By LYNN DOAN and ERIC GERSHON | The Hartford Courant
March 21, 2009

The employees of AIG Financial Products — from the secretaries to the managing directors previously enjoying quiet lives in the posh cul-de-sacs of Fairfield and Greenwich — have come under siege.

One lower-level employee at the company's Wilton offices told her friends she woke up one night this week to people knocking outside her home windows.

Doug Poling, the Financial Products executive who reportedly received the company's largest "retention payment" of $6.4 million, has a security guard stationed in the circular driveway outside his sprawling Fairfield estate — even though he agreed to return the bonus.

"People are scared," said one former employee, who has been in touch with her former co-workers in recent days.

Even as AIG remains the focus of state and federal investigations, and of debates in Congress, much of the anger is aimed broadly at the culture of bonuses on Wall Street.

But for now, the AIG employees whose division is based in Wilton are in the spotlight and, many fear, in danger.

The country's anger has poured over these workers in the last week, ever since it was announced that AIG — the insurance giant that has received more than $170 billion in government bailout money — completed $165 million in "retention pay" outlays to them last Friday.

Now that New York and Connecticut officials have some of their names and a tour bus is set to drive by some of their homes today, their personal lives are becoming even more public. CEO Edward Liddy referred to threats against them.

AIG spent Friday working with state and federal law enforcement officials to ensure the employees' safety, a person familiar with the efforts said.

Jon Green, director of Hartford-based Working Families, and his band of activists are exactly the sort of thing AIG's Wilton workers fear — indignant citizens coming after them. The organization has mounted a tour this morning that will carry a busload of people, some facing the loss of their homes, jobs and health coverage, to AIG employees' homes in Fairfield County.

It is scheduled to conclude with a rally outside AIG's Danbury Road offices in Wilton.

One neighbor of Poling's who read about the Working Families bus tour in the newspaper sarcastically said Friday, "It's going to be fun."

But Green, whose organization advocates policies to benefit the working poor and middle class, says the group's tour isn't intended to intimidate. The group has a reputation for peaceful protest and discourse, and on Friday Green backed away from the group's previous plan to hand-deliver letters to AIG bonus recipients suggesting "solutions for economic recovery and shared prosperity."

"It's not our intention to respond to that vitriol and it never has been," he said, noting that the group has been working with local police departments to ensure a "peaceful, rational, nonviolent" event.

Financial Products employees are bracing themselves for others who are less likely to come in peace. On Friday, names of some high-profile employees — and some whose identities were obscure — poured out of Connecticut's legislature, which subpoenaed the employees or former employees.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday that he had received names of those who received bonuses from AIG, and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said Friday that it was only a matter of time before Connecticut officials get them too.

If they do, Blumenthal said Friday, the state's freedom of information law might compel his office to release the names publicly.

Wilton employees have been swapping comments on each other's Facebook walls about how to sneak out of work without getting mobbed. In addition to hiring security guards, workers were reportedly advised not to wear their employee badges in public.

Poling was nowhere to be seen at his two-story, white and green-trimmed home on Golden Pond Lane Friday. A plainclothes security guard sat in a black SUV parked in front of the stone path leading up to house.

A Courant reporter who approached the home was asked to leave the heavily wooded property at the end of a cul-de-sac. A soccer ball lay in the front yard, as a deer grazed on a patch of grass down the quiet street.

For now, it seemed, the Polings had found peace. But given the public outrage in the last week and the anticipated bus tour likely coming by Poling's house today, it was set to be a short-lived peace.

Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management, said the growing outrage over the AIG bonuses reflects the extreme value of "fairness" in American culture.

"We're a very meritocratic society. We are thrilled that Bill Gates is as wealthy as he is — he earned it," Sonnenfeld said. "But we have an awful lot of people who didn't earn it. It wasn't their capital at risk, it was ours. …There's something very parasitic about it." That really sums it up for me.