A Texas Lottery Director Was Indicted for a Day. Then the Charges Disappeared.
Former Texas Lottery Commission director Gary Grief was indicted on felony abuse of public office charges by a Travis County grand jury, only for the charges to be dismissed the following day.
There is a version of this story that is a routine regulatory scandal: a lottery official retires under a cloud, investigators look into it, life goes on. The version that actually happened is considerably stranger.
On April 16, a Travis County grand jury indicted Gary Grief, the former director of the Texas Lottery Commission, on felony charges of abuse of public office. The charges were dismissed the following day by the Travis County District Attorney’s Office under “prosecutorial discretion,” with no public explanation. No press conference, no statement of reasoning, no indication of what changed between Tuesday and Wednesday that made a felony indictment appropriate on one day and not the other.
Grief led the lottery commission for 15 years before retiring in early 2024, shortly before news broke about the April 22, 2023, Lotto Texas drawing that had been structured to make it nearly impossible for ordinary bettors to win. The indictment and its disappearance are the latest developments in a scandal that has now consumed the institution Grief ran, generated formal investigations from both the governor and the attorney general, and produced almost no public accountability.
What Actually Happened in April 2023
The mechanics of the scheme are worth understanding in full, because they are remarkable.
The Lotto Texas jackpot had climbed to $95 million after 93 consecutive rollovers without a winner. At that level, the jackpot became mathematically exploitable to anyone with the resources to purchase nearly every possible number combination. A syndicate funded by Zeljko Ranogajec, a secretive Australian professional gambler described as one of the most successful in the world and, by some estimates, worth billions, identified the opportunity and moved to capture it.
Over roughly 72 hours, the syndicate coordinated several licensed lottery couriers across Texas, deployed dozens of terminals, and used pre-generated QR codes on phones and tablets to print tickets at speeds nearing 100 per second. Teams worked around the clock in improvised print locations, including a fishing shop and a former dentist’s office, cataloging and boxing millions of tickets as they rolled off the machines. By the final day, they had spent more than $25 million on tickets, covering approximately 99% of all possible number combinations.
The syndicate won the jackpot. It also collected a significant portion of the secondary prizes.
Ranogajec, who has been nicknamed “The Loch Ness Monster” because he is so rarely seen in public, gave a rare interview to the Sydney Morning Herald in March 2026, in which he admitted to bankrolling the operation while insisting it was entirely legal. He is one of the owners of Colossus Bets, a London-based online pool betting operation.
How the Rules Got Changed
The scheme was legal, or at least exploited a legal gap, because of regulatory changes that critics say should never have happened.
Grief was accused of bypassing the normal legislative process to change regulations to allow lottery tickets to be bought on cell phones while simultaneously courting lottery couriers, businesses that enable the bulk purchase of tickets over the internet. Those two changes, made without legislative authorization, created the conditions for the syndicate’s operation. Without mobile purchasing and courier access, printing 25 million tickets in 72 hours at locations across the state would have been logistically impossible.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called it “the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas.” Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton each ordered formal investigations. To date, neither office has released any findings or publicly detailed the status of those inquiries, more than two years after the drawing took place.
The Texas Lottery Commission itself has since been dismantled. The agency that Gary Grief ran for 15 years no longer exists.
The Indictment That Wasn’t
The 24-hour indictment is the most procedurally unusual element of a case that has been unusual throughout. A grand jury is a body of ordinary citizens that reviews evidence presented by a prosecutor and determines whether there is probable cause to believe a crime was committed. Grand juries do not indict on their own initiative. A Travis County prosecutor presented evidence to a grand jury, which found probable cause to charge Grief with felony abuse of public office, and then the same prosecutor’s office dismissed the charges the next day.
Prosecutorial discretion exists for legitimate reasons. Charges are sometimes filed and then dismissed when new information emerges, when a witness becomes unavailable, or when prosecutors determine that the evidence does not in fact support a conviction. None of those explanations has been offered. The District Attorney’s Office said “prosecutorial discretion” and nothing else.
The silence is the story. Abbott’s investigation has produced nothing public. Paxton’s investigation has produced nothing public. The indictment lasted 24 hours and was dismissed without explanation. The Texas Lottery Commission was disbanded. And Ranogajec, who described the entire operation as legal in his only public interview on the matter, is still in Australia.
The Texas Gambling Paradox
There is a secondary irony embedded in this story that is worth naming directly. Texas is one of the few remaining large states with no legal casino gambling and no legal sports betting, a position maintained by a legislature that has repeatedly invoked moral and social arguments against expansion. The same state that cannot bring itself to legalize a regulated sportsbook operated a lottery that a professional gambling syndicate exploited to the tune of $95 million through regulatory changes made without legislative oversight.
The argument against casino gambling and sports betting is partly that they expose ordinary Texans to exploitation by sophisticated gambling interests. What happened in April 2023 was a sophisticated gambling interest exploiting ordinary Texans through the state’s own lottery, under the watch of an official who has since been briefly indicted and had the charges quietly dropped.
Las Vegas Sands is spending tens of millions lobbying for Texas casino legalization. Miriam Adelson is funding political campaigns to reshape the legislature. Tilman Fertitta has been building Texas sports teams as positioning assets for the day gambling opens. None of them has managed to extract $95 million from Texas residents through a single drawing. A syndicate running lottery ticket printers out of a fishing shop managed to do so in 72 hours, entirely legally, with the help of regulatory changes made by the man who ran the lottery commission.
If Texas eventually legalizes casino gambling, the argument that its citizens need protection from sophisticated gambling interests will be a difficult one to make with a straight face.
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