Former Stratton Oakmont Partner and Ex-Inmate Launches Commissary Club for Formerly Incarcerated People

Bronson worked in the 1980s for Stratton Oakmont, the brokerage run by Jordan Belfort, whose story inspired the 2013 film "The Wolf of Wall Street." The firm collapsed in the mid-1990s under misconduct accusations. Bronson was a partner at Stratton but left after a year to start his own firm in South Florida. He told TechCrunch he built a $100 million business taking small-cap companies public. Some of that success came through breaking securities laws, he said, and he eventually lost everything, including his freedom. He was sent to federal prison for a couple of years.

After his release, Bronson said he could not find work. "Nobody would hire me, despite all of my education and work experience and everything else. I was like completely radioactive," he told TechCrunch. That experience shaped Commissary Club, which takes its name from the store inside a prison where inmates buy snacks and toiletries. The site is marketed to ex-cons and uses AI to help them through what Bronson described as the often confusing process of finding employment and housing after reentry.

Bronson said he saw how little assistance was available to people leaving prison. "If it was this bad for me, what about the guys I was in prison with who had very little education and very little job experience? What were their chances?" he told TechCrunch.

Commissary Club also has a social component. Bronson said he added it because the post-prison experience can be isolating. "It's almost like Facebook," he said, where people can find jobs and get help with jobs, housing and benefits, and also find community. The site also appears primed to become a referral network, and it offers a way for users to find dates, according to TechCrunch.

For now, the startup has two people: Bronson and co-founder Roman Kissin, whom Bronson called the technical mind behind the project. Kissin previously worked for eBay and IBM and served as CTO of LexisNexis between 2022 and 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The site is free at first, then switches to paid. Users get the first 10 applications for free, Bronson told TechCrunch. After that, the company bundles the next 10 applications for $149, or $14.99 each. TechCrunch noted that some may balk at the for-profit model, and for people just out of prison it may be a tough sell. Bronson sees it as a win-win: a business that can help a community few others are trying to help.

"People immediately assume, 'Oh, is this a nonprofit?' And the answer is no," Bronson said. He said there is a strong mission component and that he has devoted his life since prison to helping "my brothers and sisters with records." He also said he felt remorseful and still wakes up every day regretting choices he made.

"But we're going after a huge, huge market that nobody — I mean nobody — does anything about," Bronson told TechCrunch. He said that while others talk about AI taking away employment, he sees Commissary Club as building AI that creates employment for people society left behind.