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Six months before a multi-agency probe toppled one of South Carolina’s most recognizable lawmen, Chuck Wright welcomed state and federal agents into a sheriff’s office emblazoned with his name to ask him questions about his county credit card spending.
What they got instead was more than an hour of denials, deflections and outright lies from a six-term sheriff hell-bent on convincing his visitors that years of frivolous, taxpayer-funded purchases were nothing more than honest mistakes.
“I can tell you gentlemen both,” Wright insisted during the recorded interview on Nov. 22, 2024, “I’ve never purposely taken any money out of the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office that I knew that I shouldn’t do. I’ve never done nothing like that, and I won’t.”
Except that was a lie….
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Records from the state’s ill-fated investigation (.pdf) show S.C. Law Enforcement Division (SLED) Special Agent Austin Mills and FBI Special Agent Justin Newsome had already combed through years of county credit card statements before their sit-down with the cocksure sheriff.
Those same statements, first reported by The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier, were also the focus of a civil probe by the S.C. State Ethics Commission (SCSEC).
The widely publicized records show Wright charged more than $53,600 to his county credit card between December 2017 and April 2024, on everything from steakhouses and beach resort stays to drug tests and antidiarrheal medication.
For much of it, state and federal agents had to take Wright’s word, as case-file notes from their joint investigation confirmed the county had no “process for oversight” of his taxpayer-funded credit card, leaving few, if any, receipts to back up his spending.
So when Mills and Newsome pressed him on specific charges, including $200 at a Hilton in Memphis, $579 at an Embassy Suites in Charleston and $422 at a Hampton Inn in Spartanburg, Wright offered evasive answers like “I can’t recall,” “I don’t know” and “I didn’t stay there.”
Further questions about thousands of dollars in recurring charges from Amazon Prime, a faith-based streaming service and a string of online health-related companies drew similar responses, including “I don’t have a clue,” “I’m going to dispute them” and “it has to be fraud.”
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Wright’s memory proved selective, though, as he did offer to explain $2,000 in spending at C&C Indoor Range and T&K Outdoors, including a $726 Holosun red dot sight mounted on a departmental pistol, which he offered to show his guests.
“No,” one agent replied dryly. “I’m familiar.”
The agents were also familiar with Wright’s Apple.com purchases, which totaled nearly $12,000 over that same span. Wright admitted at least some of that went to Candy Crush, “or whatever it is,” a free smartphone puzzle game that charges players for extra lives and power-ups.
“I thought they were going on my personal card, boss man,” he said of the Apple.com charges. “I’m not going to argue about it, because if I hadn’t been playing a game on my dadgum county phone, then there wouldn’t have been a charge on it.”
For his crimes against Candy Crush, Wright had already repaid the county a whopping $1,111 for what agents submitted as “accidental purchases.”
Across the table from Mills and Newsome, though, Wright put the figure even lower, saying he was “guilty of probably a couple hundred bucks.” He then pointed to a series of subordinates who could supposedly vouch not only for his purchases but for his efforts to pay the county back.
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FROM INTIMIDATION TO THE WAYSIDE…
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Among the employees Wright named was Lisa Estes, senior administrative assistant to the administrative captain. He claimed he would hand her $20 whenever he accidentally used his county card on personal purchases, citing a pack of cigarettes from Dollar General as an example.
“No personal stuff at all,” Wright added. “Now, there are other people that have my credit card number.”
Estes, however, told a different story...
According to SLED’s memorandum of her interview on Jan. 15, 2025, she flatly contradicted the sheriff, telling agents that only Wright used the card account and that his spending on it had “gradually increased” over the years.
She added that the only reimbursement she ever received from Wright was the $1,111 he paid back after his credit card spending went public.
“Estes was not aware of any additional reimbursement payments,” the memo states.
More troubling still, the case file notes “the Sheriff may have entered the office during the interview with Estes and agents,” adding, “this action may have intimidated Estes.”
Whatever the case, Estes announced her retirement after three decades with the department, just two days after her sit-down with SLED and the FBI.
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RELATED | INSIDE THE STATE’S ABANDONED CASE AGAINST CHUCK WRIGHT
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At her retirement party, according to the file, Wright told the crowd he would “miss Estes since she approved all of his credit usage.”
“She began to cry and then left her own retirement celebration,” the description continued.
Despite the mounting evidence, the state’s investigation never produced a single criminal charge, and Wright’s credit card spending soon fell by the wayside.
Federal prosecutors instead zeroed in on a so-called “no-show” cousin kept on the county payroll for more than two decades, nearly $90,000 siphoned from a benevolence fund intended to help deputies in times of hardship and 147 prescription painkillers stolen under the guise of a drug take-back program.
All told, those inquiries generated three federal charges, to which Wright pleaded guilty in October 2025. Nine months later, in July 2026, he was handed a 41-month federal prison sentence and ordered to pay more than $462,000 in restitution.
His two co-defendants were sentenced that same week, though only one received prison time.
Only then did the SCSEC finally weigh in on his county credit card, with Wright admitting to racking up more than $18,400 in personal purchases between November 2020 and October 2024. He was subsequently ordered to repay $15,792 and cover a $5,000 administrative fee within a year of his release from prison.
He was further ordered by the SCSEC to pay $35,193 in restitution, fees and penalties for the nepotistic July 2024 hiring of his son, Andy Wright.
For lying to federal agents, however, the former sheriff was never charged.
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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