“That’s my grandchild,” she kept saying. “That was my first grandchild.” She was sold on the idea that Courtney Ames had been pregnant and lost the child due to miscarrying, a story she said Courtney had told her herself. (Randy Shields told me that Courtney was never pregnant and didn’t believe she had ever said she was.)
“She says she had a miscarriage from partying too hard and she’s not pregnant anymore,” said Gonet. “That was my first grandchild. She’s been partying every day since the beginning of the summer.”
She was a small woman with a mane of shock-white hair and deep-set eyes, dressed in flowing clothes. She was not in the best of health, she told me. She had taken the bus down from Washington State, where she lives, to visit her son Johnny now that he was locked up in the L.A.’s Twin Towers Correctional Facility. She said she was a cashier at a grocery store, and that she’d raised Johnny and his sister and brother on her own after she split with Johnny’s father, a truck driver, when Johnny was two.
“I’m not saying it’s right,” she said, “but I can almost understand someone like my son turning to crime. But why are these kids doing it? They don’t need it. They have everything.
“My son might be doing drugs but he’s not a thief,” said Gonet. She blamed Johnny’s current legal issues on Courtney. “The cops found jewelry at Johnny’s house that Courtney stole from Paris Hilton’s house,” she said with a frown. (Ames’ lawyer, Schwartz, maintained that Ames was never in Hilton’s house.)
“It looks like she was living at Johnny’s apartment,” Gonet said. “There were flip-flops and Tampons there. They’ve been together three months. Known each other six. They think they’re madly in love with each other. They want to get married. She wants to wear a bloodred dress to her wedding.” She grimaced.
She showed me a text she had allegedly received from Courtney that day. It said, “I am so sorry you have to go through this. Hopefully it will all be over soon and it will all work out. If you talk to Johnny tell him he’s my angel and I love him.”
“Her parents won’t let her talk to him,” said Gonet, “but she’s been writing letters to him in jail. She said her stepfather’s writing a screenplay about this whole thing and he wants her to help him. He said as soon as they’re done with the screenplay he’s gonna buy her a car.”
When I spoke to Shields, he said that he had written a book and a screenplay about the Bling Ring, but he didn’t say whether Courtney had helped him.
“She’s blowing me off now,” said Gonet. “She defriended me on Facebook. She’s plenty nice and sweet when she talks to you, but there’s something wrong with a girl who drinks like that. That was my grandchild. That was my first grandchild.
“I blame the parents,” she said. “She said her mom didn’t want her to smoke cigarettes, but she wouldn’t stop, so now her mom just says, ‘Don’t throw butts on the lawn.’ She gave her an ashtray.”
12
In the middle of November, three weeks after the Bling Ring kids had all been arrested, Courtney had her 19th birthday party at Les Deux.
“Its my birthdayyy . . . round 2 tonightttt!” she posted on her Facebook page. “I want a nos tank,” a nitrous oxide tank, she wrote.
Rachel came and celebrated. So did Diana. It was as if nothing had changed. Except Johnny was in jail.
Nick was not invited, of course. He’d told the police of their alleged crimes a month before, in October, launching them all into legal battles about which none of them seemed very concerned. In fact, Courtney sounded almost psyched about all the attention she was getting: “Gotta love having rolling stone magazine knocking at my door,” she’d posted on Facebook.
13
I found Courtney at Art’s Delicatessen on Ventura Boulevard one night soon after her birthday. A friend of hers had told me she’d be having dinner there. She was sitting in a booth with two other people. She was a rangy girl with dyed black hair (she was really a redhead, she said), freckles and pale, intelligent eyes. She was dressed kind of funky, like a girl I’d see in my neighborhood in the East Village. She wore a graffitti’d T-shirt and a leather jacket (not Paris Hilton’s). Her nails were painted black. She had a studied cool, as if modeled after Kristen Stewart.
“I can’t talk to you,” she told me with a stare. “I’ve been approached by the New York Times, New York Post, Rolling Stones [sic]. My lawyer told me not to talk to anybody.”
I asked her if she would come and sit with me in a booth and just talk about the case in general. She said okay. When we sat down, she offered, “I didn’t do any of this. I’m not into the whole crowd that’s into fame. If you want to know what happened, go for Tess and Alexis. They want fame. They are so starved for attention and want to be famous.”
“What about Rachel?” I asked.
“Rachel’s a good person, she has a good heart,” Courtney said. She said that they’d been “best friends” since seventh grade and that she met Nick through Rachel in tenth grade. And she said she didn’t know anything about any burglaries.
“Are you still friends with Nick?” I asked.
“I was friends with Nick,” Courtney said. “But then when I found out what he was doing, I stopped being friends with him and that’s why he’s saying I did this stuff with him.”
I wondered why she would drop a friend for being a thief when her own boyfriend, Johnny Ajar, was a convicted drug dealer and in jail.
“Just because you stopped being Nick’s friend, you think that’s why he said you robbed Paris Hilton’s house?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “The only reason I ever hung out with Nick was because he got us into clubs. That’s all I would ever do with him.”
However pictures that surfaced on TMZ showed Courtney hanging out in Nick’s bedroom, on his bed, dressed in just a pair of pajama pants and a bathing suit top (revealing a large scorpion tattoo on her side). There she was in Nick’s bedroom, again, mugging for the camera, throwing faux gang signs, smoking a bong.
A video later posted on TMZ made it clear that, even after Nick was arrested on September 17, 2009, Courtney continued to visit him in his room. “Have you seen or have you talked to Nick,” a TMZ videorazzo asked her in January 2010, after catching up with her outside the Obsession Ink tattoo parlor in Studio City, where she was getting a tat. “Has he told you anything about the picture of you laughing at him when he was getting arrested?” The photographer was referring to a picture TMZ had obtained of Courtney seemingly laughing while holding up a copy of a celebrity tabloid published in September 2009; “Suspect In Robberies Arrested!” it said, with a picture of Audrina Patridge, Lindsay Lohan, and Nick Prugo.
“That picture was actually taken with [Nick] sitting on his bed watching me take it [with a computer camera],” Courtney told the cameraman, annoyed.
“So you and Nick are cool?” he asked.
“No,” Courtney said. Not after he rolled on her a couple weeks later, in October, that is.
“I didn’t do it,” Courtney told me flatly when we spoke in the deli. “The cops have been harassing my parents, my mom and stepdad, calling them up and telling them things they shouldn’t say.”
She said that Officer Brett Goodkin had telephoned her mother and stepfather and told them she was pregnant, after he had allegedly been told this by Mark Ebner. “Goodkin called our house,” Randy Shields told me. “He says, ‘You know your daughter’s pregnant, I’m doing this as a concerned parent.’ I can’t tell you the contempt I had for him. It was all lies. Courtney was on her period at the time.”
“My stepdad wants to sue them,” Courtney said, “but my mom says no.
“I don’t need to steal,” she went on. “I have my parents. I go to college. I’m studying psychology,” at Pierce College. “I’m not into celebrities. I’m not into that whole crowd that’s into fame. I wasn’t friends with the whole Tess and Alexis crowd. I didn’t hang out at Zuma Beach.”
She didn’t seem to be willing to say much more, so I tried t
o find out what she knew about the Bling Ring kids. Her stepfather told me that “Courtney was there for every bit of it, except she wasn’t involved in any of it.”
“Do you know whether they were taking drugs from the celebrities’ homes?” I asked. I’d heard from cops that the kids were taking prescription drugs like Adderall, Ambien, and Zoloft from some of the celebrity victims’ medicine cabinets.
Courtney looked around the diner.
“Ehhhh,” she said nervously. “I can’t say anything about that.”
14
On November 12, 2009, Nick was arraigned at the Los Angeles County Court. He walked grimly past a phalanx of media shouting at him from behind a police barricade: “Nick!” “Nick!” “Was it worth it?” “How’s it feel to be a rat?”
Nick was looking very Young Hollywood that day, wearing dark sunglasses and a sporty jacket. His lawyer, Sean Erenstoft, who looked like a lawyer on Law & Order, was following behind him. Erenstoft’s girlfriend, also a lawyer, walked beside Erenstoft, holding his hand; she looked like a soap opera actress. Although she was not instrumental in the case, she would often accompany Erenstoft to Nick’s media-saturated court appearances. They could have come around to the back parking lot like everyone else, but instead they came in the front, where the cameras were.
Nick’s parents were nowhere in sight.
Once he got inside the big white building on Temple Street, several policemen, including Brett Goodkin—a tall bald guy in his thirties who looked like Mr. Clean—surrounded Nick and hustled him across the lobby to the elevators. It was as if Nick were a defendant akin to Lee Harvey Oswald, in imminent danger of being gunned down. Erenstoft had told TMZ that Nick was under the protection of “multiple law enforcement agencies.” (This was untrue. With Johnny Ajar now in custody, the only alleged threat against Nick had been neutralized. Erenstoft later admitted to me that his “strategy” was to “use the media to create sympathy for Nick,” who was being called a “rat,” and that he had actually “paid for [Nick] to stay in a private hotel to effect the imagery of him being in ‘protective custody’ following his decision to rat out the rest of his crew.” It was all smoke and mirrors.)
In the hall outside Department 30, where more media was clustered, I introduced myself to Erenstoft and asked if he were going to allow Nick to talk to me, as we’d discussed on the phone. “I don’t know,” the lawyer said airily. “I haven’t decided. NBC and ABC are still fighting over me. Everybody wants a piece of this.”
A few minutes later, in the courtroom, Nick was charged with eight counts of residential burglary; he was facing up to 42 years in prison.
Three weeks later, on December 2, Nick pleaded not guilty, even though he had already confessed.
Erenstoft put a picture of himself and Nick in court that day on the home page of his website.
15
On November 16, 2009, Alexis was arraigned. She brought an E! camera crew to court with her; they were filming her reality show, Pretty Wild.
“They’ve been with me since four-thirty a.m.,” Alexis whispered to me. She was talking about her five-person crew. It was about 8:30 now.
She was sitting on a bench outside the courtroom, pursing her lips for a makeup woman, Julie, who was applying lip gloss. Two regular guys, who were also in some kind of legal trouble, sat at the other end of the bench, trying to ignore this.
Alexis’ mother, Andrea, stood nearby, looking nervous in a snug brown suit. Her father, Mikel Neiers, a dark-haired man in a blazer and jeans, was there too, looking rather shell-shocked.
Andrea introduced Neiers to me as Alexis’ “biological father.”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you about the case,” Alexis whispered to me, “but I’m innocent, and I’m dying to tell my story. Why would I do this? I think people need to realize I have a career going. I model. I act. I have a TV show.”
Alexis’ show was still in the speculative stages, I learned. E! was putting together a pilot, waiting to decide if it was going to pick it up. “It was supposed to be a show about two party girls on the Hollywood scene,” a supervising producer, Gennifer Gardiner (yoga pants, earpiece, and walkie-talkie) told me, aside, “but then Alexis got arrested the first morning of filming, and we were like, okay.” She smiled.
“Do I need any makeup?” asked Jeffrey Rubenstein, Alexis’ lawyer, approaching. “The only way I’ll get paid is if the reality show gets picked up,” he told me, low.
“How do you think she’ll play on Larry King?” he asked with a confident twinkle, watching Alexis being powdered.
Alexis was being charged that day with one count of residential burglary of Orlando Bloom. On July 13, 2009, $500,000 in Rolex watches, Louis Vuitton luggage, clothing, and art had been taken from Bloom’s residence, and the L.A. District Attorney’s office was saying Alexis was there.
“Somebody’s lying,” Rubenstein said with a snort. “It’s a game of Clue, except instead of Colonel Mustard, it’s Paris Hilton in the tattoo parlor with the iPhone.”
At the other end of the hall, a mob of reporters was clustered at the door to Department 30, arguing with the blonde court public information officer about who was going to be let inside. Too much media had shown up for the number of benches—the Los Angeles Times was there, and Good Morning America, Dateline, Inside Edition, TMZ, et al. The publicist was blocking the door like a nightclub bouncer. Reporters were pleading with her, flashing their credentials. “Is E! going to get a spot?” one demanded, outraged. The answer was yes, they were.
It was time to go into the courtroom now. Alexis stood up, wobbling a moment on her heels. She wore a fuzzy pink sweater and a short tweed skirt—demure as Rubenstein had suggested. A diamond stud twinkled in her left nostril. The cameraman said “ready,” and Alexis began to walk down the hall. It reminded me of the girls learning how to walk the runway on America’s Next Top Model. The camera followed.
Alexis pleaded not guilty in her baby voice.
Despite Rubenstein’s advice against it, she insisted on making a statement for the media on the courthouse steps after her hearing.
“This is a very difficult time for myself and my family right now,” she squeaked for the cameras, smiling flirtatiously. “I just want to say thank you for respecting my privacy, and I look forward to my day in court and to getting this all cleared up.”
After this, Rubenstein filmed a scene in the parking lot where he was discussing the case, repeating lines for Pretty Wild’s supervising producer.
16
About the last thing I ever wanted to do was appear on a reality show; but the producers of Pretty Wild had Alexis under contract to work on the day of her arraignment, and said I could only interview her if they could film me doing it. “Go ahead,” said my editor on the phone. “That show will never get picked up.” At that point it did seem unlikely.
We all drove from the courthouse to Alexis’ home in the Valley. I traveled in a van with some of the crew, two girls and a guy, all in their 20s. “Alexis and Tess are in a fight,” one of the girls told me as we drove along, the mountains coming into view. “Tess isn’t living at the house right now—she’s staying somewhere else.”
“What are they fighting about?” I asked.
“Maybe ’cause they’re both burglars and only one is taking the rap?” said the guy with a laugh. (When I spoke to her, Tess denied having been involved in any burglaries.)
“No,” said the girl. “I heard they’re fighting ’cause Tess wants to be in your article and Alexis just wants it to be about her.”
“Do you think Alexis is guilty?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said the girl. “There sure were a lot of cops at their house when she got arrested.”
Alexis had described for me the chaotic scene of the morning of her arrest. (At her lawyer’s request, this conversation had taken place at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel.) She said that she had come home late from the first night of filming Pretty Wild—the camera
crew had followed her and Tess as they partied the night away at Wonderland, one of their favorite clubs—and she was pretty out of it.
“I woke up with my mom and my sisters screaming at me around 9:30 and put on my robe,” Alexis said. “They were screaming that the police were here and that we needed to leave the premises and come outside in my driveway. All of my neighbors were outside. The cops were like in full SWAT uniforms; they wanted to make sure there was no one else in the house, no weapons, and that the dogs were under control.” The Dunn-Neiers household was home to a yippy Yorkshire terrier. “There were five cop cars and a lot of cops, ten cops probably—”
Andrea was trying to say something.
“I’d like you to stop talking!” Alexis said, raising her voice. “I’m sorry—she talks in every interview! I just don’t want her to say anything! So,” she went on, “they handcuffed me right away, I was in complete shock. I started crying, my sister [Tess] was crying, Gabby was crying. My biological dad was there. He’s just there in the morning; he gets to my house around five a.m., he comes pretty much every day—”
Andrea interjected, “There’s more to that story. He doesn’t really have a place right now—” (Mikel Neiers declined to comment.)
“I would like you to stop talking!” Alexis shouted. “I did not want that information to come out and that’s why I asked you not to speak in this interview. Now if you’d like to go sit in the other room—”
Andrea closed her mouth.
“Anyways,” Alexis said, “he was there that morning. He just comes to the house, he waters the front and the backyard, he takes my sister [Gabby] to school. It’s like a morning thing. It’s like a big part of my life.”
“Did you have any idea why the cops were there?” I asked.
“No, I just had no clue,” said Alexis. “I was so scared. They immediately arrested me. I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. They didn’t tell me why they were there—they said be quiet, don’t talk, turn around, face the wall . . . We went into the house and they separated me from my family and put me in another room . . . They started ransacking the house, going through everything—stuff was flying everywhere. They were talking and making some rude comments between each other and he”—Officer Jose Alvarez of the LAPD, one of the arresting officers at the scene—“sat me down and he said do you know why I’m here? He said he had a search warrant; he pulled out a big book and in that book was a photo of me and honestly I was petrified. I had no idea what was going on. It was like a headshot of me off my MySpace or Facebook or something. He started asking me a bunch of questions. I started telling the truth from what I knew; he was asking me questions about the people who were involved, locations, if I had seen anything that was stolen. I told him the truth and he said he was gonna take me down to the station for more questioning.”
The Bling Ring Page 14
