I can guarantee you that many operations staff and finance personnel were offered retention bonuses at AIG. As the previous posters have stated, believing that all this money was paid to 50 people at AIG-FP is naive.
It's even more naive to think that its regular line staff getting big bonuses. Anyone who's worked in the finance industry (or any large corporation for that matter) knows that bonus compensation is very disproportionately distributed - nearly all of it goes to a few top executives.
These AIG bonuses were no different - the vast majority of the money DID go to just a handful of people. From NYTimes:
'On Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo reported that 73 A.I.G. employees were paid more than $1 million in bonuses.
"The highest bonus was $6.4 million, and six other employees received more than $4 million, according to Mr. Cuomo. Another 15 people received bonuses of more than $2 million, and another 51 people received bonuses of $1 million to $2 million."'
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/cuomo-gets-list-of-aig-bonus-recipients/
If you total that up, those 73 guys took off with at least 2/3 of the total bonus money. And out of those guys, 11 have already jumped ship after getting their money and left the company.
So much for "retention".