THE MYSTERY MAN WITH THE SMOKING GUN

By Richard Lacayo

AND WHAT WOULD THE FORBIDDEN SEGMENT OF 60 Minutes have contained? An interview with Jeffrey S. Wigand, a biochemist and endocrinologist who now teaches high school in Louisville, Kentucky. Between December 1988 and March 1993, Wigand worked at Brown & Williamson as a $300,000-a-year vice president whose work focused partly on attempts by B&W to develop nontoxic and fire-retardant cigarettes--a project that Wigand reportedly told CBS it never pursued in earnest.

According to the New York Daily News, the 60 Minutes transcript shows that Wigand charged that B&W abandoned its plans to develop a safer cigarette and altered documents to delete any reference to the aborted effort. He also claims that Thomas Sandefur, the company's CEO, perjured himself before a congressional committee when he denied knowledge of how cigarettes were used to deliver nicotine.

At another point in the transcript, Wigand alleged that the company introduced into its cigarettes--at "a hundredfold the safety level"--a pipe-tobacco additive, coumarin, that it knew caused liver tumors in laboratory mice. And he described two threatening phone calls, one of which hinted at harm to his two children if he didn't "leave tobacco alone.'' B&W responded to the Daily News article by threatening legal action against CBS News for leaking it. A lawyer for the tobacco company warned that the network would be held responsible for any libel contained in the transcript.

But 60 Minutes isn't the only place where Wigand is going--or would have gone--public. Last week he was served a subpoena in Mississippi. State attorney general Mike Moore wants him to testify in the preliminary phase of a Medicaid reimbursement suit against the tobacco industry. The case attempts to make the tobacco industry compensate state taxpayers for funds spent on the tobacco-related illness and death of indigent citizens.

Moore, a Democrat who took office in 1988 and is seeking testimony about tobacco's addictive properties and impact on health, believes the subpoena will protect Wigand from legal action by B&W for breaking his nondisclosure contract. But even more explosive than Wigand's deposition could be the documents that the subpoena requests him to produce. Those papers supposedly include evidence that B&W altered its research into the carcinogenic, toxic or addictive effects of tobacco, as well as a diary Wigand kept while working there. Wigand, says Moore, has "wanted to tell the truth, and so far the people who were going to help him do it have folded." The trial could start by next summer in a Jackson County courthouse.

--Reported by Michael Riley/Louisville

With reporting by MICHAEL RILEY/LOUISVILLE