UPDATE: The Rich Are Different

A Hedge Fund Manager's Family Values

Broward-Palm Beach News reports:

After publishing Kelly Cramer's remarkable story "Daddy's Girl" two weeks ago, the most frequent question I've been asked about the tale of a Wall Street millionaire who married his own daughter is: How could Linda Schutt, a grown woman with a PhD in psychology, succumb to the seduction attempts of her father, hedge-fund manager Bruce McMahan, and participate in a years-long incestuous relationship with him?

Setting aside the curious notion that people don't seem nearly as puzzled by a filthy-rich financier sleeping with his own spawn, I have to admit that the question is a good one. Watching Linda in her video deposition, portions of which we made available on our website, browardpalmbeach.com, she appears to be telling the truth; she comes off as someone who was genuinely victimized. But we also published her e-mails, and in some of them, she sounds pretty enthusiastic about bedding her own dad.

Let me refresh your memory. Just a few days after their June 2004 "wedding" at Westminster Abbey, Bruce e-mailed: "Miss you W. Think nasty things about you all the time." Linda responded promptly, also using their cute abbreviations for husband and wife: "Mmm yeah, nasty is so good. You must have read my mind. What else can we say, we're H & W — that's the beauty."

Yes, eww. And for the lawyers among you, let me point out that those e-mails were entered as exhibits in a court document.

But getting back to our question: What was it about Linda that allowed her to participate in this kind of behavior? Oddly, a possible answer to that question may have come from Linda's half-sister, Heather McMahan, who jumped to the defense of her family's honor in a story in the New York Post last week.

"[Linda] was a very sexual person, like most McMahans tend to be. We have a pretty strong libido — all of us," Heather told the Post in a story in which she went on to describe her beloved half sis as a sexual freak show. At a party, for example, Heather said that Linda turned a goodbye peck into a Girls Gone Wild moment.

"She put her hands on both my cheeks and goes right for my mouth," Heather told the Post. "I pulled back, and she said: 'Wait a minute. If you don't let me kiss you on the lips, how are you going to let me kiss you down there again?'"

Now, keep in mind Heather told these things to the Post because she wanted to convince the American public that Linda and her father would never, ever engage in an incestuous relationship.

Let's break down Heather's reasoning: Heather assures us that Linda would never sleep with Dad — and she knows this how? Because Linda made sexual come-ons to her own half sister.

I guess that's the kind of logic that makes sense only in families who control more money than the gross national product of Uganda.

The Post featured Heather in two follow-up stories to their own splashy rewrite of Cramer's story, which they plugged on page one and slapped across pages 12 and 13 of their September 28 issue. (Although dated September 28, our story actually hit our website on Tuesday, September 26.) In both Post follow-ups, Heather questioned Linda's motives and suggested that Linda was lying when she testified, under oath, about sex with her dad and the wacky wedding at England's big church. (And the Post also mentioned that Heather, 44, is a sculptor, but I don't know how the venerable tabloid resisted mentioning that her short list of film acting credits includes appearances in Class of Nuke 'Em High and The Toxic Avenger IV, in which she played a character named — I shit you not — The Vibrator.)

The Post presented Heather's accusations as news, even though Cramer, in her original story, had already pointed out that family members said they doubted Linda's story. Heather didn't return Cramer's e-mail, but older sister Alison did. Cramer's story quoted not only Alison but also Melinda Ewell, one of McMahan's ex-wives, as doubting Linda's account.

Not that those doubts matter much. Go back and read the opening of Cramer's story in which she makes the point that Linda and Bruce kept their relationship secret from the rest of the family. When the clan gathered for holiday parties, for example, Linda moved the Cartier Trinity ring Daddy had given her to a nonwedding-ring finger, for the sake of appearances.

So it's little wonder that other family members are emerging today, saying they didn't know about Bruce and Linda's naughty nuptials. They weren't invited.

According to an e-mail we received, McMahan family members are telling one another in the wake of our story that Linda made up her testimony about the Westminster Abbey ceremony. As for the photo we printed of Bruce and Linda snuggling with the Eiffel Tower in the background, the e-mailer tells us it was from "a family outing with all of the McMahans in Paris."

But rest assured, Bruce and Linda were at Westminster Abbey, posing in photos with their new wedding rings.

We have an entire series of these shots, which we were able to confirm were taken outside the Little Cloister garden at the Abbey. In our original story, we printed only the most dramatic image: the close-up of Bruce's hand on Linda's, showing off their rings. To aid those McMahans who still doubt the truth, we've reproduced some of the other photos from the happy occasion on this page.

Bruce never got around to testifying in the five lawsuits resulting from this strange case, but if he had, it would have been interesting to see him answer for these photos. If Linda is lying about the wedding ceremony, why were father and daughter posing outside Westminster Abbey with expensive wedding rings on their ring fingers?

Bruce made sure he would never have to answer those and other uncomfortable questions. (Like, for example, what his sperm cells were doing on a vibrator encrusted with dried bodily fluids, pubic hairs, and skin cells that turned out to match Linda's DNA.) On September 13, as Cramer was finishing her reporting, all five lawsuits were tentatively settled. We don't know all the terms, but we do know that one of the conditions for the settlement was that all the lawsuits be permanently sealed. When that was accomplished, McMahan would write checks — somewhere, we believe, in the range of $7 million to $11 million.

All of that cash, however, couldn't take the court records we were already holding out of our hands. McMahan was simply too late to prevent our story from being published. But his throwing in the towel on the lawsuits and sealing the record would prevent other news organizations from culling records from court files themselves, which may be why more outfits haven't followed the Post's example and done their own stories. (Not that there's a lack of interest. Newsies from Australia to Greece have been asking us to send photographs of Bruce and Linda. Major daily newspapers, glossy magazines, supermarket tabloids, foreign press syndicates, and network television news organizations have all contacted us, asking for a piece of the amazing tale. But I suspect their uptight lawyers are holding them back, since they can't get the lawsuits directly from courthouses on their own.)

Bruce and his money are winning that battle. But he wasn't so fortunate when he tried to rush New Times into court the week our story hit the streets.

Thursday afternoon, the week our story appeared, we received a 37-page fax and a phone call from an attorney telling us that McMahan had convinced a federal judge in Miami to hold an emergency hearing the next morning to consider McMahan's motion for injunctive relief.

McMahan wanted the judge to force us to remove Linda's video deposition from our website, as well as other court documents we posted there, like the 1990 paternity test showing with 99.7 percent certainty that Bruce is Linda's biological father. (But we suspected it was the video that was really giving him indigestion.)

One of our intrepid lawyers, Sandy Bohrer, responded by calling McMahan's people and asking them about their filing. He mentioned that after reading it, he got the impression that they had never heard of something called the First Amendment.

That must have been some phone call. Within minutes, McMahan folded. He withdrew his motion, and the emergency hearing was canceled.

That should be the end of Bruce's legal moves. At this point, only the New York Post has done stories based on Kelly Cramer's reporting, so it's in McMahan's interest not to open another legal can of worms. If he did, he'd have to expose to public view those five sordid court cases that he's paying so much money to seal, and the rest of the news biz would be on them like hounds on a hambone.

The Rich Are Different

A secret sexual relationship with his daughter was not enough for Fisher Island multi-millionaire Bruce McMahan. He loved her so much, he married her.

_{[Photo by Colby Katz]}

Broward-Palm Beach News reports:

There had to be a wedding.

And it had to be a grand celebration befitting a Fisher Island multimillionaire who controls billions from Wall Street to Bermuda, from London to Dubai.

So on a sunny June day two years ago, father and daughter exchanged rings at Westminster Abbey.

They couldn't follow convention by inviting friends or family, and they couldn't make an announcement that they'd eloped.

There was no white dress and no officiant.

D. Bruce McMahan, then 65, and his daughter Linda Marie Hodge McMahan Schutt, then 35, pronounced themselves husband and wife on June 23, 2004.

It was their secret.

Except for a few traditional photographs, it was a wholly unconventional and unholy union.

Several shots show off their new Cartier Trinity rings — hers diamond, his three shades of gold. In other frames, they look the happy couple — cheek to cheek, faces glowing, and the Abbey's Little Cloister garden a royal backdrop.

The photo of Bruce's hand on Linda's, with their wedding rings, that they titled "Says it ALL"

Afterward, she flew home to her legal spouse in Mississippi and he went home to his compound on Fisher Island, a ferry ride from Miami.

From different states, they traded their wedding photos back and forth over e-mail.

He talked about touching up her redeye. She declared her favorite the photo of their hands wearing their new rings, his hand on hers, which they had titled: "Says it ALL." Using codes, they addressed each other in the e-mails as husband and wife.

"They are great pictures," McMahan wrote in one of their daily exchanges. "But they tell a story, so pay attention to what happens to them."

With their secret still safe, McMahan filed to divorce his fifth wife, and Linda moved out of the home she shared with her husband.

McMahan began spending more time at the plush Fisher Island retreat he'd built for his hedge-fund clients. Linda moved into a nearby condo, leaving behind her career as a psychologist.

Linda enjoyed the trappings of life with one of America's richest money managers, racking up a $74,000 bill at Barney's New York.

He enjoyed lavishing her with jewels, a Bentley Continental GT, and a Versace Club membership.

He put her on his corporate payroll. They celebrated regularly with bottles of expensive Opus One wine.

But when Christmas 2004 came along, they resumed roles as father and daughter. They needed to keep up appearances, for the sake of their families and to protect their secret.

Family snapshots show their return to normal. She put her legal husband's rings back on her left hand and moved the Trinity ring to her right hand.

They didn't know it then, but their secret was safe for only a few more days. McMahan was right: The photos do tell quite a story.

What followed was a breakup on an even grander scale than their wedding and a legal battle every bit as obsessive as each has been about the other.

For more than a year, attorneys have been kept busy in Miami, New York, Mississippi, and San Diego with the fallout over the breakup of McMahan and Linda in five lawsuits involving not only father and daughter but also their legal spouses, as well as Linda's current boyfriend and soon-to-be father of her child. Details of McMahan and Linda's extraordinary wedding at Westminster Abbey and their years as lovers come from court documents as well as Linda's videotaped deposition, which New Times has made available on its website, browardpalmbeach.com.

In court papers, McMahan denies that he ever had a sexual affair with his daughter. But he doesn't explain how his and Linda's DNA turned up on a vibrator that Linda's husband uncovered in her luggage. McMahan also hints that Linda may not be his biological daughter, despite a DNA test he paid for showing with 99.7 percent probability that he is her father.

When New Times began gathering court records and calling individuals involved in the lawsuits several weeks ago, McMahan declined to comment for this article. He hired a Los Angeles public relations firm to field New Times queries. He also made three requests to seal court documents in Miami and San Diego that three judges denied.

Then, on September 13, as this article was being prepared for print, all five lawsuits were settled on undisclosed terms. As part of the settlement, a federal judge in San Diego sealed the files of the California lawsuit and took the rare step of wiping out any record that the lawsuit had ever existed.

Through McMahan's L.A. public relations firm, the parties sent a statement to New Times, describing the matter as a mere "family dispute," and alluded to taking legal action if this newspaper published this article, which is drawn from the information in the court cases that McMahan has gone to such lengths to hide from public view.

Bruce McMahan began the seduction of his daughter one evening in the spring of 1998 by having her look over his business writings in the library of his lavish Pelham, New York, estate.

Bruce McMahan with Linda, who is misidentified as his fifth wife, Elena, in a fraternity newsletter

Linda Schutt described the events of that evening earlier this year in a deposition that was taken in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 6. McMahan declined to comment when New Times reached him on the telephone, and he never testified in any of the litigation. But according to Linda's testimony, that night in 1998, McMahan's fourth wife, Cynthia, was at a spa, and a housekeeper was somewhere on the premises.

"He opened a bottle of wine. He poured me a glass of wine, and we drank together."

While they leafed over his writings, he began to tell her of his sexual relationships with past women. He preferred them slender with wide cheekbones. "He told me he liked to buy furs for women and have sex with women on mink coats."

McMahan, who was then around his 59th birthday, asked his daughter, 29, to move to his bedroom and watch the first 30 minutes of the movie Braveheart. He wanted her to see the love story and clandestine wedding that unfolds in the opening act of Mel Gibson's film because, Linda testified, it reminded him of his relationship with her.

Then McMahan really started to lay it on thick. Linda testified he told her he believed they'd been married in a previous life. Earlier in the evening, she remembered, he had pointed out that her legs were a "very sexy version" of his own.

"He asked me what it would be like to kiss me."

Later that night, he found out.

On his bed, he kissed her and ran his hand over her body, on top of and inside her clothes, she testified. The petting session lasted two hours, she recalled. When Linda said she was tired, McMahan suggested they sleep in separate bedrooms. After Linda returned to California, her father asked if she was OK. She said she felt confused.

Their first episode of actual sexual intercourse wouldn't take place for several months. For that encounter, McMahan arranged a fairly dramatic setting — a hotel suite in London after a transatlantic flight.

Father and daughter in Paris in an undated photo

But then, McMahan had the cash for that kind of extravagance. Born into a family of entrepreneurs, he set about building his own wealth early on. His father ran McMahan's Furniture, a well-known California retail chain, but Bruce's own ideas were less conventional. Six years after graduating from the University of Southern California in 1960, the young magnate set out with some friends to create their own country.

According to newspaper articles published at the time, the plan involved sinking a mothballed World War II ship 220 miles off the California shore, then piling on concrete, clay, and garbage. The resulting island would be in international waters and outside the jurisdiction of American law. McMahan's group planned to corner the market on abalone fishing.

The plan failed, and his business biographies today don't mention it.

McMahan then moved into the financial services market. After his first wife, Jill Harvick, died of cancer, he married Melinda Headley Ewell in 1969 and moved to Spain. After six years abroad, he moved his family to New York and created the Institutional Options Department at PaineWebber Inc. He moved to Bear Stearns & Co. in 1977 and branched out on his own in 1980.

But McMahan has always been quiet about his money. Until their divorce, which ended in 1984 after three years of legal wrangling, Ewell tells New Times, "I didn't realize how much money he had... We were young, raising children. Bruce was building his business."

Today, McMahan has the reins on more money than some heads of state. On Wall Street, he heads McMahan Securities, a convertible securities firm with a trading volume third only to UBS and Thomas Weisel Partners. Through other corporations, he also owns hedge funds that he invites people to invest in. He sits on the board of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, a private nonprofit with 750 members funded by government grants and corporate gifts.

His London-based Argent Financial Group Ltd. controls billions of investment dollars in the Middle East. According to Dr. Omar Bin Sulaiman, director general of the Dubai International Financial Centre, Argent Financial is the first group in the region licensed to manage wealth-building funds, estimated at a whopping $1.9 trillion.

McMahan spends part of the year at his estate on Fisher Island, an exclusive enclave reached from Miami only by helicopter, boat, or a private ferry. The man-made island, once owned in part by Richard M. Nixon, has a population of about 500 and is in a ZIP code that the 2000 census found had the highest per capita income in the country.

While his finances ballooned, McMahan's family also grew large. He'd had six children by three women and was married to his fourth wife when, in 1990, he learned for the first time that he was the father of a grown child he didn't know existed.

Linda Marie Hodge, by all accounts, had a normal, Southern California upbringing with her adoptive parents, Laird and Mary Hodge. When she was 5, the Hodges told her she was adopted. At 18, Linda employed a service to help her find her birth parents.

Three years later and only about 30 miles away, she found her biological mother in Escondido, California.

She wrote to Myra Westphall, telling her that she was healthy and wanted to find out about her heritage. Westphall eventually answered the letter with a phone call. "It was an emotional conversation that led to our meeting," Linda testified in her deposition.

Westphall told Linda that in 1968, she'd had a fling with McMahan while both were living in Southern California. When McMahan married second wife Melinda Ewell on January 3, 1969, Westphall was already pregnant. She gave birth to Linda five months later, on May 29, 1969.

Westphall, who tells New Times she's now in the publishing business, did not want to discuss her relationship with McMahan or her daughter. "I'm just the biological mother," she says. "She has a mother. I gave her up for adoption at birth."

In 1990, though, Westphall did help Linda locate her father. At the time, Linda was a 21-year-old sophomore psychology major at San Diego State University. One day, McMahan telephoned her. She assumed Westphall had given him the number.

In her deposition, Linda described this telephone call as another emotional one. McMahan told his daughter what he did for a living and said he wanted to meet her. When they met, he also asked her to take a paternity test, saying his lawyers were insisting on it. He got the confirmation — with 99.7 percent certainty — that he was seeking.

It was then that McMahan took Linda into the family fold. He helped pay her tuition, set up a trust fund for her, and began including her in family holiday celebrations. He added her name to his list of children in his professional biographies.

Eight years into their relationship, Linda was about to earn her PhD in psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology in San Diego.

That's when McMahan had Linda over to his New York home and asked her to watch the first half hour of Braveheart.

That same spring, in 1998, Linda began dating a man named Sargent Schutt whom she met at a party in San Diego. In only a few months, the relationship had become serious. But that summer, she accepted her father's invitation to fly to London on a business trip.

They stayed in the Sheraton Belgravia for a week. In her April deposition, she described the trip. After their arrival, she testified, a discussion about how Linda could help him with business turned personal as the two sipped wine. He told her he was disappointed in her career choice in psychology.

"He offered me an opportunity for business that would incorporate my interest in brain studies with his interest in psychic phenomena," she testified.

They were still jet-lagged from their trip, so McMahan suggested they take a nap. When she woke up, "he was touching my leg and becoming physical with me." Later in the week, the two had sexual intercourse for the first time, she testified.

After the trip, according to e-mails submitted in court documents, they mailed each other vibrators. Referring to one he sent his daughter, McMahan e-mailed her on September 10, 1998: "I unpacked the toys and checked them out. The thing excites me just looking at it. I promise you have never seen anything like it. Interestingly 'it' is actually smaller than I am! But what moves! I should have been so lucky. They are now packed into their own bag and I am going to make sure we have enough AA batteries to last for the duration."

At the same time that Linda and her father swapped sex toys, her relationship with Schutt continued to deepen.

McMahan wasn't thrilled: "I know you like him. Even though I am truly jealous, I am hardly in position to interfere or even really want to interfere with that part of your life. Don't lock him out if he is important to you. Kisses everywhere," he wrote in an e-mail dated August 15, 1998.

That winter, Linda and Schutt became engaged. But the sexual relationship with her father didn't stop. She continued to sleep with her father through the end of summer 1999 and "up until" her October wedding to Schutt, she testified. Then, with the ceremony approaching, Linda ended the sex with her dad.

"I was in love with my fiancé... I was deeply disturbed with the relationship with my father."

McMahan, she said, reacted with "anger, withdrawal, paranoia."

He asked her what she wanted, what her "perfect life" would be.

"I told him that I would like to live in Sausalito, California. I would like to have a Saab convertible. I would like to have a dog named Pooh, and a sailboat."

She testified that her father answered that he could give her all of those things and financial security for life. But Schutt, he told her, probably couldn't provide that kind of life.

The argument didn't persuade her. Linda and Schutt married on October 2, 1999, in Sonoma. During the event, McMahan gave the couple a toast.

"He made an attempt to quote Winston Churchill... He told all the guests during his toast at my wedding that, 'This is the beginning of the end. '"

McMahan was no doubt cribbing from Churchill's line from a speech he gave in 1942 at a turning point in WWII: "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Linda said that McMahan never explained what he meant by it.

McMahan moved on, starting a new romance with a Ukrainian woman who eventually became his fifth wife. And he did provide his daughter employment. He named Linda president and CEO of McMahan Center for Human Abilities, a nonprofit foundation McMahan had created to extend the efforts of his primary charity, the National Cristina Foundation, which provides computers to disabled children and is named after another of his daughters, who has cerebral palsy. Linda was being paid $10,000 a month to run the foundation in the spring of 2002 when family members gathered to have dinner in a Sonoma restaurant.

Linda testified that she was asked in front of the others when she and Schutt planned to have children. "Soon," she replied.

The next day, McMahan asked to meet her in the lobby of a hotel. When she arrived, carrying paperwork for the McMahan Center, she began to speak with him about ideas for the foundation. But he became enraged.

"His face became red. He clenched his fists, and he raised his voice... He told me that having children was not part of the plan."

McMahan told her he was ending the foundation and no longer planned to pay her. (He did cut her off, but the foundation still exists.)

"He told me that I was not able to have children and be committed to the project," she testified.

She returned to her career in psychology and accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Mississippi. She and Schutt moved to suburban Jackson. She and McMahan didn't speak for months. Then, on May 25, 2003, Linda's adoptive father, Laird Hodge, a retired government contractor, died in San Diego. Linda and Schutt traveled to the funeral in La Mesa, California. McMahan sent flowers and e-mailed Linda his condolences, but they still didn't speak.

The stress of losing both fathers — Hodge to death, McMahan to indifference — weighed on Linda, she testified. It also wrecked her health. From McMahan, she'd inherited a genetic condition called Reiter's syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that causes inflammation of the soft tissues and can affect the eyes and, more seriously, the heart. Linda had a bad flare-up and developed cataracts in both eyes.

"I became very ill. I was experiencing heart problems and the doctors at the University [of Mississippi] Medical Center indicated to me that I would need surgery on my heart," she testified.

McMahan sent one of his two private planes to ferry her from her home in Mississippi to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The treatments she received there helped, and she began to recover. Her father insisted that she come to Fisher Island to recuperate so she would have access to a spa and to the Argent Center, a posh retreat McMahan had built to entertain his family and his billionaire clients. McMahan, she testified, didn't want her to go back to Mississippi or her marriage. He wanted her to leave behind the fellowship in clinical and rehabilitative neuropsychology, and he persuaded her to come back to work for him.

"I told him that I had given up opportunities based on his promises to me in the past," she testified. "And I told him that he wasn't to abandon his promise to me and that it was to be a strictly normal father and daughter relationship."

She accepted a position as executive vice president of marketing for two of her father's financial firms, Argent Funds Group LLC and McMahan Securities. But things didn't stay normal for long.

"It changed from a loving, supportive father caring for an ill, vulnerable daughter to a manipulative, contingency-based rewards/punishment relationship that created my dependence on him and gave him control and dominance over me," Linda testified. According to Linda's court complaint, McMahan again initiated an incestuous sexual relationship in April 2004 that lasted for more than a year.

In June, the couple flew to London with a twisted plan: to get married where the kings and queens of England are crowned.

We traveled to London for some business, and during that trip Bruce took me to the Westminster Abbey and we exchanged vows," Linda testified in her deposition.

Besides her testimony, there are the cheek-to-cheek photographs documenting this unusual ceremony.

There is little description in court records of how the couple made their ceremony happen in the very public church on June 23, 2004. Photographs inside the sanctuary are prohibited, so only the two of them would know if there was anything more to it than two well-dressed tourists walking up and performing a little ritual during visiting hours.

They took their photos with the garden of the Little Cloister as a backdrop. In one, they share a chaste kiss.

According to several people close to the litigation, a ceremony at Westminster Abbey made sense because McMahan, they say, is an Anglophile who counts among his heroes Adm. Lord Nelson, the British naval hero who died in the Battle of Trafalgar. Also, McMahan is said to believe that his genes are exemplary and saw in Linda the best match for his own superiority.

Four days after the ceremony, Linda wrote in an e-mail: "You asked me afterwards if I felt different. Near, I don't but at a distance, I do. I am glad about this and feel the insecurities slipping away."

In other e-mails, they began to sign off as "H" and "W," references to husband and wife. In one e-mail, dated June 29, 2004, McMahan wrote: "Miss you W. Think nasty things about you all the time." Linda answered a couple of hours later: "Mmm yeah, nasty is so good. You must have read my mind. What else can we say, we're H & W — that's the beauty."

"It is an attraction that's like no other," says Joe Soll, a New York psychologist and the only expert in the field he pioneered — genetic attraction.

Soll, who has no attachment to the McMahan litigation, has treated a half-dozen patients who had sexual intercourse with a close blood relative who had been separated early in life. An adoptee himself, Soll mediates group therapy sessions where hundreds of participants have talked openly about their physical desires for relatives they've recently reunited with.

"The dad is supposed to be the adult," Soll said. "He should have been responsible enough to say, well, wait. She got taken by something she had no awareness of."

McMahan seemed to be aware of the severity of their transgression.

"Such passions lead men straight to hell," he wrote in an e-mail to Linda titled "Midnight Musings" that was sent just after midnight on August 15, 1998.

Despite its dramatic location, however, McMahan and Linda's "wedding" in London wasn't legal. Each was married to another person at the time.

Linda's court filings claim that after the ceremony, McMahan wanted Sargent Schutt to play a diminished role in her life. He told Linda he'd start paying her "the big bucks" only if she could convince Schutt to sign a postnuptial agreement, which he did reluctantly.

Linda Marie Hodge McMahan Schutt prepares to tell the whole, sordid truth.

"May you have all the money in the entire world to yourself," Schutt penned in a handwritten note he attached to the document. "Too bad love is earned not bought."

McMahan was thrilled.

"Good girl!" he wrote to Linda in an e-mail dated June 29, 2004, that was read into the record at Linda's deposition. "This will change how your life can be lived; thank God. Someday you will understand how truly important that document is to you.

"Lots of Opus needed," he added.

By her own admission in one of several sworn statements she filed during the litigation, Linda's job as vice president of marketing entailed little more than being a companion to her father.

"My fancy title with Argent is not an accurate representation of my employment," she testified. "My salary was only $12,000 per year, whereas most of my resources were in the form of personal gifts from my father."

The chief accounting officer for McMahan Securities and Argent Funds Group, Joseph C. Dwyer, sent Linda tax statements detailing her father's largess. From 2004 to 2005, McMahan spent $649,290.55 on gifts for Linda, including $228,727.23 on cars, $25,209.31 in cash wire transfers, and $37,000 in legal bills.

When she and McMahan went out in public, how they acted depended upon who was around. To some, they were father and daughter; to others, they were a married couple.

One friend, Palm Beach interior designer Hilda Flack, knew them in both capacities, according to court filings. Flack designed the interior at McMahan's Argent Center and was planning a business with Linda — the McMahan-Flack Design Center. But Flack, reached at her Palm Beach Gardens design center, denies that she knew of an illicit relationship between McMahan and Linda.

"She was there when we were decorating with her father," Flack says. "She was his daughter, obviously. Mr. McMahan was a gentleman and treated everyone accordingly."

In an affidavit, Linda said Flack was in the room at the Argent Center when McMahan smashed several computer hard drives containing evidence of their incestuous relationship and their Westminster Abbey wedding.

Flack dismisses Linda's claims.

"I never heard of such a preposterous thing," Flack says of the wedding.

Before he flew to London in 2004 to marry his daughter, McMahan had separated from his fifth wife, Elena. Later that year, he filed for divorce.

In January 2005, Elena filed an affidavit in the divorce case reportedly accusing McMahan of having an incestuous relationship with Linda (the affidavit is under seal but referred to in other court papers). Linda alleged in court records that Elena learned of the affair when she hacked into Linda's Yahoo e-mail account and retrieved the Westminster Abbey photos.

In court papers, Linda says that McMahan showed her Elena's affidavit and asked her to make a sworn statement of her own, denying their incestuous relationship. When she refused, their relationship began to deteriorate.

"This was a difficult if not unbearable time of my life as I continued to be abused and subservient to McMahan's sexual demands while at the same time knowing that I had lost any semblance of my marriage with Sargent," Linda said in a sworn statement this past August.

In July 2005, Linda refused to continue sleeping with McMahan. In her August sworn statement, Linda says McMahan responded to the breakup by saying on the telephone: "I am going to preemptively destroy you. If you want to know how I am going to do it, meet me for lunch."

Two months later, a legal conflagration was sparked that spread like wildfire: McMahan sued Linda through one of his firms, claiming that she'd stolen company computers and trade secrets. Linda then sued her father for the income she would have made as his employee. Her estranged husband, Schutt, sued McMahan in Mississippi, where it's still legal for one man to sue another for ruining his marriage. McMahan then filed another suit against the two of them, as well as Schutt's father, accusing them all of conspiring to extort $10 million from him.

McMahan has a long history of litigating his breakups, both personal and financial. In his divorce from Melinda Ewell, for example, he took the case to New York's appellate court, challenging an order compelling him to turn over tapes and files investigators had made while he had her under surveillance.

Ewell describes him as an egomaniac who lives his life in a series of ongoing sagas. The drama he creates feeds his ego and shapes the story of his life, she says.

"When you live with someone like that, it's not fun when you challenge them," she said.

When Ewell made allegations in her divorce that McMahan had treated her cruelly, McMahan countersued and accused Ewell of engaging in affairs and "attempting to seduce mutual friends and associates," according to an appellate opinion in the case. Ewell tells New Times that one of those men was billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who has been much in the news lately for allegedly hiring underaged women to strip topless and massage him at his Palm Beach mansion. At the time, in the early 1980s, McMahan and Epstein worked together at Bear Stearns in New York. Epstein didn't return a request for comment.

"Jeffrey Epstein worked with [McMahan]. He was, let's just say, in the divorce proceedings," she says. "I was asked to stop by Jeffrey's apartment to pick up some papers for Bruce. It didn't feel right, so I didn't even go in. I stood outside the door. And then, later, Jeff said I propositioned him. There were always allegations I was having to fight."

McMahan's business relationships have also ended in grinding court battles, some making it to federal appeals courts, creating case law.

Miami lawyer and British barrister Henk Milne represented William Toto, whom McMahan sued in 1996 after the Ohio engineer had lost money in an investment with McMahan.

"He served Bill in Florida at his vacation home," Milne said. "He made something like 49 attempts to serve him because, Bill always believed, he wanted to get him on vacation."

Three and a half years later, a judge dismissed the lawsuit and ordered McMahan to pay Toto $265,000 that he had spent in legal fees fighting the case. Toto died of cancer shortly after the case ended.

"He's basically a very wealthy stalker," Shani Robins tells New Times. Robins had been McMahan's latest target in court and is Linda's new boyfriend. He says McMahan is a bruiser in court "because he has the resources to do it."

In May, McMahan sued Robins in Superior Court in Connecticut, alleging wrongdoing when Robins accepted some donations Linda made from McMahan's National Cristina Foundation. (That lawsuit was also dropped as part of the September 13 settlement.)

Consistent with his litigious past, McMahan fought his daughter and son-in-law's lawsuits aggressively. But they fought back with what appeared to be solid evidence.

Court records show, for example, that in Sargent Schutt's lawsuit against McMahan, his attorney had a "rabbit" vibrator Schutt found in Linda's luggage tested for DNA. According to the test results, skin cells from Linda and sperm cells from her father were found on the device and its black cover. Five other vibrators were also sent to labs for testing.

Through a spokesman, McMahan responded that he believed the evidence was "fabricated" but didn't elaborate. He also made allegations in court that his e-mail had been altered.

Also, after spending more than a decade integrating her into the family, McMahan has now questioned in court records whether he is Linda's father.

Ex-wife Melinda Ewell tells New Times that McMahan never had any doubt Linda is his daughter. "There was never a question," she said. "She looks like some of the other kids. He had no qualms."

Some of McMahan's extended family did have their doubts. His eldest daughter, Alison McMahan, says she never trusted Linda.

"All I can tell you is that nothing Linda will tell you can be believed," she tells New Times in an e-mail. "She is an unreal person who does not even know herself."

Ewell, no fan of McMahan after their nasty divorce in 1984, can't quite believe the man slept with his own daughter.

"How much of this is reality, I don't know," Ewell said. "There is a far greater chance that this is in her head. Way, way back when, I noticed she was very possessive of him. At my son's wedding eight to ten years ago, she really hung around him, and if anyone else was trying to talk to Bruce, she would try and get his attention. She would move in. From what I have observed, money appears to be the motivator."

McMahan makes that allegation in his lawsuit against Linda and Schutt, claiming that he was the victim of an extortion scheme. But he apparently never made a formal complaint to law enforcement about the conspiracy against him. One of his attorneys, Angela Agrusa, says that a San Diego prosecutor considered the extortion allegations while investigating charges that Schutt had hit Linda during a July 2005 argument over who owned the computers containing the e-mails and photos detailing Linda and McMahan's love affair.

But the case was dropped, Agrusa says, because Linda decided not to testify against Schutt.

Sargent Schutt filed to divorce Linda in July 2005, and the proceedings are pending. She is now dating Shani Robins, also a psychology PhD, and the couple is expecting its first child, a son, in January.

McMahan has made up with his fifth wife, Elena.

Three days after New Times called McMahan for comment on August 28, he hired Sitrick & Co., a Los Angeles public relations firm specializing in crisis management and whose logo is: "If you don't tell your story, someone else will tell it for you." In another public response, McMahan launched www.wspdfm.com, a now-defunct website asserting that Schutt and Linda had invented their allegations in an effort to extort money from him.

On September 13, after the five court cases were settled, Sitrick & Co. e-mailed New Times this statement:

"The parties to this litigation, Dr. Bruce McMahan, Linda Marie Schutt, Sargent Schutt, Major Schutt and Shani Robins, have resolved the differences among them and agreed to dismiss all pending legal actions. This was a family dispute and, as is the case with many family disputes, charges were made in the heat of the moment with little thought given to the pain they might unfairly or unjustly inflict. All of the parties involved and their counsel sincerely hope that there will be no further media coverage of this family matter and have agreed to make no additional comment about the resolution of their differences."

In other words, Bruce and Linda want their trips to London to be their secret again.