She was branded "duplicitous, deceitful and thoroughly dishonest" by Judge Christopher Elwen, pronouncing sentence at London's Southwark Crown Court.
"It is clear to me that lying is woven into the fabric of your being," he told her.
De-Laurey, 35, was found guilty in April on 20 counts of using false cheques or obtaining money transfers by deception.
"You perpetrated, from base and covetous motives, a planned and calculated breach of trust," Elwen said.
Looking drawn, she stared blankly ahead as she was sentenced to seven years on one count and five years on all the others, the sentences to run concurrently.
De-Laurey's four-month trial earlier this year hogged headlines with its details of her lavish spending and what her lawyers called the "fairy tale" wealth of the bankers she robbed.
Her husband Anthony, 50, a former Ministry of Defence police officer who was found guilty of charges relating to the retention of proceeds of the fraud, was sentenced to 18 months.
De-Laurey's mother, Devi Schahhou, 67, who was found guilty of the same charges relating to the retention of stolen money, was sentenced to six months, suspended for two years.
The judge rejected their defense that they had been ignorant of the source of De-Laurey's sudden wealth.
The cash was used on a "spree of conspicuous consumption and dispensing of largesse of such magnitude that nobody close to [De-Laurey] can have had other than at the very least the gravest suspicions," he said.
De-Laurey had splashed out on more than 380,000 pounds' worth of Cartier jewelry, a power boat and a villa in Cyprus.
When arrested in May 2002, she had an interest in 11 properties and an order for a 175,000-pound Aston Martin luxury car.
The court found out on Monday that it wasn't just millionaire bankers whose accounts were plundered.
Earlier during pre-sentencing proceedings lawyers said De-Laurey took 16,000 pounds without permission from the building society account of her mother during her trial. The cash was used to pay for household bills.
De-Laurey embraced her mother as she was led out to jail, kissing the top of her head.
Her lawyer, Jeremy Dein, QC, told the court she had received death threats in January and was on suicide watch, having twice attempted to take her own life.
Dein had asked the judge to take into account her previous good character. Had it not been for the 1998 bankruptcy of a sandwich bar business she and her husband ran, she "would still be filling sandwiches...rather than facing imprisonment," said Dein.
The financial troubles that followed coincided with her working for Goldman Sachs, where she came across "a Dallas-type world where huge, unthinkable sums of money stared her in the face day in, day out," Dein said.
Her victims included former star banker Scott Mead, who in 2000 had helped engineer mobile phone firm Vodafone's hostile acquisition of Mannesmann, the world's largest takeover.
Judge Elwen rejected as "absurd and preposterous" her claim that the cash was a just reward for her service to Mead and the two other bankers she stole from. De-Laurey had said Mead had let her help herself to over 3 million pounds for her help in covering up an affair.
Her bosses had trusted her and held her in high regard, and she had fostered their sympathy with "a cocktail of lies" about supposed marital and health problems, the judge said.
At one stage De-Laurey told her bosses she was having a hysterectomy when she was actually staying at a plush hotel in Beverly Hills.
Detective Chief Superintendent Ken Farrow of the City of London police force said on Monday they were satisfied with the sentence, which reflects the seriousness of her crime and the sum of money involved.
So far only 1.5 million pounds of the almost 4.5 million stolen has been recovered, and the police and Goldman Sachs will now be focusing their attention on a missing million pounds that was neither returned nor accounted for by De-Laurey's spending.
SOURCE: Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. 14.6.2004
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