As the years go by and I think back, what amazes me most in my life are the AIG years: how weird and how unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since. This is the story of Diana Piazza, (not her real name. Beyond a doubt she is litigious. And the title is misleading. No skin here.)
We were unhappily living in Durham, NC; Nancy had an increasingly stressful job at what was then Burroughs-Wellcome, and I had to quit to avoid being fired from a software company that was routinely and unironically ranked in the top 50 places to work. So when in 1990 Nancy got a job offer in Wilmington, DE, we leaped at it.
Wilmington is a weird little place snuggled in between Philly and Baltimore. It’s full of retired DuPont engineers, authentic Italian neighborhoods, and, with nothing else to do there, great restaurants. A winner of a contest for the city motto went, “So close to every other place you’d rather be.” (But it has great murder trials. See “The Famous and Shocking Trial of Thomas Capano, Esq.”, May 12, 2022. It’s in this blog. Generally I try to cite only myself.)
Before we moved, a friend in Greensboro who knew someone who knew someone connected me with a very kind woman in Wilmington who was the general counsel of AIG’s direct mail operation. She put me in touch with AIG’s U.S. life insurance operation across town. I had a very nice phone interview.
I flew to New York and met two of the most abrasive men I’ve ever known. They were the bosses of my potential boss. One asked me a trick question (“As a fiction writer, have you run into an unreliable third person narrator?” impossible by definition) and the other sat at a 90 degree angle from me and when he did look at me, it was as though he’d sniffed the love child of dog poop and week-old roadkill. When I flew back to North Carolina, I ordered two scotches and hoped fervently that I wouldn’t get the job.
But I did. How? I had no experience in or knowledge of life insurance. The answer became clear sometime later.
My boss was that very nice fellow from my phone interview named Jeremy. He was balding, in his late 40’s, and a very kind and gentle man. My lingering memory is of him standing behind his desk, stroking his mustache, staring first at one and then another of the files stacked on his desk. Yes, his mortal sin was indecisiveness. AIG demanded action, and yesterday, and Jeremy just wasn’t up to it. So he let his second in command, Diana Piazza, become an informal deputy general counsel so he could delegate to her.
Nevertheless Jeremy was fired a few months after my arrival, and his successor was the famous Robert, of whom I’ve spoken quite a bit on these pages. Robert had a rival: the selfsame Diana Piazza, with a lot less experience. Also Diana had no real personal skills, although she’d be shocked to hear you say that. Robert was and has always been completely charming.
Right away the department was treated to Robert and Diana’s intense, drawn-out shouting matches behind Robert’s closed doors. We all looked like fools, standing around and eavesdropping when Robert’s door would suddenly fling open.
As I was the only lawyer in the department who’d ever been in a courtroom, I was given the litigation files to sort out and evaluate. Most were lawsuits over claims we had denied against accident insurance policies: someone crashes his boat into a pier, but, oops, he was drunk, which would be a defense against paying the claim. Or high-end disability policies: a dentist whose hands are crippled by arthritis and claims he can’t work anymore. By high end, I mean, millions, so these policies invited fraud. There were autoerotic stranglings, each new one more macabre than the one before.
On occasion, there was something more exotic. Once our annuities department was accused of conspiring with other carriers to exclude certain brokers from the business. I proposed that our defense be that AIG was too confused and disorganized to conspire with anyone.
Once I had reviewed a claims file, I passed it through Diana’s office for her take. One day I was on the phone, and she appeared in my office door. She held up a file and jerked her head angrily in the direction of her office. When I’d hung up, I went down there, and she thrashed me for not recommending some course of action or another. I had no idea what she was talking about; I hadn't been trained about any of this, insurance law, the claims process, nothing. I stared at her and thought, Well, you were dumb enough to hire me.
Once when I was on the phone, she came into my office and started rifling through my inbox. When I hung up the phone, she held a file up and asked, “That’s interesting, how did he get involved?”
You know how couples snicker about things they’ve heard and repeat them for 40 years? Nancy and I have forever after, if, say, one of us caught the other eating a pastry, ask, “That’s interesting, how did that get involved?”
Diana’s training of me in the world of insurance regulation was all political, no legal, no regulatory. It was all about who would say what about whom and who would be offended.
Once I was in our small law library when she was there, and I had to climb up a ladder to pull a book off of the shelves. She said, “Nice legs!” I didn’t respond to what no sentient man would say now. My legs even then were slender and slow. (I am firmly of the view that old men like me should avoid short sleeves and shorts.)
She was married to a professor at the University of Delaware, maybe in geology. He was an amputee, and one day she said resentfully, “Oh, I heard Bob stomping around upstairs last night.”
Now I think you may have a picture of what Diana was like.
The shouting matches between Diana and Robert intensified. Finally, Robert’s boss, a scary man named Irvin, came from New York to Wilmington to sort things out. He interviewed people up and down the 10-story building.
Finally he came to see me, and nothing I said about Diana bothered him until I said: “I walked down to Diana’s office and Bob Tully was standing in there. He said he thought he needed his own claims attorney and asked her how much he would have to spend to get one. She said, oh, you can get someone a couple of years out of law school for [my salary exactly.] Wow, was that a slap in the face.”
I’d been out six years by then, and Irwin knew it. At that point, he began taking notes, scribbling awkwardly on a bending file folder in his lap.
An hour or so later, our whole department plus Irwin went to lunch. There were maybe eight of us. It was cordial, and Irwin was as sociable as he ever was (curt and awkward).
Then we went back to our offices, and reportedly Irwin told Diana something to the effect of, I’ve talked to people in all of the offices, admin, operations, and you have no allies left. You need to resign.
As my colleague Michael remarked, we broke bread with the woman, and then he fired her?
The story doesn’t end there.
Sometime after we had moved to Seattle in 1999, I received a phone call from Linda Taylor, who with her husband David Jones had been members of a book group with us in Wilmington. David was an AIG lawyer, and his office had been around the corner and down the hall from mine.
It turns out, Linda said, that David’s boss, a self-satisfied general counsel for international life insurance, had recently hired Diana Piazza. Why did Bruce, as he was called, sitting right next door to Robert and hearing the shouting between them years before, think that he could handle Diana any better? But Bruce was delusional, keeping his people after six p.m.in meetings about nothing.
Linda was calling because David had taken up with Diana, who had split with her geologist.
“No,” I said. “David was always so firm and decisive,” and starchly English, “he couldn’t put up with Diana. She’s too bossy.”
“Oh no,” Linda said, “he just wanted to come home from the office, put his slippers on, and have me tell him what to do.” Linda and David divorced, yet now David + Diana is no more, either.
I’ve no idea what Diana is up to now. A Google search reveals very little; she asserts that she is a “Partner” of AIG. Sounds appropriately delusional. AIG would never have allowed that term to be used as it has very direct legal consequences. Diana is my age, so she might have retired.
So how did I get a job that ought to be auctioned off? And for which I was obviously unqualified? It turned out that everyone on the eastern seaboard in insurance regulation knew about Diana and wouldn’t have taken the job under any circumstances. Why was I the last to know?
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