Down and dirty at TCW

L'Affaire Gundlach gets a pretty good going over in the new Fortune. There's a lot of backstory about the L.A.-based money management giant (not all that well known, even now), as well as a few interesting tidbits on the firing of Gundlach, who had been the firm's top bond manager. Both he and TCW's senior execs had been preparing for a showdown.

The company hired investigators to look into the affairs of Gundlach and his closest lieutenants, tapping their office phones and monitoring their e-mails. At the same time they initiated clandestine talks with MetWest, the $30 billion bond house that would eventually replace Gundlach's team. Gundlach was preparing too. He and his "co- conspirators" began e-mailing one another in September about their plot to steal information, according to TCW's complaint. The suit alleges that the group referred to Gundlach as "the Pope" and "the Godfather" and swiped 9 million pages' worth of client contacts, trade tickets, and software routines used to process the complex data that go into analyzing mortgages. They retained a realtor to find an office space with 50 trading desks.

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The crescendo of rumors -- of his ouster, of a sale -- was wearing on Gundlach. Still, he had no inkling of what was in store for him on Dec. 4, 2009. At 1 p.m. that day, when the markets closed on the East Coast, he was summoned to the 17th floor of TCW's headquarters. Michael Cahill, the company's general counsel, was waiting for him in a conference room with John Quinn, one of Los Angeles' top litigators. Cahill told Gundlach that TCW was putting him on administrative leave. Gundlach argued that the move would cause a disastrous customer exodus unless they negotiated a settlement that resolved various fee and management issues. The lawyers asked him to read a draft of the complaint TCW was planning to file against him. When Quinn tried to place the papers in his hands, Gundlach got angry.

He stormed out of the room and began walking down the stairs. Quinn and Cahill trailed him, thinking he was headed for the trading floor one level down, but Gundlach kept going. It was a surreal procession, says Quinn; they marched down 17 stories in total silence. The lawyers followed Gundlach out of the building and onto the street until Gundlach finally turned around and told them he wasn't planning on stopping anytime soon.