The final chapter in one of the longest-running sagas in the annals of corporate crime is scheduled to conclude today in a Connecticut courtroom.

Walter Forbes, the blue-blooded former chairman of Cendant, is due to be sentenced in Bridgeport for his role in a $252 million accounting fraud that was exposed nearly a decade ago. At the time, the Cendant fraud was the largest on record, and its exposure in April 1998 wiped out $14 billion of the company's market capitalization, nearly half its total, in a single day.

Since then, Cendant's scandal has been eclipsed in magnitude by accounting meltdowns at Enron and WorldCom. The CEOs who presided over those companies were convicted of spawning those frauds and given stiff prison sentences, 24 years for Jeff Skilling of Enron and 25 years for Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom.

Forbes' sentence probably will be lighter, but when he stands in front of U.S. District Judge Alan Nevas, he still faces a stretch of more than 10 years. That was the sentence given his top lieutenant, Kirk Shelton, who was convicted two years ago of participating in the same fraud.

The reason Forbes might get only half of what Skilling and Ebbers got is that his timing was better. The accounting fraud that occurred at Forbes' company (which was known as CUC International before a merger transformed it into Cendant), took place from 1995 to 1997. That was several years before a harsh new set of mandatory sentencing guidelines was adopted by Congress.

Skilling and Ebbers committed their misdeeds after the new guidelines went into effect.

Still, for Forbes, who was born into an affluent family in Rockford, Ill., attended Harvard Business School and became one of the leading proponents of shopping by computer in the 1990s, any sentence north of 10 years will secure him a place in what has become an infamous group of convicted former CEOs.