MILWAUKEE INVESTMENT BANK HAS ‘MR. CHICAGO’ LEAD INVASION: CLEARY GULL HIRES WINDY CITY VETERAN

A Milwaukee firm is opening an investment banking practice in Chicago and hiring a veteran of La Salle Street — the Windy City’s Wall Street — to head it.

Cleary Gull Reiland & McDevitt Inc., an 11-year-old specialist in medium-sized corporate clients, has recruited Salomon Brothers alumnus Scott George to operate out of a Sears Tower office.

“Chicago is really going to be a beachhead for (investment) banking and money management,” says Cleary Gull chief executive David P. Prokupek, who has worked on La Salle Street himself, for Bankers Trust.

“We were really trying to find ‘Mr. Chicago,’ ” says Mr. Prokupek. “His background also allows us to consider new business opportunities in the leveraged buyout and venture capital areas.”

Besides the 44-year-old Mr. George, Cleary Gull also is adding Gary Prestopino, former head of stock research at Mesirow Financial Services, and another Mesirow emigre, Mark Johnson, as research analysts. Mr. Prokupek says three or four senior investment bankers will join later.

The Chicago strategy is similar to that of another Milwaukee firm, Robert W. Baird & Co. Its No. 2 executive, president and chief operating officer Paul E. Purcell, splits his time between Chicago and Milwaukee.

A Chicago address, notes Mr. Prokupek, will aid Cleary Gull in recruiting investment banking professionals. Among its Chicago-area clients are Richardson Electronics Ltd. and United Stationers Inc.

For the last four years, Mr. George has headed Titan Financial Group LLC, concentrating on mid-cap firms in the business services industry, such as data-based telemarketing. The six-employee firm was an outgrowth of the 1989 sale of one of Mr. George’s clients, Oak Brook-based Envirodyne Industries Inc., whose founder and chief executive, Ronald Linde, became a Titan partner.

Mr. George acknowledged that the deal with Cleary Gull — and the 25% stake in the Milwaukee company’s publicly traded parent held by Boston-based buyout specialist Thomas Lee & Co. — will give him greater leverage with potential customers.

There is some skepticism, however, about how his experience with big clients, among them R. R. Donnelley & Sons Co., Amoco Corp. and Nalco Chemical Co., will fit with Cleary Gull’s smaller niche.

“It’s going to be an adjustment for both sides,” concedes Mr. Prokupek, 36, who adds: “We sell a lot of companies to very large companies. Being able to deal with those people is very important to us.”

Mr. George points to a unit he formed in the late-’80s at Salomon that spotlighted so-called high-yield and merchant banking transactions for midsize companies, such as Oak Brook, Ill.-based U.S. Can Co., then a $300-million operation.

“It’s my opinion that owners or operators of medium-sized businesses really value the type of experience I have in working on more complicated transactions,” he argues.

After 12 years as a senior banker at Morgan Stanley & Co. and Salomon, Mr. George went to Bankers Trust in 1991.

Cleary Gull is owned by Freedom Securities, a Boston-based retail brokerage and investment company that also owns two similar regional firms: Boston-based Tucker Anthony and San Francisco-based Sutro & Co. During the last year, Cleary Gull has doubled its financing volume, raising about $1 billion, and handled 30 merger-and-acquisition transactions, it says.

While Tucker Anthony has about 40 retail brokers here, Mr. Prokupek says Freedom’s strategy, for the moment, is “to grow separate brands” and consider further acquisitions.

Crain News Service