Merrell Williams Jr., a former paralegal who leaked mountains of internal documents of the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company in 1994, fueling lawsuits that resulted in an industry payout of billions of dollars to pay smokers' medical bills, died on Nov. 18 in Ocean Springs, Miss. He was 72.
The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Christina Daltro, said.
Mr. Williams was working for a law firm in Louisville, Ky., that represented tobacco companies when he copied and passed on the documents. Mike Moore, a former attorney general of Mississippi who had handled his state's litigation, said in a recent email to The Associated Press that the files refuted "the three big lies" of the tobacco industry — that "cigarettes don't cause cancer, nicotine is not addictive and we don't market to kids."
Many hailed Mr. Williams's courage, likening him to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Vietnam War history known as the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Others, notably Brown & Williamson, accused him of theft and abuse of the attorney-client privilege.
The episode was further complicated when it became known that Mr. Williams had accepted a house, two cars, a boat and a $3,000-a-month no-show job from the lawyer leading the charge against the tobacco industry.
When Mr. Williams came to work at the firm, Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs, in January 1988 as a $9-an-hour paralegal, it was his latest stop in a checkered career. By his own account he had squandered his education, which included a Ph.D. in theater arts from the University of Denver. He was in the middle of his third divorce and behind in child support and had declared bankruptcy four times. He told The Dallas Morning News in 1997 that he was "a full-blown alcoholic."
At the law firm, he was one of a dozen employees assigned to review thousands of boxes of documents that Brown & Williamson, the nation's third-largest tobacco company, had squirreled away over the years. The purpose was to prepare defenses for the accelerating attacks on the industry in the courts and legislatures.
Mr. Williams had no sympathy for the tobacco industry, even though he was a heavy smoker of Kools, a Brown & Williamson brand. His father had died of a heart attack in his early 50s that Mr. Williams attributed to his chain smoking. He said he was appalled to learn that the company had covered up research by its own scientists that raised questions about smoking.
Mr. Williams started smuggling documents out of the law firm around Christmas 1988, stuffing them in an exercise girdle he wore under loose clothing. He copied them at print shops, never going to the same one two days in a row, and returned them the next morning.
From 1990 to 1992, Mr. Williams unsuccessfully tried to interest law enforcement officials and tobacco industry opponents in the documents. In March 1992 he was laid off. That month he had emergency heart surgery, which he believed was caused by smoking.
In July 1993 he notified the law firm that he was planning to file a liability claim for health damage and job stress, and planned to use his documents as evidence. The firm and Brown & Williamson struck first, suing him for theft, fraud and breach of contract. His defense was that the documents revealed criminal activity.
In April 1994 he met with Richard Scruggs, a personal injury lawyer who had won enormous victories over the asbestos industry. In Orlando, Fla., he showed Mr. Scruggs about 4,000 pages of documents that he had stashed with a friend.
It was Mr. Scruggs who gave him the house and other gifts and arranged for a job that did not require him to show up. Mr. Scruggs denied that the gifts — or loans, as he sometimes characterized them — were a quid pro quo for getting the stolen documents. But when The St. Petersburg Times asked him if he would have been so generous if Mr. Williams had not provided the documents, Mr. Scruggs said: "That's a hard question. I don't know."
In 1994 the documents were debated in Congress, entered into court proceedings, posted on the Internet and printed in The New York Times. The case against the companies was further buttressed when Jeffrey Wigand, a onetime Brown & Williamson executive, revealed industry secrets on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" in 1996.
The case resulted in a settlement agreement in 1998 in which 46 states would recover tobacco-related health costs estimated at $246 billion over 25 years from the country's four largest tobacco companies.
Merrell Williams Jr. was born in Baton Rouge, La., on Jan. 26, 1941, to middle-class parents, both of whom smoked heavily. The family moved to West Texas and then to Mississippi, where he delivered newspapers, played football and smoked his first cigarette in a high school play, though he eventually quit.
He graduated from Baylor University and earned a master's degree from the University of Mississippi. He was 30 when he was awarded his doctorate in Denver. He then taught at a succession of junior colleges. By the early 1980s, he was tending bar on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Mr. Williams was divorced at least three times. Besides Ms. Daltro, his wife of five months, he is survived by his daughters, Jennifer Smith and Sarah Ridpath, and five grandchildren.
Ms. Daltro said that Mr. Williams had been upset about the introduction of electronic cigarettes, which simulate smoking and have fewer harmful chemicals, though they contain nicotine. "He was really, really angry about that," she said.
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