TOBACCO BLUES

ONE NIGHT A FEW MONTHS AGO, Carl Alfarano returned to his Westchester, New York, home after work to discover that he had just missed a visit from two private detectives. They told his wife they wanted his help with a "personality sketch" of Alfarano's old friend Jeffrey Wigand. The pair claimed they had come in person only because they did not have Alfarano's telephone number--something Alfarano insists is not true. "I found it rather unnerving," says Alfarano, who worked with Wigand at two medical-device companies in the 1980s and who gave the men no information. But when he learned about the...