Drinks in hand, shirtless insurance agents cluster around the 5,000-square-foot Neptune Pool at glitzy Caesars Palace.
He makes the rounds among his subordinates.
He puffs on a cigar with one group.
He cradles a pineapple cocktail with another.
It’s May, and they’ve all come to Las Vegas for the year’s biggest sales convention.
But there is no sign of tension poolside.
Young agents with freshly poured margaritas are focused on gratitude.
“Thank God for AIL and Globe Life,” one says to the camera.
The lawsuit describes a culture of abuse at a workplace that operated without guardrails.
In the sports world, Globe is known fornaming rightsto the Texas Rangers' Globe Life Field.
Globe Life sits at the top of a corporate pyramid, aholding companywith five wholly owned insurance subsidiaries.
Among them, Arias Agencies.
At 39, Arias has a profile like no other.
They also alleged customer abuses and fraud.
Another woman who worked there told Insider she was compared to dog puke.
The incidents are recounted in her federal complaint; in his response, Russin denied both allegations.
“I thought everyone was going to jail,” she said.
She said she wound up being sexually assaulted in the hotel pool.
Novak responded by email, “We do not comment on pending litigation and arbitration matters.”
Agents jump to their feet, clapping and cheering.
“Get you a CEO like that, man,” he said of Greer.
“Super cool.”
He also sits on AIL’s executive council and coaches other AIL sales leaders.
Some Arias agents are so captivated by the movie that they slap #wolfofwallstreet hashtags on social-media posts.
But the 22-year-old, Arias boasts, makes $250,000 a year.
In interviews with Insider, former agents at Arias described misbehavior ranging from the sophomoric to the dangerous.
One man who hadn’t met his targets had to let a colleague wax his legs.
“They looked humiliated,” said a former agent who witnessed the bizarre scene.
“These were grown-ass adults.”
More troubling are the allegations of sexual harassment.
It was “an everyday thing you kind of ignored,” she said.
“He showed everyone, saying how hilarious it was,” she recalled.
Though Arias declined to speak with Insider, there are signs that he was frustrated by the behavior.
Agents or others “are subject to contract termination if they engage in misconduct,” she said.
She said she was responding on behalf of AIL, not Globe.
Asked whether Globe declined to comment, she didn’t respond.
A magnet for misconduct
There are scant constraints on the unreconstructed ’80s culture at Arias.
And the light touch of most insurance regulators makes it easier for bad actors to dodge responsibility and exposure.
That’s because stock brokers are regulated by the federal government, whichrequires extensive disclosures.
Insurance is regulated only by the states, most of which require minimal disclosures from life insurance agents.
But when I sent a query asking how consumers could access this information, they quickly set me straight.
The public state databases, on the other hand, appear incomplete.
None of the databases surfaced these histories.
It’s not hard to get a license to sell life insurance.
If you flunk, you might take the test again and again.
Rob Jackson, the regional director in Chicago, took eight tries to pass it.
Past criminal convictions are reviewed “on a case-by-case basis,” Pennsylvania Insurance Department spokesperson Lindsay Bracale said.
The light regulation makes the industry a magnet for rogue operators.
AIL ultimately refunded erroneous charges dating back more than a year.
The BBB gave AIL an A+rating.
Yet the company had so many customer complaints, the bureau published only 25% of them.
“I was losing my soul,” she said.
Just as Arias customers are failed by thin regulation, Arias agents enjoy few legal protections.
A group of Arias agents are plaintiffs in a class-actionlawsuitfiled in federal court in Pittsburgh last July.
The complaint alleges that Arias and AIL misclassified their agents as independent contractors.
The two sides have agreed to arbitration.
She interviewed at Arias headquarters at age 24 and was “beyond excited,” she said.
Zinsky started at Arias in March 2019, at the Wexford headquarters.
Three years later, she filed suit.
Zinsky signed a mandatory arbitration agreement with AIL and Arias Agencies, barring her from filing a lawsuit.
Only the case against Russin, who was not named in the arbitration agreement, would proceed in court.
He denied Zinsky’s allegations of bullying, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.
“I had no idea that was going on,” he said.
“I don’t think anybody really did.”
“I became friends with all my clients,” she said.
Many of them still stay in touch.
Those warnings became real shortly after Zinsky first reported to work.
She glanced at her phone in shock.
It was a photo Russin had taken of himself naked, with an erection, she says.
She came away with the understanding that if she spoke up, she’d lose her job.
“I was so scared,” she says.
“I said, ‘I can’t feel my legs.'”
She pauses, staring off into the distance.
She hoped a break from the clamor of the office would be her chance to pitch for the promotion.
She says Russin had other ideas.
He drove to a quiet parking lot where, Zinsky says, the outing took an appalling turn.
“He grabbed my arm very forcefully and put my hand on his crotch,” Zinsky tells me.
She says she pulled her hand away and reminded her boss that she was in a serious relationship.
“They would show me the Snapchat messages.”
Another of Zinsky’s colleagues described her opening up to him over time about several of these incidents.
“She was very distraught,” he recalls.
“She broke down and lost it and told me.
We talked almost every day about it.”
With her boss, she says, she dealt with these episodes gingerly because she feared losing her job.
Zinsky was earning $109,000 at Arias by 2020, five times what she’d made at the pizzeria.
In Russin, Zinsky had a manager who openly acknowledged his volatility.
“He controlled everything,” she says.
“He controlled me having a job.”
“Nothing was done to investigate or address my concerns,” she wrote.
Zinsky, too, tried to alert managers about Russin’s sexual harassment.
In June 2021 she found a contact for Arias sexual harassment complaints, but the email bounced back.
It turns out the contact was Simon Arias’ mother, who didn’t even work at the agency.
Zinsky then arranged a meeting with Arias on August 11.
Arias said she could report directly to him instead of Russin.
This time, people sprang into action.
AIL did not respond to Insider about this matter.
During this time, AIL and Arias Agencies continued to publicly extol Russin and his work.
Haworth, the Globe spokesperson, said in a statement that AIL doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
None had heard of policies or protocols on how to report concerns, she said.
It was only after she went directly to AIL months later that Globe got in touch.
Inaction at the top
AIL fired Russin last February, according to Zinsky’s amended complaint.
But it was too late.
Zinsky by then was crippled by anxiety.
Russin had taken to posting bizarre and threatening messages addressed to no one in particular on his social-media accounts.
As the posts escalated, Williamson said, Zinsky “was a wreck.”
That post, too, he denied was related to Zinsky.
Williamson soon came across evidence that Russin had been fired in name only.
Webb, Russin’s lawyer, declined to comment on these claims.
Haworth, the Globe Life spokesperson, did not respond to a query about Russin’s current status.
The email also went to senior Arias leaders.
A recent check of the Pennsylvania insurance website showed that both men were still licensed with AIL.
Haworth did not respond to questions about the email.
She said the scene played out in full view of agents just outside.
There werepodcastswhere agents talked about stealing cars, dealing drugs, and building bombs in a garage.
“It is like winning the Academy Award from Globe Life,” a former Arias agent said.
“It brings respect from everybody.”
