Kroskey's involvement with ecstasy occurred over roughly six months in 2000, but then he quit that scene after some of his friends were arrested. He majored in education and minored in physics at college, and eventually graduated with a 3.4 grade point average. He thought he had put his ecstasy past behind him.
He got interested in the financial markets during the tech boom, and after his teaching job proved to be desultory he switched gears and entered the financial services industry. He briefly worked with an insurance company, and then was hired to do technical market analysis with Valmark Securities, an Akron-based independent broker-dealer. His job duties there included portfolio analysis and working on an ETF platform the company was developing at the time. Meanwhile, he says he was carrying a 4.0 grade point average while pursuing his MBA at the University of Akron.
And then one day the police grabbed him outside his apartment door, and Kroskey's life was upended. "Look, I screwed up and I take personal responsibility for my actions," he says. But he claims he was charged with selling a quantity of ecstasy that was "several hundred percent" more than the actual amount.
The roughly half-year period between his arrest and his sentencing date was a bizarre period of uncertainty. He thought he might avoid sentencing because the prosecutor's evidence was based on testimony and phone records, so he didn't tell the people at Valmark. He continued with his MBA studies. But it wasn't a happy period. "This was probably the toughest time because I didn't know what was going to happen," Kroskey says.
Based on the amount of drugs Kroskey was charged with selling, he faced a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years behind bars if he fought his case and lost, so he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 51 months imprisonment, followed by three years of supervised probation. He finally told Valmark in an e-mail when he was about to plead guilty to drug charges. "Their reaction was surprise and shock," he says.
Locked Up