Charles Keating, disgraced financier and savings-and-loan collapse villain, is dead at age 90
Arizona Republic/Twitter
Charles H. Keating Jr., the infamous financier behind the biggest savings and loan disaster of the 1980s, died Tuesday. He was 90.
Keating ran the Phoenix-based American Continental Corp., in addition its subsidiary Lincoln Savings & Loan. Many of the depositors at Lincoln Savings & Loan, especially older savers and naive investors, were persuaded to cash in their federally insured deposits for $256 million worth of uninsured American Continental junk bonds. Keating was convicted in 1993 of swindling those customers and raiding the thrift. The failure of Lincoln Savings & Loan cost the government $3.4 billion.
It also tainted the political careers of the Keating Five — Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), John Glenn (D-Ohio), Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), Donald Riegle (D-Mich.), and Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) — all significant recipients of Keating's campaign largesse who lobbied to get federal regulators off his back as Lincoln and American Continental teetered toward insolvency.
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Keating's convictions were later overturned, and he pleaded guilty to bankruptcy fraud in Phoenix. He served four-and-a-half years in prison. While Keating is best known for the savings and loan disaster, he garnered attention in other ways earlier in life; he was a college swimming champion at the University of Cincinnati and an anti-pornography activist. Read more at The New York Times. --Catherine Garcia
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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