Imagine building a multi-billion-dollar empire, founding an NFL franchise, and carefully constructing a trust to keep it all in the family forever. Now imagine your kids tearing it apart in court before your body is cold. That’s the McNair family in 2024.
A Nevada court filing from attorneys representing Cary McNair has cracked open a brutal set of allegations against his mother’s personal attorney, Ed Deery, his brother Cal McNair — the face of the Houston Texans organization — and, in some claims, Cal’s wife, Hannah Hartland. At the center of it all sits Janice McNair, 88 years old, widow of Texans founder Robert McNair, caught in a legal crossfire between her own children: Cary on one side, Cal, Ruth, and Melissa on the other. The prize? Control of everything.
Cary McNair, CEO of McNair Interests (Photo: McNair Interests)
The fight over the Palmetto Protector
Here’s where the architecture of the whole thing matters. Robert McNair didn’t just leave behind a pile of money — he built a governance entity called the Palmetto Protector, designed to serve as the backbone of the family trust. It gave him sole oversight of the McNair fortune, worth billions. When Robert died, Janice — acting as executor of his estate — assigned his 100% interest in the Palmetto Protector to herself.
Cary says that move blew up the operating agreement. More than that, he argues it handed his siblings the mechanism they needed to squeeze him out of the family business entirely. His lawsuit asks three pointed questions: Did Janice’s transfer violate the trust’s operating agreement? Did she have the mental capacity to execute it? And was someone pulling the strings?
The lawyer in the middle
No character in this saga draws more fire than Ed Deery, who wore two hats — personal attorney to Janice and legal counsel to the Palmetto Trust Company (PTC), the entity managing the family’s fortune. Court documents allege Deery was working hand-in-glove with Cal to steer Janice’s decisions, and one transaction in particular stands out.
Shortly after Janice suffered a stroke in early 2022, Cal and Deery reportedly persuaded her to sell the family’s River Ranch property for $3 million. The original valuation? $65 million. That’s not a discount — that’s a fire sale at roughly five cents on the dollar, and it allegedly favored Cal. The deal raised enough red flags among PTC directors to trigger an investigation, and the fallout eventually got Deery removed as legal counsel. The accusations: undue influence and mismanagement.
An 88-year-old at the center of a billion-dollar chess match
Throughout 2022 and 2023, questions about Janice McNair’s cognitive state became impossible to ignore. Legal filings describe confusion, memory lapses, and moments where Janice appeared to have no idea what was happening with the family trust she was supposedly directing. The court documents paint a picture of a woman being asked to make decisions she may not have fully understood.
Cal McNair wheels his allegedly incapacitated mother, Janice, down the Texans sideline (Photo: Bob Levey/Getty Images)
And yet, according to the filings, Cal and Deery kept her in the game — pushing her into complex legal and financial decisions, including efforts to revoke her previous power of attorney and restructure family assets. The PTC Board pushed back repeatedly, citing Janice’s diminished capacity and what they saw as undue influence by Cal and Deery. They were overruled.
The sibling war and the $300 million redirect
As the fight deepened, Cary accused his siblings of forming a coalition to lock him out. By early 2023, Janice reportedly amended her estate plan to distribute $300 million in liquid assets directly to her children — money that had been earmarked for the Robert and Janice McNair Foundation. Cary opposed the move, arguing it shredded his parents’ original vision of reinvesting the family wealth for future generations.
Then came March 2024. Armed with Janice’s interest in the Palmetto Protector, Cal, Ruth, and Melissa made their power play: they removed Cary and every independent director from the PTC Board, installed loyalists, and restructured the family governance system from the inside out. It was a clean sweep.
What’s left in the wreckage
Cary alleges the boardroom purge has done real damage — jeopardizing long-term financial stability, inflating management costs, and dragging the family’s businesses away from the principles the trust was built on.
Multiple legal disputes remain active across several courts, and nobody’s blinking. But beyond the dollar signs and docket numbers, the McNair case exposes something uglier: what happens when the guardrails around an aging family member’s autonomy collapse under the weight of competing billion-dollar interests.
Cal McNair and wife Hannah Hartland on the Texans sideline (Photo: Houston Texans)
However this shakes out, the fallout won’t stay in the courtroom. The McNair family’s legal war has the potential to reshape the business legacy Robert McNair spent a lifetime building — and redefine who actually controls the Houston Texans.
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