[5] He left the Marines in 1986, entered Yale College and studied philosophy, graduating in 1990 after winning the prestigious Truman Scholarship for public service leadership.
[6] During his years as a federal prosecutor, he won a high-profile conviction in a five-week Mafia multiple homicide trial against Gregory Scarpa Jr.
[5] After his return to New York, he was tapped to prosecute Alphonse Persico, boss of the Colombo organized crime family, on racketeering and money-laundering charges.
In the day after the attacks, he reported to a round-the-clock command center in Manhattan, where he helped FBI agents run down leads by providing search warrants and subpoenas to investigate potential terrorist cells.
[5] As a prosecutor, Kroger won the Director's Award from then-Attorney General Janet Reno, and by the time he left the office, had a 97% conviction rate of the criminals he charged.
[10] Once at the college, Kroger taught only one semester of criminal procedure before he was asked to join the Justice Department's Enron Task Force and help investigate what at the time was the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history.
For a little over a year, he led the investigation into Enron's broadband business – whose reported earnings on a future video-on-demand service, famously dubbed "Project Braveheart," contributed to the company's inflated stock price.
Eventually, Kroger and his team won indictments against seven men, including Ken Rice and Kevin Hannon, Enron's top two broadband executives.
They pleaded guilty in 2004 and became government witnesses, helping to secure fraud convictions against Enron chairman Kenneth Lay and CEO Jeffrey Skilling.
[25] After leaving Reed, Kroger became the Hauser Leader-in-Residence at the Center for Public Leadership in the Harvard Kennedy School for the 2018–2019 academic year.