Like Pioneer Heinz Prechter, President Bush took big-donor insurance magnate Maurice “Hank” Greenberg along with him on his ’92 trade mission to Asia. As a result of this “access,” AIG got to sell more insurance in Japan and became the first foreign company allowed to sell insurance in China. Besides being a huge political funder, Greenberg is a major underwriter of the Heritage Foundation think tank (see Pioneer Elaine Chao). Imagine his horror to discover a Heritage thinker urging Congress to postpone its 2000 vote on normalizing trade with Greenberg’s beloved China. After Greenberg threatened to cut off funding, the think tank rethunk its position and issued a new report: “How Trade With China Benefits Americans.” AIG scored a revolving-door coup in ’98 when it hired Ernest Patrikis, an official departing the powerful Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as a “special adviser” to Greenberg. An AIG subsidiary, AIG Capital Partners Inc., paid a $500,000 “finder’s fee” to Pioneer Wayne Berman, who helped the company land a contract to manage $100 million in state pension investments from ex-Connecticut Treasurer Paul Silvester. Silvester was convicted in ’99 of taking kickbacks from the private money managers to whom he awarded investment contracts. AIG paid Greenberg more than $6 million in ’98 alone. Pioneer Robert J. O’Connell also was an AIG executive until recently.