In 1953, a debonair Perry Como - advertising he was a two-pack-a-day smoker - helped Chesterfield spread the message that "a medical specialist" found no nose, throat, or sinus problems among people smoking its brand for 10 years.

That same year, executives of the major tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel in New York with the public-relations firm of Hill & Knowlton to devise a strategy to raise doubts about the growing evidence that smoking was linked to serious medical problems. As a result of the meeting, the industry said it would conduct "independent research."

Starting tomorrow, the Department of Justice will sue the tobacco industry under civil RICO statutes, seeking the largest damages award ever for a US civil suit. The Justice Department will use racketeering charges - which are usually brought against organized crime - to allege that tobacco companies misled the public over the past 50 years. And it will ask a federal judge in Washington to order the industry to pay back $280 billion in past profits - an amount that the industry says would drive it into bankruptcy and that is slightly more than the industry agreed to pay states in their 1998 settlement with attorneys general.

If the Department of Justice is successful, the suit could also result in new restrictions on the behavior of the industry, potentially changing how tobacco is produced, sold, and marketed.

"These other equitable remedies that the court has available to it are very important because they directly address the fundamental behavior of the tobacco industry that is at issue," says William Corr, executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "Through those remedies we believe that thousands and millions of lives will be saved."

The tobacco industry, for its part, calls the suit "ill-founded." It argues that the industry has already changed its stripes, now calling cigarettes dangerous and addictive.

Their own websites, for example, have links to organizations that provide information on quitting. And after the state settlement, the industry pulled ads from many youth- oriented magazines, stopped distributing free T-shirts and hats, and eliminated some sponsorships.

It even admits that secondhand smoke is dangerous. "If you look at the injunctive relief and stack it up against the Master Settlement Agreement [the 1998 state settlement], all the issues were taken care of," says Mike Pfeil, vice president of corporate communications at Altria, the parent of Philip Morris, the nation's largest tobacco company.

The new suit, which has taken five years to get to court, almost didn't happen after President Bush was elected. Initially, the administration tried to withhold funds from the Department of Justice to pursue the case. However, Attorney General John Ashcroft changed his mind, and the lawsuit continued.

"It was a unanimous decision by the lawyers who looked at it," says William Schultz, former US deputy attorney general and part of the legal team that filed the lawsuit in 1999.

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