Talk:Charles Keating

Previous discussions without headers

The fact that Keating was an Olympic-class swimmer in his youth should be mentioned somewher in all of this.

Agreed. Ellsworth

Done. AxelBoldt 22:23, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

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I dropped this from the article:

• News Release by the U.S. Department of Justice on Keating's guilty plea

This link is broken. Ellsworth 15:20, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Please do not remove broken links. Most everything is still available from the Internet Archive. AxelBoldt 22:23, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Note: the linke removed by Ellsworth and re-instated by you gets you a "404 Page Not Found" error when you click on it.

I've been using the WWW since it's public debut in 1994 (I also have one of the oldest, continuous Yahoo! Webmail accounts) and I've never heard of the "Internet Archive."

I'm glad someone's doing this, but I question as to whether US (and other nation's) copyright laws do not limit what this "Internet Archive" can, in fact, store.

After all, I just saw Rush the week before last, I can't take the pictures my friend took with his camera phone and post them on a website or publish them in a book or magazine without Rush's permission.

I didn't see an exemption in Federal law--or an international convention--to allow the "Internet Archive" to do its work, though I admit I didn't have time to read the entire article.

PainMan 17:39, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

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I removed this comment from the main text:

":Add the civil suits and judgements against him." 69.22.126.20 12:16, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Was Keating ever disbarred?

Just curious, but was Keating ever disbarred? Given his convictions it wouldn't surprise me if he was, but the article never says it so I'm not sure. If he was disbarred, even temporarilly, he should be added to Category:Disbarred American lawyers (that cat includes lawyers who were disbarred but later reinstated). Dugwiki 17:33, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Conviction of a felony is automatic grounds for disbarment in every state (though, of course, there maybe exceptions; after all Utah allows convicts to vote in prison!). My guess would be that Keating probably either surrendered his law license voluntarily or didn't fight the disbarment procedures.

I'm not sure of the relevance of this because his legal troubles didn't stem from his work as a lawyer, it stemmed from schnookering old people into diverting their savings from insured-accounts to uninsured investments.

One thing I've never understood is why none of the tellers or salespeople, those who did the actual, face-to-face defrauding, were ever prosecuted. After all, drug mules are prosecuted just as the so-called "kingpins" are. (And far more often, in fact! Especially in New York under it's draconian "Rockefeller" laws that hand-down savage sentence for possessing relatively small amounts of dope. But I digress...).

PainMan 17:39, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

A Complete Mess

Today 6 Oct 2008 I received an email from David Plouffe, chairman of the Obama campaign advising that they had set up a site www.keatingeconomics.com,part of which reads

"During the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s, McCain's political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion.

Sound familiar?

In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain's Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts -- and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain."

This is political campaigning, so fo course it is biased towards their viewpoint.

However, when I came to Wikipedia to check on Charles Keating, I found that over thae past week numerous edits had been made by three ip addresses, under the titles of "Legal Consequences" and "Keating Family Profited from the RTC Disposition of Real Estate In 1995 & later".

I highly suspect that these entries are vandalism by people supportive of the Obama campaign, and that it is quite possible that this is a coordinated effort by members of the Obama campaign, to have Wikipedia's record "support" keatingeconomics.com

Brian Cartwright

Verification information for RTC Properties Purchased by the Keating descendants

Brian, In response to your suspicious nature which has lead you to consider vandalism of the Wiki I submit that the information posted regarding the manner in which the Keating children and at least one grandchild profited from purchasing RTC owned real property IS VERIFIABLE through the process of having a title search performed in Maricopa County Arizona for the property addresses listed in my original revisions between October 1st and October 3rd 2008. Those two property addresses (5124 North 31st Place no. 525 AND 5122 North 31st Way no. 231 - Phoenix Arizona 85016 ) are at least 2 properties purchased by Dr & Mrs Hall and Mr.Gary Hall Jr. who at the time was aged 18.

For simplification of your verification search, the Maricopa County Tax Assessor number of the condo purchased from the RTC by Gary Hall Jr. is 164-69-485 and the Maricopa County Tax Assessor number of the condo purchased from the RTC by Dr. Gary Hall & his wife Mary Hall is 164-69-505.

 for these public records.

Sincerely, Arizona Biltmore (talk) 07:19, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

==

This article, imo, is a poster child for bad wikipedia articles.

It uses no in-text citations, in fact, no references at all. There is only a list of a few web-links at the end of the article.

I submit that this article is not up to wikipedia standards and needs a massive rewrite.

The key problem, to reiterate, is the total lack of both citations and sourcing.

However, the article is also unbalanced.

The introductory sentence:

Charles Humphrey Keating Jr. (born 4 December 1923 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American felon convicted of fraud in the savings and loan scandal of 1989.

is hardly neutral.

It should read something more like this: 164-69-505::Charles Keating Jr....is an American lawyer, politician and financier. He was at the center of one of the largest Savings_and_loan failures in American history.

The editor writes that: Such savings and loan associations had been deregulated in the early 1980s, allowing them to make highly risky investments with their depositors' money, a change of which Keating took advantage.

However, the editors does not explain how Keating took advantage of deregulation nor even what it was. He (the editor, that is) also fails to link to any source (whether another wikipedia article or outside) that would give readers further information on this. Non-Americans and those too-young to remember the S&L problems are left uninformed.

The editor also fails to inform that the vast majority of S&L failures resulted from outright theft--which ran the gamut of everything from company officers literally transfering money from depositors to their own accounts to other, more sophisticated schemes involving shell corporations.

Also, by calling Sen. John McCain his "good friend" without any citation suggests that the editor's goal is more to smear Sen. McCain than anything.

The statement that the so-called "Keating Five" took $300,000" from Keating fails to mention that these were political contributions, either directly to the politicians in question or to their PACs.

The mention of Alan Greenspan is irrelevant in the way it is presented in the article. This article is about Charles Keating and not about the Savings_and_loan debacle in general. Greenspan has never been charged with any crime let alone one relating to Lincoln Savings. To my knowledge he has never been named as a defendant in any of the civil litigation surrounding Lincoln's collapse.

There is also an error of fact. Many of the depositors who lost their money did so because Keating had his employees convince them to buy investments rather than open Federally-insured (FDIC) savings/checking accounts. This is why he was charged with, and ultimately pled guilty to, fraud.

There is no mention of the shakiness of the government's case as evidences by the decision of California prosecutors not to retry Keating on state charges and Federal prosecutor's agreeing to a plea deal with Keating in order to avoid a retrial they might have lost. US Attorneys are not noted for quailing before defendants especially a target as juicy as Keating (nailing a guy like Keating could easily help a US Attorney get elected to Congress or the Senate or even governor of a state).

The section head:

Lincoln Savings, Keating Five

Is misleading. The article is about Keating, not the five Senators who made up the so-called "Keating Five."

The editor also leaves out the fact that congresspersons meet with regulators (i.e. Executive branch officials) on behalf of constituents as a matter of routine. It maybe to help a large business or to help an individual with an issue with Social Security or one of the other federal behemoths.

The issue in question with regard to the so-called "Keating Five" was whether Keating's campaign/PAC donations unduly influenced said Senators. None of them was ever charged with a crime, sued civilly or named as an unindicted co-conspiracy (as Hillary Clinton was during the White Water trials).

---In short: this article is a complete mess and I believe that the original editors needs to completely rewrite it or it should be removed.

PainMan 17:22, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

You're right: references should be added; I pieced most of this together from various newspaper articles at a time when detailed in-line references were not yet fashionable in Wikipedia. As to the criticisms above:

• Details about causes of S&L failings are complex and best explained in its own article.
• Keating Five were never charged with a crime or sued, this is correct. The article does not claim they were; however it correctly points out that they were reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee. The Keating Five are clearly relevant in an article about Keating.
• Greenspan was never charged with a crime, this is correct; the article doesn't claim he was. However he was hired by Keating and delivered a favorable report about his S&L; this is relevant.
• Article correctly states that state prosecutors dropped the case rather than push for a retrial and that federal prosecutors agreed to the plea bargain rather than go for the retrial.
• The article correctly states what he was charged with: duping his customers into buying worthless American Corp junk bonds.
• Keating plead guilty to bankruptcy fraud, not to defrauding his customers.

AxelBoldt 19:34, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

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The article states that the reason that the state did not go for retrial on Keating is the reluctance of the witnesses to come forward after accepting their own sentences. I don't think they'res any proof of that. Without some documentation to that effect, I don't think anyone can conjecture as to what the outcome of a fair trial would have been. That is, the courts ruled that he didn't get a fair trial on the most egregious charges. The article states that Keating duped his customers into buying junk bonds. He was not convicted of that. He pled guilty to wire and bankruptcy fraud.

   Securities Fraud convicted of 17 counts 4-Dec-1991, overturned 3-Apr-1996
   Conspiracy convicted 6-Jan-1993, overturned
   Fraud convicted 6-Jan-1993, overturned 2-Dec-1996
   Racketeering convicted 6-Jan-1993, overturned
   Transporting Stolen Property convicted 6-Jan-1993, overturned
   Wire Fraud pled guilty 6-Apr-1999
   Fraud (bankruptcy fraud) pled guilty 6-Apr-1999

The article states that Keatings convictions were overturned on technicalities. I don't think that's an impartial judgement either. The "technicality" in all the cases was that he didn't get a fair trial. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.117.209.198 (talk) 11:16, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

He pleaded guilty to federal convictions, see http://www.altlaw.org/v1/cases/1360195 November 5, 1998, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, CHARLES H. KEATING, PETITIONER-APPELLEE, v. ROBERT HOOD; ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, RESPONDENTS-APPELLANTS. "the activities of Charles Keating, whose corporations, American Continental Corporation and Lincoln Savings & Loan, bilked elderly individuals out of millions of dollars of savings by selling them worthless savings bonds. Keating was prosecuted in both federal and state court, and sentenced to substantial terms of imprisonment, to be served concurrently. He ultimately spent five years in prison. His federal and state trials were both marred, however, by errors which led our court to reverse his federal conviction and a federal district court to grant his state habeas petition. Following these actions, Keating was released from prison prior to the completion of his prison sentences. At the time, only six months remained before he would have become eligible for parole on his state sentence. Keating subsequently pleaded guilty to the federal charges and, pursuant to a plea agreement, was sentenced to time served."

He doesn't sound like an honest businessman to me, indeed it's mildly embarrassing that I share the surname and might easily be a distant relation. I don't think you need to infer conspiracy on the basis of some unfavourable comments. I agree that the article could use some improvements, especially references. Go for it! Richard Keatinge (talk) 16:56, 7 October 2008 (UTC)