Feinberg Despised in Wisconsin Where Cerberus Lives Up to Name

Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Just about everyone in Kimberly, Wisconsin, hates billionaire Stephen Feinberg.

“This is a greedy, extremely greedy guy who doesn’t care about other human beings,” said Jeffery Wyngard, a third- generation Kimberly mill worker with 30 years on the job.
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Feinberg inspires this reaction in Kimberly because Cerberus Capital Management LLC, the company he founded in 1992, owns NewPage Corp., which closed the town’s 119-year-old paper mill that Local 2-9 of the United Steelworkers says was profitable when NewPage bought it nine months ago. Six hundred people are out of work in the town of 6,200 at the same time Cerberus’s money-losing Chrysler LLC automotive unit was seeking a taxpayer loan.
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Three-Headed Dog

Still, the workers blame Cerberus, named after the three- headed dog from Greek and Roman mythology who guards the gates of hell, and Feinberg, its 48-year-old founder.

Feinberg “is partly responsible for my little girl not being able to sleep at night, the 9-year-old girl who worries about her father losing his job,” Brukardt said. “That’s why he hides under his rock. Because in his heart he knows he isn’t right.”

As CEO of a $26 billion company, Feinberg has a net worth of about $1 billion, according to Forbes Magazine’s 2008 list. Brukardt made $24 an hour, or about $80,000 last year including overtime. Brukardt said he owes $160,000 on the mortgage for his five-bedroom duplex on College Avenue in Appleton, Wisconsin, and he doesn’t know how long he can keep making payments.
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Dan Sawall, a 30-year mill veteran, said he had watched Chrysler Chief Executive Officer Robert Nardelli on television “with those granny glasses at the end of his nose,” Sawall said, telling Congress the automaker needed billions in taxpayer money to stay afloat.

“How ironic is that? You’re taking people’s lives and ripping them apart and now you want those same people to bail you out?” Sawall said. “If I don’t have a job to pay my taxes, how am I supposed to bail you out? Personally, I don’t know how those guys sleep at night.”

Karl Hooyman shook his head. He calculated that $54 from his weekly unemployment compensation of $355 would go to taxes that might be funneled to the Chrysler loan.

“Thirty-eight years gone in the blink of an eye,” he said. “It don’t make sense.”