The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  “Mr. Prugo and his attorney came forward voluntarily,” Deputy District Attorney Kim said in court.

  Nick had fired Sean Erenstoft after finding out that he was being accused of committing several felonies. “When Nick’s parents called in me and Dan Horowitz it was like that scene in Pulp Fiction where they call in the cleaner [Harvey Keitel],” said Dombois. “Nick’s brains were already all over the walls.”

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  In July 2010, Erenstoft was barred for life from practicing law in the state of California. When the news came out, people I’d spoken to on the Bling Ring story were suddenly emailing and texting me again—“Did you hear?” Prosecutors said that while representing a defendant in a stalking case, Erenstoft filed a civil case against the victim in order to pressure her not to testify against his client. They further alleged that Erenstoft then offered to drop the civil case in exchange for favorable testimony at his client’s sentencing. He was originally charged with three felony counts, including attempting to dissuade a witness. “The crime is a felony and because it involves ‘the specific intent to impede justice’ it also involved moral turpitude,” says Erenstoft’s profile on the State Bar of California website. Erenstoft pleaded no contest to one charge of attempting to dissuade a witness, thereby avoiding possible jail time.

  I called Nick and asked him what he thought of this news. “I didn’t even want to confess,” he moaned. “It was Sean’s idea.”

  I asked him if his confession were true.

  “Yeah, it was all true,” Nick said. “I told the truth. But if Sean hadn’t told me to confess, I never would have said anything. I’m so upset right now.”

  When I later asked Erenstoft whether he had pressured Nick to confess, he strenuously denied it. “Nick was adamant to tell his story to Goodkin,” he emailed. “Nick reported he couldn’t sleep and wanted to come clean—but most importantly, he said he wasn’t going to go down alone and was obsessive about the fact that his cohorts were running free.”

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  Nick had been texting me, sounding upset, when it was in the news that Pretty Wild was going to air in March 2010. “Should I be upset, because I kind of am,” he wrote. And in another text: “I guess I’m mad because there [sic] using my misery and making profit off it.” And in another: “Please tell me this crap isn’t getting ratings! What is the world coming to?? :).”

  The fame monster was raging and leaving him out of the limelight. He seemed even more perturbed when the Lifetime movie The Bling Ring was announced in the spring of 2011. “I had no prior knowledge of this and am not affiliated in any way,” Nick told TMZ. “I want to sue if possible.” (He never did.) Meanwhile, Tess Taylor asked the gossip website, “Where’s the casting? I want to audition for the role.”

  The Lifetime movie, which aired on September 26, 2011, starred Austin Butler (formerly of Zoey 101) as a kid who appeared to be based on Nick and Jennifer Grey as his Melva-Lynn Prugo–like mom. The last lines in the last moment of the film gave me pause. They seemed to glamorize what the Bling Ring had done, in a way, by suggesting that having access to a certain lifestyle was irresistible, no matter what the costs. Butler, as the Nick character, stares into the camera in his computer screen and says, “I got to be a completely different person”—cut to images of him wearing stylish clothes, partying in nightclubs. “I was the cool one. I had friends. All I had to do was go through. . . .” He’d been talking about going through the “door” of his computer screen, on the other side of which there was another glamorous dimension, full of celebrities.

  “Wouldn’t you?” he asks.

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  Sofia Coppola didn’t seem at all worried that Lifetime was doing a movie with the same name, on the same subject as the one she was working on. “Oh,” she said when I spoke to her after it came out. “I didn’t watch it.”

  In March 2012, she began filming in Calabasas. When I was in L.A., I went out to watch her film one day. It was striking how very much the set of “Nicki’s house” was like Alexis’ house, complete with Buddhist statues and a brass gong. Nicki was being played by Emma Watson, the then 21-year-old star of the Harry Potter films. Watson, doe-eyed and beautiful, was outfitted like Alexis in a hot pink sweatsuit and Ugg boots. She told me she had been working with an accent coach on how to speak Val-ley Girl.

  They filmed a scene where Nicki accepts a water delivery from a hunky water delivery guy, coming on to him, giving him sultry looks. Leslie Mann, as Nicki’s mother, comes over and angrily zips up the front of Nicki’s pink hoodie. “Back to work,” Mann snaps, telling her daughter to come back and do more homeschooling; their lesson of the day: a study of their role model, Angelina Jolie, complete with cutout magazine pictures of her on a “vision board.” In a single moment, Sofia had managed to capture several of the themes we’d been talking about over the several months when she was writing the script.

  (The real Alexis, by the way, had signed on as a consultant to the film, and seemed to be getting excited about seeing herself portrayed; she’d been re-tweeting Emma Watson’s tweets about Nicki, including this one: “Nicki likes Lip Gloss, Purses, Yoga, Pole Dancing, Uggs, Louboutins, Juice Cleanses, Iced coffee and Tattoos.”)

  I had lunch with the cast and crew out in the backyard on picnic tables. Sofia told me she had met with Nick to hear his story. “He wanted us to send a car service to pick him up like he was a celebrity,” she said smiling.

  Before I left the set that day, Sofia told me that Brett Goodkin was coming out the next day as a consultant on the scene where Nicki is arrested.

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  Goodkin—who in the last year had been promoted from officer to detective by the LAPD—had been hired as a consultant on The Bling Ring, but the plan was never to have him appear onscreen. He was just supposed to oversee the scenes of the Bling Ring defendants’ arrests and make sure that everything was done according to the LAPD’s procedures. Coppola had met with Goodkin previously in L.A. in order to interview him about the case. But on the day he came to the set, it occurred to her and her producers that Goodkin, with his big frame, shaved head, and actual cop clothes, had such a classic cop look that it might add something to the scene. They asked him if he would like to do it and he agreed. He would not be playing “himself,” but a random cop on the scene.

  Goodkin went through the motions of arresting “Nicki,” just as he had arrested some of the real Bling Ring defendants in real life (Prugo, Lopez, and Ames). He came into the house, gruffly told Nicki’s mom (Leslie Mann) to secure the dog (a Yorkshire terrier). Goodkin, an eight-year veteran of the force, had had another life as a jazz musician and singer as well as a radio announcer, so he had some experience in the entertainment world. And he was a pretty natural actor, especially when he shoves a tearful Nicki into the back of a cop car by the back of the head.

  The problem was that Goodkin didn’t tell the L.A. District Attorney’s Office that he had appeared in a film—a film that fictionalized an open case in which he was the lead investigator—and that he was a consultant on it. He apparently had mentioned his consulting work to his captain, but he never received the proper approval. When it somehow broke in the news that he had appeared in The Bling Ring, some of the lawyers for the other defendants jumped on this as a way to discredit Goodkin as a witness. David Diamond, the lawyer for Roy Lopez, subpoenaed payroll records from The Bling Ring production office, which revealed that Goodkin had received $12,500 for his consulting gig rather than the $5,000 to $6,000 he had told his bosses. “ ‘Bling Ring’ Consulting Cop, Could Have Inadvertently Ruined His Own Case,” said The Huffington Post. Goodkin became the subject of an internal investigation and was placed on desk duty.

  “His judgment is as poor as it gets,” Superior Court Judge Larry P. Fidler said in court on July 20, 2012, responding to Diamond’s motion to have the entire case dropped due to Goodkin’s allegedly “outrageous” and “egregious” behavior.

  “It’s not outrageous. It’s not flagrant. It’s not egreg
ious,” Fidler said. “It’s stupid. You can have a field day with him.”

  “My client would certainly agree that in retrospect he was ill-advised, but nothing my client did impaired the integrity of the prosecution,” said Ira Salzman, Goodkin’s lawyer.

  “Goodkin’s media attention went to his head,” said Robert Schwartz, Courtney Ames’ attorney. “He got too big for his britches. He thought he was impervious to everything. As the case unfolded in the court system, Goodkin was seen as a hero in the district attorney’s office because he was the guy who put this case together. But eventually that picture started to crack. He was reading his own press clippings.”

  “I get what the D.A.’s upset about,” Goodkin told me on the phone. “But the hyperbole never subsided, I do get what they’re pissed about it—I messed up. But it has nothing to do with the facts [of the case]. It has to do with perception. I was never alone with any of these people,” meaning the defendants. “Whenever we interviewed anyone, there were about six of us sitting there. Nothing happened in darkness. It was not me against a crime ring—it was me and many detectives.”

  But perception seemed to be on the District Attorney’s mind. The prosecution, led by Deputy District Attorney Barbara Murphy, now seemed to back down in the wake of Goodkin’s blunder. In the latter half of 2012, the three remaining defendants in the case—Tamayo, Ames, and Lopez—were all handed exceptionally good deals. “The D.A. actually came back to us with a better deal than what we had counter-offered,” said Behnam Gharagozli, Tamayo’s lawyer. “I was a little shocked, but really happy for my client.”

  On October 19, 2012, Tamayo pleaded no contest to one count of residential burglary of Lindsay Lohan and received three years probation and 60 days of roadwork. (Her current immigration status is unclear.)

  On November 8, 2012, Roy Lopez pleaded no contest to one count of receiving stolen property and was sentenced to three years supervised probation plus time served in the county jail. “You got a break because of what’s happened with this case,” Judge Fidler told Lopez from the bench, apparently referring to the Goodkin mess.

  “This was a joke at the end of the day,” said one of the other lawyers in the case. “If this were in any other court in any other county, the D.A. would have shrugged and said, ‘And?’ about that stuff with Goodkin. The offers would have gotten a little bit better, but not this much better. The L.A. District Attorney’s office was worried about their image, so they just tried to sweep everything under the rug.” (Jane Robison, the publicist for the D.A.’s office, had no comment.)

  And then there was Courtney Ames. On December 14, 2012, Courtney pleaded no contest to one count of receiving stolen property—it was that leather Diane Von Furstenberg jacket of Paris Hilton’s, the one Courtney’s wearing in the photograph from Les Deux, the same jacket Nick Prugo said she stole from one of those early missions to Paris’ house in the fall of 2008, when the Bling Ring had first discovered “going shopping.”

  Courtney received three years supervised probation. “You caught a break and you know it,” Judge Fidler told Ames in court, again referring to the Goodkin affair.

  “The prosecution never developed the position that Courtney Ames entered the home of any of the crime victims,” said Robert Schwartz. Courtney is now back at Pierce College and “getting straight As,” according to her stepfather, Randy Shields.

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  “Goodbye world,” Nick tweeted on April 15, 2012, before entering the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in L.A. His $200,000 bond had reportedly been revoked by his parents, who had formerly put their house up as collateral. It seems they had grown frustrated with Nick’s repeated drug use (he’d been in and out of rehab programs since being arrested) and thought jail might be the best place for him until he was sentenced.

  Nick had pleaded no contest on March 2, 2012, to two counts of residential burglary for Audrina Patridge and Lindsay Lohan. His plea deal was two years. “My hope is to keep him in the local jail as much as possible,” his attorney, Markus Dombois, told me. “I hope it drags out and Nick, with good time credits, will only serve a year.”

  Before he went into jail, Nick came out to his parents, according to his other lawyer, Daniel Horowitz. “Nick is gay and being able to say it and say it to his parents was a tremendous watershed for him,” Horowitz emailed. “He believes that keeping this hidden led him to act in ways that were self-destructive, e.g., the drinking, partying, trying to seem important, etc. He came out to his parents and there was no resistance by them. They were immediately and tremendously accepting. This is not just Nick saying it. Shortly afterward, I was with Nick and his dad. His dad was so supportive that it touched me . . . a lot.”

  “It’s like this whole Bling Ring thing was one long complicated way of coming out for him,” said a friend of mine who’s gay. “It’s sad.”

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  Rachel Lee is now living in the California Institution for Women in Corona, California (she was originally sent to Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, but was later transferred). On September 24, 2011, she pleaded no contest to one count of burglary of Audrina Patridge, and was sentenced to four years in prison. “The last two years of my life have changed me from an irresponsible and childish drug and alcohol addict towards becoming a responsible adult,” Rachel wrote in a letter to Judge Larry Paul Fidler before she was sentenced. “I was really messed up from so much substance abuse as well as poor choices of friends.”

  At CIW, Rachel may be doing clothing and textile manufacturing, making shirts, shorts, jeans, smocks. Or she may be learning construction. She may be taking computer training or adult education classes. She may be involved in the Drug Treatment and Diversion program or the Prison Puppy program.

  Before entering jail, Rachel reportedly received some coaching from Wendy Feldman, a celebrity “prison consultant” and founder of Custodial Coaching. Feldman has appeared on Today, Nancy Grace, and other news programs. CBS Radio called her the “go-to girl” for people going into custody.

  Just before Rachel entered jail on October 21, 2011, Feldman gave an interview to Fox News’ FOX411 Pop Tarts column online. “[Rachel] is a very little scared girl, and she had a drug problem, a self-esteem problem,” she said. “Rachel is also extremely shy and this gang became a way for her to make friends. It became a rush and it was so easy, but obviously she has learned a lesson. . . .Rachel has gotten lots of therapy; she’s gotten clean and sober and become much closer to her mom. She has taken full responsibility for her actions.

  “To be honest, Rachel has a learning disability,” Feldman went on. “She doesn’t have a particularly high I.Q. and I find it hard to think she could have been the one to instigate the whole thing. She wants nothing to do with the movies or with the media. She accepts full responsibility for what she has done, but she was a young girl who was absolutely fascinated by celebrities.”

  The Rachel who had been described to me by multiple sources—schoolmates, friends, co-defendants, cops—didn’t sound that dumb. I wondered if, faced with the daunting prospect of jail, Rachel was playing the helpless “pretty girl,” again, as Nick said she did when she needed things to go her way. Feldman’s characterization of Rachel’s motivation also sounded a lot like what Nick had been promoting about himself with journalists—including me: she did it because she had a drug problem, she did it to make friends, it wasn’t her idea.

  Although she has never spoken to a reporter, Rachel has already been depicted in two films: Lifetime’s The Bling Ring (2011), and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013). In neither film does she appear to be shy or unintelligent. Without ever saying a word to anyone, Rachel came to symbolize the spoiled, celebrity-obsessed American teenager. It will be interesting to see, when she comes out of jail, if she has anything to say about that.

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  In April 2012, then 20-year-old Alexis married a handsome 37-year-old Canadian businessman, Evan Haines, in Mexico, in front of 20 guests. She told E! News they had met in Alcoholics
Anonymous. “It’s amazing to be in a happy marriage with such a loving husband,” Alexis tweeted in October of last year. She was already pregnant. She Instagrammed a picture of her “baby bump,” as the celebrity magazines call it. “I felt like I’ve always had motherly instincts,” she told E! Online. “So it’s been a very joyous experience.”

  Alexis seemed to have come a long way since she spent time in jail. After she was busted for probation violation on December 1, 2010, and found to have black tar heroin in her home, she was sentenced to a year in rehab. She checked into the SOBA Recovery Center in Malibu, a celebrity rehab center, that same month. She seemed to take her recovery seriously, vlogging about it frequently, sharing her tips for staying sober with her “fans.”

  And then in December 2011, Alexis declared that she had been sober for a year and had completed a course to become a drug and alcohol counselor. She did a very candid interview with her former nemesis, Nik Richie of The Dirty, on his online Nik Richie Radio. Richie was the one who had posted pictures of both Alexis and Tess smoking Oxycontin from a bong. He’s sort of a wannabe Howard Stern, a tough-talking exposer of pseudo-celebrity secrets.

  “I was a drug addict,” Alexis admitted on his show. She said that she had had her first drink at 12, and that by her teens she had become a user of “I.V. heroin, I.V. cocaine, major Valium, major Adderrall.” She said that she was “drinking, drinking, drinking, it was out of control. . . .I was major into Oxies”—the pill form of Oxycontin.

  “I was smoking twenty eighty-milligram Oxies a day,” Alexis said. During the filming of Pretty Wild, she said, she was actually living “at a Best Western at Franklin and Vine,” staying in the hotel room and doing drugs with her “user friends.”