Rajat Gupta is out of jail but still has some high-profile grudges. The ex-McKinsey head's book reveals his beefs with Lloyd Blankfein and Preet Bharara and celebrates his former life among the global elite.

Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Former McKinsey CEO Rajat Gupta leaves his trial with his lawyer

• Former McKinsey leader Rajat Gupta was one of the biggest names facing criminal prosecution following the global financial crisis, as he was tied to billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam's insider trading case.
• In a book released earlier this year, Gupta still proclaims his innocence, blaming his conviction on the political environment in the country following the housing crisis; an aggressive federal prosecutor; and his "biggest regret of his life": not testifying at his own trial.
• The book, called "Mind Without Fear", details Gupta's life, from his childhood in India, to Harvard Business School, McKinsey, the United Nations, and eventually, a federal prison in Massachusetts.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Even before a jury's decision in the summer of 2012, Rajat Gupta had lived a life that was worth writing about.

The former leader of consulting giant McKinsey had advised billionaires like Bill Gates and Swedish heir Sam Wallenberg, knew presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, served on the boards of Goldman Sachs and P&G, and addressed the United Nations General Assembly.

But his book, "Mind Without Fear", does not begin with a story about any of these people or even his childhood in India, where he was raised by a Bengali freedom fighter, or his time at Harvard Business School, when he was one of the few people of color at the school. It instead begins with him inside a federal prison in Massachusetts, on his way to serve the first of his two stints in solitary confinement for what he called a minor breach of rules (tardiness to a roll-call count).

Gupta was found guilty of insider trading, with prosecutors saying he tipped off disgraced hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam with news of non-public information about Goldman, including Warren Buffett's $5 billion investment into the bank during the financial crisis. In the book, which was released earlier this year, Gupta is still adamantly denying he did anything wrong.

Instead, he blames a host of factors for why he ended up spending two years in prison: former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's aggressiveness; the political climate against executives following the financial crisis; Goldman Sachs' former CEO Lloyd Blankfein; and his decision not to testify in his defense.

In interviews with media outlets around the release of the book earlier this year, Gupta strikes the same tone, pushing back on any inkling that he helped Rajaratnam gain access to inside information.

"Bharara couldn't do what he was put in the job to do," Gupta said in an interview with the Financial Times in March. "How can you have the perpetrators of the financial crisis, which is all the banks and the housing finance companies, and he couldn't bring one person to justice?

"I can tell you that basically the incentives are misaligned. Most prosecutors have political ambitions. They want to win at any cost ... if an innocent person is proven not guilty or the jury say not guilty, it's a win for the prosecutor. They shouldn't take it as a loss. What they did [was] to spin a story which they knew was wrong."

The book however details much more than just his side of the trial. It dives into the executive's life in prison, the people who stuck by him, and his feelings toward his old employer and Goldman.