Three Morgan Stanley Smith Barney advisors in the Washington, D.C. area with AUM of $700 million have joined HighTower Advisors, the fifth recruiting deal that the Chicago-based wealth management firm has announced this year.
The new advisory team, VWG Wealth Management, is based in Vienna, Va. and led by John Verfurth, Richard Weeks and Jeff Grinspoon. The three have been named managing directors and partners at HighTower.
Verfurth had spent his entire 16-year career in financial services with Morgan Stanley before joining HighTower. Weeks and Grinspoon both joined Morgan Stanley in 2001 after working at Legg Mason; Weeks had been with Legg Mason since 1994, and Grinspoon since 1998.
HighTower, with $18 billion in AUM last spring, has been on a tear since it named two top recruiters late last year: Michael Parker, an alumnus of LPL Financial, and Kevin Geary, formerly of Charles Schwab. Parker, based in New York City, works the East Coast for HighTower; Geary, in San Francisco, heads West Coast recruiting.