Eighty-six-year-old Donald Fair’s father founded Fair Finance in Akron during the 1930s and kept the small consumer loan company going for decades.

Then Donald Fair sold it for $20 million to an Indiana man named Tim Durham in 2001. And in less than a decade, the company was bankrupt, its principals indicted and its roughly investors out some 200 million dollars.

Fair and Durham are in the same federal courtroom this week in Indianapolis: Durham as a defendant in a massive fraud case and Fair as the first witness against him.

According to the Indianapolis Business Journal, which broke the story back in 2009 of suspicious deals at Fair Finance, Fair testified that he got worried after Durham and his co-defendants started hiking up interest rates promised to investors, dumped outside accountants and started putting Fair Finance money into their other businesses.  

Prosecutors describe the whole thing as Ponzi scheme that sucked in new investors with inflated promises and then used their money for everything from gambling debts to lavish lifestyles.

But in his opening, Durham’s lawyer, John Tompkins, blamed the whole thing on the financial collapse of 2008, and some bad decisions Durham made.