Timothy Durham’s fraud hooked investors for more than 200-million dollars. And it may now land him a prison term of more than 200 years.   

Durham, business partner James Cochran, and Rick Snow, their accountant at Akron-based Fair Finance, were convicted in July of turning the small securities seller into a Ponzi scheme.  

Defense attorneys have asked for light sentences—five years for Durham. They argue that their clients were bumblers not conspirators.

Prosecutors are calling for the max, including up to 225 years for Durham.  They say he and Cochran bought Fair Finance from the family of its Depression era founder, Ray Fair, all the while intending to divert its assets to their personal use and use its reputation for reliability to lure more investors.

Dan Sciury of Canton says he was a typical victim of the scheme.  “…“most of these folks were elderly like myself…retirees who had invested there in good faith because of the sterling reputation that Mr. Fair had had—he never cheated anyone out of anything—and we all got bilked. That’s the long and the short of it.  And these people were just thieves.  They were conniving and they knew just what they had done. There’s no one who could have done the things they did without it being planned and calculated.”

Durham, Cochran and Snow are scheduled for sentencing in Indianapolis where they were tried--their corporate holding company and their power base were headquartered there.

Sciury hopes the three spend the rest of their lives in jail; but also is a bit fatalistic. “…you know…it doesn’t matter if they give them 200 years or to spend the rest of their lives in prison because there’s no way that’s going to make restitution for all the grief and suffering that they’ve caused in the lives of many people.  It was absolutely devastating.  It was devastating for me.  My plans were for this money to be for my daughter who is handicapped.”