High-Stakes Poker Player Found Guilty on 21 Counts for Defrauding Texas School District
Anthony Hutchison, a "not too good" high-stakes poker player alleged to have bribed staffers at a Houston school district to use his company's services, has been found guilty on all 21 counts related to fraud and bribery.
The former NFL running back and his co-defendant, Brian Busby, formerly the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at the Houston Independent School District (HISD), faced a combined 33 counts ranging from conspiracy to commit bribery to wire fraud. All counts ended in a guilty verdict from the jury in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division, according to court documents obtained by PokerNews.
Poker Player Headed to Prison
Hutchison, who spent three years in the NFL back in the 1980s, frequented high-stakes private games in Houston, Texas. He was a known losing player in the games, according to the testimony from a World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet winner, Ayaz Mahmood, who bluntly told jurors the defendant's poker skills are "not too good."
Mahmood's testimony played a key role at trial as he showed jurors that Hutchison would chase his losses in those private games. Hutchison, per the witness, lost up to $300,000 in a single session.
“He would chase it,” Mahmood testified on the 13th day of the trial in a U.S. Southern District of Texas federal court, “We call it poker tilt, which means if you’re losing, you chase it and try to make your money back.”
Hutchison was found guilty of falsifying his tax returns and using his businesses to fund his poker habit. He is also said to have bribed district employees to favor his businesses and overbilling customers for landscaping services, which caused "millions of dollars in loss" to a school district that paid his company.
The poker player bribed HISD personnel with kickbacks in exchange for obtaining and retaining his services, a claim made by multiple witnesses.
Prosecutors argued that Hutchison and Busby overbilled HISD more than $800,000 each year from 2013-2020. Multiple exhibits showing five-figure payments made from Hutchison to HISD employees were presented in court. The government showed evidence proving that when Hutchison had to pay off his poker losses, he'd write checks to Bulldog Timber, a company that acts as a middleman to loggers and sawmills. The business also cashes checks on the side, charging a three-percent fee.
Mahmood testified that he or one of his couriers would deliver the checks to Bulldog Timber, and then the cash would be distributed to the players from the private games to cover Hutchison's losses. Prosecutors presented to the court some of those checks, which list HISD projects in the memo line.
But Bulldog Timber's owner, Theodore Theilen, testified that he doesn't recall ever having performed any services for the school district. Prosecutors said Hutchison intentionally misclassified checks to Bulldog Timber as business expenses as a way of reducing his taxable income.
Hutchison's attorneys, however, claimed Hutchison's tax preparers are to blame for mistakenly classifying the checks, a claim the jury apparently didn't buy.
Rusty Hardin, Hutchison's high-profile attorney, claimed in court that his client suffers from a severe gambling addiction, to which Mahmood agreed. The WSOP champion did say that Hutchison always paid off his debts, however.
Hutchison, 64, is scheduled to be sentenced July 28, 2025. He faces over 20 years in prison for 11 counts of wire fraud, six counts of bribery, two counts of willfully filing false tax returns, one count of witness tampering, and one count of conspiracy. Busby and Hutchison will remain out on bond while awaiting sentencing.
