1989 Strip-Club Killing Trial Opens

They were the odd couple of the strip-club world, the brawny enforcer who ruled with his fists and the brainy executive, nearly a foot shorter, who handled the books.

Horace McKenna and Michael Woods ran a chain of popular Los Angeles County strip clubs for more than a decade until one night in 1989, when their partnership ended with machine-gun fire.

On Wednesday, an Orange County prosecutor told a Superior Court jury that Woods turned against his longtime partner so he could take over the clubs, paying his bodyguard to kill the man most people called “Big Mac.” That bodyguard, David Amos, is expected to be the prosecution’s star witness against Woods.

Woods’ lawyers presented a sharply different version as the trial opened in Santa Ana. They contend that Amos is the one who wanted McKenna dead, that he hatched the idea on his own and paid a hit man to commit the crime.

“The responsibility, the plan and the scheme to kill Horace McKenna rests squarely upon the shoulders of one person, David Amos,” said Woods’ lawyer, Vicki Podberesky.

McKenna was arriving at his Brea hillside estate in a chauffeur-driven limousine March 9, 1989, when a gunman emerged from the darkness and shot him repeatedly with an Uzi.

The crime went unsolved for more than a decade until January 2000, when a longtime police informant surfaced and told district attorney investigators he committed the crime--at the request of Woods and Amos.

After a lengthy undercover investigation, authorities arrested Woods, Amos and admitted hit man John Patrick Sheridan in October. At one point in the investigation, Amos wore a hidden recording wire while discussing the crime with Woods, the prosecutor said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Bruce Moore said Woods paid Amos $50,000 and a 40% stake in three strip clubs to kill McKenna, a 300-pound bodybuilder. Amos in turn paid $25,000 to Sheridan, who actually committed the killing, Moore said.

After the killing, Amos stepped into McKenna’s role, helping Woods run the clubs now known as Bare Elegance, the New Jet Strip and Valley Ball.

Amos and Woods also went into the movie business, producing two action movies with striking similarities to the McKenna case. In one of them, “Flipping,” one gangster works secretly for the police, gathering information for prosecutors, just as Amos did years later in real life.

Both Amos and Sheridan have received consideration for their cooperation in the case. They have agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter and receive 20-year prison sentences after Woods’ trial.