-Caveat Lector-
AZ Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, one of the
"Keating Five," figures prominently in the following article -- a
mind-boggling connect-the-dots portrait of "government" AS CRIME.
CHARLES KEATING AND THE S&L CRISIS
Charles Keating, the godfather of the S&L scandal, now sits
behind bars, perhaps for the rest of his life. He has been
assessed fines exceeding 3.6 billion dollars in just one civil
action. Federal prosecution has not yet begun. Yet after
several books and tens of thousands of column inches of
newsprint, the major features of the Keating story remain, until
now, untold.
For example, General John Singlaub and the CIA's Latin
American military campaigns, Carl Lindner's purchase of UNITED
BRANDS and the U.S. Honduran aid program, extensive BCCI
transactions, PRUDENTIAL INSURANCE, and Keating's attempt to get
a strangle hold on the water supply of Arizona are key essential
features of Keating's story that have not had national exposure.
An army of federal regulators, prosecutors, attorneys and
judges have combed the affairs of Charles Keating. So why
haven't the major features of his operations come to light?
Having a brother who was vice president of ASSOCIATED PRESS
helped keep items off the wire service. The ownership of
Phoenix's two city newspapers helped even more. The ARIZONA
REPUBLIC and the PHOENIX GAZETTE are owned by the Dan Quayle
family. The Vice President's involvement in the affairs of CIA
Latin American programs provided plenty of incentive for Phoenix
newspapers to keep the Keating affair as quiet as possible. And
Carl Lindner, a much bigger fish than Charles Keating in these
affairs, holds the largest stock interest in KTSP TV, the CBS
television affiliate in Phoenix.
Keating is a man who has done favors for many powerful
individuals including Presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush**. Steven
Pizzo, author of INSIDE JOB, one of the best books on S&L
looting, supplied Barbara Honegger, author of OCTOBER SURPRISE, a
Defence Intelligence Agency telex indicating that the alleged
OCTOBER SURPRISE airplane for William Casey's and Heinrich Rupp's
Paris trip was arranged by Kenneth Qualls, formerly the chief
pilot of Charlie Keating's AMERICAN CONTINENTAL CORPORATION.
This and other high level CIA favors may suggest even more
sinister reasons why the major features of the Keating story
never made it to print.
Savings and Loans were originally chartered to provide home
mortgage loans. When Ronald Reagan deregulated the industry,
high rollers were free to attempt more ambitious projects with
the federally insured deposits. No one was more ambitious than
Charlie Keating and no one lost more of the tax payer's money.
To date taxpayers have been assessed $500 billion for the S&L
looting -- $2 1/2 billion for Charlie's sins alone. After
providing less than a dozen home loans, Keating set out to build
THE PHOENICIAN, a $300 million luxury resort hotel financed 55%
by his newly acquired S&L, LINCOLN SAVINGS, and 45% by the King
and Queen of Kuwait.
November of 1989, six months after Keating's parent company
AMERICAN CONTINENTAL finally hit the skids, the Feds took over
the PHOENICIAN RESORT in a surprise 1:00 AM raid. At 4:00 AM
Keating was summoning bellmen to a side entrance where 24 cartons
of files were loaded into Keating's recreational vehicle. When
asked about this by a member of the local press the Feds
responded that they knew of this and Keating was allowed to take
these files because "they were his personal correspondence ---
like letters to his family." The federal investigation of Keating
was totally compromised from beginning to end.
If the Feds had done even the most elemental examination of
the business affairs of Charles Keating, this is what they would
certainly have found: On November 26, 1980, just two weeks after
the election of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Keating purchased
the property located at 2735 East Camelback Road for his AMERICAN
CONTINENTAL CORPORATION Headquarters. For this he paid
$3,083,000 to the MICHAEL J. PELOQUIN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION.
During the period from 1980 to 1984, Maricopa county court
records show that sixty civil suits were filed against Peloquin.
And Michael J. Peloquin has a famous father, Robert Peloquin, who
has an even more questionable past.
After serving on Robert Kennedy's Strike Force On Organized
Crime, Robert Peloquin and half the other attorneys there,
distinguished themselves by going directly to work for the major
organized crime figures they were investigating. Peloquin Sr.
set up the private spy company, INTERTEL, reportedly for the king
pin of American organized crime, Meyer Lansky. After Lansky had
failed to introduce legalized gambling into Atlantic City,
INTERTEL was formed to "police the gambling industry" to make
gambling acceptable to the state of New Jersey. It is a matter
of record that Robert Peloquin ran the PARADISE ISLAND CASINO in
the Bahamas for Lansky. This is interesting since Keating had
his mansion base also in the Bahamas.
It was INTERTEL that was responsible for the security of
Howard Hughes the last two questionable years of his life.
Nixon's Domestic Affairs Advisor, Charles Colson once stated that
it was difficult to tell "where the HUGHES CORPORATION ended and
the CIA began."
The parent company of INTERTEL is RESORTS INTERNATIONAL
whose original name was MARY CARTER PAINT COMPANY. MARY CARTER
PAINT was reported in a significant May 20, 1976 article by
Howard Kohn in ROLLING STONE to have been founded by Allen
Dulles, the Director of CIA under Presidents Eisenhower and
Kennedy.
In the book, THE COMPANY THAT BOUGHT THE BOARDWALK, INTERTEL
was described as a merger of former FBI, CIA, Customs, Bureau of
Tobacco and Firearms, IRS and other federal agents with organized
crime. This book describes in some detail how Robert Peloquin
headed the first Justice Department STRIKE FORCE ON ORGANIZED
CRIME, then retired to go directly to work for those Justice was
investigating.
Michael J. Peloquin purchased what would soon become the
AMERICAN CONTINENTAL Headquarters property April 2, 1979, from
James E. Patrick II and Herman Chanen for $550,000. The sale to
Keating represented a bump of $2.5 million in only 8 months!
What is more, Patrick II and Chanen are not stupid when it comes
to real estate. Patrick II is the son of James Patrick, who at
this time was President of VALLEY NATIONAL BANK, Arizona's
largest bank. Herman Chanen owns the largest construction
company in Phoenix and at sale time was Chairman of the State
Board of Regents which oversees all state universities. These
men represented the very pinnacle of the Phoenix business
establishment. Soon after the Keating deal, James Patrick Sr.
retired to become president of ROYAL PETROLEUM in Kuwait, a
country closely connected to Charlie's business affairs.
September 19, 1985, Keating received a $5 million loan on
this property from PRUDENTIAL INSURANCE COMPANY, a bump of
another $2 million. This was a one payment note that was due in
total October 1, 1990. The note was secured with nothing more
that the property which had been purchased for $3,083,000. When
Keating filed Chapter 11 in April of 1989 this $5 million was
added to the rest of the money that just evaporated.
Why were these big business interests coming forward to set
Charlie up in business? PRUDENTIAL is a big player in this. Not
only was George Bush's father, Prescott Bush, on the board of
Directors of PRUDENTIAL but Ronald Reagan was one of the largest
stockholders. It was PRUDENTIAL that owned the land upon which
Herman Chanin built the lavish shopping center, BILTMORE FASHION
SQUARE, which is located just across the street from Keating's
Headquarters.
One month after the PRUDENTIAL loan, Keating really became
bold when he purchased the property adjoining the HQ property for
$13,000,000 for the Arizona branch of LINCOLN SAVINGS! For all
practical purposes this property is identical to the HQ property
in size and structures. Very bold.
The RESOLUTION TRUST CORPORATION (RTC) after taking over
LINCOLN SAVINGS moved its Arizona operations to this property.
They did this to protect Keating. Keating never had clear title
to this property. It can not be sold. The RTC attorneys have
been presented with all this information as have the attorneys
for the bondholders. They have never as much as made a phone
call in response!
Why all this high level protection and why would these big
business interests provide Keating all this money? Some answers
to these questions lie in Keating's origins.
Charles Keating started out as an attorney for Carl Lindner,
the original owner of AMERICAN CONTINENTAL CORPORATION.
According to UC Berkeley professor Dr. Peter Dale Scott, Carl
Lindner is a well documented profiteer off the Vietnam war.
Lindner is a much bigger player than Keating. According to Peter
Brewton, the star reporter for the HOUSTON POST whose hard
hitting exposees have linked the CIA to the looting of 22 other
S&Ls, Lindner owned 7 failed S&Ls but has gone virtually
unmentioned in regards to the S&L looting scandal.
Lindner is reported to be one of the wealthiest men in
America. He owns 38.5% of the CIRCLE K CORPORATION, which
exploits the underclass in America the same way his UNITED BRANDS
exploits the underclass of Honduras. Lindner has also been
reported to be one of the 5 top financiers of CIA. (When
Gorbachev first came to the United States he visited Lindner.)
At the same time as Keating was purchasing the ACC HQ
property, Linder was transferring almost the total assets of his
AMERICAN FINANCIAL CORPORATION (a private company requiring no
stockholder reports) into a Honduran company, UNITED BRANDS,
taking UNITED BRANDS from a publicly traded to a private company.
UNITED BRANDS was formed when UNITED FRUIT, a CIA front prominent
in several Latin American coups (as well as the assassination of
President Kennedy) was merged with a second company. CHIQUITA
BANANAS is one of UNITED BRANDS' well known brand names.
On the deed of Keating's HQ property it stated "When
recorded mail to AMERICAN CONTINENTAL 2621 East Camelback Road,
Suite 150, Phoenix, Arizona."
This was just across the hall from General John Singlaub's
U.S. COUNCIL FOR WORLD FREEDOM, the American headquarters of the
WORLD ANTI-COMMUNIST LEAGUE.
General Singlaub's long CIA career goes all the way back to
when he was an OSS agent under the direction of William Casey in
France and China during WWII. By purchasing UNITED BRANDS Carl
Lindner set himself up to become the world's greatest financial
beneficiary of the CONTRA/HONDURAN aid program which poured
billions in U.S. aid into Honduras to the direct enrichment of
Lindner's plantations. Did Lindner send his water boy, Charles
Keating, out to Phoenix to facilitate the Contra war with General
Singlaub so that Lindner could multiply his fortune?
The summer preceding Keating's purchase of his headquarters
property, Keating headed the media relations group for the JOHN
CONOLLY FOR PRESIDENT campaign. With Keating in this section was
Jim Brady (soon to become Ronald Reagan's Press Secretary) and
Joyce Downey. Upon arriving in Phoenix, Downey went across the
hall to become General Singlaub's top executive. Former Texas
Governor Conally's son Mark later became an AMERICAN CONTINENTAL
executive after serving as an aide to "Keating Five" Senator John
McCain.
In a very complicated way all this bleeds into Keating's
transactions with BANK OF CREDIT AND COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL
(BCCI). It is beyond dispute that before it was exposed, BCCI
was the largest corporate crime network the world had ever known.
Even TIME MAGAZINE ran a cover story explaining how BCCI had
become the favored means of moving dirty money for not only the
Medullin Cocaine Cartel, but for the PLO, MOSSAD, Abu Nadal and
the CIA as well as various countries like Saudi Arabia and North
Korea. For anyone looking for the possibilities that Keating was
laundering illegal funds for Singlaub's Contras campaign, any
transactions with BCCI would set off all kinds of bells
and whistles.
In early 1986 Keating met a Pakistani in Switzerland named
Abbas Gokal. Gokal belongs to a family of shipping magnates who
started the downfall of BCCI by defaulting on $700 million in
loans. Gokal introduced Keating to Alfred Hartmann, a BCCI
director and president of the Bank's Geneva branch. Steven
Pizzo reported in the NATIONAL MORTGAGE NEWS that Hartmann
provided $3 billion in loans to Saddam Hussein for nuclear,
chemical and ballistic missile programs just preceding the Gulf
war and is the director most closely linked to the laundering of
Medullin Cartel drug money. In 1986, Keating, Hartmann and other
BCCI directors met in London, Paris, Zurich, Phoenix and the
Bahamas where they founded a corporation known as TRENDINVEST.
<cont'd in part 2>
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