Former Goldman Sachs director convicted in NYC

Also played at trial was a wiretap of a July 2008 phone call during which Rajaratnam grilled Gupta about whether the Goldman Sachs board had discussed acquiring a struggling bank, like Wachovia, or an insurance company.

"Have you heard anything along that line?" Rajaratnam asked Gupta.

"Yeah," Gupta responded. "This was a big discussion at the board meeting."

In another recorded phone call in 2008, Rajaratnam told one of his traders that he had got a tip "from someone who's on the board of Goldman Sachs" that Goldman was facing an unexpected quarterly loss.

Prosecutors argued the sequence of events — the phone calls, the subsequent trades and Rajaratnam's boasting about his inside connection — could not be dismissed as mere coincidence. Gupta, they said, was motivated to help Rajaratnam because he had a financial stake in some of the hedge fund manager's business ventures.

"What was good for Raj Rajaratnam was good for Mr. Gupta," Brodsky said.

Naftalis countered that most the evidence was specific to the "secret world" of Rajaratnam and not about Gupta.

"I sometimes wondered whether Raj Rajaratnam was the man on trial," he said. His client, he added, was a victim of "pure guilt by association."