Fall of The Mighty

Taxpayers, elderly investors, grieving relatives and individuals triumphed last week as a number of powerful interests came before the bar of justice. The legal actions included the following:

LINCOLN SAVINGS. A federal jury in Tucson awarded $3 billion in damages against Charles Keating Jr. and three co-defendants for swindling thousands of savings and loan investors. The huge award may end up being more a symbol of public anger about the S&L debacle than a collectible judgment. The jury found that developer Conley Wolfswinkel, the Saudi European Investment Corp. and Continental Southern conspired with Keating and officers in American Continental and its Lincoln Savings subsidiary to mislead government ( regulators. Keating, 68, is in prison in California on state criminal charges stemming from the same transactions.

LOCKERBIE LIABILITY. In a victory for the families of the 270 people who died in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a federal jury in New York City found the defunct airline and two of its subsidiaries guilty of willful misconduct in allowing a bomb to be smuggled aboard. Two Libyans were indicted for the bombing last year, and Pan Am argued unsuccessfully that it should not be held responsible for the work of terrorists. Damages are still to be assessed; the plaintiffs are seeking more than $300 million, which would be paid by the airline's insurers.

HUD SCANDAL. As the virtual queen of the Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1984 to 1987, Deborah Gore Dean administered programs intended for the poor to favor well-connected real estate developers and Republican consultants. Broadening a two-count indictment issued against her in April, a federal grand jury indicted Dean, 37, on 13 criminal charges of fraud, perjury and conspiracy. The indictment accused her of using her position to dispatch $230,000 in HUD funds to John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's Attorney General.

THE SPOILS OF WAR. In a federal indictment in Denver, former Ambassador to Bahrain Sam Zakhem and two associates were charged with accepting $7.7 million from Kuwait in 1990 to help win American public support for military action against Iraq. Zakhem, 56, who made an unsuccessful bid this year to become the G.O.P. Senate nominee from Colorado, was accused of failing to register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and of avoiding U.S. income taxes.

EXXON VALDEZ. The Alaska court of appeals overturned a misdemeanor conviction against Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the tanker that ran aground in Prince William Sound in 1989, causing the nation's worst oil spill. The court found that the state used tainted evidence against Hazelwood, but acknowledged that its decision was likely to be "a bitter pill for many Alaskans to swallow."