Merrell Williams, Who Gave (Or Sold) Tobacco Documents to Scruggs, Dies at 72

This photo of Williams appeared in Williams’ New York Times obituary.

Merrell Williams died on Nov. 18 in Ocean Springs, Miss. He was 72. 

Longtime Oxford folks may remember Abbie’s Irish Rose, one of the first bars in Oxford , that opened in what had been the lobby of the Henry Hotel, later renamed the Abbey (because it had windows from a prior occupant of that space, the Methodist Church), in the mid-70s.

Its owner, Merrell Williams, came to town driving a Bentley and with a lot of stuff that was the remnants of an English pub. He set it all up and opened, I think in the Summer of 1975. I don’t think he lasted a year there, the bar closing down (later to reopen, one of a long sequence of ends/beginnings at that location), and he moved on. Williams wasn’t heard of thereafter…

Dickie Scruggs takes the perp walk.

Until the release of stolen tobacco documents erupted on the scene. I can’t remember when it dawned on me that this Merrill Williams was that Merrill Williams; it was certainly by the time Micheal Orey published Assuming the Risk, his account of the tobacco cases, and did a reading in Oxford where he brought up Williams’ tale.

A central part of that story was Dickie Scruggs’s acquisition of the tobacco documents, and the (no-showing-up required) job, house and sailboat Scruggs gave Williams.

Others may remember that Williams would occasionally arrive and begin commenting on the old Folo blog with regard to one Scruggs-related matter or another.

In his New York Times obituary, after noting that the theft of the documents was a central part of the tobacco litigation, the Times notes:

“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. …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. …

Mr. Williams started smuggling documents out of the law firm around Christmas 1988, stuffing them in an exercise girdle he wore under loose clothing. … 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.”

Coutesy of Tom Freeland’s North Mississippi Commentator