Jan 29, 2:08 AM EST

PHOENIX (AP) -- Five former executives with the Baptist Foundation of Arizona are scheduled to be sentenced in Phoenix on Friday in what has been called one of the largest affinity fraud cases ever.

Scheduled to be sentenced are: former foundation treasurer Donald Dale Deardoff; foundation subsidiaries officer Edgar Alan Kuhn; former board member Jalma W. Hunsinger; former foundation director Harold Friend; and former accounting consultant Richard Lee Rolfes.

Two former executives of the Baptist Foundation were sentenced in the affinity fraud case in September.

Former foundation president William Crotts was sentenced to eight years in prison and former general counsel Thomas Grabinski was sentenced to six years in prison on fraud and racketeering charges.

Both men also were ordered to pay $159 million to make up for money investors lost when the foundation collapsed in 1999.

The foundation was created in 1948 by the national Tennessee-based Southern Baptist Convention. It grew into an independent nonprofit organization that raised money to build churches and retirement homes.

Prosecutors said that in the 1990s, the foundation took advantage of 11,000 people - most of the elderly - promising them high returns in safe, faith-based investments.

Their business plan eventually unraveled and the foundation took on millions of dollars in debt.

"I lost a quarter-million dollars that put me and my wife back to work and pulled my daughter out (of) college. That money has to be repaid," said 60-year-old Arizona City resident Bob Shaw.

Shaw and other investors eventually got about 70 percent of their money back after authorities set up a trust to sell off foundation assets and divvy up a settlement from an accounting firm.

The other 30 percent of the money lost is supposed to come from the defendants.

But, defense attorneys for Crotts and Grabinski say their clients have virtually no money to pay their combined $318 million tabs.

The two are earning 35 cents an hour on prison wages. Crotts is a chaplain clerk and Grabinski is an education aide.

Thirty percent of their prison wages must go to victims. Their last restitution payments were a little more than $14, said Gordon Mulleneaux, associate clerk of the Maricopa County Superior Court.

Judge Kenneth Fields is expected to decide the best way to deal with the small sums, including whether to donate it to a crime victims group, Mulleneaux said.

Affinity fraud is defined as con artists targeting members of their own race, nationality or religious affiliation and exploiting their status as members of the group to solicit investments.

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Information from: The Arizona Republic, http://www.azcentral.com

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