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RJR and the Bowman Gray family(History of RJ Reynolds Tobacco)Early HistoryRJ Reynolds Tobacco Company was one of the original competitive companies formed by the judicial split up of the old tobacco trust (monopoly) which operated in the 1890s and early 1900s. For many years the company was headed by RJ Reynolds himself, but it gradually changed and became an old Southern family concern controlled by various lines of the family, and based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
In 1921, following World War I, Reynolds came under the control of the Gray family then headed by Bowman Gray I (aka Sr.). He made the company's fortune by introducing a pre-rolled American cigarette at a time when Egyptian tobacco was considered the best available. The cigarettes were sold under the "Camel " brand using Egyptian symbolism on the packet even though only a fraction of the tobacco actually came from the Middle East. He was also the first to introduce mass advertising and aggressive marketing techniques, and by the time he died of a heart attack in 1935 the company was spending $200 million a year on advertising Camels alone. 
Bowman Gray II (aka Jr.) took over the company a decade after World War II (He only became president in 1957). By then it was the top American cigarette company, but his tenure came at the time the smoking-health (S&H) controversy was just getting underway. Bowman Jr. lacked the entrepreneurial abilities of his father, and, during his time at the head of the company, Philip Morris (denigrated by the Southerners as an "upstart New York firm run by Jews" ) took the lead both in sales and in organising the combined industry's political and public-relations counter-measures to growing anti-smoking activism. More than the managers of Philip Morris, Bowman Gray II became increasingly concerned about the health issues and began to move RJR into other businesses, both to decrease its reliance on cigarette sales and also to utilize the extraordinary profits generated by cigarettes. [Back in 1963 the RJR Tobacco company had had revenues of $117 million, while 20 years later it was a conglomerate with $14 billion in annual revenues.] Bowman Gray Jr died in 1969 without designating an established successor or family succession path — which left Reynolds subject to constant managerial in-fighting and it became vulnerable to take-overs. These new managers were not confirmed tobacco executives like the members of the Bowman Gray family, so they focussed on the non-tobacco business, acquiring Del Monte (canned fruit) and Nabisco (biscuits etc.) and venturing into quite alien industries, including Sea-Land, the world's largest container shipping and transport company (1969) and Burmah Oil (in 1976). The Junk-bond buyoutRoss Johnson, the CEO of Nabisco, eventually took control of the combined entity, and in 1988 he tried to organise an executive buyout of the company. RJR Nabisco (as it was then known) then became caught up in a complex leverage buyout by junk-bond dealers, Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts (KKR) who split up the conglomerate and sold off constituent parts to finance their junk-bond purchase.This left the tobacco company loaded with debt to the point where it couldn't expand internationally. So effectively it began to drop out of international competition after about 1995, leaving most of the running to Philip Morris and British-American Tobacco. At about this time the company came under attack again from corporate raider Bennett LeBow who had purchased the smallest of the six US tobacco companies Liggett & Myers in 1986. He wanted to merge Reynolds with his own smaller L&M operation, then spin off Nabisco under his own control. LeBow was only really interested in the non-tobacco businesses, and he thought that this reverse-acquisition of the two tobacco companies would be highly profitable.
Post-Master Settlement AgreementIn the late-1990s the European Union filed a lawsuit in a US Federal District Court alleging that RJR Nabisco had engaged in global money laundering for various mafia and organized crime groups. The statement of claims says:"The RJR DEFENDANTS have engaged in and facilitated organized crime by laundering the proceeds of narcotics trafficking and other crimes. The Gray familyRJ Reynolds Tobacco owed much of its early success to a large network of family members in influential position, and to its long associations with the commercial/conservative faction of the Republican Party, Prominent recent members of the Gray family were: Second Generation
Third Generation
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