Raj Rajaratnam, the once high-flying, billionaire hedge fund manager who was convicted of insider trading, faces two decades or more in prison when he is sentenced on Oct. 13 — unless the judge is persuaded by Rajaratnam’s lawyers that a long sentence could condemn their 54-year-old client to die in prison because he is in declining health.
So, what are the chances that U.S. Judge Richard Holwell of the Southern District of New York will temper justice with mercy, as the old saying goes?
Not so good. That’s the message in an intriguing essay in Forbes by Walter Pavlo, who starts off this way: “I knew a guy who went to federal prison who was told by his lawyer that there was a chance he could get him out on a ‘health waiver.’ When the guy showed up to prison in Edgefield, S.C., he noticed a blind inmate being pushed in a wheelchair by another with a cane…and it was then that the newest inmate knew he would not be leaving any time soon.”
Prosecutors working for Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, are decidedly skeptical about the defense’s poor-health claims and have asked for Rajaratnam’s medical records. Bharara, of course, has made insider trading and other Wall Street mischief his priorities.
Rajaratnam was branded the very “face of insider trading” by prosecutors (see Main Justice’s earlier report.) In his trial last spring, prosecutors played a series of recorded conversations that portrayed the super-rich defendant as obsessed with acquiring still more money by trading on confidential information (see Main Justice’s report.)
On sentencing day, prosecutors may speak in somber tones about the human tragedy of a man undone by his own greed and the need to send a strong message to keep another people from being tempted. But newspaper photographs just after the verdict showed one prosecutor grinning broadly, as though he’d just won a big Super Bowl bet. And who could blame him, after all the work he and his colleagues put in?
The underlying message is two-fold: Don’t get in the cross hairs of the federal government. And pack your bags, Raj.
