Collins Max "Collie" Christensen Sr. rose to prominence in the world of real estate speculation, but he promised to grow money and instead reaped a harvest of bitter investors.

Noting the financial and emotional damage suffered by people who trusted Christensen, U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez sentenced the well-known Sacramento businessman on Tuesday to five years in prison, followed by three years of probation.

The term is more than two years beyond what his plea bargain called for and more than a year and a half above the top of the advisory sentencing guidelines.

Mendez ordered Christensen to surrender Dec. 5 to begin serving his time. The judge rejected a request by defense lawyer McGregor Scott that his client be allowed to surrender later in the month so he could spend Christmas with his wife and children.

Christensen, 53, pleaded guilty in February to one count of wire fraud, and in return, the government agreed to two years and nine months behind bars.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Russell Carlberg and Scott told Mendez on Tuesday they felt the sentence they negotiated would be fair and just punishment.

But the judge said it did not adequately reflect the utter devastation to investors, both fiscal and personal, that Christensen left in his wake. People went broke and lost homes, families were torn apart, he reminded the attorneys.

Christensen was accused of siphoning hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars out of the pockets of at least 14 investors, and perhaps as many as 30. However, Carlberg and Scott settled on an official misappropriation of $985,994 for purposes of the plea deal.

Some investors asked that Christensen be given the statutory maximum 20 years, but the judge said that was not realistic.

Mendez set a Jan. 10 restitution hearing on the question of how much Christensen should be ordered to pay the victims.

At the outset, with U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner looking on from the crowded spectator section of the courtroom, Carlberg and Scott informed the judge they had agreed to drop the heated rhetoric that marked their court papers leading up to Tuesday's hearing and focus on the basics of sentencing.

As U.S. attorney, Scott hired Carlberg in 2007, and the 43-year-old Carlberg has carved out an enviable record as a prosecutor of white-collar criminals. And, just as he was a dedicated prosecutor, Scott proved to be an aggressive advocate for Christensen.

Scott opened with what has been one of his themes: that Christensen saved the court a lot of resources by entering into a plea agreement before he was charged.

Later in the hearing, Mendez observed that was true, but Christensen also avoided a trial, where all the details of his skullduggery would likely come tumbling out.

"That's not a proper consideration for sentencing," Scott told Mendez after the judge imposed the five-year term.

The defense attorney also accused Mendez of "shifting the focus" of the hearing from Christensen's personal use of investors' funds to the plight of the victims after Scott presented case law that blunted as a valid sentencing factor how stolen money is used.

As he emerged from the courtroom, Scott declined to say whether he and his client will consider appealing the sentence.

Mendez also voiced concern about Christensen's felony fraud conviction in state court in the 1980s.

"How do I know he won't do the same thing 10 years down the line?" the judge asked rhetorically.

Finally, Mendez said the length of the fraud troubled him.

"He obviously made a conscious decision in 2007 to begin diverting investors' money" that was supposed to go into a number of real estate developments, the judge noted. "This went on into 2008, then 2009, and just got progressively worse. Why didn't he just shut it down?"

"He truly thought that he could keep everything going," despite the deep recession that wracked the economy in 2008, Scott replied.

"I just don't believe that," Mendez fired back, "when he was taking this money and giving it to his wife and using it to pay his bills and make personal investments."

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