In yet another chapter that underscores the Texas Lottery’s long-running saga of scandal and corruption, former Executive Director Gary Grief quietly faced a first-degree felony charge last month,1 only for Travis County prosecutors to let him off the hook almost immediately.
The Charges
A grand jury in Travis County indicted Grief on abuse of official capacity,2 alleging he misused government resources in connection with the infamous April 22, 2023, Lotto Texas drawing that paid out a rigged $95 million jackpot. Court records show the charge involved, at the very least, $300,000 in alleged harm tied to that single drawing.3 Three days later, Travis County Assistant District Attorney Rob Drummond moved to dismiss the case “at the prosecutorial discretion,” and the entire matter was closed.4
Now Texas Taxpayers are wondering whether or not a coverup has been going on behind the scenes and if anyone will ever face justice over this rampant misuse of government authority.
The Investigation
The indictment stemmed from a Texas Rangers investigation that had been ongoing for more than a year. It focused on how Grief, who ran the agency for roughly a decade and a half, handled rule changes that opened the door for third-party “courier” services to buy tickets in bulk. Those services, expedited and unprecedented, helped facilitate the massive purchase of nearly every possible number combination in the 2023 drawing, all but guaranteeing a win for an out-of-state commercial operation with ties to major international crime syndicates. Lawmakers later learned Grief had authorized the expedited delivery of dozens of terminals and other accommodations that made the operation possible, even as public trust in the lottery continued to erode.
Grief stepped down in early 2024, right before a major Houston Chronicle investigation brought the full scope of the jackpot scheme into public view. By then, the lottery had already gone through decades of leadership turnover, scandals, and vendor irregularities. Under his watch, the agency quietly tweaked rules to let couriers and online resellers operate in ways the Legislature never approved and even violated the Lottery Commission’s own rules. That approach helped turn a state-run predatory-gambling scheme meant to “fund education” into something that increasingly looked like a backdoor for influential or sophisticated entities to game the system.
Blown Wide Open
The swift dismissal of the indictment is raising fresh eyebrows. Travis County’s Public Integrity Unit has long held exclusive power to pursue ethics and corruption cases against state officials, a setup created around the same time as the lottery itself. Which raises new questions: why does one county DA’s office, in the whole state, get to determine which state corruption cases will actually get prosecuted or swept under the rug?
And for taxpayers, the whole episode feels like déjà vu. The lottery was sold to Texans in 1992 as a “painless” way to fund public schools without raising taxes. Instead, it has delivered scandal after scandal, fraud, corruption, taxpayer-funded compliance costs,5 and now this latest controversy. Low-income families, who research consistently shows shoulder a disproportionate share of lottery spending,6 continue to buy tickets hoping for a miracle,7 while the state takes its cut and scandals keep piling up.
Accountability
The Legislature took only minor steps8 to reform the problems last session, moving the entire operation, in its entirety, from the Texas Lottery Commission to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation and tightened restrictions on bulk-buying eligibility. But the rapid rise and fall of Grief’s indictment serves as a reminder that real reform requires more than rebranding an agency.
It demands genuine scrutiny of whether government should be in the predatory gambling industry at all; especially when pushing a rigged product that preys on financial desperation is only going to fund three days of public schools.
Texans have every reason to be skeptical. When a grand jury finds probable cause for felony misconduct at the top of a state agency, only to see prosecutors bury the charges days later without explanation, it reeks of even more corruption. The lottery was never going to replace sound budgeting. It was always a gamble on integrity, as much as on the numbers themselves.
Until elected officials treat the lottery as the corruption-prone, predatory scheme that it is, the cycle of scandal, eroded trust, and broken families, will continue.
All this comes just one month before delegates at the 2026 Republican Party of Texas Convention are set to consider resolutions to make “Abolishing the Texas Lottery” and preventing the further expansion of predatory gambling a RPT Legislative Priority.
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- https://x.com/bwaltens/status/2054292780579688497?s=20 ↩︎
- https://x.com/bwaltens/status/2054304093905043462?s=20 ↩︎
- https://www.kxan.com/news/indictment-of-former-texas-lottery-director-dismissed-by-travis-county-district-attorney-days-later/ ↩︎
- https://texasscorecard.com/state/exclusive-former-texas-lottery-director-gary-grief-indicted-quietly-cleared-by-travis-county-da/ ↩︎
- https://texastaxpayers.com/the-texas-lottery-decades-of-scandal-corruption-and-fiscal-irresponsibility/ ↩︎
- https://cssh.northeastern.edu/gap/wp-content/uploads/sites/62/2025/11/ssrn-3660130.pdf ↩︎
- https://cssh.northeastern.edu/gap/wp-content/uploads/sites/62/2025/11/ssrn-3660130.pdf ↩︎
- https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=89R&Bill=SB3070 ↩︎
