Chapter One

The Four Seasons restaurant on East 52nd Street is an uncommonly rich venue for celebrity spotting. On the first Wednesday in May 2005,midday diners could glance around the room and see Tom Brokaw, Barbara Walters, Colin Powell, and a bevy of other big names, but the person turning the most heads that day wasn't a famous broadcaster or politico. It was Hank Greenberg, the man who built American International Group into the world's largest insurance company. Greenberg had long been a celebrity CEO, at least among the financial cognoscenti, one whose singular accomplishments lifted him above his peers and gave him a stature that overshadowed all but a handful of other corporate chieftains.

Greenberg's celebrity, like that of most business moguls (and insurance executives, in particular), was not the type that turned heads as he walked down the street. Some might know the name, but few knew the face.

Not until 2005, that is, when scandal at AIG put Greenberg's photo in the New York Times almost daily, and a line-drawing of him appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal at least once a week. Suddenly, Hank Greenberg was the highly recognizable malefactor of the moment, accused of cooking the books at AIG to inflate profits and make the balance sheet look stronger than the underlying reality. That afternoon at the Four Seasons-on his 80th birthday, of all days-Greenberg was having a new kind of power lunch. His companions were two attorneys, Robert Morvillo and Kenneth Bialkin, and they weren't talking deals. Morvillo is a crimi