Money Talks Government regulators say S&L operator CHARLES KEATING looted his bank, but he says it was the regulators' incompetence that caused the $300 billion (or more) savings and loan disaster

Q. When you were asked whether the money you contributed to the so-called Keating Five -- Senators Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, Donald Reigle, John Glenn and John McCain -- influenced them to help you, you said, "I certainly hope so."

A. That probably was a dumb way to phrase it. I was participating in a system. I have never asked to give anybody money. A politician will come to me and say, "Will you make a contribution?" And they usually suggest a size for you to go out and try and collect. Now I didn't make all those contributions; I went out and collected them. I only contributed to the legal limit.

Q. Surely there's something in it for you. Senator Cranston was able to collect $850,000 over four years from you. Don't you get a little tired of being hit up?

A. You get tired of getting hit up again and again and again. But it's the political process. You know people compare me to, say, an individual who asks for help with citizenship papers for his mother, and he gets help. But the campaign chairman for the politician doesn't go ask him for money. The chairman goes where he sees there is a source of funds. So when I ask for something, I become a prospect for money.

Q. So then what did the Senators do for you?

A. All the Senators said was either hit Keating or finish the investigation, this had to be the longest examination in the history of the S&L business. If you can't go to the Congress to get relief from an agency that's gone haywire, what do you do? You live in a different country than I think we live in.

Q. You say you're broke, but how could you be when you and your family made at least $14 million in three years?

A. The Government knows, because they know all of our bank accounts, that my family and I probably have no net worth. Period. We're broke. Back in 1983, before I bought Lincoln Savings and Loan, we had a fair market value as a family of many tens of millions of dollars. We produced, we were making money, we had excellent assets. We took a failing S&L, we made $17 million in the partial year we first took it, pretax. We made $100 million the next year. Then the Feds started helping us run it, so we only made $80 some million in the third year. Their help intensified in '87, and we made about $60-plus million. In '88 they really came in and took us over, and in '89 they completed the confiscation.

Q. You act as if the Federal Government is just out to ruin your life. Not just your life but your depositors', and bondholders in American Continental Corp. who mistakenly assumed their investments were federally insured.

A. There's a lot of people who know that the Government goes haywire in a lot of respects. I'm fool enough to guess that the media would be the first one to know because you're looking at the HUD situation, you look at the IRS problems. Almost everything you scratch, there's a problem.

Q. You can look at the HUD scandal and see whose pocket the money is in. But you can't see any money in the pocket of Edwin Gray, the former Federal Home Loan Bank Board chairman, who fingered you. What's the motive?