Crystal Clear: The Deals Were the Easy Part

This column by Stephen A Crystal, Founder & CEO of SCCG Management, was first published in Global Gambling News, October 2026.

Nearly 35 years of partnership, hundreds of thousands of miles by road and by air, thousands of morning walks, late night huddles, meetings and phone calls. This is the honest measure of what I have shared with D. W. “Dave” Barrick, and I have enjoyed every moment of it.

People ask about the transactions, so let me set them down and move on. Riverboats in Kansas City, casinos in Biloxi and Tunica, properties on Fremont Street that changed what Downtown Las Vegas was for, tribal gaming developments in Oklahoma… we pioneered some of it together and some apart, and much of it had no precedent when we started.

For anyone who does not know the name, Dave did not come up through gaming. He came from banking, and before that from ranching, mining and oil. He has chaired Barrick Properties since 1990, started up Casino Magic at Bay St. Louis, built a $500m riverboat and hotel in Kansas City with Station Casinos, and ran six hotel-casinos downtown as Chairman & Chief Executive of Barrick Gaming.

He was a non-endemic operator decades before our industry invented the phrase, and that is precisely why he saw things the rest of us did not.

But the deals were the easy part

What I remember is the walks. Thousands of mornings, most of them before the day properly started, working a problem aloud before anyone else was awake to complicate it. Little of consequence in my career was decided in a conference room. It was decided on a sidewalk somewhere, between two people who trusted each other enough to say the unhelpful thing first.

If you are young in this business, that is the part nobody puts in the deal book.

It was not always perfect. Nothing is. There were years that went the wrong way and deals that did not close, and the only thing to do was persevere and turn up again the next morning. What we did, mostly, was live life to its fullest and without regret, treat people respectfully and with dignity, and keep going.

This is the lesson, and it is smaller than a deal and larger than a career. This is a small industry with a long memory. The people across the table on one transaction are beside you on the next, sometimes 20 years later, and how you behaved is the only part of the file anybody kept.

Chairman Emeritus

So, this month SCCG Management named D. W. Barrick our Chairman Emeritus. And at this year’s G2E Las Vegas I personally honoured this man for his contributions to our industry, and mostly for his years of friendship, mentorship, teaching, love and respect. You cannot put a value on that in the way we could on some of our many deals over the decades. It is priceless.

We can look back with some pride at what we accomplished and look forward with hopefulness for our children and their families and for the future.

If you see him at an industry event, come and find him. He was there for all of it.