And Give Up Showbiz?: How Fred Levin Beat Big Tobacco, Avoided Two Murder Prosecutions, Became a Chief of Ghana, Earned Boxing Manager of the Year, and Transformed American Law

In the early ‘90s, Big Tobacco was making a killing. There was no entity more powerful, and national tobacco-related deaths numbered in the hundreds of thousands each year. The economic loss from smoking-related illnesses was billions of dollars. And yet, Big Tobacco had never paid a nickel in court. Until one trial lawyer discovered he could revise part of a Medicaid law so that it would enable Florida to sue Big Tobacco to reimburse the state for health care costs. The end result? Hundreds of thousands of American lives have been, and will continue to be, saved because one lawyer found a loophole and ran with it. Meet Fred Levin. Called by his son a philanthropist and a cockroach, Fred Levin is no clean-cut lawyer pulled from the pages of a John Grisham novel.