Charles Keating

Early life and military service

Keating was born on December 4, 1923, in Cincinnati, Ohio, into a devout Roman Catholic family. He was the son of Adele (née Kipp) and Charles Humphrey Keating. He grew up in the Avondale and Clifton neighborhoods of that city.

His younger brother William was born in 1927. Their father came from Kentucky and managed a dairy. Charles Keating Sr. lost a leg in a hunting accident, and then fell into a long decline from Parkinson's disease around 1931, and was nursed by his wife until his death in 1964.

Keating began swimming at a Catholic summer camp and became passionately involved in the sport. He attended St. Xavier High School, where he was a good student, was on the swimming team all four years, and also ran track and played football.

In swimming he led the team to three Greater Catholic League championships, set several school records, was named all-state, and was captain of the team in his senior year. Keating graduated from St Xavier in 1941.

After one semester at the University of Cincinnati in fall 1941, Keating left because of poor grades, although he advanced to the NCAA Men's Swimming and Diving Championships in 1942, finishing sixth in the 200 yard breaststroke. He enlisted in the United States Navy. He trained in the Navy Air Corps to become a carrier-based pilot flying Grumman F6F Hellcats.

During World War II, Keating was stationed in the U.S., sometimes at Banana Creek in Florida, and flew Hellcats to armed services swimming meets. He was not injured at Naval Air Station Vero Beach when he failed to lower the landing gear on his Hellcat wrecking his plane in a belly landing. Due to squadron transfers and receiving additional training on new intercept methods, the war ended without his being engaged in combat.

Education and swimming

Keating was ready to return to college after finishing his Navy service in 1945. His abilities as a swimmer made him an attractive recruit, despite his having dropped out earlier. He made an agreement with the University of Cincinnati whereby it would accept for academic credit much of his Navy service, then he would take six months of liberal arts courses before entering its law school.

Keating won the 200-yard breaststroke at the Ohio Intercollegiate Conference championship in 1945. On March 30, 1946, Keating competed in the 200-yard breaststroke at the NCAA Men's Swimming and Diving Championships at Yale University's Payne Whitney Gymnasium. In an exciting, back-and-forth contest with Paul Murray of Cornell University and future coaching legend James Counsilman of Ohio State University, he prevailed by a foot to win the championship with a time of 2:26.2. (The event was later reclassified as the butterfly in NCAA records due to a definitional evolution involving the two strokes.)

This was the first ever national championship in any sport for the University of Cincinnati. He and teammate Roy Lagaly become the first-ever Bearcats to be named All-Americans. Keating was an imposing 6 feet 5 inches, a natural leader and co-captain of the team with Lagaly. Of Keating, Lagaly said, "You could tell even then he was going to be very successful. He was very ambitious. Whatever he did, he did all the way." Keating followed this by swimming for Cincinnati Gym, finishing second to future Olympic gold medalist Joseph Verdeur in the 220-yard breaststroke at the April 1946 national AAU championships.

Keating received his law degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 1948, and would later be named a member of the university's Athletic Hall of Fame.

Charles Keating was a long-time supporter of U.S. swimming and beginning in 1969 he and his brother William donated $600,000 to St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati to build a state-of-the-art competition pool. The school's swimming team went on to win many state titles. St. Xavier named the Keating Natatorium after the brothers' father, and inducted Charles Keating into its initial Athletic Hall of Fame class in 1985. The University of Cincinnati's 2006 athletic building is named the Keating Aquatic Center, in honor of William Keating, and donations from the Keating family used to construct it. Charles Keating funded Cincinnati's Marlins swim club; six swimmers on the 1980 Summer Olympics squad were from its roster, including future Olympic champion Mary T. Meagher. When he later moved to Phoenix, Charles Keating built the Phoenix Swim Club, where Olympians also trained.

Marriage and family

Keating married Mary Elaine Fette in 1949. She was an athletically-minded Catholic from an established Cincinnati family. They had six children, including Charles Keating III.

His daughter Mary married Gary Hall, who would go on to swim in the 1968, 1972 and 1976 Summer Olympics, winning a medal in each one. Keating's grandson Gary Hall Jr. competed in the 1996, 2000, and 2004 Summer Olympics as a swimmer and won ten medals overall.

Another Keating grandson, Chief petty officer Charles Keating IV, a Navy SEAL, was killed at age 31 in combat with ISIS in Iraq in 2016. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for his actions in combat.

Early legal and business career

After law school graduation, Keating did spot legal work for the FBI, then joined a law firm doing corporate law. On the side, he entered the business world where his ventures involved selling life insurance, running a fruit stand, and working for Roto-Rooter.

In 1952, along with his brother, William, and a mutual friend from law school, he became a founding partner of the Cincinnati law firm Keating, Muething & Klekamp. Beginning in the late 1950s they took on Carl Lindner Jr. as a client. Lindner was rapidly accumulating ice cream stores, supermarkets, real estate, and savings and loans, and soon essentially became Keating's sole client. In 1956, he filed requests for Q clearances on behalf of a small company of former Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory scientists with an office in Newtown, Ohio; unknown to Keating, the FBI suspected the application was fraudulent and launched an investigation of him, but no charges were made. Keating was admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court bar in 1958.

In 1960, Lindner and Keating created American Financial Corporation, a holding company of Lindner's disparate businesses that created further subsidiaries and financial instruments, all doing business with each other. Keating was named to the board of directors of the company in 1963.

Anti-pornography activism

In 1956, Keating joined a priest leading a group of Catholics in Cincinnati who were concerned about the dangers of pornography, and he began giving talks on the subject to parents and other groups. In 1958, Keating testified before the House Judiciary Committee on mail-order pornography, saying that it was "capable of poisoning any mind at any age and of perverting our entire younger generation", and that it was closely tied to juvenile delinquency, while also quoting a Senate Committee report that "part of the Communist conspiracy was to print (obscene materials)". Keating mentioned links between pornography and Communism at other times, but distanced himself from the more fervent anti-Communist groups of the early 1960s. He stated that 90 percent of obscene materials were produced for profit, not ideological reasons, and told Congress in 1960, "I had better say [...] that I am not blaming obscenity in America on the Communists."

Keating founded Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL) in 1958 (later renamed a number of times, the best known of which is Citizens for Decency through Law), which advocated reading classics not "smut." It would grow to 300 chapters and 100,000 members nationwide and become the largest anti-pornography organization in the nation. It absorbed some other groups, such as National Citizens for Decent Literature and the Pittsburgh National Better Magazines Council. The structure of CDL was initially decentralized, but Keating grew frustrated with some local chapters taking aggressive actions he did not approve of, and so he gave it a more controlled focus with a national magazine, film production, and a greater role in legal actions.

Over the next two decades, CDL mailed some 40 million letters on behalf of its position and filed a series of amicus curiae briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court. Keating gained the nickname "Mr. Clean".

In 1964–65, Keating produced Perversion for Profit, a film featuring announcer George Putnam. It was a survey of then-available prurient and obscene materials, and asserted that pornography led to moral decay. It, along with two lesser-known films produced or distributed by CDL, was screened frequently throughout the country and remained in print for a long time.

In 1969, Keating's national reputation on the issue led President Richard Nixon to appoint him to the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which had been begun under Nixon's predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The majority on the commission issued a report which concluded that pornography does not degrade the morals of adults or cause crime, and recommended that all federal, state, and local laws preventing consenting adults from obtaining pornographic materials be repealed. Keating, Nixon's only appointee on the 18-person commission, was the leading commission dissenter from the report.

American Financial Corporation

While officially an outside lawyer, Keating functioned as a public face for Carl Lindner and American Financial Corporation and the two were close associates on business as well as legal matters; Lindner would sometimes refer to Keating as a "founder" of American Financial. The company had easy access to credit lines, which allowed it to continually grow. The web of transactions involving the company and its subsidiaries was large and complex, and one stock analyst stated in 1977 that he had "never come across a company that has so much strange paper on its books."

Keating left his law practice in 1972 and formally joined American Financial Corporation, by now a $1 billion enterprise, as executive vice president. Keating became Lindner's person in charge of firing employees from newly acquired companies. Within business circles Keating gained a reputation for aggressiveness and arrogance. He took on an operational involvement in The Cincinnati Enquirer, the town's only morning newspaper. He interfered in editorial decisions, such as adding coverage to high school sports that he or Lindner's sons were involved in. The paper was then sold to a group including his brother, William, who had been a Republican congressman from Ohio's 1st congressional district in the early 1970s. Charles Keating was involved in American Financial's 1974 sale of Bantam Books, and its decision that year not to enter the investment banking field.

In 1975 and 1976, several stockholder lawsuits were filed against American Financial, and Keating was under fire for aspects involving unsecured loans, stock warrants, and the sale of the Enquirer. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched a major investigation of the company and charged Lindner, Keating and others with having defrauded investors and filing false SEC reports. At particular issue was a $14 million loan that the SEC said was made on preferential terms. Keating resigned from American Financial in August 1976, with conflicting stories as to whether or not Keating and Lindner had remained close or whether they had fallen out.

American Continental Corporation

Keating moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1976 to run the real estate firm American Continental Homes, a struggling, millions-losing homebuilding spin-off of American Financial that was given over to Keating for $300,000 as part of his departure package. The move was completed when his family followed him in 1978. In 1979 the SEC case with American Financial was settled, with Keating signing a consent agreement where he neither admitted nor denied guilt but agreed not to violate federal fraud and securities statutes. In practice, Keating was blamed for much of the irregular financial practices that had gone on and his reputation was significantly damaged.

Keating reaped benefits from the move to Arizona, a wide-open territory in both a physical and business sense that allowed someone a fresh start. He turned the now-renamed American Continental Corporation around, adding various operations and divisions in a structure somewhat reminiscent of American Financial. As chairman and controlling stockholder, Keating relied heavily upon family members, employing his son and four of his sons-in-law in prominent positions. Charles Keating III had a fast career rise within the company.

In 1979, Keating served as head of fundraising in the Southwest for John Connally's campaign for the 1980 Republican Party presidential nomination. Connally was a favorite of the business community, but his campaign had difficulty parlaying its fundraising successes into popular support. In early December 1979, Keating was named campaign manager, with the existing manager being demoted to campaign strategist. Keating's first action was as a "pruner" who immediately fired twenty workers at the campaign's Virginia headquarters. The campaign continued to struggle, and, by late February 1980, Keating was out as manager, with Connally taking the role. Connally's campaign ended two weeks later, famously known for having spent $11 million and gaining only one delegate.

Having won the 1980 election, President Reagan contacted Keating about becoming U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, where Keating had spent considerable time. When Keating's run-in with the SEC resurfaced in press reports, however, he was dropped from consideration. This dismayed Keating, who subsequently said, "To keep people like me out of positions like that because of yellow journalism, I don't know what good it does."

Lincoln Savings and the Keating Five

In 1984, American Continental Corporation bought Lincoln Savings and Loan Association for just over $50 million. Up through the early 1980s, Lincoln had been a conservatively-run enterprise, with almost half its assets in home loans and only a quarter of its assets considered at risk. It made slow growth at best, and had shown a loss for several years until it made a profit of a few million dollars in 1983. Once he took over, Keating fired the existing management. Savings and loan associations had been deregulated in the early 1980s, allowing them to make high-risk investments with their depositors' money, a change of which Keating and other savings and loan operators took advantage. When Keating later was asked why he got into savings and loans, he said, "I know the business inside out, and I always felt that an S & L, if they'd relax the rules, was the biggest moneymaker in the world."

Over the next four years Lincoln's assets increased from $1.1 billion to $5.5 billion. Lincoln's particular investments took the form of buying land, taking equity positions in real estate development projects, and buying high-yield junk bonds. A sales document from this period urges staff to, "always remember the weak, meek and ignorant are always good targets."

Beginning in 1985 the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) feared that the savings industry's risky investment practices were exposing the government's insurance funds to huge losses. It instituted a rule whereby savings associations could hold no more than 10 percent of their assets in "direct investments", and were thus prohibited from taking ownership positions in certain financial entities and instruments. Lincoln had become burdened with bad debt resulting from its past aggressiveness, and by early 1986 its investment practices were being investigated and audited by the San Francisco office of the FHLBB: in particular whether it had violated these direct investment rules; Lincoln had directed accounts insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation into commercial real estate ventures. By the end of 1986, that office of the FHLBB had found that Lincoln had $135 million in unreported losses and had surpassed the regulated direct investments limit by $600 million.

Keating believed that the regulators were against him because he opposed their rules. He also told his staff that some of the San Francisco regulators were likely "homos" who were "out to get him" for his strong moral views. Keating took measures to oppose the FHLBB, including recruiting a study from then-private economist Alan Greenspan saying that direct investments were not harmful, trying to hire FHLBB members or their wives, and getting President Ronald Reagan to make a recess appointment of a Keating ally, real estate developer Lee H. Henkel Jr., to the FHLBB. By March 1987, however, the ally had resigned upon news of his having large loans due to Lincoln. It appeared as though the government might seize Lincoln for being insolvent.

Failure of Lincoln and American Continental

Lincoln stayed in business; from mid-1987 to April 1989, its assets grew from $3.91 billion to $5.46 billion. Following Keating's past practices with Lindner, American Continental amassed a large collection of confusingly connected subsidiaries in real estate, banking, and insurance businesses; these numbered at least 54, and there were some overseas ones that auditors were not aware of. Keating was triumphant in having defeated the regulators, whom he despised as useless relics from an outmoded financial past, and defended his high salary and business practices. He spent about $500,000 on radio advertisements in the Phoenix area to improve his public image; the commercials stressed his real estate projects and his family-oriented values. A 1988 Los Angeles Times profile assessed Keating as "a businessman without apparent peer in Arizona in terms of riches, clout and color." While Keating had taken Citizens for Decency through Law with him, he had generally de-emphasized his anti-pornography work when he moved to Arizona. Nevertheless, X-rated movies and Playboy magazine were banned from his hotels.

In October 1988, Keating opened his most extravagant real estate project ever, the 250-acre (1.0 km2), 600-room The Phoenician Resort at the base of Camelback Mountain. Its construction cost $300 million, included many opulent, imported features, and saw a number of instances of Keating or his decorator wife making wholesale late design changes at great expense. His other grand project was Estrella, a 20,000-acre (81 km2) mixed-use development outside of Phoenix in Goodyear, Arizona, in the direction of the Sierra Estrella. Incorporating homes, offices, industrial buildings, schools, shopping, a resort and a hospital, it was intended to eventually house 200,000 people and become a model 21st-century city. American Continental wrote rules saying that Estrella homeowners could not "intentionally terminat[e] a human pregnancy" or possess "adult material", but removed them once Keating was informed that such covenants were unconstitutional. A late 1980s downturn in the Sun Belt real estate market put Estrella in jeopardy before much building could be done.

Asked in an interview if he ever worried about going broke, Keating responded, "All the time, every day. I come into the office with this hollow feeling in my stomach lots of time.... You get trapped almost. You get too many responsibilities. It's a bellyfull to carry. It's risky. Dangerous. There's the possibility of failure with it every day and every night. But in a way, it's a challenge. It's invigorating. There isn't any point in not being a player – you're here.... It's not only the money. It's the disgrace, yourself, your manhood. I'm not sure I'd have a big problem with that. On the other hand I'm not sure I wouldn't."

Legal consequences

Keating blamed government regulators for the failure of Lincoln Savings and sued for control over the bank. The suit was dismissed in August 1990, with the judge calling the seizure fully justified. Keating's legal fees were running at $1 million per month.

In September 1990, Keating and his associates were indicted by the State of California on 42 counts related to having duped Lincoln's customers into buying worthless junk bonds of American Continental Corporation. Keating went to jail when he could not post a $5 million bond. He was convicted in December 1991 of 17 counts of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy. Mother Teresa asked the court to show leniency to Keating, in recognition of the considerable sums he had donated to her charitable operations. In April 1992, California Superior Court Judge Lance Ito gave Keating the maximum 10-year prison sentence, quoting Woody Guthrie, to wit "More people have suffered from the point of a fountain pen than from a gun." Keating was sent to the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution, Tucson to serve his time.

In May 1992, Keating's son-in-law, Robert M. Wurzelbacher Jr., a senior vice president of American Continental, and chief executive of an investment firm owned by Lincoln Savings, who was also implicated, pleaded guilty to three federal fraud counts in connection with the collapse of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association and agreed to testify against Keating. (In December 1993, Wurzelbacher was sentenced to a 40-month prison term.)

In January 1993, a federal conviction followed, on 73 counts of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy. In July 1993, Keating was given a 121⁄2 year sentence. The judge ordered Keating to pay restitution of $122 million to the government, but Keating said he was $10 million in debt and had no assets to sell.

One case filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was settled in 1994: Keating said he was bankrupt but agreed to repay millions should any hidden assets be discovered. A third case filed by the Resolution Trust Corporation resulted in a summary judgment of $4.3 billion against Keating and his wife in 1994, the largest judgment ever against a private person. The judgment was overturned on appeal in 1999, on grounds that Keating could not be held personally liable to the government without a specific criminal conviction or some other decision at trial. Throughout his incarceration, Keating maintained his innocence, saying he was a "political prisoner" of the U.S. government and a scapegoat for the largest banking scandal in the nation's history.

Final years and death

Following his release from prison, Keating separated from his wife Mary. He moved in with his daughter Mary and son-in-law Gary Hall Sr. in the Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley.

During the 2000s, Keating worked as a business consultant and as of 2008 was involved in some successful real estate developments in the Phoenix market. He kept a low profile in his business operations, and declined comment during John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign when the Keating Five scandal was brought up again by the press. During his final years, Keating maintained good physical shape through swimming and walking and was able to go out in public without being recognized.

Charles Keating died in a Phoenix hospital on March 31, 2014, at age 90, after an undisclosed illness of several weeks.

Legacy

The Chicago Tribune's lengthy profile of Keating in 1990 said in summary:

To say that Charles Keating is a complex man seems a gross understatement. Some see him as an aggressive man who got desperate when the real estate market bottomed out and crossed the line between "business as usual" and fraud. Others see him as a con artist who finally got caught, a hypocrite who masked his greed with phony piety.

Michael Binstein and Charles Bowden's 1993 book, Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions, also presents Keating as a complex individual with contradictory tendencies, and concludes:Charlie Keating built things, and, at some level that haunts anyone who looks over his records, he thought his schemes would work. He did not simply rob a bank. He broke a bank with his dreams. If he is simply a thief, why did he put the money into deals and projects instead of into his own pocket? If he is just a hardworking businessman simply trying to make a profit and create jobs, why the need for jets, fancy meals, big paychecks to his family? If he is such a devout communicant of his faith, why did he peddle hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of junk bonds to old people when he knew his empire was in serious jeopardy?

Keating steadfastly maintained that it was not his mistakes or criminal deeds but regulators' actions that were responsible for the major losses.

Some of Keating's 1980s judgment as a developer was later vindicated. The Phoenician became a successful hotel in the luxury segment, and the Estrella project achieved at least some of Keating's vision and was acquired again in 2005.

In popular culture

In the novel Myron, author Gore Vidal uses the names of various anti-pornography crusaders to take the place of swear words. One of the names is "keating", which is used many times throughout the book as a synonym for "shit".

Keating, portrayed by James Cromwell, appeared in Miloš Forman's 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt, leading a Citizens for Decent Literature charge against Flynt's Hustler Magazine.