The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  “You seem really emotional,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, sniffling again. “I’d rather talk about it than not talk about it.”

  She would have gone on talking about her pain that day, but Rubenstein cut the interview short, saying Alexis would be available another time. I was disappointed that he wouldn’t allow her to discuss her case, but he assured me she would do so eventually. On my way out of the office, I stopped by a conference room where Alexis was now meeting with Susan Haber and her mother, Andrea. Alexis was begging Haber to let her fly off to Mexico with a friend on his private jet.

  “My friends are telling me, ‘you need to chill out,’ ” Alexis was saying. Her voice had taken on a different tone—it sounded flip.

  Haber reminded her that she was not allowed to travel out of the state, much less out of the country, as she was a suspect in a burglary case.

  “Nobody will find out,” Alexis whined.

  “You’d be in Mexico and TMZ would catch you on a beach,” Haber said.

  It turned out that Alexis actually wanted to go to Mexico for a Pretty Wild shoot in Cabo San Lucas, which she eventually did. The episode, “What Happens in Cabo, Stays in Cabo” featured Alexis and Tess doing a photo shoot in bikinis to “raise money for Haiti.” “We are successful, strong independent women. I know this is the truth. . .and so it is,” they prayed, outfitted in their bikinis.

  Alexis started telling me more about her career.

  “I started modeling about four years ago,” she said, brightening up. She said she booked her jobs herself; she didn’t belong to an agency. “Just print work. I’m not tall enough to do runway unfortunately. I wish. Maybe in, like, six-inch pumps.

  “I went to Paris in August and stayed at the Crillon [Hotel]”—this was for the Issa Lingerie shoot for FashionTV—“and it was gorgeous,” she said. “I flew first-class there and back. . . .I took my sister Tess. We got shopping money every day and a personal driver and Ferraris and Mercedes took us around. It was like two weeks of total luxury. It was incredible.”

  Andrea said, “It wasn’t two weeks, it was—”

  “It was almost,” Alexis insisted. “It was so cool.”

  I observed that she seemed to have a fabulous life for one so young.

  “Oh, you don’t even know,” Alexis said, laughing. “I’ve been dating [an Academy Award–winning actor] and Tess is dating Kid Rock.” (In March 2009, Tess posted a picture of herself and Kid Rock posing, along with several other girls, on her MySpace page.)

  Andrea knitted her brow. “You went on one date,” she said. “Unfortunately, she’s over 18 and I can’t say anything,” she told me.

  “We were in this house,” Alexis said, ignoring her mother, “and [the Academy Award–winning actor] takes my Dior red lipstick out of my purse and rubs it all over his lips and turns around and does this 15-minute monologue as a transvestite. It was so funny, so amazing.”

  I said I remembered reading something about how the Academy Award–winning actor had gotten back together with his wife.

  “Tabloids lie,” Alexis scoffed. “When you read he’s back together with her, he’s not; he’s just doing it for the kids.”

  Later, my cop source, who had had access to Alexis’ cell phone at some point, told me, “Alexis had sent some texts asking [the Academy Award–winning actor] to hang out with her, kind of clingy. He was very polite about it.”

  15

  “Alexis is going to jail,” my cop source said one day in November 2009. We were sitting in Du-par’s, an old-school diner in Studio City with red Naugahyde booths and giant homemade donuts in the display case up front. “She already confessed to being at Orlando Bloom’s house the night of the burglary,” he said. He gave a small belch. “Did she do the fake crying thing with you where she couldn’t quite squeeze the tears out?”

  He was a big guy wearing an ill-fitting suit. I’d met him on the phone when I called the Hollywood Community Police Station, which covers Beverly Hills and was the seat of the Bling Ring investigation. (In person, the precinct isn’t quite as glamorous as its name; it might as well be the set of Barney Miller.) I asked if I could use his real name but he said, “Call me Vince Vaughn.” He told me if I “sold him out,” he’d “plant drugs” on me; but that was just his sense of humor.

  He was eating scrambled eggs and a mountain of turkey hash and drinking continuous cups of black coffee.

  “How can Alexis be innocent if she was at the burglary?” I asked.

  “Alexis submits that she— Well, I can’t tell you that right now. But she did stuff,” he said, “believe it.”

  “What about Tess?” I asked.

  “Tess is a Cybergirl, kind of hot. There are a bunch of pictures of her wearing clothing belonging to the victims.” One of those pictures was posted on TMZ; it showed Tess wearing a studded, light-blue leather vest allegedly belonging to Rachel Bilson. “Rachel Bilson: Hey, That’s My Vest!” said the headline.

  “Then why wasn’t Tess arrested?” I asked.

  “Because her sister”—meaning Alexis—“didn’t rat her out,” said Vince. This was speculation—Taylor was never charged. “The D.A.’s office only pursues the cases they think they can prove,” he said. “They have to have enough evidence to make it stick.”

  Nick Prugo didn’t rat out Tess, either, although he had told on everyone else allegedly in the burglary ring. On October 6, 2009, three weeks after he was arrested, Nick met with the LAPD in the offices of his lawyer, Sean Erenstoft, and described in detail how he and his friends had been robbing the homes of celebrities. He named names, gave dates, and brought photographic evidence—pictures of his friends wearing items allegedly belonging to the burglarized stars. In one shot, Rachel Lee wears an “R” necklace that had allegedly been stolen from Rachel Bilson; in another, Lee’s wrist sports a blue-faced Rolex watch that had allegedly been taken from Lindsay Lohan’s house.

  Nick told on himself more than anyone else, offering all of this information without first getting a deal. “Which is weird,” Vince said, shaking his head.

  “Why would he do that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Vince. “You’ll have to ask him that.”

  But Nick didn’t implicate Tess—at least, not yet. “They had a date to go clubbing,” Vince said with a shrug.

  On October 13, 2009—a week after Nick talked to the police—he was seen out clubbing with Tess and former Nickelodeon star Drake Bell, with whom she told the gossip blogs she had been “hanging out.” TMZ posted a video of the trio coming out of the Roosevelt Hotel in L.A. and walking down the street to Bell’s car. Nick smiles gleefully as the paparazzi cluster around them, calling Bell’s name: “Drake! Drake!” “Who’s the beautiful young lady?” Bell, formerly the co-star of the tween comedy Drake & Josh (2004–2007), is an affable medium-level teen star; but suddenly the paparazzi were acting like he was James Dean. But the Bling Ring suspects were the ones really attracting the attention. Drake Bell-with-alleged-burglars was a story.

  “Did you ever think you’d reach this point of fame?” one of the videorazzi asks.

  “I didn’t know I had,” says Bell.

  “He’s a celebrity,” says Tess, who is pouring out of her clothes.

  Nick, in the background, giggles excitedly, his white-toothed smile emitting enough wattage to light a room.

  “Welcome to Hollywood by the way,” Bell tells Tess.

  “I don’t think Dominick Dunne would write about this,” Vince said wryly, in between bites of apple pie.

  “Probably not,” I said. He liked teasing me—he seemed to enjoy dangling half answers without telling me all he knew. He was holding out on some vital things: What was Alexis’ story? What was Tess’ explanation for wearing stolen clothes? How did Courtney Ames and Diana Tamayo come into it? How did it all start? How were they caught?

  And, “What’s the deal with Rachel?” I asked. “Why hasn’t she been charged?”
<
br />   “I totally know why,” Vince said in his faux Valley Girl voice. “I know it all, kiddo. But I’m not gonna tell you. I will say she’s definitely an interesting client for her lawyer. Do you have the Las Vegas arrest warrant?”

  The Las Vegas warrant for Rachel Lee from October 22, 2009, had been sealed by the LAPD, but it was mistakenly released to the media by the court information officer at the Clark County Nevada Court, who didn’t realize he was only supposed to give out the first page. “We seal it to protect cooperating witnesses,” Vince explained. “Well, Las Vegas, which is not used to much celebrity attention, got requests for this search warrant from the A.P. and they released the whole warrant.” The document included some of the information Nick had given to the police, revealing that he had implicated his alleged partners in crime.

  Now Nick’s lawyer was demanding that his client be placed in protective custody, as one of his alleged cohorts—Jonathan Ajar—was a convicted felon on the run. Nick reportedly declined police protection, however, but moved from his home to a hotel until Ajar could be apprehended.

  “TMZ’s acting like Johnny Dangerous is John Dillinger,” said Vince, “but he’s really just a small-time dealer. He did a two-year bid in Wisconsin.”

  “Do you think they’ll get him?” I asked.

  “Ah, yeah,” he said. “I don’t get the sense that this guy is all that bright. For one thing he was hanging out with the Burglar Bunch.”

  I asked him why he thought they did it.

  “I know why they did it,” Vince said. “Here’s the deal: these kids were not doing this solely because it was so sexy their nipples got hard ’cause they were in Rachel Bilson’s house. At the end of the day, there isn’t much more going on here than that the victims they chose happened to be very famous, so it’s garnered an inordinate and almost certainly inappropriate amount of media attention. Paris Hilton, clearly, has got shit to steal. With these kids, it wasn’t like you with a Sean Cassidy poster in your bedroom. These kids were certainly completely entranced with everything that was celebrity, but more than that, it was about dough.”

  “But I thought they just wanted to wear the clothes,” I said. “They didn’t sell much of it, did they?”

  “They stole a lot of different stuff,” Vince said. “They stole jewelry. They stole cash. And just because somebody’s got a lot of cash doesn’t make it any less of a crime when it’s stolen.” He took out his cell phone and thumbed through it until he found a picture of Paris Hilton. She was sitting at a police officer’s desk at Hollywood Station in a short skirt, long legs crossed, looking fetching.

  “I met Paris Hilton when she came into the station,” Vince said, “and she was a very nice lady. She was a real victim. She clearly lost a lot of things. She’s not even certain of all she lost because she just has so much. By all accounts they entered most of these homes multiple times. Prugo’s introduction to crime and crime with young kids in general is very similar to drug use. It starts off small, like chasing a high. . . .”

  16

  It became “like an every night ritual,” Nick said. He and Rachel called it “checking cars.”8 “There was a period of time,” between junior and senior year, 2007 and 2008, “when we would, like, drive around looking at cars in Calabasas,” he said. “It’s a wealthy area; people would leave their cars unlocked. People would leave their purses in their cars. Money. I had no idea this existed. So I’m like, okay, I guess this is fun, scary, exciting. I’m like a young kid. I didn’t know what to think of it.”

  He said he remembered “instances where I would scrounge up enough change to put some gas in my car so we could drive around. We’d drive down a street, like in a wealthy neighborhood.” They would look for the Mercedes and the Bentleys, the more expensive rides. They’d park, get out, and stroll up to the car as if they were going to get in it.

  “You’d pull on the door handle to see if the car was unlocked,” he said. “Maybe seventy percent of the cars were unlocked, especially in gated communities. And like, maybe ten percent had purses or wallets in them. We would open a car; there’d be a purse in there. You’d take their credit cards, their cash.” Sometimes sunglasses, iPods, other things. “We had instances where we’d find, like, at least six hundred dollars in a wallet. So we’d find that, and then we’d go shopping.

  “We went shopping with the stolen cards,” he said. “We’d go to like, Kitson”—a boutique on Melrose popular with Young Hollywood. “We’d go to Robertson, Rodeo. We’d walk in, stylized and beautiful. We’d use the cards and no one would question. No I.D., nothing. No one would question it.”

  Now, he said, they were burglarizing other homes in Calabasas. Some of the houses belonged to people Rachel knew, Rachel’s “old best friends.” “I’ve actually asked her,” Nick said, “ ‘if I ever became not your friend anymore, would you rob me?’ And she said, ‘I would never do that to you.’

  “When I would enter these houses,” he said, “I would want to run out the door. I was always like no, no, no—like, I genuinely hated it. . .but Rachel somehow, she’d be in these houses and it would be an hour and she’d still be comfortable and she’d be sitting there like it’s her house. She’d go through everything meticulously, [looking at] clothes, like, try on a jacket.

  “I would always be—I guess Rachel would say ‘tripping out.’ She would say, ‘You’re tripping out, you’re freaking out,’ and she would be the one that would calm me down. I’d look at her for guidance and advice and she would be like, ‘This is fine, this is okay, why are you tripping out?’

  “She had that level of comfort,” he said. “She was very comfortable with herself and very, very confident with what she was doing. She pushed that confidence and that comfort level on to me, to where I thought, okay, she’s comfortable. . . .”

  To boost his own confidence, he said, he did cocaine. Rachel “introduced cocaine to me,” Nick said; someone she knew was a dealer, but this dealer, an older girl, wouldn’t sell to Rachel, because she didn’t want to corrupt her, and so Rachel asked Nick to go and “get a sack.” “So I got a gram and I tried it,” he said. “I was so scared, but I did it. I snorted it. I would never, never use needles.

  “I liked it,” he said; and then he loved it, and then he became addicted “for a period of time. . . . And that caused a lot of things to happen. ’Cause then it was like I was stealing for drugs, for cocaine.”

  17

  I wanted to see the celebrity homes that the kids had robbed, so I took a drive up into the Hollywood Hills. I’d always liked the Hills—I didn’t want to like it, the way you don’t want to like a guy with a smooth line, but I had to admit the neighborhood was beautiful, seductive, with its winding roads and lush, overhanging trees and shrubbery shading the houses. Hollywood stars started moving up into the Hills in the silent era—Rudolf Valentino, Gloria Swanson, and later, in the 1930s, William Powell, Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland. . . .It soon became a movie industry enclave, a fortress of fame and glamour. Many of the homes were built in the 1920s, and the neighborhood had retained that feeling of another era.

  The celebrities who’d been burglarized lived in a succession of fancy digs: Orlando Bloom’s large ranch-style house looked like a Bat Cave, painted black and surrounded by its own small secluded forest. Lindsay Lohan’s modest Mediterranean-style home was surprisingly tasteful for such a flamboyant young woman. Brian Austin Green had the kind of charming Tudor cottage only lots of TV residuals can bring. Audrina Patridge lived in a small, Spanish-style house, the perfect starter home for a young celeb. Rachel Bilson’s suburbanish home (it was actually in Los Feliz—I’d driven there first) looked like it could be the setting for a sitcom about rich kids living in L.A. and running a burglary ring.

  It was hard to imagine having the nerve to just walk into these people’s homes and steal their stuff. What, I wondered, had made the Bling Ring kids so bold? Was it that they’d been able to find out the location of the houses so easily? Was it ju
st because they could? Were they high, drunk?

  It was odd, when you thought about it, that Hollywood had never seen a burglary ring on this scale before.9 Hollywood, in the words of Vince the cop, had “shit to steal.” And Hollywood has never been shy about showing off its wealth. If all the valuable things up in the Hills weren’t enough to attract gangs of thieves, then there was the added attraction of these things belonging to celebrities. In terms of the marketplace, celebrity stuff is sprinkled with magic dust. Look at the boon it affords private dealers and auction houses. Christie’s took in nearly $137 million auctioning off Elizabeth Taylor’s jewels—a world record for a private collection of baubles, almost three times the record for any other single collection, and that was the Duchess of Windsor’s.

  So why wasn’t Hollywood always getting robbed? (Ironically, the movies specialize in glamorizing thieves—see The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968; How to Steal a Million, 1966; The Italian Job, 1969. . . .) Especially in hard times like the Great Depression, when Hollywood flaunted its wealth as unabashedly as now. Think of all those sumptuous Hurrell photographs of actors and actresses lounging in luxurious settings, looking mystically bored. Or MTV Cribs. Or the spreads on celebrities’ homes in magazines like InStyle and Ocean Drive.

  And yet, the burglary rate among Hollywood’s celebrity population has always been remarkably low. Could it be that criminals assume that famous people have better security, better moats? Maybe, but security never stopped bank robbers. It’s not as if some enterprising burglar couldn’t figure out where all the celebrities lived, even before the Internet. There have always been maps of the stars’ homes and bus tours leaving on the hour. In an episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy jumps off a tour bus and does a B&E on Richard Widmark’s property, climbing over his wall to steal a grapefruit souvenir. (No doubt the Bling Ring would have made off with some of his wife’s dresses.)