Numbers

The Keating Five

• Alan Cranston (D-CA)
• Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ)
• John Glenn (D-OH)
• John McCain (R-AZ)
• Donald W. Riegle, Jr. (D-MI)

How It's Used

"Responding to McCain, Randy Mastro, a deputy mayor under Giuliani, invoked the senator's involvement in the Keating Five scandal in the 1980s, when McCain and four other lawmakers were tied to Charles Keating, a corrupt savings-and-loan official. Mastro made the case that no politician is perfect, saying, 'It's no fairer to judge Rudy Giuliani on the basis of this one issue than it would be to judge John McCain on the basis of the Keating Five scandal.'"

"Other miscreants who crossed Mr. Bennett's path, again when he was working as a Senate special counsel, were the Keating Five, senators investigated in 1989 by the ethics committee for interfering in the investigation of the collapse of a savings and loan. Only one member of the quintet, Alan Cranston, was censured by the Senate. Another, John McCain, emerged barely scuffed from the episode, but the fact that Mr. Bennett had once pursued him lent a certain depth to the lawyer's recent public defense of Sen. McCain."

"Before resigning as a regulator in 1994 for the freedom of academe, the red-bearded Black had won showdowns with Democrat Speaker of the House Jim Wright and discredited the Keating Five after the Senators tried to squash his attempts to close Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan, a scam for which Keating was ultimately jailed and which ultimately became the country's most expensive bailout at $3.4 billion."

Links