Business Notes

"I thought the judge was very fair," remarked former Dallas thrift owner Don R. Dixon last week. Fair and then some. Dixon was convicted last December on federal charges that he used funds from his Vernon Savings & Loan $2 million to pay for a California beach house and $10,000 for prostitutes for board members. Though Vernon's former chairman, Woody Lemons, had been sentenced to 30 years, U.S. district court Judge A. Joe Fish gave Dixon only five years, pointing out that the jury had not found him responsible for Vernon's $1.3 billion failure. Dixon could be paroled after serving only 20 months in a minimum-security prison within commuting distance of his home.

As the curtain fell on one act of the S&L follies, it went up on another. The Resolution Trust Corporation, the government's thrift-policing agency, filed a claim in federal court against the giant Cleveland-based law firm Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue. The RTC seeks more than $50 million in damages, citing Jones Day's alleged "endorsement of and/or acquiescence in" the actions of Charles Keating and his associates at California's Lincoln Savings & Loan, the nation's most spectacularly failed thrift. Jones Day denies all charges.