Liddy, the former chief executive of Allstate Corp., was installed on Sept. 18, 2008, as chairman and CEO by the U.S. Treasury Department and voluntarily took an annual salary of $1. He held both jobs until August 2009 when he resigned, saying in a farewell letter to employees that he “had no idea what I was in for” when he joined AIG. “It hasn’t been easy, and goodness knows, it hasn’t been pretty,” Liddy wrote.

Benmosche, whose salary was $7 million in 2010, his first full year, had his own tribulations as CEO, chafing at government oversight of the insurer.

Investors benefited from Benmosche’s turnaround tactics, after the stock plunged 97 percent in 2008, the year housing- market related losses pushed the firm to the brink of collapse. The shares closed at $56.06 on Benmosche’s last day as CEO, compared with $11.39 on the day his hiring was announced.

Robert Herman Benmosche was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 29, 1944. He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Alfred University in Alfred, New York, in 1966, where he played on the football team. After college, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1966 to 1968.

Banker, Broker

Benmosche worked in technology at Arthur D. Little Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based management consulting firm, before joining Chase Manhattan Bank in 1979. From 1982 to 1995, he was at securities broker PaineWebber Inc., where he rose to executive vice president and helped guide its acquisition of Kidder Peabody & Co.

He moved to MetLife Inc. in 1995 as executive vice president, becoming president and CEO about two years later. Benmosche transformed the New York-based company into the largest publicly traded U.S. life insurer from a mutual owned by customers.

After retiring in 2006 from MetLife, Benmosche moved to Croatia, where he owned a villa with a 12.5-acre vineyard and had a collection of thousands of bottles of wine. Benmosche wanted to bring Zinfandel wine-making back to Croatia, where the variety may have originated, he told Wine Spectator magazine in December 2009.

Croatia’s Allure

“People say, why would you want to live in Croatia?” said Benmosche, who said he spent half the year there during his retirement. “Because it’s a beautiful place and it’s safe.”