The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  Booking photos of Nick and Rachel from previous arrests (hers for petty theft at Sephora; his for D.U.I.) showed them to resemble the people in the Lohan and Patridge videos—especially Patridge’s, in which you can see both of their faces in the bright light shining from above the front door. When investigators checked out Nick and Rachel’s Facebook pages, it became evident that they were indeed “friends” with each other. From Facebook, they also learned that the two had attended Indian Hills High School in Calabasas, California, together. They saw that they liked to post pictures of themselves wearing designer clothes and jewelry; that they liked to party; and they seemed very interested in celebrities.

  In addition to the call from the source at CNN, cops were now also receiving tips from random citizens. “Who does this sound like to you?” Vince asked me, playing a voicemail message that had been left for detectives at Hollywood Station. The voice on the phone sounded a lot like one of the Bling Ring suspects, anonymously identifying other defendants.

  “Armed with the above information, search and arrest warrants were penned and executed at the homes of Lee and Prugo,” said the LAPD’s report.

  2

  On September 17, 2009, the morning he was arrested, Nick said, “I was laying in my bed. My mom walks in the room crying. It’s like seven a.m. I already feel something in the pit of my stomach. She comes in my room and says, ‘You need to get dressed. They want you to come outside.’ Just hysterical. I felt like the worse piece of shit ever.”

  His parents, Nick said, “knew something was not right but they didn’t know anything” about why the police might be there. But, he said, he knew, “after, obviously, the Lindsay thing.”

  The heavily armed police detail that had been sent to the Prugo house was considered routine. In California, burglary is a “strike” offense under the state’s “three strikes” law, and burglars, if convicted, can face sentences from 25 years to life in prison, so there’s thought to be the potential for someone to try to run or fight arrest. “It was people with, like, machine-gun-looking guns pointed at my family,” said Nick.

  Under California’s Penal Code Section 459, the definition of burglary is entering a structure with the intention to steal or commit a felony. Nick’s house was being searched that day on suspicion of burglary and possession of stolen property.

  “They didn’t even come into my house,” at first, Nick said. “I walked out to them. They patted me down—actually they patted my mother down. I felt like so responsible. I felt such shame.”

  Since he’d already moved most of his stolen possessions to his grandmother’s basement, there wasn’t much for the police to find—at least nothing they could recognize. “They searched my house and they left [stolen] property there ’cause they didn’t know what they were looking for,” Nick said. “I had shirts and jeans and T-shirts from these [celebrities] but they didn’t know, so they left it.” They took a pair of designer sunglasses they presumed belonged to Orlando Bloom—but actually, Nick claims, these were his. “I may have bought them with stolen money,” he clarified, “but I didn’t steal them.”

  “I just went quietly,” he said. “I made it as easy as possible. I went down to Hollywood Station. I was there all day. Seven a.m. to eleven at night.” His bail was set at $20,000. “Eventually, I was bailed out,” he said. “I stayed quiet.”

  When he was grilled about the burglaries of Audrina Patridge and Lindsay Lohan, Nick told police he didn’t know anything. That was what Rachel had told him to say if he were ever questioned, he said. “She was just like, keep denying it, there will be no evidence. There’s no fingerprints. It’s just your face. They can’t prove anything with just a face.”

  Nick denied that he had done anything wrong, or that Rachel had, either. He admitted they knew each other and hung out together, but that was it. He covered for her.

  After not finding Rachel at home that day, the LAPD didn’t try to apprehend her in Vegas. Apparently they felt there wasn’t enough evidence yet to warrant an out-of-state arrest. Immediately upon his release, Nick said, he called Rachel at her father’s house. He said she sounded “relaxed. . . . She said she hadn’t heard anything” from the police. She knew about Nick’s arrest, having seen news of it all over the Internet. “Arrest Made In Lindsay Lohan and Audrina Patridge Burglaries,” said People Online. “Yes, we have found [him]. God is good,” Dina Lohan, Lindsay’s mother, told the website.

  Nick said Rachel also told him that she’d sent emails to several celebrity news outlets including TMZ, planting a story that Nick was a friend of Lindsay Lohan’s and had been “hanging out” with her on the Burbank, California, set of the ABC Family film Labor Pains (2009). When asked why she had done this, Nick said, Rachel replied that it was to throw the police off the scent, to arouse suspicion that Lohan was involved in the burglary of her own residence. It seemed to work: “LiLo May Have Connection to Burglary Suspect,” TMZ posted on September 22, 2009. “I think she’s in on it,” wrote one commenter. “He’s probally [sic] her coke dealer,” wrote another.

  Rachel told Nick not to worry, he said, nothing was going to happen to him. It was all going to blow over.

  And it might have blown over, if Nick had not confessed. The police, at this point, did have very little evidence. They had no stolen property. They had some fingerprints they couldn’t place. The Patridge video was grainy enough that some good defense lawyer conceivably could have argued it away. If Nick hadn’t confessed to committing multiple crimes with his friends, it’s possible that nothing much would have ever happened to any of them. Why he did confess is one of the most puzzling aspects of this story.

  3

  My early conversations with Sean Erenstoft, Nick’s former lawyer, all took place when he was in his car. Once when we were talking, he told me he was “in [his] Porsche” and so, if I lost him, he would call me back.

  “I’m in a unique position,” Erenstoft said as he Porsched along. “I’ve got inside information about what’s going on.”

  In the next few weeks, Erenstoft would share some of this information with the “Sunday Styles” section of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, People, The Daily Beast, and TMZ, to name a few of the places he was quoted. I started to wonder whether it was Erenstoft who was the source of the “inside information” about the Bling Ring that was flowing to TMZ, but there were so many other possible candidates—some of the other lawyers, who didn’t seem averse to publicity; cops; and the Bling Ring defendants themselves, who seemed to feel no hesitation about trashing each other.

  In our initial conversations, Erenstoft sounded like a sharp guy who knew how to help a reporter out while still protecting his client’s interests. He would divulge details about the other Bling Ring suspects while minimizing Nick’s role in the burglaries. “Rachel’s in possession of a lot of property,” he told me. “She stashed it before the cops could get to her. . . . Courtney Ames was sleeping with [Johnny Ajar]. She’s the wannabe gangster type.”

  But every now and then the lawyer would say something that would make you want to squint. “Even I have been around Paris Hilton when she’s snorted coke,” he said. “If you’re a night owl in L.A., you’re gonna run into any one of these people. We all feel like we know Paris.”

  Erenstoft seemed to be bothered personally by what the Bling Ring kids had done and to feel that they should be punished. He told me a few times, “I’ve been a prosecutor.” He said, “I don’t know where people get the gumption to step in someone else’s home. When I was a kid you weren’t supposed to touch stuff that wasn’t yours. I’m troubled by the new generation.”

  Nick met “Sean,” as he called him, in late September at Miyagi’s, a darkly lit Asian fusion restaurant on Sunset near Crescent Heights—it was the same place where Nick and Courtney had been drinking the night Courtney crashed her car in August 2009. Once a hot spot with a lot of celebrity clientele, it was now somewhat past its prime (and has since closed). Nick was close with someone w
ho worked there, and his friends said they could get served drinks there even though they were underage. “They serve children at Miyagi’s, when you’re under eighteen,” says the girl with Courtney in the TMZ video where Courtney’s outside the Studio City tattoo parlor Obsession Ink in January 2010.

  It was a chance encounter between Nick and Erenstoft. They were introduced through Nick’s friend at Miyagi’s. Hearing he was a lawyer, Nick started telling Erenstoft about his legal troubles. Nick had just been arrested and was out on bail. He had another attorney at the time. But somehow by the end of the conversation, he was convinced that Erenstoft was the lawyer for him, and had decided to hire him to defend him.

  I’ve wondered if Nick, who’d been abandoned by Rachel, and seemed to crave the direction of a strong personality, had now found this in his new lawyer. Erenstoft is a guy with strong opinions who isn’t shy about voicing them; there’s something of the old movie cop about him; he actually looks a bit like Dick Tracy.

  One night in November 2009, I met Erenstoft for dinner at Iroha, a Japanese restaurant in Studio City that he’d chosen. We sat at the sushi bar, where he kept ordering from the sushi chef with a pronounced Japanese accent. He wore a suit, and seemed to have recently had a haircut. He was all angles, square haircut, and square jaw.

  That night, Erenstoft admitted to me that “the cops didn’t know anything” about what Nick had really done before Nick confessed. “As far as the cops were concerned,” he said, “Nick was [only] in receipt of stolen property. He had come and talked to me in private,” at his offices, after their first meeting, “and he said, ‘look, I saw the surveillance videos on TMZ. It was supposedly me and I went oh my God, oh my God, this is serious!’

  “This was his reaction,” the lawyer explained. “He realized he had some major issues to deal with, because now he wasn’t sleeping. He thinks he’s losing his hair over it; he’s not eating; he can’t hold food down—[he has] all of the nervousness of a very, very scared man. Basically, for the first time in your life, you realize this isn’t child’s play. It was Rachel’s idea—let’s go out and have some fun, and now he’s being hunted,” after the surveillance videos had been released.

  “When I met [Nick] that night,” at Miyagi’s, Erenstoft said, “he talked to me. He said, ‘Sean, I want to be able to sleep. I want to come clean. I want to figure out a way to do it. I don’t trust the authorities.’ And he said, ‘Will you help me find a cop that you trust, because I have a feeling that I’m about to make this cop famous.” His rendition of Nick’s dialogue didn’t sound quite like an 18-year-old boy to me, but I guessed this was just his interpretation of their conversation.

  “No one has solved these capers up until now,” the lawyer went on, supposedly quoting Nick, “and I need to come clean for my own life’s sake. . .I need to make the victims whole,” in other words, to confess and return their stuff. “I’ve realized this is fucking serious.”

  “So I met him the next day, I met him in private,” Erenstoft said, stabbing at a piece of pricey raw fish with his chopsticks. “He had gathered from meeting me that I was a sensitive kind of attorney. It wasn’t just about deny, deny, deny—I happen to be a judge also here in L.A. . . . Sometimes I tell the D.A.’s I work with, my guy did not do it and I’m willing to do battle, and sometimes I say, my guy fucked up, I’m not gonna fight as hard on this one. . . . When Erenstoft’s gonna try a case, he does. And then sometimes you want a guy like me saying, here’s my sense of justice: I know the case better than you. I know my client better than you, and you need to take my lead. You need a guy like me to dole out what justice should look like.”

  Erenstoft said that after his second meeting with Nick, he contacted Brett Goodkin at Hollywood Station. He knew Goodkin was not a detective, he said, he’d just been one of the officers at Nick’s arrest. “I knew he was a good cop,” said Erenstoft. “Andy Griffith, that’s who we’re dealing with. . . . I said we’re definitely not going to the detectives on this case ’cause these jackasses don’t know what they’re doing.

  “After this he’s gonna have a stripe,” Erenstoft said of Goodkin.

  But according to Goodkin, it was just a coincidence that Erenstoft reached out to him. “Sean called me ’cause Nick Prugo’s mom had my business card,” Goodkin told me. “I left it with her when we arrested him; it was standard procedure. That’s the only business card they had.” But because Erenstoft called Goodkin with Nick’s confession, Goodkin became the lead investigator on the case.

  4

  On October 6, 2009, Goodkin and Detectives Steven Ramirez and John Hankins went up to Erenstoft’s offices on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. His suite was in a brown brick high-rise along a main drag dotted with palm trees and bank branches. The meeting was voluntary, arranged by Erenstoft. The men met with Erenstoft first, without Nick there, in his office, where he laid out his client’s general involvement in the crimes to which he was about to confess. Erenstoft asked if Nick’s cooperation could be relayed to the District Attorney’s Office. The detectives said that “should Prugo’s level of cooperation rise to the level of which Erenstoft represented,” they would write a “Letter of Accomplishment” to the D.A. and “would not oppose a disposition favorable to Prugo”; however they “did not offer immunity or otherwise promise leniency for Prugo,” according to the LAPD’s report.

  After their initial conversation, the men went into a conference room to meet with Nick. He “seemed like a smart kid, very matter-of-fact,” Goodkin said. In a straightforward manner, “like he was describing a trip to the store,” Goodkin said, Nick proceeded to tell them a story that surprised even these seasoned law enforcement officials. He talked about doing a string of burglaries of the homes of some very famous people—Paris Hilton, Audrina Patridge, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Lindsay Lohan. He said that he had also participated in the burglary of a house on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino (Nick DeLeo’s). He confessed to robbing the home of an architect named Richard Altuna. He said that he’d mistakenly thought Altuna’s house in the Hollywood Hills belonged to the celebrity D.J. Paul Oakenfold, but realized his mistake when he saw mail in the house that was addressed to its true owner. He said that he and his friends robbed the place anyway, taking a Nikon digital camera, which they sold to their fence for $700. They also discovered $5,000 in cash in the house, which, Nick claimed, they split among themselves.15

  Nick said that he had been accompanied on these burglaries by several different accomplices—among them Rachel Lee, Diana Tamayo, Alexis Neiers, and Courtney Ames. (It was in a later meeting that he alleged the involvement of Tess Taylor.) He told of how Jonathan Ajar, a club promoter he knew, had acted as their fence, and how he—Nick—had planned out a bigger robbery of Paris Hilton’s jewelry along with Ames and a bouncer he knew only as “Roy” (Lopez). (Ames and Lopez’s attorneys, Schwartz and Diamond, again, deny their clients had anything to do with the burglary of Hilton.)

  “He confessed to crimes we didn’t even know he committed,” Goodkin said. “He told the truth even when it only hurt himself. He seemed like he wanted to come clean.”

  “He went into it not getting any assurances,” Erenstoft told me that night at Iroha. He seemed to be struggling with conflicting feelings about having allowed his client to confess. “I’m a righteous guy,” he said. “I feel like I see justice. . . . I believe I have the pulse on what is right and wrong. . . . I know the difference between chaos and order and I have a complete true sense of how it should be helped. . . . I am pompous enough to think that I have a greater sense of justice here.

  “I take a lot of responsibility,” he said. “I know I have the respect of prosecutors and judges. He’s a fair guy. Justice seems to get done on his watch. This is the first time I’m thinking, wow, my client’s neck is so far out there and I’m letting him take so much responsibility—if he gets his neck cut off on this thing I’m going to scream bloody murder!”

  As the night went on, Erenstoft told me about his p
ast. He seemed haunted by his childhood. He said, “I got kicked out of the house at seventeen. You didn’t deserve it but you still think you did something wrong—why do I feel so alone? I know Nick Prugo. When Nick said, ‘I need to sleep, I don’t know what to do,’ I understood.” Then he left the restaurant and went home in his Porsche.

  5

  After our meeting that night, I went back to my hotel and thought about Erenstoft’s story; it seemed odd. Why would Nick confess to crimes the police didn’t know about and might never know about? And why would his lawyer let him do that? Erenstoft claimed that Nick had confessed in order to ease his conscience, and that he, Erenstoft, had endorsed this plan because of his “greater sense of justice.” It all sounded very noble. I wanted to believe it.

  I called my friend Kent Schaffer in Houston. Kent’s a well-known criminal defense attorney. I met him while doing another story. I wanted to know what he thought of Nick’s confession. “In thirty years practicing criminal defense law,” Kent said, “I’ve never told someone to confess. Once you confess, your options are down to nothing—you’re at the mercy of the state. ‘Okay, I did it, everything I am accused of doing’—there’s not much the lawyer can do for you after that. You just have to hope that the state takes over representation of your client’s interests. It makes no sense. If the guy had kept his mouth shut he never would have had a prosecutable case.”