‘Big Mac’ Slaying Inquiry Reaches Into Dark World of ‘Adult’ Clubs

Big Mac is dead, but at the Bare Elegance, life goes on without so much as a moment of silence.

The husky doorman takes your $8, and the bartender charges $3.50 for a weak orange juice. If you place a dollar on the rail, the dancers linger and flirt a moment longer before moving on to the next guy. Some dancers wear black--teddies, garters and such--but the effect is not one of mourning.

Ask employees about the late Horace Joseph McKenna--their purported boss, gunned down in mobster fashion Thursday in his limousine at the gate of his Brea horse ranch--and they are less than effusive.

Better Not to Know

Talk isn’t cheap, not here, not in a milieu where a tax fraud investigation apparently winds up in murder. One club manager told detectives she didn’t care to hear rumors. What she didn’t know, she figured, couldn’t hurt her.

So you leave the Bare Elegance, its watchful management and hulking bouncers. At another strip joint a dancer helps explain how McKenna could live such a lavish life style.

“Are you kidding?” she snaps. “These places make beaucoup dinero. “

McKenna, the 6-foot, 6-inch, 300-pound body builder and former California Highway Patrol officer, controlled several of these places, say investigators for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. The Bare Elegance is just one of five such “live adult entertainment” clubs the investigators allege that McKenna secretly owned with his partner, former highway patrolman Michael Woods.

The district attorney’s office said it may be several weeks before formal charges are brought against participants in the alleged tax fraud conspiracy.

Only a Front, Some Say

Through attorneys, Woods and other owners-of-record have denied a conspiracy exists. The dancer said McKenna was only a front--that the clubs are really owned by “some people in New York.”

Although alcohol sales are forbidden in nude clubs, an investigative auditor projected a collective legitimate gross of more than $2.5 million annually. Investigators also suspect untold illicit profits through drug dealing, prostitution and money laundering.

McKenna, however, most recently reported a taxable income of less than $40,000.

Warrants and affidavits unsealed Wednesday--the day before McKenna was killed--as well as a visit to the Bare Elegance provides a glimpse into a world that many people never encounter and few patrons understand.

It is a business where a man listed on official records as the “owner” cleans tables, while a man this “owner” describes as a “part-time bartender” counts the night’s cash receipts; where managers say they make only $1,500 per month, while dancers who make minimum wage might take home hundreds of dollars per shift in extra fees and tips; where a boss’ management style may involve regular lie-detector tests and threats of violence.

Labor Dispute

Like other enterprises, the “adult live entertainment industry” has its labor disputes. Recently, according to two sources familiar with the Bare Elegance, at least three dancers left the club in a spat over “topless table dancing”--essentially a semi-private, very-up-close-and-personal version of the stage performance.

“It’s pretty much what you make it,” one dancer said.

It is also a major source of revenue. At the Bare Elegance, a patron pays $15 per song, not including tip, for such a session. A popular woman can make hundreds of dollars per shift for herself and for the club, sources say. The dispute, sources said, involved the size of the house cut.

District attorney’s investigators said they concluded that McKenna and Woods controlled at least five clubs after a probe that lasted more than a year.

Three of the clubs--Bare Elegance, the New Jet Strip and the Star Strip--are located near Los Angeles International Airport. The other two--April’s Cabaret and the Odd Ball--are in Sepulveda in the San Fernando Valley.

Homicide investigators are now probing reports that McKenna may have tried to purchase the Mustang Club in Santa Ana in 1987, before its owner, Jimmy Casino, was killed by gunmen. The possibility of a relationship between the deaths of Casino and McKenna is just one of many possible leads, authorities say. Woods and McKenna “play ‘the good guy, bad guy’ game,” one informant told investigators, explaining that McKenna was the intimidator, while Woods would try to soothe feelings.

That informant estimated that McKenna took about 75% of the profits, while Woods took 25%. Investigators linked the supposedly unrelated clubs in part through interviews in which employees apparently inadvertently told of being “promoted” or “transferred” from one club to another.

Among those employees was Robert Berg, who was chauffeuring the limousine in which McKenna was killed. Berg, according to investigators, told them he was promoted from a doorman at the New Jet Strip to the post of assistant manager at April’s Cabaret.

Counting the Money

At the Gardena club, the Sly Fox, investigators said they watched the owner-of-record clean tables while “part-time bartender” James Carroll Wallace, described as “a close and trusted associate of McKenna,” counted cash receipts.

“When the interview with Wallace first focused on McKenna,” investigators asserted, “Wallace started to perspire and became fidgety.” Other purported employees, including Michael Woods’ brother, Richard, acknowledged they feared McKenna.

McKenna’s relationship with former and current law enforcement officers frustrated the probe, investigators said. One employee refused to talk even with an offer of confidentiality.

“That man can hurt people,” he told investigators. “Mac has friends in the Police Department. Anything I say will get back to him.”

It was not surprising the other night to hear a dancer say she was neither saddened nor shocked by McKenna’s death. Her primary reaction, she said, was one of relief.

“I’m just so glad,” she said, “that no one was in the back seat with him.”

The mourning is left for McKenna’s family.

Michael McKenna, 23, on Sunday gave a reporter and a photographer a tour of the 40-acre Brea estate, saying he wanted everyone to know “the true part.” His father, he said, was “a little flamboyant,” but he was good to his family, “as gentle as a kitten.”

Times staff writer Claudia Luther contributed to this article.