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Talk of the Bay
He's not about to end his fight against 'evil' cigarettes
By WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE
Published August 21, 2006
Expect to see Big Tobacco's No. 1 nemesis in the Tampa Bay area back in the courtroom soon enough. That would be St. Petersburg lawyer Howard Acosta, the nonsmoker who decided years ago that smoking is an evil he must work to stop. A recent Florida Supreme Court ruling upholding the reversal of a $145-billion punitive damage verdict for 700,000 ailing smokers said cigarette manufacturers are negligent and their products cause 16 major diseases. That negligence finding makes suing Big Tobacco easier and opened the door to a new wave of litigation. Acosta estimates 50,000 lawsuits around the state could be filed. He may file well more than 1,000. Acosta, who has filed more cigarette lawsuits than almost any lawyer in the nation, has a simple justification for his continuing crusade against Big Tobacco: "Cigarettes are too evil to be set free." One Big Tobacco lawyer, after facing Acosta in court, said he admired the man's persistence but denied tobacco was evil. Acosta tried smoking once when he was a kid. He turned green. His wife, Diane, hid her smoking habit after their marriage but quit after her husband came home early and found a cigarette in the toilet. That was his real first tobacco win.
[Last modified August 21, 2006, 06:23:40]
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