Charles Keating, Jr.

Charles Humphrey Keating, Jr. was an American athlete, lawyer, activist, and businessman who was involved in an illegal savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s.

History
Before getting into business, Charles Keating was a swimmer and then a lawyer. In 1976, Keating founded the American Continental Corporation in Phoenix, Arizona, which operated as a real estate business. American Continental bought Lincoln Savings and Loan in 1984, and began using the recently deregulated industry to their advantage, and used depositors' money in risky investments, such as Keating's ambitious real estate projects in American Continental. Keating urged staff to "always remember the weak, meek, and ignorant are always good targets." In 1985, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board began instituting rules to protect insurance funds, ordering S&L associations to hold no more then 10% of their assets in direct investments, but it was discovered by late 1986 that Lincoln Savings had $135 million in unreported losses and that it had breached the FHLBB's regulated investment boundaries by $600 million. Keating then bribed Five U.S. Senators, the "Keating Five," in an effort to keep Lincoln in business. Regulators were still able to prove that Keating had been disobeying regulations, and ordered him to stop transferring Lincoln's assets to American Continental. Both Lincoln and American Continental went bankrupt afterwards, and Keating was eventually convicted of 73 counts of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy.