James W found out the why for this one:
http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/exception-handling.html (in the "Automatic exception recovery" section)

The testing of these two settings was tricky, so the comment on how to test was added.  The observed behavior for the connection timeout was always 5 times longer than the setting.  The Automatic exception recovery was the reason for this.  It can be overridden to have customized behavior but trying 5 times seems better than trying just once.