BANKING/FINANCE

Spinning the Wheels of Justice: Jean Burger is frail and legally blind and has been in and out of hospitals for months. She blames her condition on, among others, Charles H. Keating Jr., the convicted operator of failed Lincoln Savings & Loan in Irvine.

The 74-year-old woman, now living in a small cottage near Carmel, says that she and a neighbor were made ill by “sewer gas” and toxic waste fumes from a wide arroyo running alongside an apartment complex in Phoenix where she lived several years ago.

But she is waging a lonely battle in Arizona courts as she tries to keep alive her lawsuit against the developers and Homestead Savings & Loan, a failed San Francisco thrift that owned the land and is now operated by regulators.

She can’t find a lawyer to take her case, and she figures it is because of the unusual claim she is making: She believes that Keating controlled Homestead. Lawyers in the Keating case said that they know of no connection.

Burger said more than 100 lawyers in three years have declined to take her case, so the former court stenographer is representing herself.

“Nobody will listen, and the cry for help is put down as paranoia or schizo or something,” Burger said. “What’s going on?”