The athletic, British-born attorney trains for arduous criminal cases by swimming, jogging, and weight-lifting. He goes after prosecutors with a determination born of childhood boxing matches against kids twice his age.
He speaks of courtroom action as if it truly were 15 rounds on sweaty canvas, with blood-lust in the air and dirty punches withheld only if you can't get away with them.
"I went for him, sure. He was in the ring with me," says the 6-foot-2-inch, 195-pound Mr. Keating, reflecting on his bare-knuckled aggressiveness toward the prosecutor in the recent, widely publicized murder trial of Robert L. Myers, whom he defended.
Mr. Myers-an accountant, accused of hiring a hit man to kill his wife-was convicted of first-degree murder for his involvement in the 1979 Carroll county slaying and sentenced December 9 to life in prison. The state had sought the death penalty.
"You fight like hell," says Mr. Keating, 39. "When I get into the courtroom, we're gonna trade blows with words. It's the ring but I don't get my nose broke."
Anton James Sean Keating's nose has been broken-by his brother, back home in postwar London when there were learning boxing basics.
Their father was a 6-foot-6-inch professional who was "heavyweight champion of all British troops in the European theater in 1946" and 300 bouts before Mother Keating made him retire in the early 1950's. "That's a lot of fights," Mr. Keating ways proudly, "But he kept his brains."
So did the pugnacious 6-year-old with a broken nose. Young Anton left dreams of boxing stardom with his adolescence, growing up to settle down in the New World and graduate from the University of Maryland Law School in 1969.
He acquired broad legal experience in Baltimore through stints as a prosecutor in the state's attorney office, as an assistant public defender for the city's Supreme Bench and as head of the Maryland attorney general's Medicaid fraud unit.
Along the way, he ran unsuccessfully for city state's attorney in 1978 and participated, as a prosecutor or defense attorney, in many high-visibility courtroom confrontations of the past decade, including more than 100 murder cases.
In addition to the Myers case, Mr. Keating handled the defense of another headline maker, John Earl Williams, the so-called "Lombard street sniper," who killed a policeman and wounded six other in an hour-long gun battle in 1976. Williams is serving a life-plus-60-years sentence.
The Keating career speaks of a canny, driven man, who knew from an early age that an American courtroom, not an English boxing ring, was where the smart action was. "When I was a kid," he says with a gap-toothed smile, "I wanted to be a judge, with a book with all these rules written in it and people calling you, My lord, my lord.'"
"But in England, I could never have been a barrister. The class system there is getting better, but I'd probably be a bus conductor if I had stayed."
He almost didn't make it out of Battersea, the working-class neighborhood where he was born in. In 1943 - while his father was away at war - a German V-2 rocket hit their street killing 30 neighbors, taking out a wall of the Keating home and trapping the family inside.
The incident has strongly influenced his life, and Mr. Keating went back several years ago to take a look at his old home, now the silently eloquent dividing line between rebuilt houses and those left standing after the attack. "My whole family's life is an extra; we should be dead," he says. "It's given us a great joie de vivre."
When he was 10, Mr. Keating scored well in a countryside exam and won a full scholarship to the Emanuel School in London. It was quite a coup for a blue-collar lad in those days, self-described as "kind of a wayward kid. Yeah, mate, I got caned once or twice, but they straightened me out."
He was captain of the rugby team, and when the family moved to Niagra Falls. Ontario, in 1957, he began lifting weights and starred in high school in shotput, high jump, and javelin. "Sports has always helped me adjust and handle pressure," Mr. Keating says-something which his only sibling, Charles, had trouble doing in the new environment; he was kicked out of school.
(Charles Keating, two years older than Anton, is now an accomplished Shakesperearan actor who portrayed the character Rex Mottran in the PBS television series, "Brideshead Revisted." There is no hostility over broken noses, his brother insists.)
At Boston University, Mr. Keating was captain of the varsity crew in his junior and senior years and, for a while, studied chemical engineering to please his parents. "One day, I was sitting in class," he recalls, "The [professor] had an equation this long on the board, and I said to myself, I'm gonna be doing this all my life'" An English major was born.
Baltimore was his new wife's home town, and upon graduation in 1966, Mr. Keating enrolled in law school here, working part-time in the state's attorney office. "The only thing I was interested in was court action," he explains. "I wanted to get there and fly."
In 1969 he was appointed a staff prosecutor by Charles E. Moylan, then state's attorney for the city. Mr. Keating was with the office for five years and headed the 1971 grand jury investigation of the Baltimore City Jail which resulted in the resignation of Warden Hiram W. Schoonfield. From 1973 to 1978, he served as an assistant public defender "to see what it was like to be on the other side."
Stephan Tully, a former chief of the trial division of the state's attorney office, remembers an early match up with Mr. Keating as defense attorney, one of about 20 bouts the two had over the years. "Anton brought in all these books and would pull them out and refer to them during the trial," he says.
"Later, the jury foreman told him, "Mr. Keating, we didn't really listen too much to what you said. We heard your accent, thought you were new to this country and were looking in the books because you didn't know the law."
"He stopped bringing books after that," Mr. Tully laughs, and goes on to describe his adversary as "articulate, thorough, well prepared. He always fights you tooth and nail, but we've always been able to go out afterward for a drink."<> Sam Brave, a prosecutor in the state's attorney office and a good friend of Mr. Keating, calls him "the most prepared trial attorney I've every seen. He's a nuts-and-bolts lawyer who goes right for the jugular."
The Keating style was evident in the Myers trial, a two-month marathon on which Mr. Keating says he spent 1,200 hours in preparation and court appearances. As an experienced attorney in private practice, he was hired by the public defenders office for $10,00 to represent Mr. Myers in the death penalty case.
A press account of the trial mentions a relationship that "obviously simmered in animosity" between Mr. Keating and prosecutor Thomas Hickman, Carroll county state's attorney. "Sure, I said a lot of nasty things about him," Mr. Keating cheerfully admits.
"In a trial, I'm saying, Do something, Mr. Prosecutor, step out of line and I'll beat you over the head with it.' I want to substitute my personality for the defendant's, and I'm going to attempt to interfere with the prosecutor doing the same thing."
The personality he attempts to substitute is literally tailored to the specific case. "When I was a prosecutor, I dressed in a more liberal way, to break the mold of the uptight prosecutor," Mr. Keating says, "In the Myers case, I was more conservative, I wanted them to see that I was serious and concerned."
He even drove a car that fit in with the rural setting of the trial, "a beat-up old Datsun with the muffler falling off. You had to avoid the impression of [being] the big-city s---kicker."
Whether the tactics made any difference are open to question. Although Mr. Myers-now in prison awaiting appeal-maintained his innocence throughout the trial, he was found guilty. "Sure they won," Mr. Keating says of his Carroll county courtroom rivals. "But not as big as they wanted to win. They wanted to kill him."
He adds with a shrug, "Experience means you've been beaten before. When it's over, I just want to be able to look back and say, Lad, you gave it everything you had'" The case is being appealed by Victoria Keating, an attorney in the public defender's office and Mr. Keating's second wife.
Frank Coleman - an assistant state's attorney in Carroll county who participated in the trial - comments that, "I think he [Mr. Keating] very ably presented the defense that Mr. Myers wanted him to present."
Perhaps referring to the barrage of motions offered by the defense, another Keating trademark, Mr. Coleman adds, "I'm sure there wasn't any right that Mr. Myers had that his attorney did not protect." (Mr. Hickman was unavailable for comment.)
Anton Keating, from a perspective acquired as both a prosecutor and a defense attorney, sees pluses and minuses in each role."For a prosecutor, there's a limited sense of accomplishment because you normally have all the goods," he says.
The rewards? "You exercise your conscience as a prosecutor. And there's some satisfaction in doing what you set out to do: have the truth told in the courtroom."
During his five years as a public defender, Mr. Keating handled Circuit Court cases involving "the heavies, not your social charmers. You're probably on the wrong side of justice [as a defender], at least with street crime," he says."Your professional accomplishment can be a negative result for the community."
But walking the defense tightrope is an exhilarating challenge all its own."As a defense attorney, you're 100 percent advocate, you're putting the state to the test. You have to fight as though it were you."
If somebody really is guilty and has the audacity to tell him so, Mr. Keating "fights like hell. I've had clients who hated me... You still fight like hell."
And in no case do you fight harder than if your client is facing capital punishment, a penalty Mr. Keating strongly opposes. It was a minor issue in the 1978 Democratic primary for city state's attorney, a race in which he never seriously challenged the law-by-order incumbent, William A. Swisher.
"I'm totally against it," he says. "I don't have any magical solutions, but the public has got to stop looking for easy ones." Another objection is to the negative effect the death penalty cases have on prosecutors. "They become very callous about it. I went to a [prosecutors' convention] in Texas a couple of years ago, and some of these guys were wearing gold nooses on their jackets."
His outspoken views on the death penalty did little to help win him the 1978 election. Neither did the last minute entry of a black attorney, A. Dwight Pettit, a development which eroded Mr. Keating's support among the black and liberal communities and helped give Mr. Swisher an easy victory.
Ironically, one thing that may have worked against Mr. Keating during the campaign was his British accent, a mellifluous reminder of his roots that works to his advantage in the courtroom, he feels, making juries more attentive to his arguments.
But it just didn't wash with voters. "I feel my opponents encouraged the impression that I was a foreigner. They tried to paint me as an aristocrat," Mr. Keating says. "Believe me, I wish I were."
Any memories of the hard-fought campaign, on which he spent $5,000 of his own money? "I just wasn't a politician. I remembered once, after a long day at the Inner Harbor, I gave a guy my card and he ripped it up and threw it in the air."
"I said to myself, OK, you want to rip up cards, here...' and I started handing him more cards. My people grabbed me and said, Anton, that's enough for the day.'"
He sighs and lights a cigarette. "I'm not too geared to take abuse, I guess." Would he run for office again? "I'd consider it. But right now, I want a little more privacy in my life."
Since October, 1981, Mr. Keating has been in solo practice, and it's as close to a sellout to the big-bucks world of law as the boy from Battersea has come. "Yeah, I know," he says, "My whole family's history has been, Do us a favor', leave enough to bury yourself and we'll be happy."
"But I've got to be a little less selfish. I've got a baby now." The new Keating is 1-year-old Christopher, and his "night person" father often baby-sits during the day at the Keatings' downtown home, returning to the office after dinner and on weekends to prepare cases. A daughter from his first marriage, Erin Diane, is a sixth grade student at Friends School.
There is no word yet whether the baby has inherited the Keating blood-lust, and his nose isn't broken yet.
But stayed tune. His articulate, aggressive, well prepared father named him Christopher Kelly.
That was Grandfather Keating's ring name.
