— A Raleigh investment adviser was sentenced Friday to 40 years in federal prison for bilking clients in an elaborate Ponzi scheme.

Stephen Condon Peters, 46, who owns VisionQuest Wealth Management, also was ordered to pay $15 million back to the investors.

"You lost your way. Greed consumed you," U.S. District Judge James Dever III told Peters, calling the fraud "systematic, prolonged deceit."

Federal authorities said Peters promised investors returns of 8 to 9 percent a year on low-risk investments. Some turned over their retirement accounts to him, but prosecutors say he diverted $6 million to his own personal use, including buying a horse farm near Lake Wheeler and a luxury villa in Costa Rica, and used other money to pay off earlier investors.

During a three-week trial in May and June, former VisionQuest employees testified that they lied to clients and forged documents under Peters' direction. One former worker said he even agreed to secretly record conversations with Peters because he knew Peters was breaking the law and didn't want to be part of it.

Employees also described how Peters set up a strategy to deceive federal investigators by forging and backdating disclosure forms for investors.

Peters disputed the allegations, saying he had made some bad investments but fully intended to make good on his client obligations. He insisted that other witnesses, including clients who lost money, had lied and that he made full disclosure of losses to clients and never instructed employees to falsify documents.

But a jury deliberated for less than two hours before convicting him on 20 counts of fraud, obstruction of justice and identity theft.

Before he was sentenced, Peters said he regrets that clients lost money, but he expressed no remorse for his actions.

"I don't think you're sorry," an obviously irritated Dever told Peters at the Friday sentencing.

The judge read the name of every client aloud in court, calling them "real people" whose hard work and dreams were stolen by Peters.

"That was money we had set aside in our 401(k) for retirement. Now, we're at retirement age, and we don't have that money," said Melinda Evans, a Florida woman who said her family lost about $500,000 to Peters' scheme. "He caused us a lot of grief. He lied, flat out lied, when I would question him with things. He'd try to come back and try to explain it away. It never made sense to me."

Evans said she was pleased with the 40-year sentence.

"I thought he'd get more than he did, but hey, Friday the 13th, 40 years, I'm happy," she said.

Authorities seized many of Peters' properties, including the horse farm, the Costa Rican villa, vehicles and watches, to be sold off to help repay investors.

Peters will serve his time at the federal prison in Butner, the same facility as Bernie Madoff, convicted in the nation's largest Ponzi scheme ever.

"With what is effectively a life sentence for Mr. Peters, the court in this case gave a clear message: Investment advisers who steal their client’s money with lies and use it to fund their own greed will pay for their crimes in decades – not days, months or years," U.S. Attorney Robert Higdon said in a statement.