HOUSTON -- (AP) -- Flamboyant lawyer John O'Quinn, who won billions in verdicts against makers of breast implants, pharmaceuticals and tobacco products, died Thursday in a traffic wreck. He was 68.

O'Quinn and a passenger were killed when police say the sport-utility vehicle he was driving skidded across the median of a rain-slicked parkway just outside downtown Houston, went airborne and slammed into a tree.

His law firm said O'Quinn's passenger, Johnny Cutliff, 56, was the attorney's personal assistant.

Police said neither O'Quinn nor the passenger was wearing a seat belt.

BIG EGO

The 6-foot-4 O'Quinn, one of Houston's best-known trial attorneys, was known as a Texas-sized lawyer with a Texas-sized ego and a wallet to match, lavishly spending on himself, philanthropic causes and Democratic campaigns.

O'Quinn made his money and his reputation taking on wealthy corporations. He was one of five lawyers who shared a $3.3 billion fee for helping the state of Texas settle its lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

His first big win came in 1986, when a jury found Monsanto negligently exposed an employee to benzene at a Houston-area plant and ordered the company to pay $100 million. The award was later vacated and the case settled out of court, but O'Quinn's fame was cemented.

IMPLANT CASES

By 1992, he began a long, profitable run of silicone breast-implant lawsuits with a $25 million verdict against Bristol-Myers Squibb. O'Quinn said he took in $3 billion from more than 3,000 implant cases between 1992 and 2000. In 1995, Dow Corning, an implant manufacturer, cited his lawsuits as reasons for its bankruptcy filing.

In 2004, O'Quinn won a $1 billion verdict in a Texas case involving Pondimin, part of the now-banned weight-loss combination of fen-phen.