The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  There’s an argument for a client confessing, say other attorneys. Daniel Horowitz, Nick’s current lawyer—also a well-known criminal defense attorney, practicing out of San Francisco—actually defended Erenstoft’s strategy when I asked him about it. “[Erenstoft] counted (perhaps) on his relationships with prosecutors to cure the problem,” Horowitz wrote in an email. “Most prosecutors will do ‘what’s right’ and help an early cooperator regardless of whether promises were made.”

  And yet Horowitz and his colleague Markus Dombois still brought a motion in 2010 to have Nick’s confession suppressed, based on Erenstoft’s failure to adequately represent his client by encouraging him to talk to the police. The motion was denied.

  When I asked Brett Goodkin what he thought of Nick’s confession, he said, “It was the right thing to do.”

  6

  Based of Nick’s confession, the LAPD now moved ahead with searching the homes of the other suspects. Their search warrant for Courtney Ames, Alexis Neiers, Diana Tamayo, Roy Lopez, and Jonathan Ajar dated October 22, 2009, said they were looking for “hats, purses, designer bags and/or luggage, watches, silver and/or gold jewelry, sunglasses, coats, clothing, scarves, personal computers, laptop computers, gloves, photos, cameras, rugs, paintings, and Hilton Family heirlooms” allegedly taken from celebrities’ homes; also “narcotics, dangerous drugs, marijuana, and paraphernalia related to the use and/or sale of such substances as hypodermic syringes, hypodermic needles. . .spoons, balloons, condoms, measuring devices, badges, pipes, cutting agents. . . .as well as large sums of cash.” They were looking for any sort of communication “boasting about the burglaries.” They were afraid the suspects would find out from each other that the heat was on and let each other know, so the searches were to be conducted simultaneously. So many cops were needed for the five-residence sting that Hollywood Station, which has a relatively small force, was pulling officers and detectives out of all its departments, including homicide. The Bling Ring was about to be busted.

  7

  When the police arrived at Diana Tamayo’s Newbury Park apartment, only Diana was at home. They went in with guns drawn, as was their protocol. Diana was cool and collected as showed them into her bedroom, where they found several items they felt were “consistent with that taken during this crime spree.”

  They’d determined beforehand that they only needed to find one thing in each residence in order to make an arrest. In Diana’s room they allegedly found a Chanel makeup bag, Chanel No. 5 perfume, “a Louis Vuitton brown leather purse, stacks of assorted perfumes, including the Paris Hilton signature brand, a Hermes black leather purse, and designer shoes.” They also found a photo album with pictures of Diana posing, out partying, with Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee.

  At Hollywood Station, Diana repeatedly refused to consent to an interview with police. She said she would talk only in the presence of an attorney; her mother was working on getting her one. Diana allegedly told officers, “Those other guys were fuckin’ stupid to talk to you guys. . . .All that stuff in my house I bought at the swap meet.”

  She was in jail for four days, until October 26, when she was released from LAPD custody to U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). Her lawyer, Behnam Gharagozli, would later complain that Goodkin, “with the assistance of Detective James Martinez,” had “improperly obtained knowledge” of Diana’s illegal status and given her over to ICE as a means of intimidating her into confessing. (LAPD Special Order 40 states that “officers shall not initiate police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person.”) In July 2012, Superior Court Judge Larry P. Fidler dismissed the motion to drop the charges against Diana on this basis.

  On October 26, 2009, Diana was released from ICE back into the custody of the LAPD. She had agreed to be interviewed. “You promise this ICE crap isn’t gonna be on me, right? No ICE hold anymore?” she asked Goodkin, according to complaint filed by Gharagozli. “No ICE hold on you. I promised you. I promised your attorney,” Goodkin allegedly said.

  “Her confession was coerced,” Howard Levy, Diana’s lawyer at the time, told me. Levy was, however, present in the room when Diana admitted to cops that she had accompanied her friends Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee on a burglary of the home of Lindsay Lohan. According to Gharagozli’s complaint, Levy had told police, “Okay, she’ll talk, but she’s only going to cop to one of them, Lohan.”

  In her videotaped interview, Diana said that on the night of August 23, 2009, she and Rachel had decided to go out to dinner—“sushi or something.” Diana said that Nick was with them in her Navigator, which she was driving, when Rachel suggested, “Let’s go look at some really pretty houses.” Diana said that she then overheard Nick and Rachel discussing the location of Lindsay Lohan’s home. Nick directed her where to drive, Diana said; and then, all of sudden, there they were, on Lindsay Lohan’s street. Diana said that Nick got out of the car and started walking toward a house—it was Lohan’s house—and then suddenly they all were going toward it.

  “What did you think you guys were gonna do when you walked up to the house?” Goodkin asked.

  “Go into it,” Diana said.

  She said that Rachel had “told her things she had done in the past.”

  “Okay,” Goodkin said, “so you figured that they were probably just gonna break in?”

  “Yes,” Diana replied.

  She claimed it was Rachel, not she, who entered Lohan’s kitchen through a window and then let her and Nick inside. Diana said that she took just one pair of the actress’ shoes from the house that night, but later discarded them in the trash.

  Diana said that she and Rachel had also approached the Toluca Lake home of Ashley Tisdale in late July. She said that Rachel rang Tisdale’s bell, but when a housekeeper answered, they “ran away.” Tisdale would later tell police that the two young women her housekeeper had seen had actually entered her residence before they fled.

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  “Nick was the brains, Rachel was the balls, and Diana was the lookout,” Courtney Ames told the LAPD in her videotaped interview at Hollywood Station.

  As the camera rolled, Courtney stonewalled the room full of cops and detectives asking about her alleged involvement in her friends’ criminal activities. “She was tough. She was smart. She was almost like a lawyer,” said a lawyer for one of the other defendants, who had viewed the tape. “She just kept saying, why should I answer your questions? How will this benefit me?”

  But Courtney was willing to talk about her friends. She told police that she was friends with Rachel Lee, Diana Tamayo, and Nick Prugo; and that one night Nick called her up to say the three of them had burglarized the home of Lindsay Lohan. She said Nick said he had some items in his car from that burglary, and that he was going to bring them over to show her. She said Nick said he had some “presents” for her, and that he came over to her house and showed her the “presents”—designer clothing and jewelry, which Courtney said she couldn’t identify because she didn’t wear jewelry. But Courtney said she never took any of these things for herself. The police had found no stolen evidence at her home.

  Courtney also said she knew that one of her friends had burglarized Paris Hilton, according to the LAPD’s report, which also claimed that Courtney said that some of her friends had burglarized the home of actor Brian Austin Green and his fiancée, Megan Fox. She allegedly said that Nick told her he’d stolen a gun from Green’s house and that the gun was eventually given to Johnny Ajar (her boyfriend at the time). The police were surprised to learn of this sixth celebrity burglary, as Nick had failed to mention it in his lengthy confession.

  There seemed to be no love lost between any of the suspects. “Ames was like, do you know what kind of people these are?” Vince, my cop source, said, “Ames for whatever reason doesn’t have a sense of smell—she can’t smell. And she said that [one of the other girls in the burglary crew] knew about this and took a can of tuna and put it in her car so it would rot so everything would end up sme
lling like rotten fish.” Including Courtney.

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  Roy Lopez said from the beginning that he didn’t want to rat out anyone. Brett Goodkin told the Grand Jury that after Lopez was arrested at a stoplight and taken to Hollywood Station on October 22, “He denied any involvement in any criminal activity at all. He did lay out how he knew Ms. Ames,” from working with her at the Sagebrush Cantina in Calabasas. “He did lay out how he had met Ms. Lee and Mr. Prugo at the Sagebrush initially, because they were friends with Ms. Ames. But during that interview, he would not admit to any crime. So I concluded the interview, and I moved him to, like, a holding tank, which is a tank that is just a little closed-off room with a glass window and a bench, and I sat him in there to get him ready to book him. And at one of the points when I was walking back and forth, he stood up and waved me over. I opened the door and, you know, asked him if everything was okay. I figured he needed to use the restroom or what have you. And it was at that point that he said, ‘Hey, if’—the best of my recollection was, ‘Hey, if you let me make a phone call, I can get all of Paris’ stuff back.’

  “And he went on further to say that he wasn’t a rat and that he wasn’t going to tell me who his accomplices were or what they did, but that he was going to take responsibility for this burglary.

  “So I walked Mr. Lopez back to my desk, and I asked him what number he wanted to call. And he gave it to me and I called that number, handed the phone off to Mr. Lopez, and he proceeded to describe to this person on the other end of the phone, ‘Hey, I need you to go into your garage. Remember that place where I keep my stuff? There’s a bag,’ and he described it, ‘and I need you to bring it to Hollywood Station.’ And then he put the man on the phone with me and I gave him the address.

  “About forty minutes, forty-five minutes later, a young man arrived at Hollywood Station and handed me a very large, garish bag that was filled with jewels.”

  Lopez’s lawyer, David Diamond, says the LAPD lost the audio recording of its interview with his client, “thus preventing us from showing the police report was embellished.” But Diamond did not respond directly to my question of how his client came to be in possession of the Louis Vuitton bag full of Paris Hilton’s jewelry. All he said was, “The bag was returned. No one ever knew the entire contents of the bag.”

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  On the morning of October 23, TMZ posted footage of Courtney, Diana, and Alexis being taken away in the back of a police car after they were all arrested. They were being transferred from Hollywood Station to Van Nuys Station to be held pending bail. They all looked tired and greasy, as if they needed a shower. “Did you do it?” a videorazzo shouted through the car window. Diana sat forward, scowling, apparently answering in an unfriendly fashion. Alexis and Courtney sat back, looking stunned and scared. They said nothing.

  “They put me in the cop car to transfer me to Van Nuys,” Alexis said when I spoke to her at the Polo Lounge in December 2009. “And when I sat in the car, Diana and Courtney were next to me and in that car ride it was extremely unpleasant and not so nice. Words were exchanged on Courtney’s end.” Alexis began to get tearful.

  “When we got to the station,” she said, “when they were booking me and putting me in a cell, they said do you fear for your life? They ask you a number of questions about your health and at that time I said yes I do! And they said with who? And I said with Courtney. I went into the medical facility to get checked up on ’cause I was still feeling dizzy and sick ’cause I still hadn’t eaten at that time. When they gave me my clothes and my blanket, they took me to the cell and they bunked me with Courtney on the top bunk and me on the bottom.” Now Alexis was crying. “And I believed it was intentional. I had just said I feared for my safety because of Courtney! I felt the whole time they were being really tough on me. . . .” (Ames’ lawyer, Robert Schwartz, had no comment.)

  Jeffrey Rubenstein, Alexis’ lawyer, said, “That day I saw her, she looked very young, very frightened, she hardly had any clothes on, and was, like, soaked in sweat and tears. She appeared very frail and vulnerable, not somebody you needed to traumatize anymore.”

  “I looked so fragile,” said Alexis.

  “She looked like she was twelve,” said Rubenstein.

  “Like a baby,” said Alexis.

  “And when Courtney threatened you,” said Andrea, “didn’t she use—” I wondered if she were going to mention Johnny Ajar.

  “Stop it,” Rubenstein said.

  “Stop!” Alexis told her mother. “We’re not talking about that! That’s why you need to keep your mouth shut!”

  While Alexis was being put in a cell, Tess had already been released. At first, she said she didn’t know what the police were talking about, according to the LAPD’s report; but then she relented and said she knew her friends Nick, Rachel, and Diana had been robbing the homes of celebrities. She provided a list, which included Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Brian Austin Green, and Megan Fox. Tess said that once Nick had been arrested, and she learned he wasn’t really a stylist, as she said he’d claimed, she packed up all the clothing he had given her in boxes and ordered him to come and remove them from her garage—which, she said, he did.

  “Yeah. That never happened,” Nick said.

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  Rachel Lee’s father, David Lee, lived in a large white house with a red tile roof in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Las Vegas. There was a pool in the back. There were few trees on the streets, which provided a vista of some lumpy gray hills in the distance. Everything was blue sky and bright sunlight and emptiness.

  Rachel was home alone when the police arrived with guns drawn on the morning of October 22. Detective Ethan Grimes of the Las Vegas Police asked Rachel if she knew why they were there, and he said she calmly told him, “Yes.”

  “My friend Nick was arrested about three weeks ago and he called me from jail and told me that the police had done a search warrant on his home,” Rachel said, according to Grimes. She said that she had been watching TMZ and “ ‘they’ [were] saying she [was] a ‘person of interest’ ” in the burglaries of the homes of celebrities, the detective said. Grimes said that when he asked Rachel if she’d been involved in any of the burglaries or been in any of the celebrities’ homes, she said, “No”; and when he asked if the police were going to find any stolen property at her house that day, she said, “No.”

  “While we were waiting for the LAPD detectives,” Grimes wrote in his report of the warrant service, “I had explained to Lee that it appeared that the LAPD had a strong case against her and that her cooperation in helping us recover any of the stolen property might help her in the long run. She said she didn’t know anything about the stolen property. Before the LAPD detectives arrived, she asked me, ‘Hypothetically. Let’s say I might know where this property is located and who has it, how could that help me?’ ”

  Grimes said that he told Rachel that detectives on the case were “trying to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property for these victims,” and that if she could help them locate it, he was sure that “they would definitely say that her cooperation helped them locate it.”

  Then, he said, Rachel fell silent, and sat and watched as the police arrived and began to search her father’s home for evidence.

  Detectives from Las Vegas and Los Angeles found pairs of “high-end designer jeans,” a custom-made black mink coat, and a box containing less than an ounce of marijuana that Rachel admitted was hers. “I have a prescription for it and bought it in California,” Grimes said she told them.

  In a residential trashcan outside the back of the house, Detective Steven Ramirez from Los Angeles found two photos among the trash. They were photographs of Paris Hilton, nude from the waist up. Rachel “saw me bring the photographs in from the outside and put them on the table with the other recovered items,” Ramirez said.

  “And did you notice any change in her demeanor from the time when you arrived to the time that those items were pla
ced in front of her?” asked Deputy District Attorney Sarika Kim during Grand Jury proceedings on July 22, 2010.

  “She seemed deflated at that point in time,” said Ramirez. “Her shoulders slumped, and she kind of put her head down when she saw me bring those in.”

  At that point, police felt they had enough evidence to arrest Rachel, and they did so, handcuffing her.

  “If I tell you guys where the stuff is, will you let me go?” Rachel allegedly asked.

  Rachel’s father, David Lee, a middle-aged man with a long ponytail, arrived at home while the police were searching his house. “Don’t say anything, Dad,” Rachel allegedly told him.

  Meanwhile Officer Craig Dunn of Las Vegas was canvassing the neighbors for information. Dunn reported that he spoke with Judy Shott, a neighbor down the street, who said that “over the past two months she has seen suspicious activity at [Lee’s] residence. Shott said she has seen several Asian subjects loading boxes” into the back of two different pickup trucks, and described one of the subjects as being “a middle-aged Asian male with a long ponytail.” (David Lee did not respond to requests for comment.)

  Rachel “wanted to help us get the property back,” Detective Ramirez said, “but. . .she wanted to speak to her attorney.” Between “half a dozen and ten” times, she said she wanted to speak to her attorney.

  Police also found a sheet on which “Rachel had written her name out several times, but used different middle names,” reported Detective Grimes. There was another piece of paper, Grimes said, which had “a circle drawn in the middle with line spoking [sic] out from the edge of the circle and at the end of the various spokes were names.” They were the names of the other subjects in the crime ring. Rachel’s name was not on the paper.