Lottery industry spearhead charged with felony abuse of office
By Kate Northrop
A grand jury has indicted former Texas Lottery Executive Director Gary Grief on a felony charge accusing him of abusing his position in events tied directly to the $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot buyout in 2023.
Lottery industry pioneer Gary Grief was indicted and reindicted on a felony charge that accuses him of collaborating with a foreign purchasing group, an alleged partnership that state personnel are saying defrauded Texans the chance to win a $95 million jackpot.
In April, a Travis County grand jury indicted Grief on a first-degree felony count of abuse of official capacity involving an amount of $300,000 or more. In this case, the charge relates to the $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot that was won on April 22, 2023 by a New Jersey-based entity called Rook TX that spent about $26 million to purchase nearly every single number combination to just about guarantee a win.
The indictment was dismissed three days after it was filed without any reported explanation, until one week later, when the court reindicted him on the exact same charge.
The second time around, however, Travis County named the Texas Lottery Commission, now disbanded, in the indictment, specifically commissioners Ed Rogers and Clay Kidd. Rogers passed away in 2024.
In the reindictment filed at the end of April, the state accuses both Grief and the organization of intending to "harm and defraud" in their leadership capacity, "intentionally and knowingly misus[ing] government property, services, and personnel" to do so.
The court documents pertaining to the reindictment have been placed under a tight seal to bar them from the public, but not before several media outlets had already obtained them.
District Attorney José Garza told Nexstar that he was legally prohibited from speaking about the case, but his promise to speak in more detail in the coming weeks suggests that there may be more context surrounding the DA's decision to pull the original indictment and reissue a new one.
Grief's attorney, Sam Bassett, told the New York Times that the case was the result of politicians "searching for a scapegoat," and that Grief has been nothing but transparent and cooperative with the Texas Rangers and their investigations.
"When all facts are revealed in court, the public will see that Gary's leadership at the Lottery Commission generated millions of dollars for Texas schools and veterans and there was no crime," Bassett said in a statement to the paper.
Texas state legislators have been hammering the Texas Lottery in hearing after hearing ever since the $95 million jackpot event gained worldwide attention, laying the blame on lottery courier services and grilling executives on regular Lottery-retailer procedures.
One senator, a staunch opponent of the Texas Lottery, accused the commission of changing its administrative roles "to help criminals rig the lottery."
Months of arduous government discourse led to the resignation of yet another Executive Director, pressured the Lottery to ban lottery couriers, which it did, and resulted in the abolishment of the Texas Lottery Commission and transferal of its oversight to another state department.
But with the latest indictment against the former Lottery Executive Director, legislators have still decided that it is not enough.
Grief is summoned to appear in Travis County court on June 26 at 9:00 a.m., according to court documents.
Indictment records
Below are the original indictment (and court record) and the reindictment (and court record).
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* Texas is indictment country. Didn't they indict their own Attorney General awhile ago? 😳
It is also a go-to for patent trolls.
Imagine that............
I think Texas officials mad a out of state group won their lottery
i'm curious how they think he helped the group? did he help set up one of those fake stores with a ton of lottery terminals that just printed tickets for the group 24/7?
I am not understanding what he allegedly did either. Did he get a kickback? Did he order stores to stop everything, close to the public, and allow the printing of millions of tickets? How did he collaborate with this foreign group? How could he have stopped them? Where is the fraud? Wasn't this ticket paid?
I agree about Texas being obsessed with this big group play.
I agree.
You may be next.
There is so much wrong with the Texas lottery I'm in favor of doing away with it. Get rid of it and get on to something better like bingo(not the online crap), where you can see who you are playing with and see who wins!
Texas play his age
"Texas is indictment country. Didn't they indict their own Attorney General awhile ago? "
You know the saying about a DA being able to indict a ham sandwich, right? That said, maybe their AG deserved to be indicted, and maybe that's why he agreed to pay 300k restitution, perform 200 hours of community service, and take 15 hours of legal ethics training to avoid a trial. And then there's the $6.6 million that was paid to 4 whistleblowers who were fired from their jobs in the AG's office after filing complaints alleging a laundry list of issues with Paxton's actions. Of course that was taxpayer money and didn't come out of his own pocket.
"It is also a go-to for patent trolls. "
That's not really about Texas. It's just that federal courts in Texas happen to be a good choice of venue for plaintiffs.
"i'm curious how they think he helped the group? "
IIRC he helped set them up with their own terminals so they could generate more tickets than if they had to rely on regular retailers.
"the state accuses both Grief and the organization of intending to "harm and defraud"
Who did he harm or defraud? Maybe it's bad for the lottery in the long run, but in the short term he helped the lottery sell more tickets than they otherwise would have. Call me crazy, but I've got a suspicion that selling more tickets is one of the things the lottery director is supposed to do. If the argument is that he harmed some hypothetical winner if the group hadn't gotten the winning ticket I think there's a great deal of reasonable doubt. There are many examples of groups that didn't get help from the lottery still managing to buy enough tickets to win a jackpot, so being (legally/criminally) responsible for causing or facilitating their win seems like a reach.
I don't think it should be possible for an entity to buy such enormous numbers of tickets for a draw game that they have a nearly certain chance of having the winning combination and will almost certainly turn a profit because of an unusually large jackpot, let alone be actively helped by the lottery. I also don't think it was illegal at the time, so I'm skeptical that what he did qualifies as a crime, so I'm inclined to think his lawyer is right about trying to make him the scapegoat.
It's hard to get by on $216,000 a year. 🙄
Good Grief !
"IIRC he helped set them up with their own terminals so they could generate more tickets than if they had to rely on regular retailers."
i remember one of the lottery courier services doing something like that, and obviously they got help from the texas lottery to set up these print shops. and i believe the bulk buy groups used one of these lottery courier services. but that doesn't equate to gary grief directly helping the bulk buy group. the lottery courier services made their services available to everyone back when they were allowed to operate in texas, whether individuals or bulk buy group.