A deposition at the end of 2025 put Craig Cavileer and his former boss in the same room for the first time since their decades-long friendship went up in flames.
Cavileer fretted over whether to approach Majestic Realty’s Ed Roski Jr. and agonized over what he would say, which was strange, because before they sued each other, the pair spoke almost daily.
He was an executive vice president at Majestic, and for 30 years, Roski was a father figure to him. Cavileer was protegé, even muse, to Roski. Then, a year ago, amid succession drama at the family-owned firm, Majestic fired Cavileer.
A Texas native, Cavileer made a name for himself as the visionary behind the Fort Worth Stockyards, wrangling the 19th-century livestock market into a tourist destination that now attracts more than 10 million visitors a year, making it the 15th-most-visited destination in the country and justifying a major expansion — phase two. h
Cavileer’s ability to secure Roski’s backing for a project so far afield from Majestic’s bread-and-butter in business parks and industrial real estate demonstrates their unique relationship and the synergy between the cowboy boot-wearing Cavileer and the buttoned-up California billionaire.
Cavileer earlier proved his development acumen with the Silverton Casino and the Staples Center, which anchors billionaire Philip Anschutz’s sprawling L.A. Live development and brought pro sports back to downtown Los Angeles for the first time in 30 years. Those successes seemed to give Cavileer power to dictate the terms of the $1 billion Stockyards second phase, an undertaking more capital-intensive than anything Majestic, which bills itself as the country’s largest privately held developer of office parks, had ever built.
Yet six months after the announcement of the sequel, the Stockyards visionary who’d enjoyed the shelter of the Roski umbrella for 30 years found himself out in the rain.
Roski appointed his daughter Reon CEO in 2022 and president in 2024, and Cavileer blames the passing of the torch for the end of his peculiar but fruitful business dynamic with Ed. The company then demanded immediate payment for $76 million in loans, and when he couldn’t, foreclosed on his ownership stake in the projects he worked on, jilting Cavileer out of the sweat equity his former boss promised, not to mention his life’s work, he claims. But Majestic is a family business, and he’s not family.
While the court weighs whether blood is thicker than sweat, Majestic is shifting gears to pursue gradual further development in the district, and Cavileer faces the reality of a seismic reduction in rank, from king of the Stockyards to one of many dukes competing to shape the project. He’s now the head of Delightful Development, a firm he launched after his firing that is pursuing its own one-off plans in the district. A billion-dollar Fort Worth redevelopment project that’s been pondered by local families for generations is caught in the balance.
Majestic did not make anyone available for interviews, but the company responded to a list of emailed questions. Regarding questions about the legal battle with Cavileer, a representative said the company does not comment on personnel matters or litigation.
Sweat equity
Thirty-year-old Cavileer was already making a name for himself in Los Angeles real estate when Roski plucked him from Doerken Properties in 1993. Fresh from Texas, Cavileer had just brought Los Angeles its first five Walmart stores.
Cavileer quickly displayed his creative aptitude, and three years into his tenure at Majestic, Roski tapped him to help develop the Staples Center (now Crypto.com Arena) after purchasing stakes in the Los Angeles Kings and Los Angeles Lakers with Anschutz in 1995 and 1998, respectively.
In 1996, Roski became owner of the Boomtown Casino in Las Vegas, and a year later he asked Cavileer to be its vice president and general manager. Cavileer oversaw the rebranding to Silverton Casino Lodge, secured a partnership with Bass Pro Shops and turned the enterprise into a cash cow after it operated at a loss for years, Cavileer explained in his lawsuit.
To do this work, Cavileer relied on cash infusions from Roski. He explains the system of securing this funding in his complaint against Majestic: He’d bring his boss development ideas that he was unable to fund independently. For greenlit projects, they’d partner on an ownership LLC, with Roski funding his portion and issuing a promissory note so Cavileer could fund his equity share. When the project was recapitalized or sold, Cavileer would pay Roski back while netting a share of the profit.
[He] has a newfound awareness of the objective foolishness of his position — of trusting in his boss’s word when a document said otherwise, of imagining that a man would side with his colleague, irrespective of their closeness, over his child.
The arrangement is alluded to in a Majestic-authored report dated July 2024. In it, the company describes “an entrepreneurial culture with principals having long-term vested interest.”
Cavileer claims he was promised he wouldn’t have to pay back the notes until a capital event, in light of which, he “made a long-term commitment” to Majestic projects and “provided many years of tireless work and dedicated expertise on those projects to Roski and Majestic.”
One such event occurred when Majestic liquidated an industrial portfolio in South Fort Worth. Cavileer concurrently paid off loans from Roski with his distributions and took out new loans to purchase property in the Stockyards.
“You’re getting a distribution check and borrowing money on the same day,” Cavileer said.
For Cavileer, now 63, spending the bulk of his career at Majestic was like wearing golden handcuffs. He describes Roski as the guy with the resources, while he brought the ideas.
Cavileer was rewarded for what he brought to the table and felt that his boss wanted to see him succeed and enjoy the fruits of his hard work. He liked that his employees drove nice cars; heck, he liked to drive nice cars, too. At the time of that distribution, Roski was encouraging Cavileer to buy a boat, he remembers.
Wall Street of the West
The story of the Fort Worth Stockyards mirrors that of 20th century manufacturing hubs across the country, peaking about the time of World War II and becoming obsolete thereafter.
Known as the “Wall Street of the West,” the area was home to the largest livestock market in Texas and the Southwest for the first half of the 20th century, earning Fort Worth the nickname “Cowtown.”
Livestock processing didn’t leave behind the husks of steel mills or smoke stacks; the industry’s architectural mark on the area took the form of barns. Built in 1912, the two-story red brick buildings were used as horse and mule markets, exposition barns and stables for rodeo animals. The Fort Worth Stockyards held its last auction in 1992.
By then, the district’s purpose had already shifted to tourism, starting with the opening of Billy Bob’s Texas — the world’s largest honky-tonk, whose stage has been graced by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings — in 1981.
Cavileer met the Hickman family of Fort Worth because of Billy Bob’s. As part of a dream to revitalize the Stockyards in the late 1980s, patriarch Holt Hickman started assembling land in the district and reopened the honky tonk (which went bankrupt in 1988). By the mid-1990s, the owners were considering a Las Vegas outpost for Billy Bob’s. The project never happened, but the process forged ties that the Stockyards stakeholders would tug on when they wanted help directing the redevelopment of the Stockyards a few years later.
When former Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief took office in 2003, those vacant mule barns hadn’t been touched in years and were in sorry shape. He said the district was at risk of “destruction through neglect.”
“It became not only a safety issue, but we were losing our heritage while we watched,” he said.
Unwilling to let that happen on his watch, Moncrief got the ball rolling on renewal. The momentum kept up through his successors, former Mayor Betsy Price and current Mayor Mattie Parker.
Majestic and the Hickmans formed the Stockyards Heritage Development Company. The city of Fort Worth provided up to $26 million in incentives, and Majestic got to benefit from the tax increment financing district created in the Stockyards in 2014.
It wasn’t easy to break into Fort Worth. Cavileer was stepping into a minefield of drama involving local landowning families, legacy business owners and historical preservationists over the future of the Stockyards, and he, an outsider — an Austinite who spent decades in California — was asking Fort Worth’s leaders to entrust him with what Moncrief called “Fort Worth’s unpolished jewel.”
The city and developer spent the next few years turning residents’ vociferous concerns into a plan. They caught stray bullets along the way, including from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which put the district on its annual list of America’s Most Endangered Historic Places in 2015. In a press release, the trust wrote: “insensitive development threatens this historically significant place.”
“We got a tremendous amount of grief and hate, and it even split our family,” said Pam Minick, rodeo star and former part-owner of Billy Bob’s with her husband Billy.
The honky-tonk’s ownership group, which included the Hickmans, fractured over questions of how to preserve the Stockyards, an issue that mapped onto the group’s disagreements over operations at Billy Bob’s. The discord culminated in the 2017 ouster of the Minicks’ son and Billy Bob’s president Concho, spurring a lawsuit that went to the Texas Supreme Court.
Still, the $175 million first phase eventually transformed the horse and mule barns into storefronts. Mule Alley, as it’s now known, is home to a Lucchese store, a Wrangler outpost, a handful of restaurants and bars and the 200-key Hotel Drover.
Today, beefy Texas Longhorns stomp the streets at 11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. for daily cattle drives. During the day, visitors swarm East Exchange Street to perch for photos on the cattle, or buy a freshly steamed and shaped Stetson. On weekend evenings, the thoroughfare crawls with bachelorette parties and college students.
Moncrief had told him to treat the project like something that would outlive him, and even Cavileer’s early detractors eventually applauded what he’d built.
“Craig Cavileer was a remarkable field general for Majestic,” Moncrief said.
It didn’t hurt that the landmark’s makeover was revealed in 2021, amid the wildly popular run of Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone,” which revealed Americans’ appetite for cowboy culture.
Cavileer immediately got going on a plan for a sweeping expansion. The next phase would add 300,000 square feet of commercial space, hotels totaling at least 500 rooms, a 295-unit multifamily project and two underground garages with 1,300 spaces to the district by 2032. The city of Fort Worth agreed on a $380 million incentives package, contingent on Majestic spending $630 million on improvements.
Blood ties
Unlike the defenders of the Stockyards, Ed Roski Jr. seems to avoid dwelling on the past. When he and John Semcken tried and failed to bring a National Football League team to Los Angeles, Semcken sounded awestruck at his partner’s ability to move on.
“Guys like Ed, they never look back,” he told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2022. “He didn’t look back the first time we didn’t get it and he never looked back the second time.”
According to Cavileer, Roski didn’t spend much time dwelling on the future either. He demonstrated a “persistent inability to acknowledge mortality,” Cavileer said.
He cites his longtime former boss’ reverence for Steve Sample’s “The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership.” In the book, the late former president of University of Southern California advises: “Never make a decision today that can reasonably be put off until tomorrow.”
In Roski’s scant free time, he and his wife Gayle went on adventures. They climbed to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro and went deep diving off the coast of New Guinea. They traveled to the ocean floor in a submersible to see the wreckage of the Titanic. They planned on adventuring around the world into their 90s.
Then, Gayle’s life was cut short at 79. She died in October 2020 after a short battle with ALS. Her rapid illness and untimely death “destroyed Ed,” Cavileer said.
It also forced the succession issue. There were no more tomorrows left. Roski appointed his daughter Reon CEO in May 2022. She became president of the firm in the summer of 2024, the same season Majestic was negotiating the incentives package for phase two of the Stockyards with the city of Fort Worth.
Reon Roski’s style shifted Majestic’s modus operandi, Cavileer said. The two butted heads; the approach honed by Ed Roski and Cavileer over decades did not translate.
The way Cavileer tells it, Reon was “always jealous of the father-son-like relationship between Roski and Cavileer,” he said in his complaint against the company.
“You’re getting a distribution check and borrowing money on the same day.”
It’s hard to know the truth of their relationship without hearing Reon’s side of the story. Still, Cavileer wasn’t the only longtime employee who chafed against the new sheriff.
Stan Conway is also in a legal battle with Majestic. Conway filed for arbitration in February 2025 after ending his 25-year tenure at the company in April 2024. The company then sued him in October 2025, accusing him of hiding a real estate opportunity from his employer. Conway called the lawsuit “a tactical ploy to publicly embarrass Mr. Conway and bully him into retreating” in his response.
Conway’s response to Majestic’s suit also hinges on the appointment of Reon to CEO. He said in the filing that he “disagreed” with her appointment and that she “mismanaged the LLCs and LPs formed by Mr. Conway and Mr. Roski,” prompting him to initiate arbitration against Ed Roski and the company.
Cavileer’s tenuous professional relationship with the younger Roski lasted about six months after she was named president of the firm. Majestic terminated him from his role as Silverton Casino and Lodge CEO in December 2024. He was fired from Majestic itself in April 2025. Majestic demanded repayment of his $76 million in loans. When he couldn’t, the company foreclosed on his ownership interests in 13 limited-liability companies connected to various projects Cavileer had worked on during his time at Majestic.
The sale “if not remedied, will mean that the past 32 years of Cavileer’s professional life have been for nothing,” Cavileer’s attorneys wrote in his lawsuit.
There’s a sort of bafflement to the way Cavileer talks about the man he described as a father figure. Majestic was known for its ruthless litigiousness. Even after watching it for decades, he was still surprised that it happened to him.
The ongoing lawsuit hasn’t stopped Cavileer from taking on new projects. His firm Delightful Development, launched with partner Kayla Wilkie, has plans to apply the Stockyards playbook to a historic jail outside of Austin, winning approval to purchase the former Williamson County jail in February.
Stockyards’ future
The succession drama hasn’t just led to beef and lawsuits. It’s also muddied the path forward for the Stockyards expansion.
Majestic didn’t provide a straight answer as to what will become of phase 2. “We continue to evaluate all aspects of current and future development with a focus on financial soundness, appropriate timing and long-term success,” a spokesperson for the company wrote in an email.
Among the aspects to be evaluated is the Chapter 380 agreement the company reached with Fort Worth City Council in the summer of 2024. In exchange for a $630 million investment from Majestic the city offered $380 million in incentives, including $71.6 million in annual grants and up to $15 million for improvements to Cowtown Coliseum. The city would also purchase two underground parking garages at a cost of up to $126.2 million.
“We’re in a pause right now while they review that plan,” said Fort Worth Councilmember Carlos Flores, whose district includes the Stockyards.
So far, new leadership at Majestic hasn’t filled Cavileer’s shoes, according to Minick.
“The new people haven’t even met the mayor yet, and they’ve been there since March 2025. So what does that tell you?” she said. “I’m pretty much at the Stockyards all the time, but I’ve never met the person that they’ve put in his place, and it’s been nine months.”
What’s filled the void left by the prospect of a sweeping second phase by a big-timer is essentially a group project.
Since Cavileer’s plans were put on ice, Majestic and Hickman Companies announced a $30 million renovation of the historic Stockyards Hotel and the adjacent H3 Ranch restaurant, which they purchased in 2022. Sheridan is in the mix as the new owner of Fort Worth’s Cattlemen’s Steak House, which he spent about $5 million renovating.
There are other projects rumored to be in the pipeline, but so far, the $35 million in definite development pales in comparison to what was planned.
While the new landscape gives Cavileer significantly less sway, future development still has to play by the rules he set up. He helped establish Fort Worth Stockyards Inc., a quasi-governmental organization meant to manage growth while preserving the character of the district.
“The bar has been set so high that any part of the future development will have to measure up,” Minick said.
Minick, who first met Cavileer in the 1990s when they discussed bringing Billy Bob’s to Las Vegas, said: “We never dreamed that he wouldn’t be part of the Majestic team.”
Courtroom drama
Cavileer has scored early wins in the case against Majestic, which is playing out in Los Angeles, far from Western set of the Stockyards. Majestic challenged the legal basis of Cavileer’s cross-complaint, asking for a dismissal, while Cavileer asked for the filing to be overruled. Judge Kristin Escalante overruled the challenge, called a demurrer, on 8 of 11 causes of action. (Los Angeles Superior Court has a reputation for being relatively kind to claims about workplace culture.)
Most notably, Escalante determined Majestic didn’t explain away Cavileer’s claim that the company breached an oral argument.
“Here, Cavileer has sufficiently alleged that the notes were not an integrated contract. The notes were part of a complicated relationship between the parties,” she wrote.
Still, Cavileer is the David to Roski’s Goliath.
He seems to get that and has a newfound awareness of the objective foolishness of his position — of trusting in his boss’s word when a document said otherwise, of imagining that a man would side with his colleague, irrespective of their closeness, over his child.
He talks about his former boss almost wistfully. As he mulled how he’d treat his first interaction with Roski since the lawsuit, he remembered asking about greeting an adversary during a legal battle between Majestic and Hilton.
Cavileer remembers Roski saying that he’d just shake his nemesis’ hand: “It’s just business, Craig.”