Word: thrifts
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Until last week financier Charles Keating had insisted on being the final witness at congressional hearings on the $2.5 billion disaster at Lincoln Savings & Loan, so that he could rebut the witnesses who had accused him of staving off a federal crackdown on his troubled thrift by lavishing money on influential politicians. But as the aggressive ex-fighter pilot, Olympic swimmer and pillar of the Phoenix business community was being sworn in before the House Banking Committee, his right hand trembled noticeably. His tanned face flushed, his 6-ft. 5-in. frame slumped, Keating, 66, demanded that television cameras...
Jack Atchison. In 1986 and 1987 Atchison was a managing partner of Arthur Young & Co., the accounting firm that audited Lincoln. Under Atchison's direction, the thrift got a clean bill of health. Later Atchison took a $930,000-a-year job as a vice president with Lincoln's parent company, American Continental Corp. Like his boss, Atchison took the Fifth before the committee several weeks...
Lawrence Taggart. The top thrift regulator in California in 1983 and 1984, Taggart allowed Keating to transfer $800 million in Lincoln's assets to high- risk investments. A month later he resigned from the government to become head of a Keating-controlled enterprise, TCS Financial Inc. Immediately Keating poured nearly $3 million into the business, wiping out the debt of the financially ailing firm. A friend of then FHLBB head Edwin Gray, who became his bitter enemy, Taggart wrote to Don Regan in 1986, calling Gray a "re- regulator" who was having a "very adverse impact on the ability...
Unlike the Senators who seek campaign contributions from the likes of Keating, Wall had nothing to gain but the continued esteem of the thrift industry for his consistently low estimates of the extent of the savings and loan debacle. He is a stolid former city planner from Salt Lake City whose only extravagance seems to be his natty suits and monogrammed shirts. As the top aide to Republican Senator Jake Garn of Utah when Garn was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Wall became a favorite of S & L owners. Says Senator Leach of Wall's 1987 appointment: "The industry...
...staff director of the Banking Committee in 1981, Wall drafted the industry's dream deregulation bill, the Garn-St. Germain Act. That law created a new breed of thrift operator. In came highflyers like Keating who shifted their depositors' money (now insured for $100,000 instead of $40,000) from unexciting residential mortgages to potentially more lucrative but indisputably riskier shopping malls, resort developments, energy-generating windmills. The new breed awarded themselves seven-digit salaries, private jets, hunting preserves and yachts on which to entertain members of Congress. Keating and his associates took $21 million from Lincoln even...