http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five
In 1989, the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, Calif., collapsed. Lincoln's chairman,
Charles H. Keating Jr., was faulted for the thrift's failure. Keating, however, told the House Banking Committee that the FHLBB and its former chief Edwin J. Gray were pursuing a vendetta against him.
Gray testified that several U.S. senators had approached him and requested that he ease off on the Lincoln investigation. It came out that these senators had been beneficiaries of $300,000 (collective total) in campaign contributions from Keating.
McCain received $112,000 by 1987 from Keating and Keating's relatives and employees to McCain's Senate campaign, more than any of the other Senators. [1] In September 1987 National Thrift News was the first media outlet to break the story.[2] In October 1989 The Arizona Republic reported that in addition to campaign contributions,
McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. The paper also reported that
the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental Corporation (parent of Lincoln) jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.
McCain also did not pay Keating for some of the trips until years after they were taken, after he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln.
After months of testimony revealed that all five senators acted improperly to differing degrees,
the senators maintained they were following the status quo of campaign funding practices. In August 1991, the committee concluded that Cranston's, DeConcini's, and Riegle's conduct constituted substantial interference with the FHLBB's enforcement efforts and that they had interfered at the behest of Charles Keating. The Ethics Committee concluded that Glenn's and McCain's involvement in the scheme was minimal.[5] The committee recommended censure for Cranston and criticized the other four for
"questionable conduct."
