AIG office flies under radar of Conn. town

WILTON, Conn. -- The money managers who helped ignite the world financial crisis didn't operate in a gleaming corporate penthouse overlooking New York Harbor, but on a trading floor in a two-story brick office building with a view of a Mobil station.

At AIG Financial Products here, the riskiest of business was conducted in the blandest of settings.

Through deals involving complex derivatives contracts, AIG Financial brought its corporate parent to the edge of insolvency. That threatened to wreck the global financial system, which prompted the U.S. government to approve a $170 billion corporate bailout, the biggest in the nation's history.

President Obama, members of Congress and ordinary Americans expressed outrage this week after disclosures that AIG had just paid bonuses totaling more than $160 million to employees in this same unit.

When it comes to AIG Financial, people in this affluent town of about 18,000 are angry, protective, embarrassed or even oblivious to the notion that their town figured so prominently in the financial meltdown.

"I can't believe it — I had no idea they were here," says Marilyn Gould, a former member of the Board of Selectmen, a Planning and Zoning Commission member and director of the Wilton Historical Society.

AIG Financial settled here nine years ago. Wilton is only an hour's drive from Manhattan. But in style, its executives were light-years from swashbucklers like the suspendered, pinstriped Gordon Gekko, who claimed in the 1987 film Wall Street that "greed … is good."

The AIG workers, residents say, dressed comparatively casually, in slacks, sweaters and shirts. "They were just very quiet," says Ted Hoffstatter, a high school teacher and one of the town's selectmen. "Most people didn't even realize they were here."

There was an AIG team in a local men's basketball league. Otherwise, the employees worked long hours, ate well — the company provided up to three meals a day on the job — and kept their heads down.