Why he matters
Charles Keating built the most extravagant resort Arizona had ever seen, on the most storied resort land in Scottsdale, and nearly all of it with other people’s money. The Phoenician opened below Camelback Mountain in October 1988; the savings-and-loan that financed it failed the following April. The building survived him, and it set the ceiling for every luxury project in the Valley afterward.
He also, by accident or design, saved the oldest resort architecture in the city. When his crews cleared the Jokake Inn and Paradise Inn grounds, they left the Jokake’s twin adobe bell towers standing. Everything else on the shelf went under the graders.
Where to find his mark today
The Phoenician. The resort is his monument, though its 2016–19 renovation traded much of his marble-and-crystal shout for a quieter desert look.
The bell towers. The Jokake Inn’s 1936 towers stand on the Phoenician lawn, the physical link to the 1920s resort started on the land of painter Jessie Benton Evans.
What’s missing. The Paradise Inn, open since 1946, closed in 1987 and vanished under construction; its page tells the half of the story Keating’s marble covered.
The resort and the reckoning
The best single account is October 1988, the Phoenician’s opening month (the exact day isn’t recorded). It covers what the money bought: Italian marble, crystal chandeliers, a pool tiled in mother-of-pearl, a 27-hole golf course and a private art collection, all turned toward the mountain. Mary Elaine’s, the rooftop French room named for his wife, Mary Elaine Keating, outlived his ownership by nearly two decades.
For the neighborhood around it, the Camelback corridor guide tells how ninety years of resorts lined up under the mountain, and where Keating’s arrival sits in that sequence. The wider decade is in the 1980s chapter.
The full story
Charles Keating was born in Cincinnati in 1923 and practiced law there before moving into real estate and finance. By the mid-1980s he was a Phoenix developer whose American Continental Corporation owned Lincoln Savings and Loan of California, and Lincoln’s deposits were flowing into American Continental’s projects.
The Phoenician was the grandest of them. Starting around 1985, American Continental assembled the shelf at the foot of Camelback: the Jokake Inn, the 1920s adobe resort that had grown out of the Evans family estate; the postwar Paradise Inn next door; the small El Estribo Lodge; and the Valley Country Club. Accounts differ slightly on timing (the Paradise Inn history dates the assembly to 1985–86), but by 1987 the old inns had closed and the graders were in. Contemporary accounts put the budget around $250 million, at a time when a very good resort cost a fraction of that. The Phoenician opened in October 1988 to reviews that ran out of adjectives.
The collapse came almost immediately. In April 1989 Lincoln Savings failed in what was then the largest savings-and-loan failure in American history, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $3 billion. Five U.S. senators who had intervened with regulators on Keating’s behalf became the “Keating Five,” and the resulting ethics inquiry made his name a national shorthand for the S&L crisis. Keating was convicted of fraud and went to prison; the convictions were later overturned on technical grounds, and he then pleaded guilty to lesser charges.
The Phoenician, meanwhile, spent its infancy as a government asset, run under federal control for years before it was refinanced under new owners. It matured anyway. Under later ownership, and after a top-to-bottom renovation that began in 2016, it became the city’s definitive luxury resort, the scandal softened into local legend. Keating died in 2014. The bell towers he chose to keep are still on the lawn, older than anything else in Scottsdale’s resort history and standing on the most expensive grass he ever paid for.