Inside Alec Baldwin’s Crusade to Take Down a Nobel Prize-Winning Lab

This article is adapted from Robert P. Crease’s book The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory and it originally appeared in The MIT Press Reader.

In the summer of 1997, an environmental activist and sport fishing boat captain named Bill Smith called actor Alec Baldwin. He wanted to meet him at a diner in Amagansett, where Baldwin had a house, to talk about the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory.

An intimidating presence—burly, loud, and swaggering, with a ponytail and facial stubble—Smith was absolutely convinced that Brookhaven was not only contaminating the Peconic River but that “these bastards are killing people on Long Island and they’re getting away with it.”

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