Miami Mortgage News

Ex-Professor Says Dismissed Racketeering Case Is Still ‘Devastating’

Next month will be the seventh anniversary of the darkest moment in Joy Laskar’s life.State agents for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided the Atlanta home and office of Dr. Laskar, then a celebrated professor of electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was eventually fired from his tenured job and indicted by a grand jury, accused of misusing university funds and other resources to benefit his private start-up. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a hefty fine.It all came to nothing.Last October, a judge tossed out the state’s case before a trial, ruling that the five-year statute of limitations had expired on the misdeeds that it had accused Dr. Laskar of committing. It was an unceremonious end to an episode that highlighted how entrepreneurial initiatives in academia can go very wrong.Dr. Laskar, who was the subject of a New York Times article in 2013, decided to speak publicly about the dismissal last week. He had previously remained silent to avoid antagonizing prosecutors, who still hold family items with sentimental value, like a laptop with the only copies of childhood photographs of Dr. Laskar’s three daughters and an unfinished novel by his wife.“It has been devastating personally, professionally,” Dr. Laskar said by phone, referring to the case against him. “It’s had a huge imprint on us as a family to this day. It will never go away.”Nick Genesi, a spokesman for the attorney general of Georgia, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Before he was ousted, Dr. Laskar had been a high-profile professor at Georgia Tech, where he brought in tens of millions of dollars in grants and research contracts from companies and government agencies.He started chip companies on the side, which Georgia Tech encouraged, eager to see successful university spinoffs that had showered riches and prestige on Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other top computer engineering schools.