7
When you drive up to the address of Indian Hills, the first thing you see is another school, Agoura High; the two schools share a campus. Agoura is a bustling, idyllic sort of American high school, very proud of its Chargers football team. It sits in a large tan brick building with a parking lot full of luxury cars, shiny BMWs, Audis, and SUVs.
Indian Hills, which has less than 100 students, resides at the back, in several prefab buildings, like the ones used as offices at construction sites. It has as its logo the uncomfortable image of an Indianhead, and, hidden at the back of the compound as it is, it has the feeling of being stuck on a reservation.
The two girls I met in the parking lot were seniors at the school. They said they’d rather not use their real names, as they “didn’t want to get involved.” They chose the names “Monica” and “Ashley.” They were wearing low-slung jeans, tight long-sleeved Ts and a lot of dark eye makeup. Monica was smoking.
We went and sat on the bleachers of the playing field, which was empty except for a couple boys running around the track. Monica said she was sent to Indian Hills for “drugs”; Ashley because “I have trouble learning.”
“She was toootally into herself,” said Monica.
“Oh, I liked Rachel,” said Ashley. “She could be sweet.”
Monica raised an eyebrow. “Sweet? You mean mean,” she said.
They said they knew Rachel Lee, Nick Prugo, and Diana Tamayo, having gone to school with the older kids before they graduated in 2008. “Everybody knew what they were doing”—that is, burglarizing the homes of celebrities, said Monica.
“They bragged about it. At parties and stuff,” said Ashley.
“Most people didn’t believe it,” Monica said. “People thought they were just talking shit.”
I asked them why no one ever reported it to the police.
Monica made a face. “You don’t do that. They would wear like, Paris Hilton’s stuff, and say they were wearing it. I would have sold that shit.”
TMZ would post a picture of Nick wearing a “P” necklace allegedly belonging to Hilton; across the picture Nick had scrawled, Perez Hilton–style, “Hey Paris, look familiar?”
“Rachel had really nice clothes,” said Ashley. “Everyone else would be dressed, like, casually, in jeans and shorts, and she would be wearing like some designer top and heels. She looked like a celebrity. She looked like someone in a magazine.”
“Yeah, Burglars’ Magazine,” said Monica.
“Prugo stated that Lee was the driving force of the burglary crew and that her motivation was based in her desire to own the designer wardrobes of the Hollywood celebrities that she admired,” said the LAPD’s report.
I asked the girls if they knew how Rachel afforded her stylish wardrobe. “A lot of people in this area have money,” Monica said, shrugging.
“She acted kind of spoiled,” said Ashley. “I heard she didn’t get along with her mom but then she would have all this really nice stuff so I thought maybe her mom was trying to win her daughter by giving her stuff—I don’t know. I heard she didn’t like her stepfather. She had a really nice car, an Audi A4.”
“Rachel’s a mean girl,” Monica said with a click of her tongue. “She was backstabby. When people say Nick was the ringleader, I don’t believe it, ’cause he could never do that by himself. He was too nervous.”
I asked them about Diana Tamayo. “Always getting into fights,” Monica said. “She used to, like, yell at the Agoura Hills kids ’cause they act like we don’t exist.”
The boys running around the track ran by.
“It’s not all bad here,” said Ashley after a moment. “Heather Graham,” the actress, “went to Agoura.”
“And Brad Delson, the guitarist from Linkin Park,” Monica said. They seemed almost proud of it.
“We’re a very small group,” said Ashley said, “but Rachel and Diana definitely ruled.”
“They thought they were The Plastics”—the popular clique in the movie Mean Girls (2004), said Monica.
“Once Rachel told me she liked my shoes—they were just some flip-flops but they had a bow—and, I don’t know, it made me feel good that someone with that much style liked what I was wearing,” said Ashley.
8
It all started, Nick said, when he met Rachel at Indian Hills in the fall of 2006. He’d come back to Calabasas after a year in Idaho, where his family had moved for a while, in part because he was having difficulties. He’d become “anxious and depressed.” He’d been “seeing therapists and psychiatrists.” He “had issues,” he said. “I was trying to figure out who I was.” He’d been diagnosed with ADHD when he was 12, but didn’t “think that was a true diagnosis.” He didn’t think it was “accurate.” He could concentrate on schoolwork, he just didn’t want to. They put him on Concerta2 anyway and he “lost a bunch of weight.” He got skinny. He wasn’t eating. His parents took him off that when they saw he was “getting weak.” Then they put him on Zoloft3 for his “anxiety issues,” but he didn’t think it was helping either.
He said he didn’t really know why he got like this—troubled, scared. He wasn’t always this way. When he was a kid, he said, he felt good enough about himself to perform in plays. He was in all the plays in school. His parents had seemed proud of him then. His mother seemed excited and happy for him when he got a part in a documentary for the Discovery Channel called Little Lost Souls: Children Possessed? (2003). It was about children whose parents think they’re possessed by evil spirits. He played a kid named “Kenny” in a re-enactment—it was somewhat corny, but it was a real job, and it was like being a real actor. He thought about becoming an actor one day. Why not? His dad was in the business.
And then something happened around the time he turned 14. It was like somebody pulled out the rug from under him and he was falling through the floor. Suddenly, he couldn’t feel comfortable in his own skin, he was so aware of people looking at him, judging him. He became self-conscious about his face, his body, and his clothes. “I genuinely felt that I was ugly,” he said. “I never thought I was an A-list looking guy”—not like the models in magazines or the actors on TV, the really truly good-looking people with their perfect skin and perfect bodies and perfect hair and teeth. He felt “self-loathing things.” It was getting harder and harder to do anything. He didn’t want to go to school anymore.
His family moved back to Calabasas and he spent ninth grade at Calabasas High. But he didn’t like it there—the atmosphere could be very intimidating. All the kids seemed really rich—“everybody else had, like, BMWs and I had a Toyota,” he said. They were ambitious and focused on getting into good colleges. The school was ranked one of the top high schools in the state—it had won some “blue ribbon” award from the government, and you never stopped hearing about it. If you did well there, then you were on your way to having this awesome life, they always seemed to be telling you, but if you couldn’t cut it. . . .There were kids who seemed to smirk if you couldn’t keep up. Meanwhile the most notable person who had ever attended that school was Erik Menendez, who killed his parents.4 Oh, and Katie Cassidy, David’s daughter; she was on Gossip Girl.
Nick stopped going to class. He “couldn’t deal with the whole going-to-school thing every day. It didn’t fit me. I didn’t want to get up. . . .I wouldn’t want to go to school—for stupid things, like, oh, I had a pimple.” Eventually he was kicked out for excessive absences. Some people wondered if he were doing drugs, but “this is the crazy thing,” he said, “I didn’t even smoke cigarettes. I didn’t smoke weed. I didn’t do coke, I didn’t do anything, right? I think I was just. . .depressed and had anxiety issues and other stuff.”
And then, in tenth grade, he went to Indian Hills. It had a reputation for being a school for burnouts and fuck-ups. He was afraid it was going to be some kind of horrible place, but actually, it was a welcome change, a haven. “Everyone talks about it like it’s all these drug addicts,” Nick said, “but some of the kids just can’t
do the school thing every day—they learn different from other kids. The people I involved myself with, they weren’t drug addicts—they were unconventional.”
It was at Indian Hills that he first saw Rachel Lee. It was hard not to notice her. She was a “really attractive girl.” And she had the most stylish clothes. But it wasn’t just her clothes, Nick said, it was the way she wore them, like someone who really knew about fashion and had a sense of what looked good. That was so rare in Calabasas. Rachel wore clothes like she deserved to look good. She had this amazing confidence. It fascinated Nick. He noticed Rachel because he was into fashion, too. He “liked clothes,” he “liked to think” he “was a stylish guy.” But he had never met anyone he could talk with about fashion. He’d never had many friends at all, and fashion wasn’t something he felt he could discuss with his family. Imagine, asking his dad what he thought of Charlize Theron’s gown at the Oscars.
He and Rachel “bonded over fashion naturally.” “She liked fashion, she liked celebrity, she liked clothes.” Nick had never thought about designing clothes before, but now he did. Rachel wanted to design clothes; she said that some day she would have her own line. She wanted to go to FIDM, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, in L.A. Lauren Conrad from The Hills went there. “A lot of the Hills girls went to FIDM. Rachel loved The Hills,” Nick said. Before too long he found himself at Rachel’s house, hanging out and watching The Hills, laughing over the stupid catfights on the show and talking about the clothes. Now Nick and Rachel were going on style websites together and checking out the fashions worn on her favorite shows and finding out where you could “get the look.”
“She was the first person I felt was, like, my best friend,” Nick said, and it made him so happy, “sometimes I almost felt like I could cry over it.”
With Rachel, he could talk about anything. They could talk about clothes and try on clothes. He could even put on eye makeup with Rachel, if he wanted to, just for fun; Rachel didn’t judge. But it wasn’t only fashion they were bonding over. They were telling each other about their lives. Nick had never done this with anyone before. He told Rachel about his “turmoil”; how he was feeling estranged from his parents. It seemed his problems in school and emotional struggles had caused a breakdown of communication. “Me and my parents kind of had a falling-out,” he said. “It was an awkward time for me and them.”
Rachel listened. “She really sympathizes with whatever your situation is,” Nick said. “She puts herself in there to understand you, to feel your pain. She builds on that. She really knew where I was at and she knew how to comfort me and be a friend to me, and I think that’s why I trusted her so much and why I got involved with her so much. . . .
“I loved her,” he said. “I really did, she was the first person I felt was like my best friend. . . .I really thought I loved her—just as a person, not as a girlfriend. I just loved her almost as like a sister and that’s what made this situation so hard. . . .”
Now they were in constant contact, talking on the phone, IMing, texting. “People would call Rachel and be, like, oh, you’re with Nick. People would, like, know that we were together all the time, every day. Every moment we were together. We were like a one-man-one-woman show. It was me and her till the end, death do us part. We were inseparable.”
And Rachel was telling Nick about her problems, too. Her parents had divorced when she was young. Her father moved to Las Vegas, and Rachel and her older sister, Candace, had stayed with their mother in Calabasas. Then Rachel’s mother married a man named Phil with whom, Nick said, Rachel didn’t get along. “Rachel hates her stepfather,” he said. “She just had her issues with him as any stepkid would.” He said her stepfather had children of his own, and there was tension in the house. Nick comforted her as she had comforted him. “It was so much more than a friendship.”
Through Rachel, Nick was making other friends—“just normal kids, maybe more upper-class, with money, but normal, nothing out of the ordinary.” He met Rachel’s friend Courtney Ames, who went to Calabasas High. Rachel had known Courtney since seventh grade. Courtney would skip school and come out to smoke weed with them, Nick said. She was kind of a tough girl, not fashionable like Rachel, but Nick “bonded” with her because she was Rachel’s friend. It seemed that Rachel and Courtney were close because they had known each other for so long; they were certainly very different. Nick got to know Courtney at the many parties someone was throwing “every other day.” For the first time in his life, he knew what it was to be part of a social scene.
He also met Tess Taylor, who went to Oak Park High. “Tess really liked me,” Nick said. “I would go hang out with Tess. We would smoke together. . . .She’s pretty. She’s gorgeous. She’s a really good storyteller—she’s really good at getting people believing her stories. . . .Basically, if she wants to make it happens she’ll make it happen, she’s really smart like that.” And through Tess, Nick met her friend Alexis Neiers, another pretty girl, one grade younger, who was being homeschooled because her mother believed in all this New Age spiritual stuff.
“This was the social group,” Nick said, “This was the Valley group. . . .And this group is sympathizing with me; they’re caring for me. I felt like they understood me. It was the first time. . .I felt like I had a support system outside of my family, and someone my own age I felt loved me.”
Tenth grade was wonderful. It was Nick and Rachel, a couple of “carefree kids,” “smoking weed,” “hanging out at Zuma Beach” near lifeguard stand No. 7, “going to parties with a lot of underage kids doing beer pong,” Nick said. “It wasn’t something devious or ill.” He never wanted it to end.
“I guess I was a little naïve about everything,” he said, “but I was like, I’m gonna do whatever makes this person happy.”
And that’s why, he said, when Rachel “sort of let it drop” that she had gone into someone’s house and stolen some money, he didn’t make a big deal of it. “She said this one time before I even knew her she had, like, gone into this person’s house when they were out of town and taken money from them. In my mind I’m like okaaay, whatever, just wanting to please her.”
And then, he said, Rachel asked if he knew of anyone who was out of town. This was the summer after tenth grade, now 2007. “And,” Nick said, “I was like, this guy’s out of town, why?” The guy’s name was Eden. Nick had met him on MySpace. They’d been getting to know each other, “hanging out.” Nick told Rachel that Eden and his family had gone to Jamaica for two weeks; and before he knew it, he said, he and Rachel were driving to Eden’s house in Woodland Hills, about ten minutes from Calabasas.
It was night. They parked on the street and rang the bell, checking to make sure no one was home. They never had any trouble getting into anyone’s house, Nick said, there was always a way in, usually through an unlocked door. And there was always the cover of their youth and presumed cluelessness if anyone noticed them trying door handles or windows. They could say they had forgotten their keys, or they were helping a friend who’d forgotten theirs. Usually they just walked in a door someone had forgotten to lock. Who’s that careful in a nice neighborhood? They walked right into Eden’s house. Nick said he immediately felt like running back out. . . .
But now, he said, Rachel was strolling through the place, looking at everything, picking stuff up. “I’m in the house, walking back and forth,” he said, “freaking out. I mean, it’s weird, to go through somebody’s things; it’s unnatural, it’s not something, like, you know how to deal with.”
But then “[Rachel’s], like, looking under the bed,” he said, “and she finds a box full of, like, eight grand in cash. This is the first time I’ve ever been involved in something like this, so naturally it’s like, oh my God, you found eight grand? . . .
“So we each get four grand,” he said. “And it was like, wow. That was so easy. . . . We didn’t do anything so bad. We didn’t kill anybody. . . . It wasn’t murder.”
The next day, he said, they
went back to the house and took Eden’s Infinity out for a spin. Rachel had found the keys in the house.
“We went to Rodeo Drive,” Nick said. “We went shopping.”
9
“Nick’s got some self-esteem issues he’s working through and he’s seeing a psychiatrist,” Sean Erenstoft, Nick’s lawyer, told me on the phone. “He’s going to drug rehab—he had a drug bust,” for cocaine possession, “earlier in the year and so his world collapsed. Inward he’s a kid; he’s still eighteen and lives with mommy and daddy.
“Rachel’s very much the ‘A’ type,” Erenstoft said. “She’s the lioness, very much a leader, very influential. Rachel was actually able to lead some other pretty good kids into what seemed like fun—sounds like this Diana Tamayo was the class president and most-likely-to-succeed type girl and the next thing you know she’s being arrested for burglary.”
It was November 2009 when Erenstoft and I spoke a few times—he still hadn’t made up his mind about whether he was going to allow Nick to talk to me. Meanwhile I was travelling back and forth from New York to L.A., meeting with cops and other lawyers in the case. I was beginning to worry about making contact with the defendants—any of the defendants; their attorneys had them all on lockdown. But this story wouldn’t be any good without hearing from the kids. They were the only ones who could really say why they did it or what it all meant.
I was starting to suspect from my conversations with Erenstoft that he was the reason for all the media reports on how Rachel was the “ringleader” of the Bling Ring gang; he was getting out in front of the story, minimizing Nick’s role, depicting him as a follower. Nick “will be found to have played a very, very limited role,” Erenstoft had said in a phone interview with the Today show in October.
Of course, the person I wanted to speak to most of all was Rachel herself. I tried repeatedly to make contact with her, but her lawyer, Peter Korn, would not allow it. What was Rachel’s story? I wondered. What was her motivation? Why did she want celebrities’ clothes? Was she really the one influencing all the other kids? Or was Nick just selling her out to save himself?
The Bling Ring Page 5
