Wednesday, February 25th, 2015 — After more than two decades of a legal roller-coaster that at one point had the tobacco industry hit with $145 billion in damages, hundreds of federal lawsuits in Florida are close to being settled after three tobacco giants reached a deal to pay a total of $100 million. In May 1994, a Florida man named Howard Engle filed a class-action suit against the country’s largest tobacco companies on behalf of smokers in the state who alleged that cigarette makers had misled consumers about the dangers of their products.