Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions

Front Cover
Random House, 1993 - Business & Economics - 420 pages
Jesse James. Willie Sutton. Bonnie and Clyde. John Dillinger. Charles Keating. Charles Keating? In the pantheon of Americans who have removed from banks what wasn't theirs, Charles Keating stands tall. Over $2 billion tall, to be exact. When the money disappeared from his Lincoln Savings & Loan, now collapsed, Charles Keating was accused of promulgating the largest bank failure in U.S. history. In Trust Me, the bizarre world of Keating is revealed in a financial farce that reads like a collaboration written by Robert Penn Warren, Sinclair Lewis, and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. See Keating battle Larry Flynt over pornography, give millions to Mother Teresa, and lose $100,000 at a craps table. Watch Keating contribute $1.4 million to five U.S. senators, build a $300 million hotel in the middle of the desert, and toss paper clips into the open mouth of his sleeping heir. Witness armies of federal regulators desperately try to piece together the methods, madness, and mystique of Charles Keating in brave attempts to nab him amid his great adventure. Through it all, Keating has never confessed, begged for mercy, or recanted. Facing over five hundred years in prison, he remains defiant, an American original, a patriot who believes he did nothing wrong. Greed and power should be rewarded, not condemned; Keating simply used the rules to win. Novelistic, captivating, and powerful, Trust Me is a brilliant morality tale about the American way - a red, white, and blue testament to piety and corruption run wild.

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Contents

PART
1
PART
73
PART THREE
133
Copyright

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About the author (1993)

Charles Bowden was born in Joliet, Illinois on July 20, 1945. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona and a master's degree in American intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin. He completed work toward his doctorate there but walked out while defending his dissertation, because he was frustrated with what he felt were uninformed questions from his review committee. He was a reporter for The Tucson Citizen in the early 1980s. He wrote several books during his lifetime including Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields, and Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. He died on August 30, 2014 at the age of 69.

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