Dennis DeConcini: Panama Canal Reservation, Keating Five, Private Prisons

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Dennis DeConcini was the last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race in Arizona, in 1988, before Kyrsten Sinema's 2018 victory ended a 30 year drought. Born in Tucson in 1937, he was the son of Evo DeConcini, who served on the Arizona Superior Court, as state attorney general and on the Arizona Supreme Court. Dennis earned his degrees at the University of Arizona, served in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, co-founded a law firm with his father in 1968, and was Pima County attorney from 1973 to 1976. Elected to an open Senate seat in 1976, the freshman forced the DeConcini Reservation into the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty, authorizing U.S. military force to keep the canal open, which nearly derailed the handover until the Church Amendment softened it.

His career was shadowed by the Keating Five affair. Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings, then the sixth largest employer in Arizona, was under federal scrutiny, and in April 1987 DeConcini and fellow senators met with regulator Edwin Gray. The Senate Ethics Committee found he broke no law or Senate rule but acted improperly, and he did not seek a fourth term. In his final years he voted to confirm Clarence Thomas and chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee. After leaving in 1995 he served on the Freddie Mac board, the Arizona Board of Regents, and from 2008 to 2014 the board of Corrections Corporation of America, now CoreCivic.

• Allegations surfaced in 1979 that he bought land along the Central Arizona Project route and later sold it to the federal government for nearly $1 million.
• Former Panamanian negotiator Carlos Lopez Guevara called the DeConcini Reservation unacceptable, sparking a diplomatic crisis.
• He was one of 11 Democrats who voted for Clarence Thomas in the 52 to 48 confirmation in 1991.
• He chaired the Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks and wrote a memoir titled From the Center of the Aisle.
• Protests over his private prison board seat began around 2010; he denied lobbying for harsher sentencing but spoke in favor of for-profit prisons.