Business

Ex-Goldman boss begins prison term, ‘reunites’ with jailed partner

Call them jailbirds of a feather.

Only it’s the Federal Bureau of Prisons that has white-collar felons Rajat Gupta and Raj Rajaratnam in a gilded cage.

Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs director and ex-head of McKinsey & Co., made his 2 p.m. deadline on Tuesday to report to prison after being convicted of insider trading, a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson confirmed.

The 65-year-old disgraced Wall Street figure arrived at the front gate at Federal Medical Center Devens, a minimum-security prison camp 40 miles west of Boston — and was “reunited” with his partner in crime, billionaire hedge-fund operator Rajaratnam.

Gupta was found guilty in June 2012 of feeding insider-trading tips to Rajaratnam, who was convicted in May 2011 for using those tips to benefit his Galleon Group hedge fund.

Rajaratnam is serving his 11-year term in Devens’ medical facility, which is separate from the minimum-security prison, where Gupta will serve his two-year stretch. Still, that the two pals would pay for their crimes in the same overall facility is a bit odd.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, in its suit against Gupta, asserted that the tips generated “illicit profits and loss avoidance” of more than $23 million.

Gupta was found to have illegally passed along insights obtained as a board member for Goldman and Procter & Gamble.

Devens — one of a handful of prisons known as a “Club Fed” for its cushy amenities — has a recreation area for floor hockey, basketball courts and a soccer field, along with a hobby craft room and a music-practice room.

The BOP spokesperson said “a number of factors” figured into the prison assignments — including security risk, medical needs and a place of incarceration “within a 500-mile radius of each inmate’s release destination.”

And while the spokesperson declined to give specifics about how both insider traders landed at Devens, the spokesperson would say that “it was not a coincidence.”