The Man Behin AIG's Credit-Default Swaps

The man behind AIG's Credit-Default swaps was Joseph J. Cassano who worked out of the London office of AIG and headed up AIG's Special Products Division, which is where the whole mess started. The following information is from Wikipedia. As you know Wikipedia is sort of a public forum and can be edited by contributors. Consequently, any information found on Wikipdia should be taken with a grain of salt and the statements indidually varified. However, I did quite a bit more research on Mr. Cassano and found nothing that contradicts the following.

What does Joseph Cassano look like? I have no idea. I tried to locate a photo of him. I found several photos labeled Joseph J. Cassano but several of them were actually Martin Sullivan, the former CEO of AIG. One, that was in a major newspaper that was too old for a 52 year old man and another that looked just too much like a fake on CNN. Amazing! Several usually reliable news networks and all with totally different photos of Cassano? What does Cassano really look like?

Cassano grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was a policeman. He earned a political science degree from Brooklyn College in 1977. He worked at investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert during their junk bond phase.

In 1987, AIG hired Cassano as one of the first ten people in the Financial Products unit, as Chief Financial Officer.^[3] In 1994, Thomas R. Savage appointed Cassano as head of the Transaction Development Group. Cassano rejected the 1998 proposal by J.P. Morgan to package credit-default swaps on Broad Index Secured Trust Offering (nicknamed Bistros). Cassano considered these collateralized debt obligations a key event: "It was a watershed event in 1998 when J.P. Morgan came to us, who were somebody we worked with a great deal, and asked us to participate."^[4]

Before he was forced to retire in March 2008, Cassano received $315 million: $280 million in cash and an additional $34 million in bonuses.^[5] An initial $1 million-a-month consulting fee was later canceled.^[6] According to Matt Taibbi,

In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." (Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)

In the wake of the scandal, United States regulators and the United Kingdom Serious Fraud Office began investigating Cassano's dealings to determine whether they were just excessive and risky, or criminal.^[7]

Cassano was a political contributor to the campaigns of Chris Dodd , Barack Obama and the Republican Representative Nancy L. Johnson ^[8]

The original Wikipedia biography, with references can be found here.