Burn and Crash

He usually woke up a little before noon, sometimes hungover. He'd tumble out of bed and pull on a wrinkled white T-shirt and baggy blue jeans. Breakfast was a Diet Coke sheathed in a coozie. He'd head down the front porch steps and past the chain-link fence toward his new Kia Optima.

Chris Reiter rented a house near Priscilla's on 43rd Street and Rainbow. He worked on the second floor of the Congress Building at 36th and Broadway. The drive lasted less than five minutes -- about the time it took to smoke a cigarette.

The Congress Building was a drab place with low ceilings, few windows and dingy, gray-carpeted floors. Reiter was usually the first to arrive at the office, where he was greeted by company banners and fake palm trees with torn fronds. A fish tank gurgled in the corner. Cobalt shot glasses were stacked in columns, and lighters littered the coffee table. White fuzzy dice hung above Reiter's computer, onto which he'd downloaded burlesque wallpaper. People could smoke in the office; it smelled like a run-down casino.

Reiter worked for the local branch of Group III Promotions, a Chicago-based public-relations firm. As a "program manager," he carried out a contract the company had signed with the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company to promote Camel cigarettes in local bars.

Reiter says he had two sides: Corporate Chris and Party Chris.

Corporate Chris was running a $130,000 marketing campaign. He knew the industry and the costs associated with supplying his goods and services to customers. In March, he exceeded his goals by 136 percent and had his best quarter ever.

Party Chris had six piercings: one in each ear, one in his tongue, a ring in his lip and one through each nipple. A swirl of sea creatures and a mermaid crested in a wave tattooed from elbow to shoulder on his left arm. Waiting to be colored on his right arm was a mermaid holding a baby and sitting on an anchor. He'd seen mothers yank their kids away when he passed them at the mall.

The best part about Reiter's job was that the image he sold was simply a reflection of himself. The message was simple: Camel is young. Camel is hip. Camel is cool.

Every week, R.J. Reynolds comped Reiter a carton of Camel Ultra Lights. Sometimes he smoked more than a pack a day -- call it professional drive. After he factored in all the perks, Reiter, a high school graduate, was making $45,000 a year.

By this spring, the campaign had made him a nightlife kingpin. Bouncers waved his cover charges. Bartenders poured him free drinks. Girls knew his name.

"If you can market a product that kills people," he says, "you can sell anything."

Cigarette companies had conquered nightclubs by the time Saturday Night Fever sparked the disco craze.

In 1971, the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act banned cigarette ads from TV and radio. In response, Philip Morris (Marlboro, Parliament, Virginia Slims, Benson and Hedges, and Basic), R.J. Reynolds (Camel, Winston, Salem, and Doral) and other cigarette manufacturers took their products directly to the people.

They marketed different brands to different consumers. Experts say that bar promotions for Virginia Slims tried to attract African-American women; Brown and Williamson's Kool sought African-American males. The entire market for Newport, a cigarette produced by Lorillard, was created by bar sampling -- promos at six Long Island nightclubs in the mid-'70s doubled the number of Newport smokers in the area.

In the '80s, big tobacco companies arrived in force at spring break destinations. In Florida, they "sponsored" bars in Fort Lauderdale and Daytona Beach and hung banners at pool parties. They also showed up at ski resorts in Aspen, Colorado.

The idea was to corner the college crowd. Camel's mystique had faded with the '50s, and Winston had been dethroned by Marlboro around 1970. "The only people smoking Camel in the '70s were the guys in the VA hospital with their limbs lopped off," says Michael Cummings, who is chairman of health behavior at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. Cummings is a leading expert witness against cigarette makers in lawsuits involving tobacco use, policy, packaging and control.

Bars offered smoker-friendly environments with specific target groups. "You can basically go out and take over a bar with your image and then use image equity to do other advertising on billboards, transit and print," Cummings explains.

R.J. Reynolds debuted its idea for "Camel Clubs" in Chicago in 1996. In a grassroots distribution scheme to get smokers to switch brands, the company sponsored live musicians and DJs at nightclubs. By 1998, a Camel spokeswoman says, Camel Clubs were up and running in Kansas City. The first bars to sign up included Atlantis (now the XO Club), the Hurricane and a few other Westport clubs.

But the next year, having been sued by the attorneys general of 46 states, seven big tobacco companies signed the Master Settlement Agreement. It forced them to pay states $206 billion over 25 years and further regulated their marketing tactics. In addition to its $1.5 billion anti-smoking campaign, the Master Settlement Agreement banned cartoon characters in advertising, outdoor advertising for cigarettes and brand-name sponsorships of events with significant youth audiences.