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.
