The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  Ajar was living the high life; that’s how he saw it. “I had a good time,” he told Maxim. “Who else can say they had Playmates at their birthday party?” He’d been photographed with Black Eyed Peas member will.i.am. and partied with former Death Row Records mogul and reputed Bloods gang member Suge Knight.

  Coming upon Courtney Ames and her friends at the Green Door the night they met, Ajar said he helped them get in, although they carried fake I.D.s. He seemed to like Courtney’s tough girl image, so different from the typical airheads that flocked to the nightclub scene. On another night, at Les Deux, he talked Courtney and her buddies into getting body-painted in honor of his birthday (another birthday). Soon Courtney and Johnny were spending time together and she was staying overnight at his apartment in Winnetka.

  8

  By the spring of 2009, the Bling Ring was in full escalation mode and the kids were hitting Hollywood nightlife hard in their newly acquired clothes and jewelry. They had exciting new things to wear, and now they wanted to show them off—and where better to do that than in the same places where the celebrities they were robbing, and planning to rob, liked to go and party?

  Dressed in their new celebrity skins, they gravitated to Les Deux. The French-themed club was popular with underage guests, as it had a garden and a dance floor that made it easy to pass from the restaurant to the bar unnoticed. But the Bling Ring kids never had a problem getting served, or getting in, thanks to their friend, now Courtney’s boyfriend, “Johnny Dangerous.”

  Alexis Neiers and Tess Taylor actually knew Johnny before the other kids. “He would get us into clubs,” Alexis said when I spoke to her again at her home, after our first meeting in her lawyer’s office. She said that she and Tess had been going out since they were 16 and 17, and that’s when they started to become a part of “the Hollywood scene. It was known that we were out hanging out with Emile Hirsch and Leonardo DiCaprio,” Alexis said, “and just, like, typical Young Hollywood. Paris Hilton’s birthday—just typical stuff.”

  In her Grand Jury testimony, Hilton testified she didn’t know any of the Bling Ring kids; all the other celebrity victims said the burglars were strangers to them. “Every time we were at a club there’d be celebrities there,” Alexis maintained. “That’s how I became friends with Mickey Avalon. . . . Mickey’s such an awesome guy!” Avalon is a white rapper and former prostitute known for his graphically sexual lyrics.

  According to Nick, Alexis and Tess would sometimes exaggerate their closeness to the stars. “They like to make themselves sound like they [know them],” he said, “but they don’t. There’s a little bit of truth to each of their stories. They might have met someone and hung out with them in a club, but they don’t really know them. They’re really good with embellishing. They sit at these guys’ tables, these rich guys and whatever, and then it’s over. They’re like arm candy. . . . They just get [caught up in] the celebrity, the glamour.”

  But the glamour was what Nick wanted, too. And he knew that Tess and Alexis could provide him with that by bringing him into nightlife. “They were the first people that brought me out to clubs,” he said. “They brought me to Beso,” the celebrity hot spot on Hollywood Boulevard. “I started going out with them, started meeting people. Everyone loved me, everyone loved them. We started going out a lot to the hottest nightclubs, celebrity nightclubs—Voyeur, Wonderland, Teddy’s at the Roosevelt. They can get in anywhere because they’re so hot and gorgeous and young and the celebrity guys love to have them at their table.”

  Clubkid Nick was a very different Nick from the boy who, just three years earlier, was too anxious to go to school. Cocaine, perhaps, and a successful robbing spree, along with a fabulous new wardrobe, had given him an edgy self-confidence. Now he was a boy who hung out with beautiful half-naked girls in his room. A picture taken in 2009 (published on the gossip website The Dirty in 2011) shows Nick and a topless Tess in Nick’s bedroom, Nick looking suavely into his computer screen as Tess bends over him, looking seductive (she’s wearing a bra that’s pulled down). Gabby Neiers can be seen in pictures from the same photo shoot, smiling and apparently giggling.

  “Prugo has this weird relationship with pretty girls where he falls in love with the girls and lets them boss him around,” observed Vince the cop.

  “I’ve liked surrounding myself with beautiful girls,” Nick said. “Tess . . . really connected with me, she was really good at manipulating me, with, like, making me feel loved and wanted friendship-wise.”

  Which made Rachel jealous? “Of course,” said Nick. “Rachel felt Tess was a threat. She didn’t really like Tess and Tess didn’t like her. Tess wanted me to be her little best friend, and Rachel wanted me to be her best friend—it was kind of awkward for a while. I tried to introduce them a couple of times and it was really weird so I didn’t do that anymore.”

  In a purely social sense, the Bling Ring had two wings, Nick being the common denominator to both. It was Nick and Rachel (and Diana and Courtney), and Nick and Tess and Alexis (and Gabby), and they rarely socialized with each other. “I didn’t care for Rachel,” Alexis said. “She seemed odd—like, I hadn’t heard the best things about her. I had heard that she was nasty, not a nice girl. . . . She was haughty . . . and she always dressed really, really nice in extravagant things but she looked like she was just a typical Calabasas rich girl.”

  So Nick did double duty with both his sets of “girlfriends,” hitting the town with Tess and Alexis some nights, and Rachel and Diana on others. They would all be dressed to the nines. “Diana’s, like, entire personal wardrobe was made up of clothing she stole,” Nick said. (“Patently false,” said Tamayo’s former lawyer, Howard Levy.)

  They were living out the fantasy of the nightclub as seen in countless hip-hop music videos made over the past 20 years. By now it was a copy of a copy of a copy of a nightlife experience that had originated in the club scene in New York in the 1990s, when hip-hop was crossing over into the mainstream—the Cristal Champagne popping, the half-dressed flygirls dancing as slick boys in wifebeaters ogled them, throwing simulated gang signs. It was the club scene of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” and 50 Cent’s “In Da Club”—except that it was a bunch of white kids from the Valley. Celebrity was necessarily a part of it. Celebrities had to be there, somewhere, in the background, validating the glamour of it all with their presence. It was the fun being had, somewhere, by Paris and Puffy and Jay-Z and Leo.

  “We had a really good time,” Nick said. “The nightclub scene was there whenever we wanted it. All you needed was money. And, like, me and Rachel had money so we could get in anywhere, too—that’s all you need, money and looks, and, like, we weren’t ugly so it wasn’t that hard.” This was a different boy, too, from the one who said that in high school he had been convinced that he was “ugly.”

  But in nightlife, it’s a much less prestigious thing to be the kind of patron who gets into the club because he can afford to purchase a table, versus being the one who gets in because he’s with the hot girls who know the promoters and maybe the stars. Nick went out “more with Alexis and Tess,” he said, because it was more fun. And it seemed cooler.

  “Nick really liked the life we had,” Alexis said. “He wanted to live like us. . . . He wanted. . .to tag along with us to the clubs. . . . We never introduced him to celebrities—the only one he met was Drake Bell. In a way he looked up to them. He was into the typical celebrity gossip. He’d say ‘Oh, she’s hot, oh, she’s not’. . . . He just really wanted to seem like he was the cool guy.”

  Nick was dressing different, acting different; now he always had a Parliament cigarette in his hand. Whereas he used to be shy and hesitant to speak, now he was glibly throwing jokes around. He’d developed a sardonic humor and flippant air like the characters on Rachel’s favorite TV shows.

  He was dressing Tess and Alexis, too, for their evenings out on the town, confident in his opinions and his style. “I was like, this looks good, this doesn’t,” he said. “Because I read G
Q. I read the magazines. I know what looks good. I know fashion. So, I would tell them, you look trampy. You look good. You look classy. I’d be honest, and they valued my opinion because they looked good after I was done with them.”

  9

  Someone else who was changing in the wake of her exposure to Hollywood nightlife was Courtney Ames. Courtney’s very appearance had transformed. Once typically seen wearing Converse sneakers, T-shirts, and baggy jeans, she now dressed in designer clothes. “She was transforming from a tomboy to a sexy girl,” said her stepfather, Randy Shields, when I spoke to him on the phone. “She had friends for the first time in her life. She went about a year and a half with zero friends. Then Rachel introduced her to Nick and all of a sudden she had friends. Now she was having the time of her life.”

  “The one time I saw her [at Les Deux] she was wearing a leopard piece of lingerie with zebra shoes,” Alexis sneered.

  “Alexis and Tess would make fun of [Courtney] a lot,” Nick said with a laugh. “There was this song called ‘Sexy Can I’ by Ray Jay”—about a man with a taste for designer fashions (“Gucci on the feet, Marc Jacob on the thigh”) begging a hot girl to have sex with him (“Sexy can I?”)—“and basically me, Alexis and Tess made it into a song about Courtney. . . . It was like, ‘Courtney can I?’ . . . and she would get upset about it. And she’d threaten people: ‘I’m going to beat your ass! I’m going to kill you!’ ” (Ames’ lawyer, Robert Schwartz, had no comment.)

  Nightlife photos taken of Courtney at Les Deux in 2009 show her looking like a stylish club girl, in short skirts and leather—including that leather Diane Von Furstenberg jacket that belonged to Paris Hilton. “Prugo gave it to her,” Shields alleged. “She accepted the coat for one night. She was a stupid kid out partying and she wanted to look good.”

  Courtney’s once frizzy dark hair was now slicked back and styled. A picture she posted on her Facebook page of herself and a female friend in a suggestive pose was captioned “Hwydd,” as if announcing her new domain and her new attitude. “This is the end of who I was and the start of a whole new beginning,” said another one of her posts. She had become the girlfriend of a Hollywood club promoter, bad boy, and drug dealer, and she seemed proud of it. “Mondays Le Deux [sic]. Johnny D.,” she posted.

  “Courtney had never been out in Hollywood at all,” Nick said. “Courtney was introduced to Johnny and they hit it off and started connecting and got quite close. They were sleeping together and, like, partying, and she was getting more confident.” In one nightlife shot, Courtney has Johnny’s middle finger all the way in her mouth.

  She seemed to find the dark side of her new life quite glamorous. A picture found on the computer stolen from Nick DeLeo’s Encino home shows her brandishing a thick wad of cash. “It’s kind of like Alpha Dog without the killing. Hahh,” she posted on her Facebook page. (Alpha Dog, a 2006 film starring Emile Hirsch and Justin Timberlake, was based on a true story about a group of suburban drug dealer kids who got caught up in kidnapping and murder.) On October 10, 2009, twelve days before she was arrested, Courtney posted, “What a dangerous road we walk and a tangled web we weave.” And on October 15: “Karma is a bitchhh god I love my lifeeeee.”

  Nick claims it was Courtney who told him that Johnny Ajar was interested in becoming the fence for their stolen goods. (Ames’ lawyer, Robert Schwartz, had no comment.) “[Courtney] found out that Johnny had contacts, or connects,” Nick said. “And it came to Johnny’s attention that me and Rachel were involved in what we were involved in and Johnny made a proposal that if we had anything of value to sell or get rid of he was our man.

  “So we tried it out one time,” he said, “we brought him the Rolexes”—Rolexes belonging to Orlando Bloom, who had an extensive collection of the watches, 10 of which disappeared from his house during a burglary on July 13, 2009. Johnny “sold them, he gave us cash,” Nick said. “Five thousand. For like ten Rolexes, which is, I guess, a rip-off now that I think of it.

  “I wasn’t thinking this is what they’re worth,” he added. “I was just like, cash, okay, easy, fast, whatever. Johnny gave us the cash and we just started a business thing.”

  And perhaps it was also fear of Ajar, an older, more hardened criminal, which kept Nick from pressing for more of a return. “It is with the introduction of Ajar that Prugo’s life was first threatened,” said the LAPD’s report. “Unfortunately, it would not be the last time as Ajar advised Prugo that should he ever speak to the police about Ajar’s fencing activity that Ajar would not hesitate to murder him or his family.”

  “I find it troubling that Mr. Prugo who, according to most of the players, is the mastermind of these burglaries, along with Ms. Lee, is now implicating everybody else, while my client Johnny Ajar who has nothing to do with the Bling Ring burglaries remains incarcerated,” said Michael Goldstein, Ajar’s attorney.

  10

  Ajar didn’t bother to deny that he was fencing the Bling Ring’s goods when he was interviewed for Maxim. “I ended up buying [Brian Austin] Green’s pistol,” he said, “because the stupidest fucking thing to do would be to let them run around with that.” He also said that one of Orlando Bloom’s Rolexes was still in his apartment and that he would gladly return it. (The LAPD had already found it during their search warrant there and returned it.)

  “They did all this research, but I didn’t pay much attention,” Ajar said of the Bling Ring kids. “I didn’t want to be involved. They were spending all their money from the crimes on bottle service at the clubs. It wasn’t just my club; it was every hot club in the city. And they drink horribly. Courtney, I tried to tell her, ‘You can’t act like that.’ Nick would blow chunks all over the place.”

  Before leaving Las Vegas, Ajar gave Ebner a Sony VAIO laptop he admitted belonged to Audrina Patridge. Ebner didn’t want to be traveling with Ajar while he was in possession of stolen property, Ebner told me, so he left the computer at his Vegas hotel for a lawyer to retrieve it.

  “I can’t fuck with stolen goods,” Ebner said on the phone. “I gotta turn that in. I’ve already got Marty Singer,” a high-powered L.A. lawyer, “suing me for a million dollars over that Eric Dane–Rebecca Gayheart video.”

  He was referring to a sort of sex tape of a threesome between the married actors Eric Dane and Rebecca Gayheart and a former beauty queen, Kari Ann Peniche (the women loll around, topless, while Dane walks around naked), which Ebner had sold to the gossip website Gawker for an undisclosed amount. (How he came into possession of the tape is unclear.) According to Dane and Gayheart’s suit, “as a direct consequence of Defendant’s despicable misconduct,” the tape was “now available on countless other adult sites on the Internet.” (In August 2010, Gawker settled with Gayheart and Dane and agreed to take the video off its site.)

  After leaving Las Vegas, Ebner—also the author Six Degrees of Paris Hilton (2009), about an L.A. kid named Darnell Riley who insinuated himself into the lives of celebrities including Paris Hilton, and then in 2004 videotaped himself robbing and extorting Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis at gunpoint—drove Ajar to his own home in Los Angeles, where Ajar proceeded to summon a tattoo artist to Ebner’s living room. During the tattoo party, Courtney Ames appeared wearing a rosary necklace that looked just like one Lindsay Lohan had been photographed wearing. TMZ had already posted a picture of Courtney wearing the necklace with the headline: “Burglar Bunch Suspect Up To Her Neck In Trouble,” suggesting the necklace might be stolen. Courtney told Ebner she had bought it retail. Courtney’s lawyer, Robert Schwartz, told me “the necklace was given to her by Prugo.” Randy Shields said, “The guy she was dating gave it to her. She didn’t know it was Lindsay Lohan’s.”

  “Courtney shows up,” Ebner said, “she’s obviously high on something.” (Schwartz had no comment.) “She’s just, like, slouching around the house. And the idea was Johnny and his best friend were gonna get matching tattoos of guns on their torsos and she was gonna get a ‘Dangerous’ tattoo.” This was all happening a li
ttle more than a week after Courtney had been charged with one count of residential burglary of Paris Hilton, and Ajar was still technically an outlaw.

  When Ebner asked Courtney about her burglary charge, he said she told him casually, “Oh, I’m pleading not guilty to that.” She then told Ajar she was pregnant with his child, according to Ajar, which got him in a funk. (Schwartz had no comment.) “As the evening winds down, I find the young lovers a cheap hotel on the edge of Hollywood where they can spend one last night together,” Ebner wrote.

  “It’s like this drama thing with these kids,” Ebner said. “This is their fifteen minutes and they’re loving it. I can’t even find a reference—you wanna say it’s like The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, but it’s more like The Gang That Couldn’t Pass Their GED. When we were in high school everybody loved their drama and scandal, but now it’s at this absurd level. Everybody’s living in their own reality TV show.”

  11

  I met Ajar’s mother, Elizabeth Gonet, one afternoon in November 2009 at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Sherman Oaks. She was disappointed that the place didn’t seem as inviting as she remembered it being years before when she lived in California with her young children, so we ended up just talking in the parking lot.