Lucky Steve Ott, Jr.

Lucky Ott has spent his life building things that route around the people in the middle — and he brings an operator's discipline, not an advocate's enthusiasm, to the Foundation's daily work.

His formation ran through institutions that select for character and stewardship. He is an Eagle Scout and a member of the Order of the Arrow. As a delegate to Oklahoma Boys State he was nominated for lieutenant governor on his party's ticket, and at the University of Oklahoma he was chosen for the President's Leadership Class — one of a hundred freshmen selected — where he studied business management and held leadership in Lambda Chi Alpha.

He came up in his family's business. His father was a Sonic Drive-In franchisee, and Lucky worked in the stores from childhood onward; by the mid-2000s he was developing and operating multiple restaurant locations and concepts, each producing between $1.5 and $2.5 million in annual revenue, until the family sold. In 2013 he moved into healthcare and started Boerne Drug Company from a single store, on a simple thesis: that the money in American pharmacy was being taken in the middle, and that a pharmacy built the right way could hand it back to patients and employers. He grew it into a six-store, technology-enabled group with an integrated clinic, telemedicine, and a self-funded benefits captive engineered to deliver affordable care outside the traditional pharmacy-benefit-manager system — more than thirty employees, over a million dollars in annual payroll, and stores under development across Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. To strengthen independent pharmacy more broadly, he also founded Pharmers Buying Club, a group purchasing organization built to give struggling independents the leverage of collective buying power and rebates.

In 2019, retroactive PBM clawbacks closed the pharmacy — reimbursements reduced after prescriptions had been filled, dispensed, and paid for. No one was charged with anything. A lawful business model, operating exactly as designed, took a company out of existence and thirty families with it. That was three years before any indictment.

In 2022 he was indicted in the Southern District of Georgia — a district he had never set foot in — on a single conspiracy count. A member of the Sons of the American Revolution and a descendant of the Magna Carta barons, the twenty-five men who in 1215 forced King John to seal the charter at Runnymede, Lucky had never had much reason to dwell on that heritage until he sat in that courtroom and watched his rights, his possessions, and his family's security stripped away before a single juror had voted on anything. The due-process protections those barons won are written into the Fifth and Sixth Amendments today — and, he learned, still not evenly kept. He declined every plea offer the government put in front of him and asked for a trial. At trial in Statesboro in October 2025, at the close of the government's case and before the defense called a single witness, the court granted his motion for a judgment of acquittal, finding the government had failed to establish venue. The government has appealed, and the matter remains pending before the Eleventh Circuit.

The three years in between cost him nearly everything he and his family had built. The businesses closed. His parents — who had spent their working lives building a family company and should have been retired — lost their home and their savings defending their son. He lost his home too, and came out broke and deep in debt at an age when most people are consolidating what they have built. That is the part people miss about an acquittal: it does not give anything back.

He started over anyway. Today he owns OtterBooks, a family bookkeeping and fractional-CFO practice he founded in 2022 — his mother its backbone — serving small and mid-sized businesses across San Antonio, Boerne, and the Texas Hill Country, built on thirty years of running companies through the exact problems his clients face: partner disputes, payroll taxes, landlords, regulators, and the arithmetic of survival. It means the person overseeing the Foundation's operations reads financial statements for a living. Earlier, through his venture Phoenix Frontier, he sourced and supplied emergency sanitizer and PPE during the pandemic's early scramble, and became the first investor behind C6 Diamond, a San Antonio company he helped form and capitalize as the licensed manufacturer of Cat Diamond Tools under license from Caterpillar.

As Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, and a co-founder, Ott runs the Foundation day to day — its operations, coalition, economic-impact research, board development, and the governance and vetting standards that determine who the organization associates with publicly. His work is not about relitigating any one case; it is about the mechanics that break ordinary people before a verdict is ever reached — the trial penalty, intended-loss math, the erosion of criminal intent as a requirement, pre-trial asset seizure, and venue. His position is simple and hard-won: stop the system from breaking innocent lives before the damage is done, not after.