Greenberg & Sons
AIG CEO HANK GREENBERG is a tough boss and a tough dad. Two of his sons left his company in anger. If only the story had ended there.
By DEVIN LEONARD

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Donald Trump wouldn't like the insurance business much. It's not a place for CEOs who want to be celebrities. Consider the cruel trick that fate has played on Robert Benmosche, CEO of MetLife. MetLife's annual revenues--$36 billion--are larger than those of Microsoft. Yet while the entire world knows Bill Gates, hardly anybody outside the insurance industry could name MetLife's CEO. The only consolation is that the chief executives of Allstate and Chubb also toil in relative obscurity.

Aside from Warren Buffett, who is better known as an investor than as an insurance company chief, the only star in the business is Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, CEO of AIG. The 79-year-old Greenberg is the Cal Ripken Jr. of the corporate world. He has been CEO of AIG for 37 years. During that time the company's market value has soared from $300 million to $173 billion. Its earnings per share have grown at a compound annual rate of 17%. Yet, unlike the former Baltimore Orioles shortstop, Greenberg refuses to leave the playing field. He dines on fish and steamed vegetables. He keeps a StairMaster on the corporate jet so that he doesn't miss a workout. Greenberg is fond of pointing out that his grandmother lived long enough to celebrate her 105th birthday. So why shouldn't he?

Perhaps it's not surprising that a CEO intent on frustrating death itself would set into motion one of the great oedipal dramas of the corporate world. Greenberg wasn't satisfied with running the largest American insurance company; he also wanted to create a dynasty. He groomed his two elder sons--Jeffrey, a graduate of Brown University and Georgetown University Law Center, and Evan, a former hippie with only a high school diploma--to be his potential successors at AIG. There was little chance that this would end in anything but tears. Sure enough, Hank would not let go of AIG, so first Jeffrey and then Evan departed in bitterness.

If Hank and his sons were members of a typical family, the tragedy might have ended there, making redemption possible. But the Greenbergs were anything but typical. Evan and Jeffrey were still determined to prove themselves to their father, so they took jobs at other companies, each of which had a complicated relationship with AIG. In 1999, Jeffrey was named CEO of the world's largest insurance broker, Marsh & McLennan, which had a virtual stranglehold on AIG because it represented the bulk of AIG's corporate clients. Four years later Evan was made CEO of ACE Ltd., a Bermuda-based insurer and a haven for former AIG executives bent on taking business from their ex-employer. Oddly enough, it didn't seem strange to many people in their industry that Hank and his sons now sat atop three companies with combined annual revenues of $103 billion. It is hard to imagine that happening in, say, the software business. But expectations were different in the insurance world, where the Greenbergs were the closest thing to a royal family.

Then the industry was shaken by an incredible scandal, and the Greenbergs were at its epicenter. On Oct. 14, 2004, New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer sued Marsh & McLennan, accusing the company of defrauding its customers by steering business to insurers--including AIG, ACE, Hartford Financial Services, and Munich-American Risk Partners--that allegedly paid the broker special commissions tantamount to kickbacks. The suit tarnished the entire insurance industry, but the three companies run by Hank and his sons were singled out for special punishment. Of all the companies that Spitzer subpoenaed, only Marsh & McLennan, AIG, ACE, and one other (Zurich American Insurance) have had employees plead guilty to crimes. Shares of the three companies plummeted, wiping out $44 billion in stock market value in seven trading days. Marsh laid off 3,000 employees, and Jeffrey Greenberg stepped down as CEO. On Jan. 31, Marsh apologized for its "shameful" acts and agreed to pay $850 million in restitution to its victimized clients.

Hank, Jeffrey, 53, and Evan Greenberg, 50, declined to speak to FORTUNE. Hank has said publicly that nobody in senior management at AIG was aware of any misdeeds at the company. An attorney for Jeffrey told FORTUNE that his client too was in the dark. Spitzer has yet to conclude his investigation. One thing is clear already, though: Hank Greenberg, a true American success story, put enormous pressure on his two elder sons to live up to the standard he set as a pitiless, shrewd, obsessive businessman. Whether on the tennis court, at the dinner table, or on the ski slopes, he cultivated a hypercompetitive family spirit. When he drew the boys into the business he ruled, he reaped the consequences.

"I don't know why you talk about my being tough," protests Hank Greenberg. "I thought I was a pussycat. You'll ruin my reputation."

It's a November afternoon, and Greenberg is speaking to a roomful of his colleagues at the New York Palace Hotel in Manhattan. He has just been introduced as the insurance industry's "toughest brass-knuckles competitor." Now Greenberg smirks. He doesn't have any problem with people talking about his sharp edges. The truth is, he loves it.

The CEO of AIG exudes toughness. He has the weathered countenance of a man about to enter his ninth decade, but all that StairMaster climbing has paid off. From the neck down, Greenberg is trim and muscular; it's almost as if his head has been grafted onto the body of someone decades younger.

He proceeds to scold the executives in the room for spending this morning wringing their hands over the downward spiral of prices after three years of robust growth. "We talk all the time about how this cycle is going to be different from the last cycle," says Greenberg. "But whether rates are going up, down, or sideways, human behavior doesn't change. Experienced companies will come through any cycle well. The inexperienced ones, the ones that believe they are smarter than the rest, will fill the empty spots in the graveyard."

As if he hasn't been morbid enough already, Greenberg warns his peers that if they are selling insurance to generate cash for investment purposes instead of making a profit on the policies they write, "you are dead. It's only a question of when you are going to lay down."

You might expect the CEO of AIG to be a trifle more magnanimous. AIG isn't just America's largest insurance company; it's the tenth-largest company in the U.S., with $81 billion in revenues. By any measure Greenberg has made it. Yet he still has to show everybody what a hard case he is.

Can you imagine having this man as your father? Nikki Finke, a Los Angeles journalist who was married to Jeffrey Greenberg in the '80s, recalls how harshly the CEO treated his oldest son. "When Jeff would talk about problems at school, his father would say, 'You think those are problems? That's nothing! You should see what I go through. I can't believe you are complaining,'" says Finke. "If Jeff had a problem at work, his father would say, 'That's nothing!'"

In many ways, Hank Greenberg is a classic first-generation entrepreneur. He came from nothing, and he has spent the balance of his life working like a man possessed. His father, who owned a candy store on New York City's Lower East Side, died when Hank was 5 years old. His mother remarried; her second husband was a dairy farmer who lived in upstate New York. Hank grew up milking cows before dawn and trapping muskrats and mink. He enlisted in the Army in 1942, when he was 17, using a fake birth certificate. He landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day and served in the infantry unit that liberated Dachau. Later Greenberg was recalled to fight in the Korean war, during which he was almost killed while fetching shrimp for a general's cocktail party. Between wars Hank barely stopped to catch his breath. He got his high school diploma, attended the University of Miami, and graduated from New York Law School.

Returning from Korea, Greenberg wasn't sure what to do with himself. On a whim, he wandered into the offices of Continental Casualty in lower Manhattan in 1953 and talked his way into the office of the personnel director. Greenberg thought the man was excessively rude, so he stormed into the office of a vice president and told him that Continental's personnel director was a "jerk." He was rewarded with a job as a $75-a-week underwriting trainee. Before the end of the decade, he was Continental's assistant vice president in charge of accident and health insurance.

In 1960, Greenberg was stolen away from Continental by one of the legendary eccentrics of his industry, Cornelius Vander Starr, founder of AIG. Like Greenberg, C.V. Starr was a former military man who had risen from humble roots. His mother ran a boarding house in Fort Bragg, Calif., from which she sold liquor to patrons of the lumber town's nearby bordellos. Starr, soft-spoken and painfully shy, blossomed into a cultured man who wore bow ties, collected art, and once underwrote a production of Madame Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera. He had a 400-acre retreat in Brewster, N.Y., called Morefar, with an 18-hole golf course. The links were adorned with pieces from Starr's sculpture collection.

AIG traces its roots back to a small insurance office that Starr opened in 1919 in Shanghai. There may have been other Westerners who sold insurance in the city, but Starr was the first to offer it to the Chinese themselves. He was so successful that he expanded his operations throughout Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.

Starr had a hard time getting a toehold in the U.S., however. In the 1950s he bought companies with large sales forces that sold personal insurance to U.S. citizens and small businesses. But they bled red ink. Finally, in 1962, Starr turned them over to Greenberg. Hank jettisoned the old model, got rid of the Willy Loman types, and turned the affiliates into companies that sold high-margin coverage to corporations through brokers like Marsh & McLennan.

Starr's heart began to fail--he was followed everywhere by a Chinese servant named Ling who bore an oxygen tank and an assortment of pills. Just before he died in 1968, Starr astonished many of his longtime executives by naming Greenberg his successor at a dramatic meeting in Bermuda. A year later AIG went public.

The company's new CEO thought of himself as a rebel in a stuffy industry. In 1978, FORTUNE marveled that AIG was a company that went in "for some of the hairiest risks imaginable." It sold kidnap and ransom coverage and earthquake and flood policies. It insured oil rigs and satellites. Greenberg spent much of his time circling the globe and cultivating important contracts. "One time we were talking about China, how all the various CEOs wanted to get in there," says Stan Galanski, a former AIG executive. "He said, 'I've been there 48 times in the last ten years. How many of them have been there more than once?' " As a result, Greenberg's international connections were so deep that he was offered the No. 2 position in the CIA by the Reagan administration. Greenberg declined. He was already in charge of a rather formidable operation. "We have come to view AIG as almost the equivalent of a sovereign corporate nation, with its own diplomatic ties, economy, and head of state," analysts at Paine Webber wrote in 2000. (If you want to go down a rabbit hole, read the outlandish conspiracy theories about AIG and the CIA that are available on the Internet.)

Greenberg--whom his employees referred to as MRG, his initials--ruled AIG from the 18th floor of AIG's art deco skyscraper near Wall Street. He kept the company shrouded in secrecy. (Until recently, Greenberg never hosted conference calls with analysts.) But investors didn't care. Greenberg was a skilled manager. He gave AIG executives plenty of leeway to be entrepreneurial and come up with new, innovative products. It worked because MRG persuaded everybody at AIG that nothing happened without his knowledge. "If a twig snaps in a Chinese forest, Hank Greenberg hears it," says one of his former executives. Greenberg maintained that illusion by refusing to let information filter up to him through his top executives. He would call the janitor if he thought that would get him the answer to an important question.

Greenberg became one of the most feared CEOs in America. He manufactured an atmosphere of constant crisis. He was a screamer. He was especially hard on those who showed signs of weakness. Once, Greenberg berated an AIG executive until he couldn't take it anymore. "You know?" the executive told his boss. "You are right." "I don't need you to tell me I'm right!" Greenberg replied.

"He was very loyal to people who were loyal to him," says Dennis Busti, the former president of AIG's American Home division. "But you had to take a beating once in a while."

Yet Greenberg's loyalty ended when employees left AIG. Too many of them, the CEO felt, didn't understand how much he had done for them. "Many times when you work closely with somebody, they begin to think they're you," Hank told former FORTUNE assistant managing editor Walter Guzzardi in a corporate history of AIG commissioned by the company but never published. "They believe they can do what you do better than you can. Maybe they can, but there haven't been many that have proved it yet. I don't mean that egotistically. I'm simply stating it as a fact. A great deal of the creativity and the motion around here comes from me and from this organization. After somebody leaves--well, we wait and see."

It was never clear where the boundary lay between Greenberg's professional and private lives. The Greenbergs had a country home in the exurbs of New York City, but it was close to Morefar, now an AIG retreat, and it wasn't unusual for MRG to summon executives from the golf course for impromptu meetings. The family's preferred ski resort in Stowe, Vt., was partly owned by an AIG affiliate. After a day of skiing, Hank would plunk himself down in his favorite chair, pick up the telephone, and yell at his employees in New York.

With AIG constantly on his mind, Hank never really relaxed with his family. He charged down the slopes with his children as if he were Jean-Claude Killy. He dueled with them on the tennis court as if they were in the finals at Wimbledon. If you were a Greenberg, you played to win.

Hank's children reacted to their domineering father in different ways. The younger two, Scott and Cathleen, did brief stints at AIG before going their own way. Scott is now a venture capitalist in New York; Cathleen is a doctor in Brookline, Mass.

But Jeffrey and Evan had a harder time leaving their father's orbit. Jeffrey, the oldest, tried for perfection from an early age. He was a track star at the Choate School in Connecticut, and he sang in the choir. "He was everything a wide-eyed, 17-year-old girl would think was fabulous," recalls Connie Ferguson, a former girlfriend.

Yet Hank treated Jeffrey like one of his employees. He was scornful when Jeffrey echoed his conservative political opinions at the dinner table. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Hank told his son in front of a girlfriend.

Evan, on the other hand, rebelled. He grew his hair down to his shoulders. He ran away from a series of boarding schools, ending up at Stockbridge School, an "alternative" school in Massachusetts's Berkshire Hills and a way station for troubled children of wealthy families. Evan played harmonica at jam sessions and portrayed a dwarf king in what one classmate recalls as a "wild" production of The Hobbit. He was popular with his classmates, but he struck some of them as an "obnoxious rich kid." "He borrowed my guitar once," says Annie Quest, a Stockbridge schoolmate. "I remember asking for it back a month or so later. He kept stalling. Finally he told me he had sold it. It was so bizarre. This kid had money too."

Evan fought constantly with his father--and was clearly his favorite. After all, the CEO of AIG had joined the Army over his mother's objections and fancied himself an insurance industry rebel. Hank could see himself in his second son. That was not lost on Jeffrey, who was pained by the way his father rewarded his difficult younger brother, according to people close to the family.

Jeffrey's friends say his strained relationship with his father only made him try harder to shine at Brown University, where he matriculated in 1969. Jeffrey always had to have a cool sports car, the prettiest girlfriend. He would fly off the handle when his fraternity brothers disagreed with him. "There was always a bit of an edge to Jeff," says Brad Warner, who roomed with Jeffrey at Brown for two years. "He needed to be better than everybody else."

Jeffrey also wanted to prove he was more than just Hank Greenberg's privileged son. He paid for his cars by pumping gas in Providence and cleaning yachts in Greenwich, Conn. After graduating with honors in American civilization from Brown, Jeffrey got a law degree from Georgetown. Like Hank, Jeffrey had no burning desire to practice law. Instead, he took a job at Marsh & McLennan's commercial aviation and aerospace insurance group. "I don't want to go to AIG as the boss's son," Jeffrey told his first wife, Nikki Finke. "I want to go to AIG when I'm already successful."

What did Evan do after Stockbridge? Not much. He became a drifter, thumbing his way around the country and working as a cook in a nursing home and as a bartender. Now and then he showed up on his parents' doorstep. Once he arrived on his sister Cathleen's birthday in a van filled with fellow hippies. He and his friends took the delighted 8-year-old for a ride. Then Evan vanished again.

One day Evan got a phone call in Colorado from Carl Barton, head of an AIG subsidiary. "Your dad said if I was ever in Colorado, I should give you a call," Barton told Evan. "Maybe we should go out to dinner." Evan was astonished. He didn't think his parents had any idea where he was living at the time. "Thank you very much, but stay away from me," he told Barton.

After much negotiating, Barton talked Evan into accepting his offer. At the end of the meal, he stuffed several hundred dollars in Evan's pocket and offered him a job in his Denver branch office. "No one has to know who you are," Barton told Evan. Evan was broke, and his girlfriend thought it was time he got serious. So in 1975, Evan began processing auto insurance policies. To everyone's surprise, he loved it. He was soon working in New York as an AIG underwriter.

Hank took a less subtle approach with Jeffrey. Jeffrey complained to Nikki Finke that his father repeatedly told him,"I don't understand why you are wasting your time [at Marsh & McLennan]. Why aren't you working for me?" Hank's oldest son eventually ran out of excuses. He joined AIG in 1978.

Jeffrey quickly won the respect of his peers at AIG. Having spent two years at Marsh & McLennan, he was already a poised young executive by the time he arrived. Jeffrey didn't have his father's decisiveness, but like Hank, he was keen when it came to finance and underwriting, and he carried himself with the same regal air. MRG dispatched him to London to manage AIG's aviation division.

It was more difficult for Evan to fit in. He would go out drinking after work with his fellow employees, but "I don't think he ever picked up a check," says Robert Arvanitis, a former AIG executive. "It just wasn't his nature. But he didn't need to. There were enough hangers-on around, saying, 'Oh, let me get that, Evan.'"

Yet Evan could never live down his reputation as MRG's wayward son. He had his father's street smarts, and he was more willing to trust his gut than his older brother was. But everybody at AIG knew Evan was a former hippie who had never graduated from college. His former colleagues complain that they had to explain things to him repeatedly because Evan wasn't swift enough with the numbers. Evan tried to compensate by adopting his father's tough-guy persona and silencing people with whom he had differences. Scoffs a former AIG executive: "He always wanted to be the smartest guy in the room." Some former AIG executives say they left the company over the years because they couldn't stand working for Evan.

Of course, Hank Greenberg was the smartest guy at AIG. He never let his sons forget it, and in fact he treated Jeffrey and Evan more harshly than their peers. "It's kind of like the old Animal Farm line turned on its head," says a former Wall Street analyst who knows the Greenbergs well. "At AIG, everybody was equal, but they were more equal than Jeffrey and Evan."

Now that Hank had his sons working for him, he obliterated the line between business and family. One minute, Jeffrey's phone would ring and it would be MRG demanding, "What the hell is going on?" The next minute, Hank would call to inquire affectionately about his grandchildren. When Jeffrey and Evan went to Hank's house for dinner, their father grilled them about AIG business. A colleague asked Jeffrey what it was like to go to Sunday dinner chez MRG. Jeffrey sighed: "I feel like I need to have my lawyer and my accountant there." (Jeffrey's lawyer says his client never talked business with his father over dinner.)

Eventually Hank pushed his oldest son too far. In the early '90s, Jeffrey was an AIG executive vice president in charge of its U.S. property and casualty operations. Wall Street considered him a natural candidate to succeed his aging father as CEO. Then, in 1995, Hank promoted Evan to the same rank Jeffrey held, executive vice president. The feeling within AIG was that the CEO was pitting his sons against each other. Jeffrey was outraged. "Here he was with his advanced degree, and now Evan, who had barely finished high school, had been promoted to the same level," says someone close to the family. "Jeffrey felt he was being treated unfairly."

Jeffrey stunned everybody by leaving AIG in 1995. Hank and his son shared little contact. It wasn't just Jeffrey who was bitter. MRG felt that anybody who left AIG was an apostate. Hank's wife, Corinne, finally made the two men patch things up.

Within a year Jeffrey was back at Marsh & McLennan. In 1996 he was elected to the board of directors. Three years later, he was CEO. The feeling at Marsh was that Jeffrey was "gold, absolute gold, because of his last name," says a former broker.

Now maybe Jeffrey would finally get some respect from his father. After all, Marsh & McLennan and AIG had an intimate relationship. As Credit Suisse First Boston recently noted, "Marsh is AIG's principal source of business; in turn, AIG is Marsh's principal market."

Jeffrey's departure cleared the way for Evan to succeed his father at AIG. He became the company's chief operating officer in 1997. But even though he was now officially second in command, Evan was dismayed to discover that little had changed. Hank showed no sign of slowing down. In 1998 he masterminded AIG's $19 billion acquisition of SunAmerica, extending his company's reach into the variable annuities trade. Hank did all the talking when he and Evan met with analysts at investment banks. He still screamed at his son in front of other people at AIG. "Sometimes I thought, 'This is so strange,' " says Tom Flanagan, a former AIG executive. "We're talking about an $81 billion public company here. Sometimes it felt like it could be a pizza parlor, the way Hank and Evan communicated with each other."

Evan asked his father several times to cede some of his power. Hank ignored him. Finally, in 2000, Evan quit too.

Fourteen months later Evan stunned everybody by accepting a job as vice chairman of ACE Ltd. The company's CEO, Brian Duperreault, a onetime AIG executive vice president, had boosted ACE's revenues from $537 million in sales in 1994 to $7 billion in seven years by going directly for his former employer's throat. Under Duperreault, ACE began selling the same kind of exotic, high-margin policies that AIG specialized in.

Hank made no secret of his contempt for ACE. He quipped to analysts: "ACE. Isn't that a bandage or something?" He didn't stop deriding the company after his son joined.

It wasn't ACE that brought the wrath of Eliot Spitzer down on the insurance industry. It was Marsh & McLennan, headed by Hank Greenberg's dutiful son.

In many ways Jeffrey resembled the delusional former AIG executive his father scornfully evoked to Walter Guzzardi. Jeffrey tried to be as tough at Marsh & McLennan as his dad was at AIG. As soon as Jeffrey became CEO, there was constant pressure on his executives to boost earnings. "There was this seismic shift in thinking and attitude that seemed to happen overnight," says an ex--Marsh division head.

Marsh executives entered Jeffrey's office on the 44th floor of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper with trepidation. Like his father, Jeffrey didn't hesitate to raise his voice when he was displeased. "If you got summoned up there, he was either going to anoint you with the key to the kingdom," says a former senior vice president, "or he was going to rip the floor out from under you."

But the more Jeffrey tried to emulate his father, the more apparent it became that he was no MRG. He wasn't willing to peer under rocks to find out what was really going on. He wasn't able to instill the same discipline in the ranks that his father had.

This proved disastrous. Marsh & McLennan, which had revenues of $11 billion in 2003, was a complicated entity. It was really three disparate companies: Marsh Inc., the world's leading insurance brokerage; Mercer Inc., a human resources consulting firm; and Putnam Investments, a mutual fund company. Yet they all had something in common. Each was swept up in scandals investigated by Eliot Spitzer during Jeffrey's five-year stint as CEO.

In 2003 the CEO of Putnam was fired after six of the company's money managers were charged with "excessive short-term trading." Last year Mercer admitted to providing a financial analysis riddled with "inaccuracies and omissions" to the New York Stock Exchange, which used it to justify former CEO Richard Grasso's controversial $187 million pay package.

That was nothing compared with what exploded at Marsh Inc. According to the Spitzer complaint, Marsh, unbeknown to its clients, steered the lion's share of business to insurers--like AIG--from which it received the highest commissions. Marsh required participating insurers to periodically make phony, inflated bids--"b-quotes," in Marsh-speak--to make sure clients didn't mistakenly select an insurer that wasn't playing by its rules.

Some insurance companies complained about the corrupt system. AIG was more pragmatic. It allegedly worked out a deal in which it paid Marsh an escalating percentage of its premiums if the brokerage renewed policies with its existing customers. In one instance cited in the Spitzer lawsuit, Marsh required ACE, of all companies, to provide an inflated b-quote so that Fortune Brands, whose products include Jim Beam bourbon and Titleist golf balls, wouldn't be tempted to stray from AIG. (After the incident became public, Fortune Brands dropped Marsh.)

It became clear that Jeffrey's days as CEO were numbered when Spitzer subpoenaed Marsh and its preferred insurance companies. AIG and ACE began cooperating almost immediately with the investigation, providing damning e-mails about the brokerage's scheme. Marsh didn't seem to take the probe quite so seriously. The company's general counsel told Spitzer's people that they didn't "understand" the insurance business. Spitzer said publicly that "the leadership of [Marsh & McLennan] is not a leadership I will talk to and not a leadership I will negotiate with." Jeffrey was gone in a matter of days.

It's unclear where all this leaves the Greenbergs. Marsh & McLennan settled with Spitzer, who told reporters he doesn't expect to file charges against Jeffrey. Wall Street expects AIG to settle too. By cooperating with the investigation, Evan Greenberg showed he could handle a crisis better than his older brother. But ACE received a second round of subpoenas from the New York attorney general, seeking information about so-called finite insurance products, which companies use to "smooth" income statements and make their finances look rosier. (In 2003, AIG agreed to pay a $10 million penalty to the SEC for selling similar products.) In January, Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal filed a lawsuit accusing ACE of paying a $50,000 kickback to Marsh after the broker had steered an $80 million state contract to the insurer.

Ensconced in the landmark AIG tower in Manhattan, Hank Greenberg appears to be less vulnerable. There are many layers of management between MRG and the AIG employees who have pled guilty. The problem is, MRG has always held himself out to his employees as the CEO who knows everything that goes on at his company. So either Greenberg isn't being entirely candid or he was never as omniscient as he wanted everybody to believe he was.

But then, Hank is also a father. He has said publicly that he sees his sons only on a "very rare occasion." Someone close to the family says that Hank and Jeffrey get along well enough, but there is still plenty of tension between MRG and Evan. Hank has told this person that he feels "terrible" about Jeffrey's flameout at Marsh. He has also said something that suggests he feels in some way responsible. Recently he admitted to an intimate that he regrets pushing Jeffrey and Evan into AIG. He tried to mold them into replicas of himself. But Hank himself has argued that anybody who thinks he can be Hank Greenberg is bound to fail.

That is exactly what happened to Jeffrey. It remains to be seen if Evan can escape the same fate. Hank will almost certainly be around to see the result of his handiwork. His grandmother, after all, lived to be 105. ■

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