Charles Spiller

Charles J. Spiller spent nearly three decades at PSERS, the Pennsylvania Public School Employees' Retirement System, one of the largest U.S. public pension funds (roughly $49–65 billion in assets over his tenure). He attended Northeastern University (1970–1975) and joined PSERS in 1994 during an earlier direct-investment push, initially to purchase and manage property directly for the fund.

In 1997 he was named managing director for private equity and real estate. Over his career he grew PSERS's private-markets book from about $1 billion in 1997 to roughly $29 billion, building the staff that sourced, vetted, and recommended hundreds of private equity, real estate, hedge fund, and other "alternative" investments. When James H. Grossman Jr. became chief investment officer in 2015, Spiller was elevated to Deputy Chief Investment Officer, continuing to lead the "non-traditional investments" (private markets) program.

Spiller was PSERS's lead on real estate and briefed the board on those transactions. He championed in-house, direct deal-making — assembling a portfolio that included a Florida shopping mall, a California pistachio farm, Florida fruit orchards, and Midwestern and Southern mobile-home parks — and pushed to hire more commercial real estate specialists. From 2017 he also drove PSERS's controversial purchases of three blocks of downtown Harrisburg real estate for redevelopment, activity that later drew federal (FBI/IRS) scrutiny alongside a broader probe of the fund. He served on the board of 812 Market Inc., a nonprofit created in 2017 to hold title to some of those Harrisburg properties.

At retirement Spiller was about 69 years old and among Pennsylvania's highest-paid state employees, earning roughly $400,000 a year. He stepped aside as trustees moved to reshape the portfolio he had built — shifting away from hedge funds and toward U.S. equities — and retired in March 2022, saying he had recently become a grandfather and looked forward to more family time.

• Operated as an institutional LP, committing pension capital to external PE, real estate, private-debt, and hedge-fund managers rather than making venture/seed bets.
• Favored direct and in-house deal-making in real assets — farmland, retail, and mobile-home parks — to control fees and capture yield, and wanted to expand PSERS's internal commercial-real-estate capability.
• Sized commitments large: single-fund tickets ran into the tens to hundreds of millions (up to ~$250M).
• Publicly argued that private markets were PSERS's highest-performing asset class after the fund ramped its allocation — though outside reviews criticized the alternatives book for high fees and lagging peers (a 2018 study ranked PSERS 50th of 52 state funds).
• Diligence-driven and relationship-based: as director of alternative investments and later Deputy CIO, he personally brought recommendations (with staff analysis) to the board for approval.