The Osage Nation (ON) Congress is set to hold hearings on questionable expenses by former Osage Casinos CEO Byron Bighorse. During his tenure Bighorse routinely expensed personal items such as rare whiskey, expensive wines, golf clubs and thousands of dollars at restaurants and country clubs.
Bighorse’s past practices are the subject of a deep dive report by the Osage News, based on recently released, formerly confidential information by the ON Gaming Commission.
The former CEO is widely considered to be the most successful executive of the Osage Casinos, and is married to Osage Nation Principal Chief Standing Bear’s daughter, Jennifer. From January 2019 to September 2021, he charged $398,552 in expenses to the casinos, including $107,000 spent at the Patriot, Summit and Tulsa golf clubs.
Eventually, questions about his expenses and those of other Osage Casinos executives led the ON Gaming Commission to issue a then-confidential report that caused former Commission Chairman Mark Revard (chairman from November 2021 —April 2022) to send up a red flag about the expenses and who was vetting them. “I only asked one or two questions and it seemed like it pulled on a string,” Revard told the Osage News.
Revard began a new policy requiring that two board members review and sign off on executive expenses. Although he was replaced as chairman of the gaming board in April of 2022 by Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, the current chairman, Geoff Hager, credits the policies with causing a dramatic decline in executive expenses since 2021.
Nevertheless, the excesses before the changes became public and are causing public outrage and demands for investigation.
In August 2022 the Osage Nation Congress asked the current commission to look into Bighorse’s expenses, and that of several other casino officers. The documents were delivered to Congress on September 2.
One of the congressmen leading the hearings will be Billy Keene, who told the Osage News, “There’s a charge last year for over $4,500 at the Summit Club in one day.” He added, “It is mind boggling how that could be pushed through. How could no one even bat an eye at something like that? That’s malfeasance, to bill $4,500 in alcohol on July 13, 2021.”
Hager didn’t approve of releasing the expenditures to the public. He considers the issue to have been remedied for more than a year. He commented, “This is not something remedied by Congress. It was remedied by the board last year—and a year later was made public by the Congress.”
He praises Bighorse’s leadership. “Mr. Bighorse led the casinos for several years with clean audits every single year, while delivering year-over-year growth that has funded unprecedented expansion of the Osage Nation government and related services to our people.”
He added, “I’m always troubled in situations like this when an extraordinary tenure with incredible performance metrics is seemingly tarnished at the end and ultimately casts a shadow on an otherwise stellar career.”
Speaker of Congress Alice Goodfox disagrees: “A few people on the board didn’t seem to see the information the same way I did. One board member didn’t even look at the information. Some thought it was business as usual, that everything was justified, that the lack of checks and balances—like names not being on receipts—was no big deal.”
She added, “My goal was to make it to where we could sleep at night, to have checks and balances and policies and procedures in place to not only do the right thing but to be a model of how we should be running things.”
