Schubert, the state Agriculture Department's lead plant disease expert, had confidential papers relating to the company's Benlate experiments. Dupont wanted them back, and got them.

DuPont has zealously sought to shield information about its fungicide through protective orders and confidentiality agreements that even seasoned lawyers find extraordinary.

"It's the damndest thing you ever saw. DuPont settles out of court and sends a truck to take all the documents away," said David Galloway, a Plant City attorney who represents growers with Benlate crop damage claims.

The company says confidentiality is vital to protect its legal and business interests. But state officials, growers and judges in two states say DuPont has abused its privilege by withholding information that casts Benlate in less than flattering light.

DuPont's secrecy also has served to keep important information sealed and inaccessible to agencies investigating possible health effects of the fungicide, officials said.

'DuPont has not been forthright on any front from the beginning," said Agriculture Commissioner Bob Crawford, whose agency has headed the statewide inquiry into plant damage and health complaints.

In a 1993 letter to Dupont CEO Edgar Woolard, Crawford complained that 23 boxes of documents the company did turn over to the state "are in no apparent logical order" and that "much of the data... are not in usable form."

Lawyers suing the company say records located at Dupont's multimillion-document depository in Wilmington, Del., are no less difficult to sort out.

"They scramble them up like a big salad," said James Ferraro, a Dade County attorney who represents a 5-year-old boy born without eyes.

DuPont vigorously denies engaging in improper conduct and cites 3 million pages of documents it has produced for various court proceedings

It has positioned itself as an "exemplary corporate citizen," sympathetic to the growers, unwaivering in the search of the agent of widespread crop destruction, which Dupont calls "The Unknown."

But a flood of once-secret documents that has entered the public domain conflicts with some of the company's representations about its product and research.

One of the most closely guarded DuPont documents - known as Path Forward - was unsealed by a judge in Hawaii earlier this year.

Created in March 1992, within days of Crawford's call for a probe into Benlat-related health complaints, Path Forward is a plan for dealing with the growing financial and public relations disaster in the wake of the Benlate 50 DF recall.

Path Forward recommends "creative communications approaches." It outlines a plan to build alliances with regulators and influence public officials in Florida, where some 1,200 crop damage claims and concern over possible human health effects fueled the Benlate controversy.

Among the suggested strategies:
-- Stay close to human health regulators.

-- Make Agriculture Commissioner Crawford look good. ("It's in Crawford's interest to shut this down.")
-- Support Crawford's legislative agenda.

-- put pressure on the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (WAS), which was conducting Benlate research, "via legislators."

-- Deliver key messages to key audiences - growers, regulators and UF researchers.

By 1995, Crawford's civil case charging DuPont with selling an adulterated and misbranded product had collapsed, the university had all but stopped its research and Dupont had delivered one key message outlined in Path Forward: "No contaminant in product."

But there were traces of other pesticides in the product. And documents indicate that Dupont knew it as early as the summer of 1990 - seven months before it pulled Benlate DF off the market.

Russian roulette: When Leesburg grower Frank Fuzzell summoned DuPont representatives to his dying nursery in August 1990, he was pretty sure Benlate DF was to blame, he said.

The plant symptoms - stunting, root damage, strange growth patterns and an unusual "greening" in some plants - mirrored effects the nurseryman had seen in 1989, the first time Benlate DE was the subject of a recall.

DuPont said some batches of the 1989 fungicide were contaminated with a weed-killer called atrazine. The company paid Fuzzell and other growers for the damage.

But when Dupont scientists analyzed the Benlate that Fuzzell provided in 1990, they found no atrazine. According to an internal memorandum they did find "significant levels" of two other fungicides - chlorothalonil and flusilazole, which is not registered for use in the United States.

Flusi1azole, when drenched into soil in high enough amounts, could cause "the 'greening' effect.,. distortions of the foliage... and/or reduction in the plant's growth," wrote one Dupont scientist.

Fuzzell's complaint was followed by another in North Carolina, a circumstance that spurred one frustrated DuPont registration specialist to dash off a memo about product contamination.

"We jump from atrazine to flusilazole to "What is next?" wrote Ronald Hamlen in an August 1990 memorandum. "We have very limited biological data to allow any meaningful interpretation as to the safety of our products... I feel it is a little like playing Russian roulette."

DuPont informed Fuzzell that Benlate was not the cause of his plant problems.

Meanwhile the company continued its efforts to get flusilazole registered for use on food crops in this country. The registration process required that DuPont notify the federal Environmental Protection Agency of any known adverse effects of the product.

In December 1990, DUPont advised the agency that preliminary results of a two-year feeding study indicated that the fungicide caused liver and bladder tumors in laboratory rats.

DuPont did not inform the EPA that flusilazole had been detected in some batches of Benlate DF just four months before. Or that the company had told its formulator to put it there.

The company says it does not consider the presence of flusilazole to be contamination because the chemical was reported at levels below federal guidelines of 500 parts per million. Internal memorandums say that DuPont authorized Terra International, the company it contracted to make Benlate, to add flusilazole to Benlate DF at levels as high as 1,000 parts per million.

When DuPont did advise the state Department of Agriculture and EPA after the March 1991 recall that chlorothalonil and flusilazole had been detected, the company said the chemicals were present in "trace" amounts and were not responsible for plant damage.

Regulators were not told of Hamlen's calculations that one of the lowest levels of flusilazole based Nustar the company reported - 42 parts per million - was six times more than the level at which DuPont researchers had observed plant damage when used as a soil drench.

The highest level of Nustar DuPont reported was 422 parts per million.

Enemies: By the summer of 1991, Dupont's scientists weren't the only ones trying to find the cause of massive damage to Benlate-treated plants in 40 states.

Independent consultants and umversity researchers also went to work to identify "The Unknown".

In florida, the state hardest hit by the scourge, the effort was led by R. Hilton Biggs, a University of Florida biochemist who theorized that a combination of factors - including Benlate breakdown products, contaminants and climate - contributed to the weird array of plant effects reported by growers.

One of the culprits, he believed, was n-butyl isocyanate (BIC), a toxic gas produced when Benlate breaks down in the environment~

The UF researcher noted that BIC also was known to cause sometimes severe respiratory problems in sensitive individuals.

Biggs, a plant man, was drifting into the health realm.

"You couldn't avoid it," he said. "BIC is in the health realm."

Biggs was a member of the UF faculty for 35 years before, he Said,I chose to retire in disgust" when his Beniate research funding was cut off in 1993. He pressured the university to shut down his research.

In 1992-93, DUPont was a member of The President's Academy at UF, an honorary listing of individuals and companies who made major foundation gifts of at least $500,000 in cash or a pledge of at least $1.5 million.

DuPont says contributions to any academic institutions "have been and always will be devoid of any attempt" to influence university politics.

The company also says it never pressured the university "via legislators" as suggested in the Path Forward document.

Biggs had his supporters.

"He's a good scientist. They've tried to make him look like a quack or something," said Carl Whitcomb, a crop consultant who has testified against DuPont in Benlate cases in a half dozen states.

In a deposition earlier this year, both Whitcomb and Biggs were identified by DuPont public affairs consultant Pat Getter as subjects of a Path Forward initiative directed at scientists the company considered adversaries.

Under the heading "Experts," the Path Forward plan recommends:
-- Cut them off publicly.

-- Don't share information with them.

-- Get intelligence on them so we're not blind-sided.

-- Know your enemies.

Getter said last week that the Path Forward document, which was distributed to about a dozen scientists, lawyers and others in the company, was the result of a brainstorming session. "That doesn't mean that any or all of it got implemented," she said. "Some of it probably did. I'm certain that there's a whole lot that didn't."

For whatever reason, Benlate research in the U.S. has come to a screeching halt, said Whitcomb.

"Other than two or three folks at the University of Hawaii, there is no one at an agricultural college in this country working on this problem," he said.

Political science: In dealing with the unprecedented fungicide recall, DuPont initially wrote big checks to settle plant damage claims. But the company also was working to minimize potential liability.

A September 1991 letter written by Orlando attorney Thomas Burke, who DuPont hired to oversee its Benlate problems, lays the foundation for what was to become a two-front war that the company would wage in laboratories and courtrooms across the country.

"Scientifically, DuPont can maintain that it continues to search for a cause and that it will continue to do so as long as it appears necessary to address the issues raised by customers and regulators. At some point, I would expect that it will no longer be an issue, but am unable to predict when that may occur," Burke recommended to Dupont's in-house counsel.

"In the litigation mode, we will not be forced into admitting that we have found a cause and it is our fault. It is a much better litigation position to state that we have looked, are looking, and will continue to look but have had no success, leaving the issue unresolved than it is to have to admit that we have isolated the mechanism of injury," Burke wrote.

Five months later, DuPont research manager Bruce Hadley wrote a memorandum telling company scientists that "by your involvement in this research, you are essentially working for Tom Burke, not DUPont, in support of claims and litigation."

DuPont says Burke's 'only actual suggestion was 'I recommend the basic science effort continue at some level,' ' and that attorneys did not direct or influence its scientists' work "in any way.

Publicly the company has maintained that it mobilized its scientific resources to identify "The Unknown."

"The magnitude of this research effort is unprecedented in the agricultural chemical industry," Dupont Vice President William Kirk said in November 1992, when the company announced that its scientists had absolved Benlate of any role in adverse plant or human health effects.

But various documents - culled from Dupont and government files - say that some Benlate samples used for experiments were prescreened for contaminants, Benlate-treated topsoil at some Dupont test sites was removed and replaced before experiments were held and some of the plant species selected for experiments were described by one state scientist as "bulletproof"

Judge Kevin Chang, who presided over a Benlate liability case in Hawaii, also called DuPont's science into question.

In a 165-page finding of fact, Chang concluded in March that:
-- Duponts conduct "is suggestive of test bias."

-- Company scientists reported directly to Dupont's legal department and outside legal counsel.

-- Members of the 'independent" panel of scientists DuPont used to validate its research had signed consulting agreements with Burke's law firm "to promote the effective legal representation of Dupont."

-- The reliability of expert opinions based on Dupont's Florida and Hawaii field tests was open to question."

-- The testimony of an expert the company hired to conduct research "for the purpose of Duponts litigation effort... is not worthy of belief."

-- The reliability of the growers paid experts "is also open to question and is unsettled in this case."

-- The only credible witness in the case was a University of Hawaii researcher who was not paid and testified for the growers that Benlate caused plant damage, Chang said.

In January, another Hawaiian judge fined DuPont $1 .5 million for withholding damaging information from growers' attorneys in a crop damage lawsuit. DuPont has filed an appeal.

Eight months later, a federal judge who presided over a Benlate liability suit filed in 1993 in Columbus, Ga., upped the ante, slapping DuPont with a record $115 million fine in a court ruling that found fraud and suppression of evidence.

"This Court had found Dupont's conduct to be the most serious abuse in its years on the bench and the most serious abuse reflected in the legal precedents," wrote U.S. District Judge J. Robert Elliott in a 79-page ruling that DuPont also is appeallng.

The company vigorously denies engaging in any type of improper conduct. "Underlying the dispute is science and our science is sound," Getter said.

A federal grand jury in Georgia is currently investigating whether Dupont illegally withheld test data in the Columbus trial.

In September, Florida's agriculture department failed to prove its case that Dupont had violated state law by selling an adulterated and misbranded product.

That ruling, says Dupont,"lays to resat any doubt" about the company's testing or the integrity of its product.

As for the health issue, said Getter, "There is no credible science to support health effect allegations regarding Benlate. Period."

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