Too Big to Fail [87]
Returning to New York after Korea, Greenberg talked his way into a job as $75-a-week insurance underwriting trainee with Continental Casualty, where he quickly rose to become the firm’s assistant vice president in charge of accident and health insurance. In 1960, Cornelius Vander Starr, the founder of what would become AIG, recruited Greenberg to join his company.
A onetime soda-fountain operator in Fort Bragg, California, C. V. Starr was one of the prototypical restless Americans of the early twentieth century, the kind who made their names as wildcatters, inventors, and entrepreneurs. After trying his hand at real estate, he entered the insurance business and at the age of twenty-seven sailed to Shanghai to sell policies. There he discovered a market that was dominated by British insurance companies, but they sold only to Western firms and expatriates; Starr built his business selling policies to the Chinese themselves. Forced out of China after the communist takeover in 1948, Starr expanded elsewhere in Asia. With the help of a friend in the military by the name of General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the occupying force in Japan after the war, Starr secured a deal to provide insurance to the American military for several years. Before the country opened up its insurance market to foreign underwriters, AIG Japan would become the company’s largest overseas property-casualty business.
By 1968, Starr was seventy-six and ailing, and with an oxygen tank and vials of pills never far from his side, he turned to Greenberg to crack the American market, naming him president and Gordon B. Tweedy chairman. Greenberg wasted no time in making it clear who was going to be taking the lead. At a meeting soon after his appointment, he and Tweedy were on opposite sides of an argument when Tweedy stood up and began loudly pressing his point. “Sit down, Gordon, and shut up,” Greenberg told him. “I’m in charge now.” Starr, whose bronze bust still greets visitors to AIG’s art deco headquarters, died that December. The following year, AIG went public, and Greenberg became CEO. (Tweedy left soon afterward.)
Under Greenberg, AIG grew rapidly and became increasingly profitable through expansion and acquisitions, doing business in 130 countries and diversifying into aircraft leasing and life insurance. Greenberg himself became the very model of an imperial CEO—adored by shareholders, feared by employees, and a cipher to everyone outside the company. Despite his slight build, he had an intimidating presence. He drove himself relentlessly, eating nothing but fish and steamed vegetables every day for lunch, and regularly working out on a StairMaster or playing tennis. He showed little affection for anyone, with the exception of his wife, Corinne, and his Maltese, Snowball. Within AIG he was famous for his short fuse and his ceaseless drive to know everything that was happening inside the company—his company. He was rumored to have hired former CIA agents, and security men seemed to be posted everywhere at headquarters.
To the outside world the biggest AIG drama was Greenberg’s attempt to secure a dynasty; what he created, instead, was a blood feud among insurance royalty.
Jeffrey Greenberg, his son, a graduate of Brown and Georgetown Law, had been groomed to succeed Hank. But in 1995, after a series of clashes with his father, Jeffrey left AIG, where he had worked for seventeen years. Two weeks earlier, his younger brother, Evan, had been promoted to executive vice president, his third promotion in less than sixteen months, establishing him as a rival to Jeffrey. With the departure of his brother, Evan, a former hippie who for many years had shown no interest in following his father