Mysterious Target of Fraud Probe Shot Dead at Estate

A former California Highway Patrol officer, under investigation for tax fraud in connection with four Los Angeles nude and topless bars, was killed in a hail of gunfire early Thursday as he arrived at the gate of his remote Orange County home in his chauffeured limousine.

Horace Joseph McKenna, 46, was killed only hours after Los Angeles Superior Court records were made public detailing the Los Angeles County district attorney’s investigation of him and a suspected business partner, Michael Woods, also a former CHP officer. The documents identified several people associated with both men.

“Judge J.D. Smith released (the court records) yesterday. The thing goes down today. You can draw your own inferences,” district attorney’s spokesman Andy Reynolds said Thursday.

McKenna, a body builder whose sprawling Brea estate reportedly was sometimes guarded by men with machine guns, died instantly in the gangland-style ambush at 12:30 a.m., Brea police said.

The shooting broke out as McKenna’s chauffeur, Bob Berg, 42, was returning to the car after unlocking the gated entrance to the estate, known as “Tara Ranch,” in the 6200 block of Carbon Canyon Road, police and employees at the ranch said.

McKenna, a hulking 300-pound man who had been asleep in the car, died of numerous gunshot wounds, possibly from automatic or semi-automatic weapons, police said. The motive was unknown and no suspects were in custody.

It was not clear, according to police accounts, how Berg escaped the gunfire. Unhurt, he drove the limo to the house, a mile and a half up a winding driveway, immediately after the shooting and notified authorities.

Reached by phone Thursday night, Berg, his voice trembling, said he would have no comment “until I talk to a lawyer. I don’t want to talk about it, I’ve had enough.” Berg was identified in court documents as one of the alleged conspirators in the tax case.

Late Thursday, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office released investigators’ search warrant affidavits that had been unsealed in court Wednesday at the request of McKenna’s attorney, Michael Nasatirs. The 300-page document named several associates of Woods and McKenna, including at least eight who allegedly conspired with them to hide profits and skim money.

The warrants identified McKenna and Woods as the alleged hidden owners of several nude and topless bars in the Los Angeles area.

Several law enforcement agencies--including Los Angeles and Long Beach police, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and the FBI--had monitored McKenna and Woods’ suspected hidden interests in the bars, as well as alleged illegal gambling, narcotics and prostitution activities, according to the documents.

Investigators said in the warrants that the two men “have maintained associations with terminated, retired and currently employed law enforcement officers, thus making this investigation extremely sensitive.

Authorities had no comment on the whereabouts of Woods Thursday.

Extravagant Life Style

“McKenna appears to live a life style,” investigators wrote, “which apparently exceeds his reported income.” For example, when McKenna and a girlfriend rented an apartment in El Segundo in 1987, they noted, McKenna listed his annual gross income as $44,431.

The Brea property, purchased in February, 1986, cost $825,000 and investigators estimated mortgage payments to be $70,000 per year. In addition, they said, McKenna employed groundskeepers to maintain the horse training track at his “Gone With the Wind Arabian Horse Stables,” a western movie set, grounds and residence.

“Both estimated monthly payments and employment costs well exceeds McKenna’s reported income of $44,431 . . . and strongly suggests that the McKennas were involved in a fraudulent loan application scheme or received funds from unreported income,” investigators said.

Sherry McKenna, McKenna’s former wife, has no other source of income, they added.

Los Angeles County authorities said Thursday that they were close to filing charges against Horace McKenna, who records showed had a criminal history--including a federal conviction for conspiracy to counterfeit in 1976, a Los Angeles conviction for assault with a weapon in a San Pedro Bar in 1982, and a record of arrests for running what was described as a large prostitution ring in 1975.

A native of New Orleans, McKenna joined the CHP in June, 1968, working generally in West Los Angeles until he resigned in June, 1972, a CHP spokesman said.

On April 14, 1976, McKenna surrendered to sheriff’s deputies investigating what they said was a prostitution ring centered in the Inglewood and Lennox areas. McKenna, deputies said, was the suspected kingpin of the ring.

They linked McKenna and the prostitution operation to establishments called “The Institute of Oral Love,” “Sexual Relief Center” and “Wild Mary’s.” The outcome of that case was not known Thursday.

McKenna was sentenced to six years in prison in the counterfeiting case, but it was not known Thursday how much time he served.

On Thursday night, at the New Jet Strip in Lennox--one of the bars in which McKenna allegedly was a secret owner--a woman bartender remarked:

“What a weird night to be working. I didn’t think we would be working tonight.”

She elaborated: “Because the owner was killed last night. He was all over the news.”

When asked for more information about McKenna, the woman declined and refused to give her name.

“I can’t talk about it,” she said. “I’m too upset.”

At 6-foot-5, McKenna was known as “Mac or Big Mac or just Big,” said associates, who described him as a flamboyant and mysterious character who kept exotic animals on his ranch, where he also often entertained nightclub dancers.

According to Sherry McKenna’s attorney, Richard Debro, she feared for her life because her former husband had threatened to kill her. He said his client has been in hiding.

The attorney said McKenna “used drugs and became incredibly violent.”

“I’ve seen her after she had been beaten up (by McKenna), the black eyes, things like that,” Debro said. “The law didn’t mean anything to him.

“She said she had no doubt in her mind that he would kill her, or have her killed” if she insisted on fighting their divorce settlement, the attorney said. “He had threatened to kill her with a gun to her head.”

Neither Bill Gray, 42, owner of a gym in Brea where McKenna worked out, nor other friends and associates contacted Thursday had any idea who would have wanted to kill him. They described McKenna as a big, lovable man who was building a Shangri-La on his ranch for the pleasure of friends and their families.

“There wasn’t a mean bone in his body,” Gray said. “He would take people’s kids up (to the ranch) and give them horseback rides.”

Since buying the property, McKenna had stocked the ranch with prize Arabian show horses--some worth as much as $20,000, friends said. He remodeled the property’s sprawling, ranch-style home, installed a swimming pool and rose garden and was in the process of completing an Old West-style “ghost town,” complete with “Main Street” and facades of a saloon, blacksmith shop and bank, they said.

Mike Tutty, 31, a longtime friend of McKenna and a member at the 4 Star Gym in El Segundo, which KcKenna owned, described him as “a very intimidating person. . . .

“He was a person who commanded attention. He wanted people to know who he was. He had a big ego and he needed fodder for that ego. And he pretty much got it.”

Moreover, Tutty said, “he liked the ladies, there’s no doubt about it. He was very gracious to the ladies.”

According to Dana Sermas, one of several woman horse trainers McKenna employed, he often entertained friends and business associates by taking them on horseback rides and giving them “guided tours of his ‘ghost town.’ ”

McKenna also regularly entertained a group of young women whom he laughingly referred to as “his bimbos,” because they worked as dancers at nightclubs in the Los Angeles area, according to Sermas and Ingrid Locken, another horse trainer.

Both women said they were under the impression that the clubs featured topless or nude dancing, and they added that the women whom McKenna brought to the ranch “dressed in sleazy outfits.”

Pete Cahill, 35, another member of the El Segundo gym, described McKenna as “the most lovable gangster in the world. If he was a gangster, I guess that’s the way you’ve got to go.”

Cahill said that at the club it was understood that McKenna “owned a lot of topless places. It was an unspoken thing everybody knew but nobody talked about it.”

Sermas said McKenna was in the process of installing an electronic gate at his home so the chauffeur would not have to get out of the limousine every time they entered. She said the gate was about to be hooked up by utility crews.

While police tried to piece together details of the slaying, one neighbor said she thought nothing when three visitors came to McKenna’s home on Wednesday night, although now it seems ominous.

About 6:55 p.m., the neighbor said, she watched three people, one with a flashlight, “going over the fence.”

Police would not immediately comment on the woman’s statement or other details of the case.

Times staff writers Richard Beene, Jim Carlton, Dianne Klein, Eric Lichtblau and Nancy Wride in Orange County, and Richard Colvin, Hector Tobar, Boris Yaro and Sebastian Rotella in Los Angeles contributed to this article.