His victims say Paul Stella was a charmer.

Stella was known to treat his customers like gold at his funeral home on Harford Road. Grieving family members usually held no doubt that Stella, gregarious and generous, could be counted on to bury their loved one right.

That was before they found out the man was robbing them blind.

In a courtroom packed with his embarrassed relatives and enraged former clients, Stella was sentenced yesterday to nearly 4 1/2 years in federal prison for plundering close to $1 million in prepaid funeral accounts for 191 customers.

"I think he should have gotten more time," said Martha Thomason, 81, of Essex, who worked with the FBI to record Stella lying about how he drained her burial nest egg.

Despite the evidence of theft over nearly four years and a legal finding that the victims were among society's most vulnerable, Chief U.S. District Judge Benson E. Legg brushed back prosecutors' call to send Stella to prison for slightly more than five years.

Instead, the judge departed from recommended guidelines calling for a sentence of between 63 and 78 months and ordered Stella to prison for 53 months followed by three years of probation. Stella's attorney had asked for a prison sentence of three years.

Stella, who had pleaded guilty to a single count of bank fraud, was also ordered to pay restitution of more than $757,000.

"He stole from elderly, sick and financially strapped people so that he could maintain a lifestyle that included extravagant gambling, vacations, 11 expensive vehicles and lavish gifts," Rod J. Rosenstein, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, said in a statement yesterday.

From his eponymous funeral home in the 7500 block of Harford Road in Northeast Baltimore, Stella persuaded dozens of customers to deposit prepaid funeral expenses in accounts at a bank and let him serve as a trustee, according to court documents filed with his guilty plea.

Many customers had signed up for the program when the funeral home was still owned by Hartley Miller. Stella, who had worked for Miller, took over the business in March 2003.

After receiving money, authorities said, funeral home employees opened prepaid funeral expense accounts at Madison & Bradford Savings and Loan and its successor, Madison Bohemian Savings Bank. But starting in June 2004, Stella forged customers' names and closed 111 of their bank accounts, investigators found.

Stella, 43, of Forest Hill admitted that he endorsed the bank checks worth about $530,000 to himself and redeposited the proceeds into accounts that he controlled. He withdrew the money to gamble in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, prosecutors say.

In a second scheme, authorities say, Stella falsely assured 75 customers between 2003 and 2006 that he would safeguard their money and hold it in trust so it would be available to pay for their funerals when they died. Instead, according to his plea agreement, Stella cashed or deposited more than $370,000 of the customers' money into his personal and business bank accounts.

Eventually, customers started to ask questions and complained to the State Board of Morticians. When the board initiated an inquiry, Stella asked one of his employees to take business files home and later lied to investigators, saying that prepaid funeral expense account funds had been reinvested in life insurance products.

"He engaged in lies, lies and more lies," prosecutor Harry M. Gruber said in court yesterday.

The assistant U.S. attorney said many of Stella's victims, including elderly pensioners and the terminally ill, were not able to diligently check to see whether they continued to receive bank records showing that their funeral accounts were still funded.

One victim "was in a position where he could be convincingly deceived," Gruber said, adding that Stella "knew the types of individuals he was dealing with."

Stella's defense attorney, Joseph A. Evans, countered that many of the funeral arrangements had been completed by family members who were not infirm. Time and time again, Stella continued to bury clients even as the finances of his business were collapsing around him, according to Evans.

To Stella's victims, more was lost than money. One of Stella's victims spoke at yesterday's hearing about the indignity of deceiving her dying husband.

He thought the funeral had been paid for and she told the federal judge that she didn't have the heart after 41 years together to tell him that the account had been emptied.

Another spoke of losing so much money from Stella's scam that all she had to hold her husband's ashes was a plain, black plastic box instead of the fancier urn she could no longer afford.

Stella's brother tearfully sought to defend his family's name, telling the judge yesterday that the shocking crime was "the mother of all first-time offenses."

"I had no reason to believe that my brother was capable of this," he said, adding that he believed Paul Stella stole principally to keep the ailing business afloat and perform funerals even after his license was suspended.

At the end of yesterday's three-hour proceeding, a somber Stella stood before the judge and expressed sorrow and regret to his family and to his former customers.

"My business kept losing money and my gambling losses grew," he said. But he added, "I'm not blaming someone else," and asked those gathered to "accept my sincerest apologies."

matthew.dolan@baltsun.com