The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  20

  “Oh, God, Nick,” Tess said as she waltzed out of a Starbucks In L.A. “We’ve known each other since high school.”

  She was talking to a videorazzo from the gossip website X17 Online. “He got into some in-ter-est-ing business,” Tess said dryly, “and we really haven’t been speaking much since. But, we go way back.”

  She was wearing a pair of low-slung jeans and an off-the-shoulder white T-shirt that showed a lot of skin. She had on her black Ray-Bans. You had to wonder how X17 Online knew she would be there.

  “[Nick] was accused of breaking into Lindsay Lohan’s house and stealing some of her belongings,” the videorazzo said. “Do you know anything about that?”

  “Um,” Tess said, circumspectly adjusting her sunglasses. “I didn’t really know much about that until the other night when, haha, it came out on TMZ.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Yeeeah,” she said.

  “Is that when you were out with Drake Bell?” the reporter asked.

  “I was,” said Tess. “We were out hanging out at the Roosevelt. . . . We were hanging out and um, Nick just so happened to be there as well.”

  It was October 16, 2009, three days after Tess and Nick had been hanging out with Bell. But Tess seemed to be trying to distance herself from Nick now. In just six days, her “sister” Alexis would be arrested.

  “Has [Nick] ever spoken to you about anything that occurred during that time, with the Lindsay thing?” the videorazzo asked. “He’s even accused of breaking into Audrina Patridge’s.”

  “I heard about that,” Tess said. “He didn’t tell me too much. He told me he knew about it. . . .”

  21

  A couple of weeks later, on October 29, 2009, a TMZ reporter caught Paris Hilton going into Philippe, a Chinese restaurant in L.A. She was with her sister Nicky. The cameras were flashing.

  “What do you think of the Burglar Bunch?” the videorazzo asked.

  “They’re scumbags,” said Paris.

  She looked every bit the star that night: her platinum hair was cascading loosely in an elegant ’do, her lipstick was hot pink. She was wearing a little black cocktail dress with a plunging neckline. She had Old Hollywood glamour to her, although her fame had never been based on anything like Old Hollywood achievements.

  In just a couple of years, Paris’ star had fallen. She was no longer a staple of the tabloids. Journalists had vowed not to report on her anymore. The Paris backlash was in full swing. By December 2009, CNN was asking, “Why has Paris Hilton disappeared?” “Phase one was the ascension, seemingly out of nowhere,” said Samantha Yanks, editor-in-chief of Hamptons and Gotham magazines. “That came with a media frenzy, the antics, the partying, the music, the babe-like status, and of course the fashion label. Phase two, she disappears.” Sort of like former president George W. Bush, whose rise and fall Paris’ closely paralleled.

  Bush, who once enjoyed a 90 percent approval rating (the highest of any president since the poll originated), was now being called the worst president in U.S. history and was largely absent from view. Paris, who could be said to have symbolized the Bush years in some all-too obvious way, was on her way to becoming the most unpopular celebrity in America, according to a 2011 poll. She bristled at a Good Morning America interviewer, Dan Harris, who asked if she thought Kim Kardashian was “overshadowing” her. “Do you ever worry about your moment having passed?” Harris said, interviewing Paris in the lavish living room in her home. Paris got up and walked out.

  “How much [time] you think they should do in jail?” TMZ asked Paris of the Burglar Bunch, that night in October 2009, a week after they had all been arrested.

  “Ten years,” Paris said. “They’re a bunch of dirty rotten thieves.”

  PART TWO

  1

  Audrina Patridge was discovered, poolside, at the apartment building where they were set to shoot a new MTV reality show called The Hills. It was 2006, and Patridge was then a 20-year-old aspiring model and actress from Yorba Linda, California, about 40 miles southeast of L.A. “The executive producer came up and started talking to me about a new show,” Patridge told Sydney’s mX newspaper. ‘’He said it was kind of like Sex and the City and he really liked what I had going on.” A Lana Turner for the reality age, Patridge had a brunette sex appeal that would carry her through all six seasons of The Hills, in which she wore many bikinis and tank tops.

  She was a rich girl who starred in a reality show about rich kids who never seemed to work very hard, but wore lots of designer clothes and drove fancy cars. Yorba Linda, where Patridge is from (also the birthplace of Richard Nixon), is consistently ranked by the U.S. Census Bureau as one of the richest cities in America, with a median income of $115,291. Patridge’s father, Mark Patridge, is the CEO of Patridge Motors, “an extremely successful family business producing engine parts,” according to his bio page on VH1.com. In 2011, Audrina landed a VH1 reality show—Audrina—about herself and her family, produced by Mark Burnett, the reality television mogul behind Survivor (2000–) and The Apprentice (2004–).

  In 2010 Audrina, now a blonde, appeared on Dancing with the Stars, but was eliminated due to what the judges felt was her lack of personality and “passion.” A day after she was voted off the show, her lookalike mom, Lynn Patridge, emerged from the celebri-centric L.A. bar-restaurant Beso and complained tipsily to the paparazzi:

  “I’ve had it. I’ve been a celebrity mom eight years through this Hills bullshit, but ’Drina’s going to the next level, baby. . . . She’s got it in her.”

  “I liked her the best of all the Hills girls,” offered a cameraman.

  “Fucking Hills girls,” Lynn Patridge scoffed. “Hills tramps! My baby’s a star! She’s the only one that has some class and I don’t give a fuck about it. . . .I’ll be on another reality show. . .we’re gonna kick ass, show you how the real American, all-American family lives.” (Audrina was cancelled after one season.)

  As friends pulled her back inside the restaurant, the outraged celebrity mom continued to rant in that expletive-laced patois common among many adults today (dubbed “Fuckspeak” by Michael Lewis in 1989’s Liar’s Poker, it traces its lineage to Wall Street bond salesmen, rappers, and frat boys alike): “[Audrina] was kick-ass,” her mother said. “She fuckin’ smoked last night—she’s hot!”

  Audrina’s hotness was a significant factor in her role on The Hills, a spin-off of Laguna Beach (2004–2006), an MTV reality show about high school students in another affluent California town starring another rich girl, Lauren Conrad. Laguna Beach proved very popular among teenagers; and by 2007, one in seven teenagers said he or she hoped to become famous by being on a reality show. The Laguna Beach producers saw a winning ticket and followed Conrad to fashion school in L.A., setting her up in an apartment in the Hollywood Hills with three hot roommates—Heidi Montag, Whitney Port, and Audrina Patridge.

  But The Hills wasn’t really about fashion school or even the nonstop drama between the girls and their fashionable boyfriends; it was about a lifestyle. There was Lauren, the show’s real star, in her amazing clothes, in her amazing apartment, going to amazing parties and having an amazing job where she wears numerous amazing fashions. (Conrad had an internship at Teen Vogue, while Patridge was a receptionist at Epic Records.) There was Audrina, looking hot, riding around on the back of the motorcycle of her boyfriend Justin Brescia, known as “Justin-Bobby,” who was almost as hot as she (but who was sometimes guilty of fashion faux pas. “Homeboy wore combat boots to the beach,” Lauren said. “I know you don’t want that for a boyfriend”). He called Audrina “Dude.”

  Never mind that none of it was “real,” that the storylines were often scripted. In an interview with Jo Piazza for her book Celebrity, INC. (2011), Hills cast member Spencer Pratt spoke frankly of having engineered his romance, marriage to, and even divorce from fellow cast member Heidi Montag in order to profit from the publicity surrounding their union, and disunion—deals with photo agencies, appea
rances, endorsements. “We were making more money doing that than the television show,” Pratt said. “It was instant cash.” It was only when Montag admitted to People, in January 2010, to being “addicted to plastic surgery,” that fans turned against the couple; it was an orchestrated bid for more publicity that, this time, misfired. You could be unreal, it seemed, as long as you didn’t cop to it.

  But The Hills didn’t have to be real—it was reality.

  And Rachel Lee wanted a piece of it.

  “Rachel had a fascination with Audrina’s clothes,” Nick Prugo said. “She loved Audrina’s fashion.” On and off the set, Patridge’s style epitomized the kind of Southern California girl who goes in for maximum exposure of a toned body and spray-on tan. She wasn’t high fashion, like Paris Hilton; she wore “what any rich girl in Calabasas would have. . . .We found her on Google Maps and Celebrity-address-aerial-dot-com,” Nick said. It was becoming a habit.

  Nick and Rachel hadn’t been on a mission together to rob a celebrity’s home since the last time they’d visited Paris’ house in November 2008. They had done one other job, in January 2009, Nick told police, at a house on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino, a tony suburb of L.A., that they’d noticed was for sale and appeared to be empty, so they went in to check it out. It belonged to the builder and developer Nick DeLeo. Nick Prugo said they were able to get into the guesthouse, where they found two Apple iMac computers, so they took them, one for each. Nick kept his and used it, since its screen was bigger and nicer than the computer he already had. He would use it to video chat with Rachel. (It was from this computer that TMZ would take the images of the Bling Ring kids it later posted on its website. DeLeo himself had made the images available after the computer was returned to him by the police.)

  How was it that Nick’s parents didn’t notice all the expensive new things popping up in his room? “My parents—I don’t really want to involve them in the conversation,” Nick said; he did allow that, due to his estrangement from them at the time of the burglaries, “it was really easy to keep things secret from them so it wasn’t like there were all these signs for them to see. . . .”

  By February 2009, it had been eight months since Nick and Rachel had graduated from high school—or since Rachel had. Nick never did. He knew he should be getting his act together and doing something with his life, he said: “I had gotten my GED, I planned to enroll in Pierce [College], but just through my friends and my influences I never ended up going. . . . My parents wanted me in school, and I was like, I want to work, I want a job. I was just making excuses ’cause we continued to make easy money.” Stealing from cars in the Calabasas area, stealing from houses. “It was that accessible,” he said. “It was that easy.”

  On the night of February 22, 2009, Nick and Rachel drove to Patridge’s house in the Hollywood Hills. They knew she would be out. It was Oscar night, and anybody who was anybody in that industry town would be outside the Kodak Theatre, joining the yearly procession of gowns up the red carpet. It was an exciting Oscar year, for a change—at least that’s what people were saying—Hugh Jackman was the host, and Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Kate Winslet, and Melissa Leo were battling it out for Best Actress in a highly contested race.11 It was Hollywood’s night, a night of preening and posing and deal-making. If you didn’t pay homage to the industry gods at the Oscar ceremony, then you had better be at one of the hotter after-parties around town. “If you go to Google News,” Nick said, “and you type in someone’s name, it’ll kind of tell you the events they’re going to. It mentioned something about Audrina’s Oscar night plans. . . .”

  Around eleven p.m., they made it to the Hills and parked down the street from Patridge’s home. It was a cute, Spanish-style house on a leafy, winding street—three levels, three bedrooms, with a tile roof and balcony on the top floor. Patridge had bought the place in 2008, less than six months before, for a reported $1.2 million. Not bad for a 23-year-old who was making just $35,000 an episode on The Hills. But then, she “came from a rich family,” Nick said, “and had got, like, a deal to do an ad for Carl’s Jr.” (The ad, which appeared in June 2009, showed Patridge wearing a bikini and eating a hamburger.)

  “We walked up to her house, very innocently,” Nick said. “Unmasked. We did wear gloves but they were mittens, like something to warm your hands from the cold, so it wasn’t conspicuous—it was very natural, you would say. So we went there very innocently, just knocking on the door. We were gonna knock on the door and see if anyone was home and say, ‘Can we smoke weed with you?’ Just pretend like we thought we knew someone who lived there, like a couple of stupid kids.

  “There was an instance,” he said, “where we actually did this at Paris Hilton’s house and Paris actually came on the intercom outside her house pretending to be a maid. She was, like, speaking in a Latin accent and messing with us.” (He assumed it was she.) “We were like, ‘Do you have a pipe? We live in the neighborhood.’

  “I have my club card,” or medical marijuana card, Nick said, “so I’m legally able to smoke weed. We said, ‘We just want to smoke with you,’ ’cause we knew [Paris] smoked, ’cause we found a blunt in her house.” (There were also several videos online of Paris smoking what appeared to be marijuana, in one of which she says, “I am smoking pot and eating burgers.”)

  They entered Patridge’s house through an unlocked sliding glass door at the side of the property. The reality star hadn’t set her alarm before she went away to visit her family in Yorba Linda, four days earlier. “I never imagined anyone would break into my house,” Patridge told the Grand Jury on June 18, 2010, “and I only left for a few days.” However, when Nick and Rachel opened the sliding glass door, the alarm system still announced, in a robotic woman’s voice, “Door opened.” “And it scared them, and they ran off,” Patridge said, describing surveillance footage.

  But—after a few minutes in which nothing else happened, no cop cars or SWAT teams appeared—the kids came back. Grainy surveillance footage from that night shows them outside the house, ringing the bell. Rachel looks relaxed, her head cocked to one side; she seductively pulls back her long black hair, almost as if she’s posing for the security camera poised above her. “Is Audrina looking at me?” it seems she could be wondering. She’s dressed in Patridge’s style, in tight jeans and a stylish, white long-sleeve T-shirt, oversized and decorated with some design. When no one answers the door, Rachel vamps away, and Nick—wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap (he always wore hats, as he was sensitive about his thinning hair, but this one was to shield his face from surveillance cameras, too)—follows after her obediently. They go around to the side of the house, and enter.

  Once inside, surveillance footage shows, the thieves stroll into Patridge’s living room—a large, high-ceilinged room with white walls, a tile floor, and wrought-iron furniture. Rachel slinks around, surveying the place, examining things. She languidly puts up her arm to cover her face when she passes directly under a security camera, but she doesn’t seem too concerned about it capturing her image. Nick follows her jumpily, almost comically agitated and looking very much like a nervous teenaged boy. They leave the room to go upstairs, and when they come back, Rachel is wearing a white fedora with a black band. This hat would figure prominently in the L.A. District Attorney’s case against her. Rachel had it with her at her father’s house in Vegas when she was arrested there.

  As they come in and out of the living room—becoming increasingly intense in their movements; at one point, they start to run—they’re carrying luggage. They leave and enter the house by the side door repeatedly, hauling luggage. This was the first time they would use their celebrity victims’ own bags as a means of carrying their possessions away—a method inspired by Patridge having left packed luggage in her bedroom. She had just gotten back from Australia, where she was to appear at the Australia MTV Music Awards, in March and, she told the Grand Jury, “I still hadn’t unpacked.”

  “There was a suitcase in Audrina’s b
edroom full of dirty clothes,” said Nick. “There were personal things” in the suitcases that “brought home to me they’re just normal people, just seeing it firsthand.”

  When Patridge got home from visiting her family that night, at about 2 a.m. (she wasn’t at an Oscar party, after all), she noticed her luggage was gone. “And you know, at first I was like, ‘Okay. Did I leave it in my car?’ ” she said. “So I went downstairs and looked and it wasn’t there. Then I went back upstairs and I said, ‘Okay. I’m either losing my mind or someone broke into my house. . . And then I noticed there were two lines in my carpet from my luggage being rolled out of my bedroom. . . . And then when I looked in my jewelry box everything was gone, wiped out. Everything.”

  Nick and Rachel robbed Patridge’s house twice that night. They went into a kind of frenzy they’d never experienced before, stealing more than they ever had. After they left, they decided they wanted more things, so they went back and robbed her again.

  2

  When I talked to Patridge on the phone in November 2009, she sounded pissed. “It was almost like they went shopping in my house,” she said. “They took whatever they wanted. They took, like, a lot of special things—jewelry I got from my great-grandma, they took my passport, my laptop, sunglasses, purses. Anything that was intimate and that was mine—specific jeans made to fit my body, only to my perfect shape. They took shoes; they took bags and bags of stuff. I don’t even know everything they took. I don’t even know half of it. Big duffel bags and bags from storage. I was devastated.

  “When I saw everything was gone,” she said, “I was on the phone with my sister and I was afraid to hang up, because I didn’t know if someone was still in my house. . . .I kept noticing more things gone. I felt so scared. I went into my walk-in closet and shut the door and locked the door. I didn’t know what to do. What if they’re still in my house?