Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions

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.… (more)