Wamu Capital Corp., the Seattle based mortgage- and asset-backed securities broker/dealer subsidiary of lending giant Washington Mutual, has opened a New York sales desk and has made its first three hires, according to firm President Tim Maimone. Maddee Kassimir, Tom Berger and Shari Korn have joined the firm from M.J. Whitman and will begin selling MBS and ABS "as soon as we can square away our office situation," says Maimone, noting that they will work out of temporary quarters for the time being. They will report to Seattle based sales chief Todd Kaufman.
The three had left Whitman and were unavailable to comment as of press time last Friday. Maimone says Kassimir was a senior v.p. in sales for eight years in PaineWebber's New York MBS sales effort prior to joining Whitman several years ago. He says Berger and Korn have worked together, "on and off" for the past 16 years, both getting their start in Kidder Peabody's MBS trading department, where Berger was a senior v.p. and traded both MBS and ABS from 1986 to 1995.
Korn, who also worked at Kidder from 1986 until its merger with PaineWebber, was a managing director and traded the fixed and floating rate collateralized mortgage obligation book. She was also a consultant to Goldman Sachs' MBS trading desk for a year, he says.