When Mother Teresa visited the United States, it was Charles H. Keating Jr. who lent his helicopter to her to visit remote Indian reservations in the Southwest.
Now this former Olympic swimmer and fighter pilot - a benefactor of charities and politicians, a battler of pornographers and bureaucrats - is the lead character in the costliest savings and loan failure in the nation's history and a Capitol Hill drama threatening the political lives of five senators.Whether bestowing his largess on church, charities, civic causes, business associates or politicians whose help he might want some day, "Charlie Keating" has always done it with a touch of flash.
Typifying his desire for the spotlight, Keating insisted on being the final witness in the final episode of six weeks of House Banking Committee hearings into the growth and collapse of his Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, Calif.
He got his wish and is scheduled to testify Tuesday.
Originally orchestrated as a forum for building a case to oust M. Danny Wall as the nation's top thrift regulator, the hearings instead have evolved into a near inquisition for the senators, to whom Keating and his associates gave $1.3 million in his highly public war with Lincoln's regulators.
Although he was formally subpoenaed by the committee, Keating's associates say he welcomes an opportunity to tell his side of the Lincoln story: that it was regulators who created the S&L nightmare, not him.
But just how forthcoming the Phoenix millionaire will be before congressional inquisitors was unclear as of late last week. The target of a criminal grand jury in Los Angeles, various racketeering and fraud suits and ongoing investigations by three federal agencies, Keating is being advised by some to keep his silence.
For Keating, that's a tall order. From his initial entry onto the public stage as an anti-smut crusader, he has been anything but silent.
When the Home Loan Bank Board seized Lincoln last April - two years after the federal agency's examiners recommended - Keating bluntly asserted to reporters the purpose of his largesse to elected officeholders.
"One question, among the many raised in recent weeks, had to do with whether my financial support in any way influenced several political figures to take up my cause," he said. "I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so."
Four of five Keating says he meant to influence - John Glenn, D-Ohio; Alan Cranston, D-Calif.; Donald Riegle, D-Mich.; and Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz. - have told the Senate Ethics Committee in formal responses that they did no wrong. The fifth, John McCain, R-Ariz., will submit his response to the formal committee inquiry before Congress adjourns for Thanksgiving, a spokesman said.
But regulators have told the House panel they never had seen such bold political interference as Keating engineered.
"We've never experienced a guy who had so much juice," said William Crawford, California's savings and loan commissioner.
Altogether, regulators expect Lincoln's failure will cost taxpayers up to $2 billion. They contend in a suit against Keating that the losses stemmed from fraud, insider abuse and racketeering.
"If our recommendations had been followed, the taxpayers would have suffered dramatically smaller losses," said William Black, one of the four Bank Board officials summoned to meet with the five senators.
Born into a prominent Cincinnati family with strong Republican connections, Keating, now 65, began a three-decade-long crusade against pornography in the late 1950s.
In 1970, he won an appointment from President Richard Nixon to the Federal Commission on Obscenity and Pornography as a self-described "book burner." He promptly sued the commission to block publication of its report until he could write a dissent to its conclusion that pornography posed no threat.
A lawyer by training, Keating turns to suits frequently in waging his campaigns. He's filed several against the government since buying Lincoln for $51 million in 1984 and converting it from a traditional home mortgage lender into what critics say was the epitome of the kind of highflier thrifts that were at the root of industry problems that required a $157 billion taxpayer bailout.
Other tactics include hiring away at large salaries the state and federal regulators and private auditors charged with overseeing his empire on behalf of the public.
The Phoenix managing partner of Lincoln's auditor, the Big Eight accounting firm of Arthur Young & Co., helped set up the meetings between the regulators and the senators with a report affirming Lincoln's soundness. A year later, he joined Keating's payroll with an annual salary of $950,000.
Those Keating didn't hire, he retained, such as Alan Greenspan, formerly the president's chief economic adviser and now chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Then working as a private consultant, Greenspan wrote a study in 1986 defending Keating's practices.
Keating's business instincts and proclivity to spend whatever is necessary to get what he wants were developed at the knee of Carl H. Lindner, a reclusive Cincinnati billionaire who through takeovers built American Financial Corp. into a banking, insurance, real estate and meatpacking empire.
It was as a vice president and director there that Keating had his first run-in with financial regulators. After a three-year investigation, the SEC accused the two of fraudulently diverting company assets for their personal use.
They eventually signed a consent decree in 1979 admitting no wrong but promising never to do it again. Keating later said signing the decree was a mistake, claiming it cost him an appointment from President Reagan to be U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas.
About the time the SEC was launching its first investigation of Keating, he moved to Phoenix to head Continental Homes Inc., a troubled home-building subsidiary of American Financial.