Dennis DeConcini

Dennis Webster DeConcini was a Democratic United States senator from Arizona from 1977 to 1995. He was one of the five senators who met federal bank regulators on behalf of Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan, and he chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in his last Congress.¹²

Early Career

DeConcini was born in Tucson, Pima County, on May 8, 1937, and attended public schools in Tucson and Phoenix. He graduated from the University of Arizona in 1959 and from its law school in 1963, and served in the United States Army from 1959 to 1960 and the Army Reserve from 1960 to 1967. He was admitted to the Arizona bar in 1963 and practised in Tucson, was a member of the Arizona governor's staff from 1965 to 1967, and was Pima County attorney from 1973 to 1976.¹

Senate

He was elected to the Senate in 1976, reelected in 1982 and 1988, and served from January 3, 1977, to January 3, 1995. He did not run in 1994. In the 103rd Congress, from 1993 to 1995, he was chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence.¹

Keating Five

Keating and his associates contributed 1.3 million dollars to the campaigns and favoured political causes of five senators, Alan Cranston, DeConcini, John Glenn, Donald Riegle and John McCain, most of it while the Federal Home Loan Bank Board was investigating Lincoln. All but Riegle met the bank board's chairman, Edwin Gray, on Keating's behalf on April 2, 1987, and all five met a week later with four regulators from San Francisco who were in charge of the Lincoln examination. The government seized the thrift, based in Irvine, California, in April 1989.²

In February 1991 the Senate Ethics Committee divided on party lines over four of the five. According to congressional sources, its three Democrats, the chairman Howell Heflin, David Pryor and Terry Sanford, wanted DeConcini, Riegle, Glenn and McCain treated alike, possibly through letters of criticism, while its three Republicans, Warren Rudman, Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, wanted McCain and Glenn dismissed; the committee's special counsel, Robert Bennett, had reportedly advised in a confidential report of September 1990 that there was no evidence Glenn and McCain had broken Senate rules.² At the end of the 14-month investigation the committee concluded that Cranston may have committed major ethics violations and that no action was needed against the other four. It found that DeConcini's and Riegle's actions gave the appearance of being improper, and that Glenn and McCain had "exercised poor judgment."³

BCCI

In early 1990, after the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) pleaded guilty to money laundering charges in Tampa, several members of Congress criticized the plea agreement as too lenient. According to the Kerry-Brown Senate report, "Documents obtained by the Subcommittee show that Barcella met with Senator Dennis Deconcini, one of the critics of the plea bargain, in an effort to persuade him that BCCI was not the corrupt institution that he and others had claimed." Lawrence Barcella, a former federal prosecutor, was then coordinating BCCI's defense. The report records no other contact between DeConcini and BCCI or its lawyers.⁴