Police Officer Ali Oklu said it began in 2010 with a phone call from a fellow officer: “Hey, you want a side job?”

At the time, he lived at home with his two elderly parents, helping to support them through his position with the New York Police Department, which he joined three years earlier. He remembered saying yes.

He often wonders what might have happened had he turned down the offer.

“I would have had a great career and a good future,” he said in a recent phone call. “I’d be studying for the sergeant’s exam right now.”

But, as a federal judge told him at his sentencing on conspiracy charges in April, “you threw it all away.”