Keating’s Plea for Sentencing Delay Rejected : Courts: Convicted financier had sought a postponement to respond to a probation report that he says is inaccurate.

A federal judge on Monday rejected felon financier Charles H. Keating Jr.’s plea for a delay in sentencing.

Keating, convicted of 73 fraud, racketeering and conspiracy counts stemming from the collapse of his Lincoln Savings & Loan in Irvine, wanted more time to respond to a probation report that he maintains is inaccurate.

U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer refused to reschedule the July 8 sentencing, which has been postponed three times already.

Keating, who is serving a 10-year sentence on a California securities fraud conviction, faces a potential federal sentence of up to 525 years.

His son, Charles Keating III, was convicted along with him in the federal case in January and is scheduled to be sentenced July 23.

Lincoln and its Phoenix-based parent company, Keating’s American Continental Corp., collapsed in April, 1989, in a case that became the central symbol of the nation’s S&L; debacle. Authorities estimated that taxpayers spent $2.6 billion to bail out insured depositors, a record at the time.

Uninsured American Continental bondholders lost about $250 million. They included unsophisticated investors, many of them elderly, who said they were duped into buying junk bonds by American Continental and Lincoln employees who portrayed the risky securities as a safe investment, like certificates of deposit.

Jeffrey Powell, one of the attorneys for the senior Keating, said the pre-sentence report was 60 pages long, accompanied by a 10-page letter from the Resolution Trust Corp., the federal agency that liquidates failed S&Ls.;

Powell said one of the errors in the report was a recommendation for a longer sentence because the victims were vulnerable. He said that was inappropriate because his client never sought to injure old or vulnerable people intentionally.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Alice Hill told the judge there is no reason that Powell’s law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, cannot be ready for sentencing by July 8.

The large and prestigious Chicago firm has been unable to help the senior Keating much in the eyes of jurors. He was convicted on 17 of 18 counts in state court and all 73 counts in the federal indictment.

Rejecting a motion for a new trial, Pfaelzer earlier called the evidence against the senior Keating “overwhelming.”