Jan. 26–Most of the senior stock-pickers escorted out of Morgan Stanley’s office in what their one-time boss called a display of “corporate hard-heartedness” last October have already found work inPhiladelphia’s healthy investment sector.

No fewer than five veterans of what was once Miller Anderson & Sherrerd have been picked up by Chartwell Investment Partners, Berwyn; three by Nationwide Financial Corp.’s Gartmore Investments in Miquon; two by Lincoln National Corp.’s Delaware Investments in Center City; and a scattering of others by hedge funds and specialty shops from Radnor to New York. More are still negotiating terms.

Chartwell’s expatriate team includes Rick Behler, Morgan Stanley’s former head of value investing, along with Institutional Value Fund manager Eric Scharpf, Institutional Trust Value manager Matthew Levitties, and Dividend Growth managers Matthew Taylor and Doug Kugler.

“All of us agreed [Chartwell] is a firm which shares the same set of values and client focus that were prominent in our predecessor firm,” Behler said.

Gartmore hired William Gerlach, former head of mid- and small-capitalization value investing, and Charles Purcell, mid-cap value manager; they join their former Morgan colleague Gary Haubold, most recently a hedge fund manager.

Delaware picked up portfolio manager Matthew Todorow and mid-cap value manager Caleb Piper (now working with real estate investment trusts). Their new boss will be Tim Conners, who worked at Miller Anderson in the pre-Morgan days.

Wellington Management Co. in Radnor hired large-cap value analyst Jerry Kochanski. Nuveen Investments’ Rittenhouse Asset Management in Radnor hired small-cap value manager James Jollinger. And Circle T, of Philadelphia and New York, hired mid-cap value manager Dave Reidinger.

Large-cap value manager Kendall Hochman (who had been a kicker for the Penn Quakers football squad) went furthest — all the way to New York — for his new post with John Levin & Co., where he joins former Morgan Stanley executive Phil Friedman.

Former managing director Robert Marcin’s new Defiance Asset Management opened Jan. 1 in Conshohocken, joining earlier Miller Anderson alumni hedge ventures such as Arden Armstrong’s and Steve Chulik’s Redstone Capital in Berwyn and Gary Schlarbaum’s self-titled Bala Cynwyd firm, both of which have also hired Miller Anderson veterans.

There have also been some changes in Morgan Stanley’s remaining Conshohocken-based bond business. Stephen P. Esser is retiring as co-head of corporate research; Thomas L. Bennett is retiring as global head of fixed income. Raj Gupta will replace Bennett. Gordon W. Loery gets a new title as co-head of the high-yield bond team, sharing the job, for now, with a New York executive, according to Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Andrea Slattery.

It’s a happy second ending to what had become a bitter tale. Miller Anderson cofounder Paul Miller, a former Penn chairman and former director of Hewlett-Packard Co. and the Ford Foundation, was taken aback by Morgan Stanley’s handling of the firings last fall. At the time, he wrote: “Impersonal treatment of employees is as much a threat to the political viability of the corporate world as incidents of fraud and other criminal behavior.”

He added: “Business has become its own worst enemy.”

Maybe so, at the corporate level. But the pros in Philadelphia money management, at the moment, still have room to take care of their own.

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(c) 2004, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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