This seems odd to me. Basically you try to authorize the group 5 times, and if it doesn't succeed, you continue on anyways? It seems to me like the correct solution would be a while loop. In that loop, try to authorize the group, and if it fails, log it and decrement the retry count. Break out of the loop if you succeed, and if you run out of retries, raise an AppScaleException.

Of course, I'm open to discussion on this, and any elucidation here would be helpful.