Sixteen seconds.
“It looks bad,” my lawyer told me. “You hung up from the Goldman board meeting in which you learned about the Buffett investment, and sixteen seconds later you called Rajaratnam. He immediately bought Goldman stock. The next day, he told one of his traders that he received a call right before the markets closed, telling him something good might happen to Goldman.”
I was sitting in a small office, high above Sixth Avenue, with several members of my legal team. After a long and depressing winter, spring had finally come, but I had no time to enjoy the gentle sunshine and the new life that was bursting forth in my beloved garden at home. I was spending every day at the law offices, preparing to testify at my upcoming trial. I was worried we’d left the preparation too late – it was only when I decided to take over an empty office and show up every day that the lawyers finally responded to my requests to rehearse. One of the legal team, Robin Wilcox, would play the role of the prosecutor and grill me on the events leading up to my arrest, sometimes with an audience for added effect.
These practice sessions were a strange and awkward a air for me. I’d given countless speeches over the course of my career – addressing students, business leaders, humanitarians, even the UN General Assembly – and I was fully confident of my ability to speak clearly and persuasively. I had been unafraid to step on to the biggest of stages, always trusting my insight and instinct. But I didn’t like having other people telling me what I should and should not say.
My lawyers stopped me constantly, adjusting and fine-tuning my story based on a multitude of possible reactions from judge and jury.
I appreciated their thoroughness, but all this second-guessing made me feel disconnected from the simple truth. Unlike most business leaders, I’d never used a speechwriter; instead, I simply wrote what was authentic to me. Often, I would start with a favourite poem, but I couldn’t see the judge being very receptive to me quoting stanzas from Robert Frost, Rabindranath Tagore, or the Bhagavad Gita on the witness stand. Frost would have been appropriate here though, I mused: I would indeed be taking “the road less traveled” by taking the stand in my own defence.
One point we returned to, again and again, was the sixteen-second gap. I understood that it looked bad. Clearly the prosecution was counting on the jury thinking so too. The truth was that the government had only a meagre collection of circumstantial evidence for their claims against me, but a good storyteller could make it look criminal.
Predictably, Preet Bharara’s PR machine had played up the September 2008 Buffett investment in their press release following my indictment, commenting that the speed at which I ended one call and placed the next made “starkly evident” my eagerness to “lavish” inside information on my so-called good friend, “so quickly it could be termed instant messaging.”
How was I supposed to convincingly counter this narrative? At face value, the government’s highlighting of the sixteen-second gap seemed reasonable.
Why would anyone jump off of one call and on to another with barely enough time to catch a breath unless he had something of great urgency to communicate? The thing is, it actually wasn’t that unusual for me at all, as anyone who knows me would immediately tell you. My life was so tightly scheduled that I’d gotten into the habit of using any break between meetings, however brief, to return phone calls. My family constantly upbraided me for my habit of picking up the phone the moment a conversation paused or a meal was over. No matter how disciplined I was, it was a challenge to keep up with the demands of my philanthropic work, my investment ventures, and my board roles.
If there was a precious window in my schedule, the first thing I’d do was get my secretary on the phone and ask her to place the first call on my list. It’s also not surprising that the first name on my call list during the summer and fall of 2008 was often Raj Rajaratnam – after all, one of the most important things on my mind at that time was figuring out what happened to my $10 million investment in the Voyager fund.
That was the real story behind many of the events referenced in the charges.
It was the story of a ridiculously busy, overstretched man trying to manage his personal financial affairs while also guiding numerous major companies and nonprofits, at home and abroad, during one of the most volatile periods in our economy’s history.
But how was I to tell that story in such a way that it eclipsed the more dramatic and sensational spin the government was putting on it? This was the challenge facing my legal team and me as we prepared for my trial in early 2012.
Gary was outspoken about the weakness of the government’s case: “In all my years in court, never have I seen a case with so little evidence. It’s just a bunch of vague mumbo-jumbo! Where are the financial benefits? Where are the trades? Where is the profit-sharing agreement? And where is the motive? They don’t have a case. This isn’t evidence – it’s just circumstance and hearsay.”
“But what’s our strategy?” I kept asking. “I know I didn’t do what they’re accusing me of doing, but I don’t see how we can prove a negative. As thin as it is, the government has a story that sounds believable. And I can’t offer any concrete evidence that proves I didn’t do something.”
The lawyers kept reminding me that the burden of proof rested on the government. Let them prove it, they’d counselled. Our job is to show the jury that they simply don’t have the evidence. To emphasise his point, Gary would tell me that I didn’t even have to put on a defence if I didn’t want to. I understood this. Their arguments made sense – in a world where I truly was innocent until proven guilty. But I felt like I’d already been judged. I couldn’t just sit back and hope we could introduce enough reasonable doubt that it would become clear the government didn’t have a case. For months now I’d said nothing while my name and reputation were destroyed. I needed to tell my story, and I needed to tell it well.
Excerpted with permission from Mind Without Fear, Rajat Gupta, Juggernaut.
Also read:
‘It was a lapse in judgement. I lost my will to fight’: Rajat Gupta on not testifying in his trial
