a political science professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.

“For the life of me, I never dreamed that he would have any success,” Parker said. “I think what he’s accomplished . . . is just absolutely miraculous.”

Moore “was not motivated solely . . . by ambition. That part I’m confident of,” said Bill Minor, a columnist for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the dean of Mississippi political writers. He is “just an aggressive guy, and he likes to launch out in directions where nobody else has gone.”

Others suggest Moore, who has a deeply religious streak, thinks he’s on a mission from God. Without a shred of self-consciousness, Moore himself has said on more than one occasion that he believes “this case has had some guidance from above.”

If this is an act, it’s one Moore has managed to keep up in the worst of circumstances.

Ann Ritter, a lawyer with a private firm retained by Moore for the Mississippi case, recalled Moore’s unbelievable calm roughly a year ago during a near crash-landing in Topeka, Kan., where Moore and several of his lawyers had flown to meet with the Kansas attorney general.

There were shouts and there were tears, but Moore was serene. “‘Guys, it couldn’t happen now, right in the middle of this thing,’ ” Ritter recalled Moore saying. “ ‘He needs us to see it through to the end.’ ”

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“I assume he meant God,” Ritter said, “because for Mike, this is kind of a quest.”

The eldest of five children, Moore was raised a Catholic in the Gulf Coast town of Pascagoula, where he attended parochial schools and aspired to the priesthood before discovering girls.

At school they preached: “You’re not on this Earth for yourself,” Moore recalled in a recent interview. “I had a mom and dad who felt the same way, so what I learned in school was reinforced at home.”

Playing keyboards for a couple of rock bands, Moore helped put himself through college and then law school at Ole Miss.

A conservative Democrat who favors the death penalty and opposes abortion, Moore won his first election at the age of 27. He became district attorney for three coastal counties and gained a reputation as a boy wonder who cracked down on corrupt politicians.

He became attorney general at 35. And it was during his second term, in May 1994, that Moore dropped the bomb on Big Tobacco, suing to recover Medicaid funds spent treating indigent victims of smoking-related illness.

To be sure, the cigarette makers had become a safe, even fashionable, target for blistering rhetoric. But for a state, armed with an untested legal theory, to sue them for hundreds of millions of dollars? Particularly in the conservative political culture of Mississippi, the suit was widely seen as quixotic at best.

Friends and allies--even those who cheered Moore for going forward--warned that he would be swamped by tobacco money in his next run for office. Republican Gov. Kirk Fordice, a staunchly pro-business conservative, bitterly denounced Moore and even took him to court in an unsuccessful bid to void the suit.

State legislative leaders--fellow Democrats and putative allies of Moore--warned him not to waste a drop of state money on his crackpot quest.

“A great start, wasn’t it?” Moore said.

To finance the case, Moore brought in two outside law firms that had made boatloads of money in asbestos litigation and were willing to front the costs of the tobacco suit in hopes of striking it rich in the end.

One was the Pascagoula firm of Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, a former law school classmate who had helped Moore plot the tobacco suit. The other was the South Carolina firm of Ness, Motley, Loadholt, Richardson & Poole.

Both firms had small, private jets, which Moore used to great advantage. Fearing his case would be squashed unless others joined the fight, Moore began crisscrossing the country in search of allies.

“We spent a year and a half flying all over America, speaking to AGs, governors . . . public health groups--whoever would listen,” Moore recalled.

“Our strategy always was to amass just as strong and just as large an army as they had. . . . We were basically just assembling an army for the war.”

One of the first recruits, West Virginia Atty. Gen. Darrell McGraw Jr., reviewed the Mississippi suit and then phoned to ask Moore if he would mind if West Virginia basically copied his claim.

“I said, ‘Darrell, you would make me a very happy man if you would do that,’ ” Moore said.

Still, the going was slow. Only three states had joined in by the end of ‘94, and just two more took the plunge in ’95.

But as the numbers slowly grew, attorneys general who lacked Moore’s zealous sense of mission--or thought the suits would fail--began feeling pressure to line up for tobacco loot. At the same time, the industry was being hit by a slew of private class-action suits. But the Medicaid claims were “the real cases from Hell,” as one tobacco lawyer put it.

Following a cascade of new state filings in late 1996 and early 1997, settlement talks began April 1. By the time the $368.5-billion deal was announced June 20, 40 states representing more than 90% of the U.S. population had sued the cigarette makers.

The tobacco companies agreed to pay the money to settle the major legal claims against them. But with no guarantee the so-called “global” settlement will be approved by Congress, Moore demanded a separate accord with Mississippi as the price for giving up the July 9 trial date for the state’s anti-tobacco case.

Moore, who earns $68,000 a year as Mississippi’s top legal officer, has been surrounded the past three years by some of the legal profession’s financial elite--attorneys who last made $68,000 their first year out of law school.

The corporate lawyers defending the industry or negotiating on its behalf have certainly made fat fees. And the wealthy plaintiffs’ lawyers in the anti-tobacco camp are bound to become wealthier still.

But Moore does not admit to even a twinge of regret at not sharing in the spoils. His reward is “achieving what I set out in life to do,” Moore said. “There’s a lot of comfort there for me.”

He is unabashedly proud of Mississippi’s role but reluctant to boast about his own. Rather, he uses interviews and press conferences to praise anti-smoking leaders of the past.

“We just get to be the guys carrying the flag today. That’s the way I look at it,” he says.

But attacks on the tobacco deal have made Moore a bit testy.

The agreement contains a wish list of anti-smoking measures that the industry had successfully resisted in the past and now is ready to pay for. Among them are curbs on indoor smoking, restrictions on tobacco advertising and a crackdown on merchants who illegally sell tobacco products to minors.

Yet tobacco foes in Congress, along with some consumer and anti-smoking groups, contend the deal is too soft and that Moore and his allies failed to fully exploit the leverage their lawsuits created.

Critics have cited provisions that could make it hard for the Food and Drug Administration to regulate nicotine levels and that would allow the cigarette makers to deduct settlement payments as business expenses.

For their part, Moore and his allies fret that if Congress tinkers too much, the companies may back out of the deal.

In a sense, they are victims of their own astonishing success. As Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) observed last week at a congressional hearing, Moore had done such a splendid job of showing “how hypocritical and what liars the tobacco companies are” that the country now was out for blood and his deal was in peril.

But after three years of a remarkable adventure, Moore isn’t giving up now. Said Jim Tierney, a former Maine attorney general and one of Moore’s advisors: “He feels this is the most important thing he’ll ever do.”