Charles Keating – Lincoln Savings & Loan
He had five U.S. senators in his back pocket. He went to prison anyway.
As Charles Keating became the poster boy for the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s, he cloaked himself in self-righteousness and phony piety.
The head of Irvine, Calif.-based Lincoln Savings and Loan was such an outspoken moralist that President Nixon put him on the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. He even got Mother Theresa to show up at his sentencing hearing and ask the court for leniency.
When San Francisco-based regulators began investigating the debts and conflicted deals piling up at the his S&L, he reportedly told his staff that they were just some “homos” who were “out to get him” for his strong moral views.
As he fought every attempt to regulate and investigate his S&L, he had five U.S. Senators in his back pocket, including the late GOP Sen. John McCain. Each of these Senators, known as the “Keating Five,” were eventually were rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee.
When Lincoln failed in 1989, it cost the federal government more than $3 billion. Keating received the maximum 10-year prison sentence for his crimes. The sentencing judge quoted Woodie Guthrie: “More people have suffered from a fountain pen than from a gun.”
Keating died in 2014 at the age of 90.