Smoking Out Secrets

The tobacco industry has been good to George L. Barnes--and vice versa.

A high school dropout who built a lucrative career as a private investigator, Barnes for years was the eyes and ears of Big Tobacco. Nowadays, the 63-year-old former gumshoe lives in sumptuous retirement in Las Vegas and on the Oregon coast.

But Barnes & Associates, the Los Angeles detective agency he founded and later sold to his three children, continues to fill a unique niche as a leading trouble-shooter for cigarette makers. Intensely publicity-shy, the Barnes agency has managed to remain nearly invisible even as tobacco’s immense legal battles make headlines every day.

Barnes pioneered the exhaustive background probes of tobacco plaintiffs that have helped the industry preserve what has been (notwithstanding the proposed tobacco settlement) a near-perfect courtroom record.

When a sick smoker or his family sues a tobacco company, investigators fan out throughout the country in search of everyone who ever knew him. Disarmingly friendly, they quiz relatives, ex-neighbors and old fishing pals about the plaintiff’s work and smoking history, whether high school teachers and coaches warned him about smoking, if he handled toxic chemicals, had extramarital affairs or got into scrapes with the law.

Searching public records and even cemetery plots, they also assemble an elaborate family tree showing what the last five or six generations of the smoker’s family died of.

These encyclopedic profiles are used to flesh out the industry’s time-tested defense--which holds that the plaintiff made a personal choice to smoke despite the warnings, and, besides, got sick from another cause.

Anti-tobacco lawyers complain that the intensive scrutiny serves another purpose too--intimidating some clients into giving up their claims to keep embarrassing personal information from becoming public.

“Every effort is made . . . to uncover every ‘piece of dirt’ on the client,” said Dan Childs, a Philadelphia lawyer who has battled the industry. “Fights with children, run-ins with the law . . . are all looked for.”

No Expense Spared

The tobacco industry is not unique in using private investigators. But more than other litigants, the $50-billion-a-year industry spares no expense in preparing for trial, which means learning all there is to know about its adversaries.

“They [tobacco companies] do the most thorough background investigation I have ever seen,” said Howard Acosta, a Florida plaintiffs’ lawyer involved in cigarette cases. “It is more than the FBI or the CIA would do, as far as I’m concerned.”

Former Barnes investigators agree.

“The investigation we did for the tobacco companies . . . was the most perfect background investigation that you could do, at horrible expense,” said Douglas Baldwin, a former Barnes operative who now runs his own Los Angeles private investigation firm.

“We would go to cemeteries in the middle of nowhere,” Baldwin recalled. “We would go to courthouses and spend all day looking for birth certificates.”

Although cigarette makers also have used investigators other than Barnes, the Los Angeles firm “is still the major player,” said Gary Long, a senior partner with the law firm of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, a leading tobacco defense firm.

The relationship is expected to survive the proposed $368.5-billion tobacco settlement that is now before Congress. If ratified, the deal will bar class actions and lawsuits by states, but will not stop suits by individual smokers--Barnes’ specialty. As a result, the firm should stay busy for years.

Barnes also has helped cigarette makers outside the courtroom. In 1995, for example, Barnes operatives filed sweeping public-records requests with at least 19 California counties and cities, seeking information on problems with enforcement of public smoking laws.

While not disclosing in the letters who its client was, an industry lawyer told The Times that Barnes was helping Philip Morris Cos. gather ammunition to fight a proposed workplace smoking ban by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Information about the Barnes firm--headquartered in a suite of offices on Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile--is hard to come by, and both generations of Barneses mean to keep it that way.

George Barnes agreed to be interviewed about his personal background but would not discuss his tobacco work. The firm’s current president, James E. Barnes, a 42-year-old lawyer and the second of the three children, was even less forthcoming.

The firm’s investigators “accumulate information honestly, legally and without coercion,” James Barnes said in a letter declining an interview request. But he said little beyond that. Even how many people he employs is something “I could tell you, but I’d really rather not,” he said.

However, The Times compiled a portrait of the Barneses and their business through court records and interviews with former company investigators and with lawyers involved in tobacco litigation.

Although the extent of the agency’s tobacco business remains a closely guarded secret, investigators who worked there in the 1980s say tobacco law firms provided 80% to 95% of Barnes’ business. More recently, Barnes was involved in more than 20 projects for a single tobacco law firm, with outstanding bills of more than $150,000, according to August 1995 billing statements reviewed by The Times.

The firm’s success is inseparable from that of its go-getter founder, who started with nothing but eventually became a wealthy man.

Former subordinates remember George Barnes as a superb investigator and an often generous but difficult boss who would spring for lunch but also possessed a volcanic temper.

His professional success belied a turbulent personal life, including four failed marriages--two while in his teens. And on at least one occasion, Barnes proved himself a hard-nosed litigator in the style of his tobacco clients.

Less Than ‘Perfection’

A few years ago, Barnes bought property on a bluff above the beach in Brookings, Ore., and hired the man next door to build a palatial $1.4-million residence that Barnes dubbed “Point Perfection.” Later, Barnes sued the contractor-neighbor for supposedly overcharging for the job.

But according to court records, Barnes abruptly abandoned his claim on the day of trial last year because of mounting evidence that the overruns stemmed mainly from Barnes’ many design-change orders.

The judge pronounced the lawsuit frivolous. But for Barnes’ neighbor, 71-year-old Hartley Badger, it was a hollow victory that left him with legal bills of more than $100,000.

“It’s been devastating,” Badger recently told The Times, adding that the case devoured his retirement savings and threatened to cost him his home.

“My wife and I . . . started worrying about our sanity,” he said. “We saw our financial basis just evaporating to where we didn’t know where we were going.”

Although tobacco financed Barnes’ real estate and legal adventures, it also plagued him in at least one way. Barnes was a highly addicted smoker who acknowledged trying every known cessation trick--hypnosis, injections, acupuncture, acupressure, nicotine gum and patches--before finally kicking the habit a few years ago.

But tobacco also was Barnes’ golden goose.

A passionate golfer, he lives most of the year in a home on the 14th fairway of a Las Vegas golf course. His other house, the 6,700-square-foot estate in Oregon, is known locally as the most expensive house in Curry County.

“God smiled on me a whole lot,” Barnes said.

As a boy growing up in the 1930s and 1940s in South-Central Los Angeles, Barnes enjoyed few material comforts. His father left home to work in the copper mines of Montana, while George hawked newspapers on the street.

He quit school in the 11th grade to join the Air Force, and after his discharge sold auto parts to support his young family. By his own reckoning, the exuberant Barnes was also a top-notch salesman, but he hungered to do more.

As a boy, he had devoured Mickey Spillane novels and had dreamed of becoming a detective. Responding to a classified ad, he landed a job at Stein Investigations, a Los Angeles agency, and quickly rose through the ranks.

By the time Barnes opened his own shop in 1966, he had established tobacco connections. At Stein, he had done background investigations of smokers in several lawsuits against cigarette maker Liggett & Myers. Los Angeles attorney John J. Quinn, a Liggett lawyer at the time, said he admired Barnes’ “very efficient and very professional” approach.

Tobacco litigation ebbed in the 1970s, but when it roared to life in the early 1980s Barnes became the dominant player.

Even now, former Barnes minions marvel at the depth and expense of the investigations they undertook on the cigarette makers’ behalf.

Despite the huge cost for salaries and travel, investigators always worked in twos, not just in doing interviews but also when getting a copy of a deed, birth certificate or marriage license. The most routine transaction required a witness.

“You didn’t do anything by yourself,” one former investigator said.

Traversing the country, and often traveling first class, the investigators would show up, unannounced, on the doorsteps of total strangers who might not let them in. Some investigators said they were completely candid about who they represented and why they had come, while others said they were purposely vague. Either way, they were rarely turned away.

Few people, it seemed, could resist family gossip. Declaring that they had just come from Aunt Mary’s--and, by the way, possessed a family tree going back to the 1880s--was usually enough to get in the door. Often people were simply flattered to learn “you came all the way from California to talk to them,” one former Barnes investigator said.

Lawyer George Braly recalled the swarm of Barnes operatives who investigated his client, Sean Marsee, an Oklahoma schoolboy and snuff user who suffered cancer of the tongue, head and neck before dying in 1984 at the age of 19.

The investigators searched out acquaintances of Marsee’s, not only in Oklahoma but also in the hill country along the Ohio River where his distant kinfolks lived.

“They interviewed everybody everywhere that had the remotest possible connection to Sean Marsee,” Braly said. “They wanted to know how much beer he drank, they wanted to know if he smoked cigarettes . . . if he smoked marijuana . . . how many carrots he ate or broccoli or spinach. . . . This just went on ad nauseam.”

Exhaustive Approach

It was all “part of the scorched-earth, exhaustive approach to defense litigation that was invented by the tobacco industry,” Braly said.

Barnes investigators also ran checks on prospective Marsee jurors, reviewing court files for lawsuits and voter records for party affiliations, in addition to driving by their homes for information on socioeconomic background, said an investigator who worked on the case. After a lengthy trial in 1986, snuff maker U.S. Tobacco Co. was found not liable for Marsee’s death.

Investigators were always alert for information that could be used to portray sick smokers in an unsympathetic light, or as people who liked to take risks.

William Schneid, a former Barnes investigator, recalled the time he interviewed the first woman the plaintiff had ever slept with. The question came “back from the law firm: ‘Find out whether or not he wore a condom,’ ” Schneid recalled.

In another case, Schneid said, investigators learned that the plaintiff “had cheated on his girlfriend in high school, and the industry wanted us to find the girl.”

The idea was: “Here is a person who obviously is not morally compliant, so therefore what difference does it make if we put warnings on a cigarette or not? This guy is going to do what he wants, regardless,” Schneid said.

When lawsuits were filed by grieving widows, “we always considered it a coup if we turned up” evidence that the marriage was unhappy, such as a “paternity situation or a mistress,” another former investigator said.

Texas lawyer William E. Townsley, who brought several unsuccessful tobacco lawsuits in the 1980s, said that one of his clients dropped his case on hearing that investigators had turned up embarrassing information on past sexual liaisons.

Such details, while potentially humiliating, often were not relevant and would not be admitted at trial. Such was the case when Floyd Roysdon of Tennessee sued R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., and Barnes investigators discovered that Roysdon had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, his attorney said.

“They knew his every move for just about his whole life,” recalled Roysdon’s lawyer, J.D. Lee. “I was able to keep [the Klan membership] out,” Lee said. Roysdon lost the case anyway.

Twinge of Regret

Barnes investigators turned up plenty of unsavory details about the late John Gunsalus, whose anti-tobacco lawsuit was defeated in Philadelphia in 1988. Although information about marital infidelity and a weapons charge was not admitted at trial, tobacco lawyers were able to present evidence that Gunsalus had been caught breaking into a bar, and then broke into the bar again.

The point? The hard-headed Gunsalus did exactly as he pleased and would have paid no heed to tougher cigarette warnings.

With public opinion of the cigarette makers at an all-time low, some former Barnes investigators expressed a twinge of regret at having helped the industry win in court.

“I’d probably go plaintiffs today,” one said.

Another, Schneid, said he always had misgivings, but worked for Barnes because the money was good.

“I mean, I knew that what I was doing was wrong,” Schneid said.

“I certainly had a choice of what jobs I took. . . . If I found it that distasteful, why didn’t I leave?”