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As disgraced former Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright prepares to report to federal prison, agents with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) released the entire investigative file from their ill-fated state investigation.
The 75-page file (.pdf), released more than nine months after FITSNews filed a Freedom of Information Act request for it, lays out page after page of interview summaries from deputies, secretaries, retirees and at least one admitted pill dealer who sold to Wright for “years.”
None of that testimony, despite its weight in opioids, ever resulted in a single state charge.
That decision belongs to greenhorn 10th Circuit Solicitor Micah Black, who declined to prosecute Wright less than 24 hours before the former sheriff stood before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to three federal public corruption charges in October 2025.
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As FITSNews has reported ad nauseam, Black was handed the case by S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson, who was not only endorsed by Wright in 2018 but remains a close, public and unwavering ally of Wright’s attorney at the federal level, former U.S. Congressman Trey Gowdy.
Political entanglements aside, Black wasn’t alone in his dubious determination. SLED’s newly released investigative file confirms Black’s declination had received the backing of none other than SLED Chief Mark Keel, who submitted “the best course of action was not to pursue state charges.”
Despite the duo calling that a “satisfactory resolution,” it would take another nine months before Wright and his two subordinates-turned-codefendants ever faced a federal judge for sentencing.
When they did, though, both Wright and Lawson “LB” Watson, a distant cousin of the former sheriff, received the maximum sentence within their federal guideline ranges: 41 months in federal prison and $462,866.06 in restitution for Wright, 16 months and $349,885.22 for Watson.
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Federal authorities maintain that Wright kept his cousin on the payroll as a “no-show” employee from January 2021 until Watson’s March 2025 regisnation, paying him roughly $57,000 a year and outfitting him with a county-issued Tahoe despite him performing little to no documented work.
SLED’s newly released file, however, adds an earlier chapter to Watson’s story that never made it into the federal case, including an apparent years-long awareness of the felonious arrangement by none other than former Chief Deputy William “Billy” Parris.
It was further noted that in April 2005, Parris signed a personnel action form that effectively raised Watson’s salary.
Two decades later, as state and federal agents descended upon the sheriff’s office, Parris declined to investigate Watson following an anonymous complaint filed with the county, and thereafter declined the county’s request to turn over assignment logs related to Watson’s workload.
Parris retired from the sheriff’s office in November 2025.
Adding to the intrigue, the same investigative file states that while Watson’s work output was minimal at best starting in 2021, he would still show up to the office roughly three nights a week and leave notes on his supervisor’s door to ask if there was “anything he could do to help.”
Beyond the question of what work Watson was actually doing, state agents found that at least two witnesses separately observed Wright removing thin, white, letter-sized envelopes with “unknown contents” from Watson’s desk on at least four occasions.
“Sheriff Wright commented that Watson sometimes left candy for him,” a sheriff’s office lieutenant told investigators.
As for why the open secret stayed buried until authorities came to town, the same lieutenant told investigators he was “fearful for his job.”
As for the final codefendant charged by authorities, former sheriff’s office chaplain Amos Durham, he narrowly avoided prison time despite facing a guideline range of six to 12 months, instead receiving five years of probation and being ordered to pay $95,442.39 in restitution.
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Despite this lenient sentence, federal authorities maintain Durham was directly responsible for converting a sheriff’s office benevolence fund, intended to help deputies in times of hardship, into a slush fund to instead enrich both himself and the disgraced former sheriff.
That enrichment, prosecutors maintain, amounted to more than $89,000 in cash Wright withdrew from the fund with Durham’s knowledge, which, despite no accounting, appears to have gone towards the ex-sheriff’s hotels, meals, travel and… opioids.
While the totality of taxpayer money spent on Wright’s openly admitted pill addiction will likely never be known, prosecutors were able to document at least one instance of a Benevolence Fund check being used to pay for $1,000 worth of painkillers.
That check, according to multiple federal filings, was hand-delivered by Wright in the sheriff’s office parking lot to an “unindicted coconspirator.”
Federal prosecutors have remained exceedingly tight-lipped about the unindicted coconspirator, also referred to as a “cooperator,” going so far as to tell FITSNews during a July 7, 2026 press conference that the pill distributor was not the “target” of their surface-level public corruption probe.
Despite prosecutors have kept that coconspirator’s identity under wraps, though, SLED’s file is far less circumspect about at least one of Wright’s alleged suppliers: Michael Thornton, who told investigators he’d sold Wright Lortabs and Norcos for nearly a decade.
The same file reveals that Wright met Thornton at his residence, local businesses and the sheriff’s office itself to make the purchases, which, according to Thornton, were always paid in cash. When the two met at the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO), Thornton said, Wright’s pills came wrapped in a white envelope.
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When telling investigators what Wright drove, Thornton recalled a blue Ford Raptor, presumably the one seized from an illegal gambler Wright had previously been associated with, and his Gamecock Garnet King Ranch Ford, purportedly purchased with opioid recovery money.
Thornton told investigators he believed he last sold pills to Wright on March 29, 2025, when the two met at a local business, adding that he believed the meeting was captured on the business’ security camera.
Thorton’s claim echoes an earlier one documented in SLED’s file, when former SCSO patrol captain and former Duncan police chief Greg Satterfield told investigators that former deputy Andrew Crisp claimed, back in 2021, to have a video of Wright buying pain pills.
When investigators later interviewed Crisp himself, he denied ever seeing or possessing any such video.
After Wright resigned on May 23, 2025, both Satterfield and Crisp’s brother entered the race to replace him, with Satterfield later dropping out.
Nonetheless…
Thornton’s testimony, paired with that of a former sheriff’s assistant who claimed Wright asked her for muscle relaxers in 2016, directly contradicts the timeline laid out in the federal case. Based on those filings, Wright’s opioid abuse doesn’t appear to predate spring 2023, when he’s accused of stealing 147 pills of oxycodone and hydrocodone.
Details about Wright’s drug use weren’t confined to SCSO or law enforcement’s files, either.
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RELATED | CHUCK WRIGHT LIED TO FEDERAL AUTHORITIES, SOURCES SAY
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FITSNews has previously reported civilian accounts spanning from 2015, when a prescription bottle of Roxicodone purportedly tumbled out of Wright’s Callaway golf bag, to 2024, when a witness says Wright took four 20-milligram oxycodone tablets belonging to their mother, who had just died.
None of this, however, appears to have been mentioned in SLED’s November 2024 interview with then-Sheriff Wright, conducted alongside an FBI agent at SCSO, where the conversation instead centered on his misuse of a county-funded credit card.
According to the memorandum of that interview (.pdf), Wright denied any wrongdoing by explaining away what he could about his taxpayer funded credit card charges while pleading ignorance to what he apparently couldn’t.
It was further noted that during this meeting, Wright took a “smoke break.”
“I’ve never purposely taken any money out of the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office that I knew I shouldn’t do,” he later told agents, according to the memorandum of interview. “I’ve never done nothing like that, and I won’t.”
That denial hasn’t aged well, and it’s far from the last word on Wright.
This story reflects only FITSNews‘ preliminary review of SLED’s investigative file on Wright, with more detailed reporting to come in the weeks and months ahead.
Separate from the state’s file, however, is our ever-growing probe into Wright’s 39 years of service at SCSO, with sources from both sides of the badge revealing a tenure increasingly entangled with convicted fraudsters, illegal gamblers, underground cockfighters, drug distributors and a widening rolodex of violent criminals.
Write to Andy Fancher at andy@fitsnews.com.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Andrew Fancher is a Lone Star Emmy Award–winning journalist from Dallas, Texas. He joined FITSNews in 2023 after leaving an NBC affiliate, where he served as on-air talent. His reporting focuses on public corruption in South Carolina, with an emphasis on law enforcement misconduct and abuse of power.
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