Big Mac’s Mystery : Stalled Investigation, Rumors of Hidden Fortune Are Victim’s Legacy

“Big Mac”--burly Horace J. McKenna--has been dead for three months now. But authorities are still wondering who killed him and what happened to the millions of dollars in cash they believe he was skimming from hidden ownership in several nude and topless bars.

And McKenna’s son, 23-year-old Michael, is still trying to sort out his father’s legitimate financial affairs amid rumors that there is illegal money buried somewhere or stashed in banks out of his reach.

Big Mac McKenna, 46, was killed gangland-style in the early morning hours of March 9 as he slept in the back seat of his limousine. The car was riddled with bullets as his driver got out to swing open the iron gates to Tara, the $825,000 estate McKenna owned in Brea’s Carbon Canyon.

The Brea police detective who says he interviewed dozens of associates and friends of McKenna’s, trying to find the killer or killers, recently moved on to other cases. Detective Grant Gulickson said he has some suspicions as to who might have killed McKenna--or at least had a motive--but not enough evidence to arrest anyone.

Gulickson said the investigation has stalled because “many of McKenna’s associates are also crooks” who fear they would implicate themselves if they talked about him. Although many of them openly disliked McKenna, who was 6-foot-6, nearly 300 pounds and never hesitated to throw his weight around, they had a “bigger hate for cops than they had a loathe for Mac,” Gulickson said.

McKenna’s death has set back a criminal tax fraud investigation that was under way at the time of the slaying. McKenna and his partner, Michael Woods, were believed to be hidden owners of several nude and topless clubs from which they allegedly were reporting only a portion of the income.

While the investigation into Woods’ finances is ongoing, “you can’t prosecute a dead man,” Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Senior Investigator Robert H. Hausken said of McKenna. However, a civil tax fraud inquiry focusing on McKenna’s estate is also continuing.

McKenna died just one day after crucial search warrants were made public. The warrants detailed how McKenna and Woods allegedly pocketed as much as half the profits from such clubs as Bare Elegance, the New Jet Strip and the Star Strip near Los Angeles International Airport and April’s Cabaret and the Odd Ball in the San Fernando Valley.

Investigators estimated that the clubs grossed as much as $2.5 million per year. At April’s Cabaret, they said, there were two safes: one where employees locked up half of the night’s receipts and the other a slotted safe--for which the employees had no key--where they put the rest.

Gulickson said he believes that the money is now stashed. “I personally believe a great deal of it went out of the country,” he said.

The timing of McKenna’s slaying has led to speculation that he might have been killed by someone who did not want him to be able to negotiate with authorities by informing on others involved. However, Gulickson said he had no indication after McKenna’s death that the victim would have aided in the investigation and, in fact, thought McKenna might have been a macho kind of man who would remain loyal to his friends.

Hausken, who had watched McKenna and Woods for months, said he was disappointed when McKenna was killed.

“I’d grown to respect him--not for the person he was, not like you would respect the President or an astronaut. But here was a guy who had built himself an empire and he ruled it out of force and fear. . . .” Hausken said. “He was a worthy opponent. He really was, and he knew it. He knew we were after him.”

Convicted of Counterfeiting

McKenna, a former California Highway Patrol officer, was convicted in 1976 of counterfeiting and convicted in 1982 of a parole violation after he was arrested on suspicion of assaulting an off-duty police officer. Hausken said jokingly that McKenna was known as “the most successful graduate” of the CHP academy because he went on to make so much money.

On another legal front, the probate of McKenna’s estate is being overseen by his son, Michael, who at 6-foot-9 could easily inherit his father’s nickname. He now is ensconced as the new proprietor of the secluded Tara. The 40-acre estate, built with a “Gone With the Wind” theme, has stunning vistas of Orange County, a horse stable and the mock Western town his father was building for the amusement of friends.

“I’ve grown to love it up here. The peace, quiet,” Michael said one morning recently as he nibbled on stale popcorn and drank Gatorade straight from the bottle in the kitchen of the house on top of the knoll at Tara. “I would like to keep it.” Michael is an only child, and his mother and father were divorced.

The younger McKenna, whose height leaves him with the friendly, loose-jointed gait of a basketball player as opposed to his father’s intimidating bulk of a prizefighter, has strongly defended his father. Although he did not see much of McKenna before his death, the son occasionally spent time with him and his friends at Tara. He said that if his father was into illegal activities, he never knew it.

“I wouldn’t be interested in those kinds of clubs anyway,” he said, although he conceded they were “great moneymakers, I guess.”

Lives on Estate

Michael now occupies the house with a few of his friends. It is an eclectic affair whose main decoration is his father’s collection of about a dozen bronze sculptures of Western scenes. McKenna has moved these into the living room, which is incongruently furnished with feminine French provincial furniture (apparently left over from McKenna’s marriage), a baby grand piano and a gigantic python snakeskin that cuts diagonally across the carpet. The elder McKenna had just built a pool on the property and had nearly finished the ghost town. He kept 15 horses, mostly Arabians, at the stables just below the house.

Until March 9, Michael considered himself just an average young guy trying to make his way in the world. He had just gotten a job as a security guard and lived with his father’s parents. He surfed. He had a steady girlfriend. His only bills were a car payment and car insurance.

It was not the kind of life style that prepared him to deal with his father’s far-reaching--and at best confusing--business affairs. Besides, most of his father’s financial records had been seized in the probe of his ownership of the clubs.

“You’ve heard the expression you’re dropped off in a pile of (excrement). Well, I was about 8 feet under,” said the younger McKenna. “I’m only out to 6 feet, I’m just breathing again.

“I’ve learned more in three months since this has happened than I think most people learn in their lifetimes.”

At first Michael tried to keep track of the income and outflow from his father’s legitimate businesses--the 4 Star Gym in El Segundo and two small apartment buildings. He became so stressed over this and “all of the stuff that was on my mind” that he ended up in the hospital one night with acute stomach pains. Since then, he has hired a friend to keep track of the books. In the aftermath of the slaying, he also broke up with his girlfriend.

‘I Don’t Trust Anybody’

But Michael also sounded as if he was learning something about how to take care of himself. In a recent telephone conversation with his grandmother, the younger McKenna told her not to talk to any of his father’s pals. Later, he said, “a lot of my father’s friends, I told them right to their faces that I don’t trust anybody and I don’t trust you.”

Michael said rumors of vast wealth found buried at Tara are untrue. Hausken said there was speculation that Big Mac had buried money in a sewer main at Tara. Workers recently dug a hole as big as a small bedroom in the front yard, but Michael said it was to fix a water pipe. He said some money--he would not say how much--was found in a safe in the house. He has been using it to keep the ranch going while the estate is probated, which could take two years.

McKenna said he may sell his father’s horses--which he said are worth between $2,000 and $30,000 each--or even get a job to tide himself over until he is clear owner of the ranch and his father’s other property. As for his father’s alleged ownership of the nude and topless bars, the young McKenna said he is been unable to find any proof of it. And if Big Mac’s partner, Woods, has a stash of money from the bars, he isn’t sharing it, Michael said.

Even if his father actually owned the nightclubs, he said, any such partnership between Woods and his father would necessarily have had to have been by a handshake, he said. The elder McKenna, as a convicted felon, could not own the clubs outright.

“There’s no proof, there’s no evidence, there’s no witnesses to the agreement,” Michael said, describing the hypothetical partnership. “So in a sense it’s like if . . . two people got hold of a million dollars and they decided to split it, but neither one of them have (possession of) it, it’s just sitting there. When the time comes they’ll split it. If one of them died, the other one got all of it. And if the other person had a son, let’s say like me, and I came in and I knew about it but I had no proof, the guy says: ‘No, no, no. It’s all mine.’ And what can you say? You can’t say anything. You sit there and say, ‘Oh, well.’ ”

The son has his own theories as to what his father would have done had he skimmed from the clubs.

“Assuming there was that much of an income, you’ve got to think that a man like that, if there was that money, he’s not going to want to keep it around,” Michael said. “He’s going to want to get rid of it, get rid of it anyway you can. In bronze artworks maybe, the pool, the horses, paying out employees. . . .”

But Detective Gulickson said that even if there wasn’t hidden cash, there are enough assets in the estate to take care of McKenna’s son. “I do not think the kid is going to have a financial worry for the rest of his life,” he said.