Assuming the Risk : The Mavericks, the Lawyers, and the Whistle-Blowers Who Beat Big Tobacco

In this incredible story that reads like a legal thriller, Michael Orey recounts the unprecedented defeat of big tobacco. In 1985, Nathan Horton, a building contractor in rural Mississippi, developed a chronic ache in his left shoulder. A year and a half later, he was dead from lung cancer. In his final, painful months, Horton had filed suit against the manufacturer of the cigarettes he had smoked for more than thirty years. Horton, who was black, found a most unlikely lawyer to pursue his cause with near-religious zeal: Don Barrett, an arch-segregationist in his youth and an unapologetic defender of the Old South. When he took up his dying neighbor's case, Barrett knew full well that no tobacco company had ever paid a cent to anyone who claimed that smoking had harmed their health. Smokers, the cigarette makers said, assumed the risk of their habit. Now Barrett was also assuming an enormous risk, taking on the all-powerful tobacco industry.

In the end, the chain of events unleashed by Nathan Horton's suit culminated in the largest legal settlement in American history. The individuals joining forces in Mississippi included a washed-up actor-turned-paralegal who copied thousands of pages of internal company documents; a Gulf Coast lawyer whose almost accidental foray into asbestos litigation had made him a multimillionaire; and the state's maverick attorney general, who authorized a pioneering suit against the tobacco industry to make it pay for the health care costs of smoking.

In riveting detail, journalist Michael Orey tells how these people came together and did what no one else before them had: defeat the tobacco industry. Orey weaves up-close, personal accounts of their lives with a dramatic recounting of their battle against the cigarette makers, one that ended in nationwide settlements totaling more than $200 billion. Assuming the Risk is an engrossing, behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the highest-stakes legal battles ever fought.

Mississippi is not widely known for being first in anything; in fact, Michael Orey notes in Assuming the Risk, the state ranks last or near last on an embarrassing array of scales. And yet, he writes, it was in the courtrooms of this disparaged Southern state that a pioneering team of lawyers led the way in a politically controversial crusade against the tobacco industry. Mississippi was the first state in the nation to sue cigarette manufacturers to recover smoking-related health care costs incurred by the state's Medicaid program. The fierce legal battle resulted in a multibillion-dollar settlement and eventually led to hundreds of billions of dollars in fines levied against the tobacco industry when other states followed suit.

Though decidedly pro-plaintiff, Assuming the Risk is not another vituperative rant against the Evil Empire of Big Tobacco: Orey does not shout and stomp on his soapbox. Instead, the veteran legal journalist and Wall Street Journal editor coolly focuses on the objective facts, presenting the who, what, where, and when of a complex and contentious litigation. His well-researched and detailed narrative spotlights the key figures in this real-life morality play--the mavericks, lawyers, and whistleblowers--including one particularly revealing chapter on Jeffrey Wigand, a former research scientist for the tobacco firm Brown & Williamson, whose decision to break a confidentiality agreement by speaking with 60 Minutes investigative reporter Mike Wallace became the subject of the 1999 film The Insider. --Tim Hogan