THE DEVELOPER

Abstract

A personal and professional profile of millionaire developer and banker Charles H. Keating Jr., the public face of the savings-and-loan crisis, describes how he exploited a permissive business environment and the Reagan administration deregulatory trend in the 1980s to build his American Continental Corporation and Lincoln Savings and Loan empire. Keating and his career fit within the broader economic and cultural changes in the 1980s that celebrated materialism and excess. Keating’s complex character is examined; he was an accomplished athlete, a generous contributor to the Catholic Church, and a crusader against pornography. He was a moralist and yet he skirted the law numerous times, beginning with a federal securities fraud case in 1979 that he ultimately settled with regulators.