Serial con artist Craig Berkman is now officially a convict.

U.S. District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin on Monday sentenced the one-time Oregon gubernatorial candidate to six years in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to fraud charges.

Berkman managed to raise $13 million from investors in 2011 and 2012 with the claim he had a line on stock from a a number of red-hot internet companies before they went public. Berkman admitted falsely claiming to investors that he owned shares of Facebook Inc., Groupon Inc., LinkedIn Inc., among other companies.

Berkman turned around and used at least $4.75 million of the money he raised in the Facebook scam repaying a group of Northwest investors he'd defrauded in an earlier scam. He pocketed another $1.6 million, according to prosecutors, spending the money on personal expenses, travel and legal fees.

Berkman was arrested last March in Florida. He pleaded guilty in June in federal court in New York City. He's spent most of the intervening months in a federal detention center in Brooklyn.

Berkman found most of his current batch of victims in Georgia, Tennessee and elsewhere in the South. He moved to Florida in 2008 from Oregon after a Multnomah County Circuit Court jury agreed with investors that they'd been misled and defrauded by Berkman.

The two groups of investors are now battling one another. The investors from the south have filed suit in a Florida court seeking to recover the "ill-gotten gains" from Berkman's Facebook fraud to repay the Northwest investors.

The six-year sentence is less than what federal prosecutors were hoping for. In their sentencing memorandum, the prosecutors asked for eight to ten years. Berkman, now 73, had pleaded for leniency, in part because a lengthy sentence would hamper his efforts to repay his many burned investors. As part of his guilty plea, Berkman agreed to repay $8.4 million to his latest round of investors.

The government argued that freeing Berkman to operate once again among the investing public is not a good idea.

"Berkman's obligation to pay his restitution does not override the important punishment and deterrent aspects of sentencing, which in this case call out for a substantial sentence of incarceration," the government argued in its sentencing memo. "Moreover, the fact that Berkman used the proceeds of the present fraud in part to pay off his previously defrauded investors militates strongly against giving him a chance to do it again."

-- Jeff Manning