Australian gambler The Joker confirms he bankrolled 2023 Texas Lottery operation

In the first public acknowledgement of his role in the 2023 scheme in which professional gamblers engineered a guaranteed Lotto Texas jackpot win, an enigmatic Australian gambler known as “The Joker” –— said to wager billions of dollars a year –— confirmed he was the main investor in the enterprise, which netted an estimated $20 million payday.

“I was involved in the funding of the Texas lottery play,” Zeljko Ranogajec told the Sydney Morning Herald in a lengthy article published recently describing the operation. He stressed that the big buy had the full support of the Texas Lottery Commission, the agency charged with regulating the games.

“It would not have been possible to operate at this scale without full cooperation,“ Ranogajec said.

The article also provided more granular details about the colorful team of high-stakes gamblers behind the lottery play, which was the subject of an ongoing Houston Chronicle series that last year resulted in two pending investigations and the dissolution of the Texas Lottery Commission.

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With the Lotto jackpot at $95 million, on April 22, 2023, a single buyer purchased virtually all of the possible 25.8 million number combinations, guaranteeing that one of its tickets would be the winner. No other player guessed the correct six numbers, and two months later the State of Texas handed an entity called Rook TX a $57.8 million check.

The operation was carried out at four licensed retailers –— in Round Rock; Spicewood, outside of Austin; Waco and Colleyville –— which processed millions of tickets over the 72 hours between Lotto draws. Yet it also was abetted by state lottery officials.

Not only did the lottery agency provide dozens of extra official terminals and pallets of paper to process the tickets with no questions asked – including to three retailers that had sold barely any tickets in the months prior. Lottery officials also turned a blind eye to several apparent rules violations that made the scheme possible.

In an October 2024 article, the Chronicle identified the main international players likely behind the operation: A Maltese man who as a point person provided the introductions; a Melbourne professional gambler named Bernard Marantelli, who had attempted a similar play in a Connecticut lottery draw in 2019; and a pair of wealthy Tasmanian gamblers, David Walsh and Ranogajec, who also had histories of audacious lottery buys. Marantelli and Ranogajec had previously founded a London betting company together.

Each of the men spoke with the Morning Herald, clarifying their roles in the Lotto Texas buy.

Ranogajec left Australia over a $600 million tax dispute and moved to London, where he lives in the city’s poshest neighborhood and runs one of the world’s biggest betting operations. At a 2022 conference, Walsh, his schoolboy friend and business partner, said their syndicate placed about $10 billion a year in bets.

In last week’s article, Walsh for the first time acknowledged he had a silent role in the Texas lottery buy. “I did have a share, since I’m involved with Zeljko,” he said. “However, I didn’t know about it at the time.”

In addition to confirming he was behind the April 22, 2023, buy, Ranogajec also confirmed that his team had made previous attempts to buy up the Lotto Texas jackpot as it grew in early April 2023, which the Chronicle had discovered by analyzing lottery commission records.

Lotto Texas saw unusual spikes in ticket sales for the April 1 and April 15 draws, records show. While neither yielded a jackpot win, in both games a statistically unusual number of second place winning tickets was claimed by single buyers. In the April 15 game, Rook TX cashed in three-quarters of the 71 tickets with five out of six correct numbers.

“The endeavor involved significant risk,” Ranogajec told the Sydney newspaper, noting that in addition to the nearly $26 million spent buying up all the ticket combinations for the April 22 draw it won, “substantial money was wagered and lost on previous draws.”

The role of arranging to buy and process the tens of millions of tickets was given to Marantelli, who in 2019 had spent millions in an unsuccessful attempt to buy up a $25.8 million Connecticut lottery jackpot. In last week’s article, he said such losses were an accepted cost of the syndicate’s huge lottery plays.

“You’ve got no advantage over the public except that you’ve got a risk appetite that is different to theirs,” he explained. “They’re prepared to spend $4 and hope. And we might be prepared to spend $4 million. That’s our risk profile and our investment strategy.”

Marantelli first detailed how a team of 30 associates carried out the frantic operation of entering and printing 25 million tickets in a newsletter published by an investing partner last year. At one point, he said he was so desperate for labor that he hired an Uber driver to help out.

In his latest comments, Marantelli supplied more evidence of the Texas Lottery Commission’s central role in the Rook TX operation.

The agency’s executive director at the time, Gary Grief, has insisted that he was unaware of the syndicate’s operation –— only that “purchasing groups” were buying up a lot of Lotto tickets in the run-up to the April 22 draw. Yet his ignorance claim has been disputed.

Greg Potts, an executive with one of the companies involved in processing the tickets, said the company, Lottery.com, had received prior approval from Grief to carry out the big buy. “We fully expected that they would laugh at us and say, ‘Well, no, of course you can’t do this,’” he told Texas legislators last spring. “We were very surprised that the answer was yes. As a person and a lottery player, I cannot believe they said yes. I was shocked.”

In a lawsuit filed last May, an executive for a so-called courier company, which sold lottery tickets via an app until the practice was banned last year by lawmakers, said he, too, had warned Grief about Rook TX’s “attempt to effectively guarantee the Texas Lotto jackpot” which “would be at the very least inappropriate and unfair.”

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In his new comments to the Australian newspaper, Marantelli also stressed that the lottery commission was well aware of, and assisted in Rook’s actions as the team prepared for the big Lotto operation.

“I sat outside the Spicewood location and I saw what I believe was a lottery official and an IGT technician/official” –— the company that contracts to run the lottery –— “turn up in two cars and unload I think 15-ish terminals and take them inside and plug them in and spend two hours setting them up,” he said.

“In what world do I think that those guys didn’t have the correct permissions to do that from the lottery headquarters?”, he said.

Last February, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Rangers to investigate the Rook TX operation. “Texans must be able to trust in our state’s lottery system and know that the lottery is conducted with integrity and lawfully,” he said then. 

Two days later, Attorney General Ken Paxton said he was launching his own investigation. “I’m deeply concerned about the integrity of our state’s lottery system, especially when it appears that non-citizens have shown that they are attempting to rig the system to win on demand,” he said.

Yet the latest interviews with the Rook TX principals raised questions about the rigor and breadth of those investigations.

More than a year on, neither the governor nor the attorney general has publicly reported any findings from their inquiries. In their comments to the Australian newspaper, both Marantelli and Ranogajec said they had not been contacted by investigators from either office.

Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for an update on his investigation. Abbott’s office referred questions to the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Rangers.

“This remains an active and ongoing investigation, and no additional information is currently available,” the agency said in an email.