Late last year Weisel quietly recruited Kitts to Thomas Weisel Partners to be co-director of mergers and acquisitions, the senior banker in the New York office and head of financial sponsors coverage, which involves soliciting business from venture capital and LBO firms. Kitts is a star with a checkered past. He left Morgan Stanley in July 1999 after he got into a Christmas party scuffle with a junior colleague and admitted to having an affair with a subordinate. A longtime fan of Kitts’s, Weisel tried twice to hire him from Morgan Stanley in the ‘90s. Early last year, with his new firm growing rapidly - and with Kitts out of a job - Weisel reached out again. But some in Weisel’s inner circle shied from Kitts’s controversial history, and the firm did not make an offer. Weisel pressed the banker’s candidacy, and, after talking to more of Kitts’s former colleagues and clients, brought him back for interviews about six months later. “We were incredibly impressed with the progress he had made on the personal front,” says Weisel. “He basically spent that six months with his family, trying to make things right. I’m not condoning anything that he did. But I do think that people make mistakes in their lives, and as long as they don’t put their heads in the sand and they seriously face it and do something about it, I’m more than willing to give them a second chance.” Kitts declined to be interviewed.
