From his New York office, Greenberg oversees a group of insurance and investment businesses known as Starr Cos., whose assets of $15.3 billion at the end of 2014 were about a 30th of AIG’s. Visitors are greeted by a security director who wears a horseshoe mustache and introduces himself as Harry. There’s a copy of the U.S. Constitution, a photo of an exploding bomb and 11 security video feeds at his workstation. While classical music played, he demonstrated how to twist the skin over the pectoral muscle in combat. Down the hall, outside Greenberg’s office, a smaller hourglass sits on his assistant’s desk.

Kissinger Toast

A few days after the family birthday party, Henry Kissinger, who’s 92, toasted Greenberg at a dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

“I have one piece of advice to the younger people here,” Richard Nixon’s secretary of state told revelers, he recalled a week later. “It is less painful to give Hank Greenberg what he wants than to resist.”

Greenberg got what he wanted throughout most of his life, according to his 2013 memoir, “The AIG Story.” It opens with his return from the Korean War, when he tells an insurance executive that his underling is a jerk and is rewarded with a job. The government is an enemy by paragraph three, he threatens a rival by page 10 and he’s boss by AIG’s 1969 public offering.

Hungarian Stag

His description of what comes next reads like a pulpy spy novel. As AIG expands into China and the Soviet Union and offers insurance for kidnapping and a secret satellite, Greenberg slays a Hungarian stag, outfoxes Mikhail Gorbachev, yells at Ferdinand Marcos and rescues a jailed colleague accused by Iran of spying.

Even that freed colleague calls Greenberg stubborn. “Hank is not an easy man to work for,” K.C. Shabani said this month while praising his drive. “Very rude to me, almost abrasive.”

Jeff Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management and a friend of Greenberg’s, brought up Siddhartha, Odysseus, Nietzsche, Moses and Job to describe him. Greenberg’s own book gets biblical when it says his “wrath befell those who delayed or deceived.”

By 1998, AIG’s market value was more than $90 billion. Not only did it sell life and property-and-casualty insurance, it had a top performer called AIG Financial Products starting to sell credit-default swaps, derivatives that allow bond investors to protect against or bet on losses.

AIG’s Collapse

His four decades at AIG ended with the government accusing the company of tricks to hide losses and boost reserves. After he resigned under pressure in 2005, AIG apologized for deceiving the public, restated earnings by more than $3 billion and paid $1.6 billion to resolve state and federal claims it misled investors, faked bids and cheated workers’ compensation plans. It didn’t admit or deny allegations by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Things got worse. Hemorrhaging from the credit-default protection it sold for subprime mortgages, AIG was staggering toward collapse in September 2008. Greenberg, who controlled about 11 percent of the company through personal holdings and firms he ran, didn’t welcome the government bailout designed to save AIG from a bankruptcy that could have wiped out his stake.