Trial is under way in Dallas in the case of a small trucking business that claims it was forced aside when a private equity firm acquired its sole client, a chain of Hispanic food supermarkets.
“My company was destroyed. … It was traumatic. … You keep asking yourself why,” Curtis Lawrence, the founder and owner of Skyward Transportation, testified Tuesday before a jury in the court of state District Judge Aiesha Redmond.
Skyward claims in a lawsuit that its decadelong business relationship with the El Rancho Supermercado grocery chain had been mutually beneficial until El Rancho was acquired in 2023 by Heritage Grocers Group, an arm of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Then, Skyward’s suit claims, the defendant companies began “fabricating grounds for Skyward’s default and challenging agreed upon payment terms in a misguided effort to ‘cut costs.’”
Skyward’s losses as a result of the deliberate effort to push it out amount to at least $37 million, according to documents filed in connection with the company’s suit. The trucking company is principally represented by Michael K. Hurst of Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann.
Skyward was “collateral damage for corporate greed,” Hurst told jurors in his opening statement Tuesday.
Greg C. Noschese of Munsch Hardt, the principal lawyer for the company doing business as El Rancho, said Skyward’s claims were nonsense. Lawrence’s contracts to deliver groceries for El Rancho, he said, were terminated simply because Skyward failed to meet its obligations under those contracts.
Those contracts, Noschese told the jury in his opening statement, are “the one witness whose testimony is not going to be swayed” by anything anyone says during the trial. He said Skyward failed to meet the contracts’ terms for, among other conditions, on-time deliveries, maintaining groceries at proper temperatures and maintaining its trucks in proper condition.
Lawrence said no one from El Rancho complained about any of those things — that, in fact, he got sterling reviews from the grocery chain — until Apollo Global Management entered the picture.
“I was shocked,” he testified, describing his reaction when he began receiving notices in the latter half of 2023 that he was in default of his written agreements with El Rancho and related business entities.
“A lot of what was in those notices of default was inaccurate. They were not true,” he testified.
The trial is expected to last through next week.
Skyward is also represented by Jared Eisenberg, Andy Kim and Jamie Drillette of Lynn Pinker; and Anthony M. Farmer and D. Robert Jones of the Farmer Law Group of Dallas.
The El Rancho entities are also represented by William Toles, Jay D. Evans, and Emily C. Means of Munsch Hardt.
The case is DC-23-15759