Charles Humphrey Keating, Jr., (born Dec. 4, 1923, Cincinnati, Ohio—died March 31, 2014, Phoenix, Ariz.), American financier and real-estate developer who enriched his own coffers to the tune of $34 million (and spent another $1.3 million on political contributions) while bilking depositors and investors of the Lincoln Savings & Loan of Irvine, Calif., which was seized by the government after its parent company, the real-estate firm American Continental, entered bankruptcy in 1989. The collapse of that savings and loan (S&L) represented the largest of the 1,043 S&L failures during the 1980s and ’90s and cost the federal government more than $3 billion. Keating persuaded customers to replace federally insured deposits with high-yield bonds, which were not government insured, and then used their funds to make risky investments that led to massive losses. Meanwhile, he persuaded five U.S. senators, known as the “Keating Five” (Alan Cranston of California, Donald W. Riegle, Jr., of Michigan, John Glenn of Ohio, and Dennis DeConcini and John McCain, both of Arizona), whom he had generously supported financially via their political campaigns, to urge the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to relax its rules and discontinue its investigation into Lincoln’s financials. Two years prior to Lincoln’s collapse, investigators discovered that the S&L had $135 million in unreported losses and was more than $600 million over the risky-investment ceiling. Keating was ultimately convicted of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy at the state and federal levels, and he served four and a half years of a 10-year prison sentence before his verdicts were overturned (1996) on appeal. Though California dropped its case, the federal government was prepared to retry him in 1999 when Keating pleaded guilty to four lesser counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud. He was sentenced to time served. Prior to his conviction, Keating, a 1948 graduate of the University of Cincinnati College of Law, opened (1952) a law firm with his brother. He was also known for his NCAA swimming prowess and for his antipornography activism.