The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-obsessed Teens Ripped off Hollywood and Shocked the World

And then, Nick said, the thought occurred to him just to look under the mat. It was like finding Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket when the glinting metal of the key appeared. Dumb was right.

“Wow.”

Inside it was like a Barbie Dreamhouse. There were images of Paris everywhere, framed photographs of Paris on the walls; framed magazine covers of Paris cover stories; framed pictures on tables of Paris with all her famous friends—there was Mariah Carey, Jessica Simpson, Fergie, Nicky Hilton (Paris’ sister), Nicole Richie (were they still close?). There were pictures of Paris in the bathrooms. Her face was silkscreened on couch pillows.

There was a lot of pink, and there were crystal chandeliers in almost every room. Even the kitchen. It was like stepping into the girliest Hilton hotel you’ve ever seen. Nick said they walked around slowly, marveling that they were really there. “There was that percentage of wow, this is Paris Hilton’s house, but as soon as I put my foot in the door, I was just wanting to run out…. It was horrifying.”

He wanted to leave, he said, but now Rachel was running up the stairs. Upstairs were the bedrooms, and the bedrooms had the closets, and the closets had the clothes. Nick said he followed Rachel to the master bedroom—it was chilly in there and smelled like the perfume counter in a department store. The room led out on to a balcony overlooking the pool and, beyond that, the rolling hills of the Valley, shimmering with lights. As they gazed in the direction of their own homes from the vantage point of one of the most Googled people on the planet, they couldn’t help but laugh.

The little dogs—Chihuahuas and a Pomeranian, Tinkerbell, Marilyn Monroe, Prince Baby Bear, Harajuku Bitch, Dolce and Prada—scurried around, regarding them curiously, but they didn’t bark. They must have been used to having strangers in the house. (About a year later, Hilton would build the dogs a 300-square-foot, $325,000 miniature of her home in the backyard. Philippe Starck would provide the furniture.)

“Oh my God!”

Nick said that Rachel squealed with delight when she found the closets. One was the size of a small room and the other the size of a small clothing store. It was like that scene where the dwarves discover the dragon’s treasure-laden lair in The Hobbit. One closet had a chandelier, and the other had furniture, as if Paris might want to just sit in there and look at all her stuff. The smaller closet had floor-to-ceiling shelves with hundreds of pairs of shoes, all lined up like trophies—Manolos, Louboutins, Jimmy Choos, a pair of YSLs shaped like the Eiffel Tower. There were shoes of every color—satiny, shiny, pointy shoes. Huge shoes. Size 11.

The bigger closet was full of racks and racks of clothes. Nick had to smile. “Rachel, do your thing,” he said. And “she was rummaging through everything, very, very into it, very focused, very ‘This is my mission.’ ” She was plowing through the racks of the wild, sparkly, feathery clothing, exclaiming over all the designers—this was Ungaro, that was Chanel! There were dresses, gowns, blouses, and coats by Roberto Cavalli and Dolce & Gabbana and Versace and Diane von Furstenberg and Prada…. Nick said Rachel recognized some of the pieces from Paris’ public appearances; she followed these things; she knew which one Paris had worn to the VMAs and the Teen Choice Awards.

He said she said it was like “going shopping.”

Now he was starting to get nervous again. He decided to go and be the lookout from the top of the stairs; from there, you could see through the big windows to the front of the house. So Nick stationed himself there. He was “sweating unnaturally,” he said. “Every five minutes I was yelling down the hall, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here! I want to leave! Fuck this, I don’t care anymore!’ And she was like, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, let’s keep going….”

He resented the way that Rachel was always in charge, no matter what they did—he “hated that,” he said—but what could he do? This was “the girl [he] loved,” and he didn’t want to lose her. And although he’d never tested it, there was something about Rachel that said that if you didn’t do what Rachel wanted, she would walk. It wasn’t that he minded Rachel taking a few of Paris’s things—look at Paris’s house; she “had everything.” And she “didn’t really to contribute to society,” she wasn’t “some great actor like Anthony Hopkins or Johnny Depp, someone that’s really good at their craft.” She was an “heir head,” like the tabloids said, a “celebutard.”

“It wasn’t like a malicious thing for me,” Nick said. “I wasn’t out to get, like, a working-class American.”

But Nick did not want to get caught. He yelled again for Rachel to “hurry up and let’s get out of here!” But he said she just answered, “This is fine, this is okay, why are you tripping out?”

And then he saw on the wall of the stairwell the portrait of Paris scowling down at him. She was wearing a little black cocktail dress and sitting on a settee with her legs folded underneath her. She looked like a Park Avenue princess who has become very displeased about something. She was staring, glaring, as if to say, “How dare you come in my house and touch my stuff, bitch? I’m gonna get you….”

Nick bolted back down the hall to Rachel. She had selected a designer dress, he said—he couldn’t remember which, “there would be so many”—and a couple of Paris’ bras. He insisted that now it was time to leave—but not before they checked inside Paris’ purses. They knew from experience—for yes, they’d done this kind of thing before—that people with money tend to leave money lying around the house. And, sure enough, in the closet with the shoes and the sunglasses where Paris also kept her many bags—Fendi, Hermes, Balenciaga, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and on and on—they found “crumpled up cash, fifties, hundreds,” “which looked to us like she went shopping that day, and this was just her spare change.” Nick would remember the smell of the expensive leather, Rachel oohing and aahing over the labels, and the crinkling sound of the bills. They came away with about $1,800 each—a good haul.

And now it really was time to go. But first they couldn’t resist checking out the rest of the house. They wandered around—it was spooky, as if Paris were there somewhere, watching them. Paris could walk in at any time. They discovered the nightclub room with the disco ball and the padded bar. They thought about all the famous people who had been in there—Britney, Lindsay, Nicole, Nicky, Benji Madden (the Good Charlotte guitarist and then Paris’s boyfriend), Avril Lavigne…. They couldn’t help but imagine themselves there again someday, chilling, dancing, with Paris.

Nick took a bottle of Grey Goose vodka for himself, and they left.

About a year later, in October 2009, I found myself driving along the 101 North from L.A., on my way to Calabasas. It was a fine, clear day. I had a cup of coffee in the cup holder beside me, traffic was humming, and the craggy Santa Monica Mountains lay before me like giant scoops of butter pecan ice cream. They were kind of pretty, and that was not what I was expecting. I’d never been to the Valley before. All I knew was its reputation, that it was the West Coast’s bookend to New Jersey, a place full of shopping malls and spoiled teens speaking Valley Girl. Bob Hope, a Valley resident for more than sixty years, had called it “Cleveland with palm trees.”

Vanity Fair had put me on the story of “the Bling Ring”—that was what the Los Angeles Times was calling a band of teenaged thieves that had been caught burglarizing the homes of Young Hollywood. Between October 2008 and August 2009, the bandits had allegedly stolen close to $3 million in clothes, cash, jewelry, handbags, luggage, and art from a number of young celebrities including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Pirates of the Caribbean star Orlando Bloom. They’d stolen a Sig Sauer .380 semi-automatic handgun that belonged to former Beverly Hills, 90210 cast member Brian Austin Green. They’d taken intimate things: makeup and underwear. It seemed they just wanted to own them, wear them.

The Bling Ring kids were from Calabasas, a ritzy suburb about thirty minutes from L.A., and that’s why I was headed there. There’d never been a successful burglary ring in Hollywood before, and somehow it made sense that it would be a bunch of Valley kids. I wasn’t sure why it did, but I thought if I went to Calabasas I might find out.

Up until the 1940s, I’d read, the Valley was “out there,” ranchland where settlers went to grow oranges and raise chickens and families. Then Hollywood discovered it as an appealing hideaway with bigger houses—Clark Gable and Carole Lombard made a love nest there, and so did Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Jimmy Cagney moved out to play gentleman farmer, Barbara Stanwyck to run a thoroughbred ranch, but somehow the place never became glamorous. Something was always off. After the war, the population exploded, and the Valley became the defining American suburb, a sunny Eden of split-level homes, electric blue swimming pools, and kids living seemingly perfect childhoods. The Brady Bunch were tacitly Valley folk.

Frank Zappa’s song “Valley Girl” (1982) introduced the world to a young white Southern California female whose main interests were shopping, pedicures, and social status: “On Ventura, there she goes/She just bought some bitchen clothes/Tosses her head ’n flips her hair/She got a whole bunch of nothin’ in there….” Zappa learned about Valley Girls from his then 14-year-old daughter Moon Unit, who encountered them at parties, bar mitzvahs, and the Galleria mall in Sherman Oaks. The film Valley Girl, released in 1983—adding “space cadet” and “gag me with a spoon” permanently to the lexicon—explored Valley kids’ longing to be part of the supposedly cooler, star-studded world of Hollywood, so close but so far away.

Calabasas (population 23,058) was said to be a typical Valley hamlet, but with more celebrity residents, including (then) Britney Spears, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett and their already famous kids, country singer LeAnn Rimes, Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe and Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi, former Nickleodeon star Amanda Bynes…. Weirdly, Calabasas was also a Fertile Crescent for reality television. One of the first big reality shows featuring a (sort of) famous person, Jessica Simpson, and her then husband Nick Lachey, was shot there: Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica (2003–2005). So was Spears’ burps-and-all look at life with her then husband Kevin “K-Fed” Federline: Britney and Kevin: Chaotic (2005). And so is the Queen Mary of all reality television: Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007–). In each of these shows, Calabasas looks like Xanadu with SUVs, a place of SoCal-style easy living, where everybody’s wealthy.

And Calabasas is rich, relatively speaking; the median income is about $116,000, more than twice the national average. According to the online Urban Dictionary (albeit an opinionated source), “The typical Calabasas resident is young, rude, rich…. You’ll see … 10-year-old girls with their Louis Vuitton purses and Seven jeans giggling to their friends on their iPhones.”

It was interesting to see how media coverage of the Bling Ring was playing up the burglars as “rich.” Said the New York Post: “A celebrity-obsessed group of rich reform-school girls allegedly waged a year-long, A-list crime spree through the Hollywood Hills, ripping off millions in cash and jewels from the mansions of such stars as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan….” People always seemed fascinated by stories about rich kids. I should know, I’d done a few myself. Editors seemed to like such stories, especially if the kids were behaving badly. Readers seemed to love to hate these kids. I once received a letter, in response to one of my stories about bad rich kids in Manhattan, from a World War II veteran demanding, “Can the prep school gangsters fly a B-29?” That was a very good question.

But it was clear the appeal of the Bling Ring story wasn’t just the wealthy kids; it was one of those stranger-than-fiction tales that hits the Zeitgeist at its sweet spot, with its themes of crime, youth, celebrity, the Internet, social networking (the kids had been advertising their criminal doings on Facebook), reality television, and the media itself, all wrapped up in one made-for-TV movie (which didn’t exist yet, but would). The wall between “celebrity” and “reality” was blurring faster than you could say “Kim Kardashian.” Celebrities were now acting like real people—making themselves accessible nearly all the time; even Elizabeth Taylor tweeted (“Life without earrings is empty!”)—and real people were acting like celebrities, with multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts and sometimes even television shows documenting their—real and scripted—lives. It was all happening at warp speed, affecting American culture on a cellular level and, if you wanted to get fancy about it, begging the age-old question of “What is a self?” (And, “If I post something on Facebook and no one ‘likes’ it, do I exist?”) The Bling Ring had crossed a final Rubicon, entering famous people’s homes, and their boldness felt both disturbing and somehow inevitable.

News of the kids, so far, didn’t offer many details, and no interviews with the suspects themselves. The six who had been arrested in connection with the burglaries were Rachel Lee, 19—“the gang’s alleged mastermind,” according to the Post; Diana Tamayo, 19; Courtney Ames, 18; Alexis Neiers, 18; Nicholas Prugo, 18; and Roy Lopez, 27, who had been identified as a bouncer. Lee, Prugo, and Tamayo all reportedly knew each other from Indian Hills, an alternative high school in Agoura Hills (it was “a couple of exits away” from Calabasas, a Southern Californian had told me). The only one who had been formally charged was Prugo, with two counts of residential burglary of Lohan and reality star Audrina Patridge (she was one of the girls on The Hills, a sort of real-life Melrose Place about vacuous twentysomethings in L.A.). Prugo was facing up to twelve years in prison. Another suspect in the case, Jonathan Ajar—a.k.a. “Johnny Dangerous,” 27—who had been identified as a nightclub promoter, was wanted for questioning. TMZ was saying he was “on the run.”

The kids’ mug shots didn’t tell much, either, except that they all looked very young and bedraggled in the way people do when they get hauled into jail. Prugo looked rather cunning (later, he would admit that the black-and-white striped T-shirt he was wearing in his mug shot belonged to Orlando Bloom). Lee and Ames—a brown-haired, light-eyed girl, neither pretty nor plain—looked scared. Tamayo wore a defiant expression. Lopez looked thuggish and resigned.

And then there was this wild picture of two of the other girls—it was like a poster for Bling Ring: The Hollywood Movie (which didn’t exist yet, but would as well). It was of Alexis Neiers and her “sister”—actually her friend—Tess Taylor, 19, a Playboy model and “person of interest” in the case. They were coming out of the Van Nuys Area Jail in the wee hours of October 23, after Neiers had been released on a $50,000 bond. It looked like a paparazzi shot—in fact, it was. You had to wonder who had alerted the paparazzi to Neiers’ arrest.

In the picture, Taylor has her arm protectively slung around Neiers’ shoulder as she hustles her past photographers blasting away. Both girls have lots of lustrous dark hair and perfectly shaped eyebrows and perfectly toned, exposed midriffs. Taylor has on a black tracksuit and Ray-Ban sunglasses, although it’s night. Neiers is wearing what appear to be ice blue Juicy sweatpants and a pair of Uggs. She’s holding the end of a black scarf up around her face, dramatically concealing everything but an expertly made-up eye. The girls look like celebrities. It appears as if they think they are. What had not yet been reported was that they were the stars of an upcoming reality show, Pretty Wild, which was being filmed for E!.

“I didn’t do jack shit, it’s a joke,” Neiers told reporters outside the jail.

“You are going to hear about five targets in this case: Rachel Lee, Nick Prugo, Diana Tamayo, Roy Lopez, and Courtney Ames. You are going to hear that these five targets know each other through school, through the neighborhood, with the exception of Roy Lopez, who the other targets know from having frequented a local [Calabasas] restaurant, Sagebrush, where he was working.

“You are going to see photographs of the targets hanging out. You are going to see that they celebrate birthdays together … that they hung out on the computer together, that they eat lunch together.

“They go to hotels together. They party together.

“But you are also going to hear that they commit crimes together, and over the course of the year between the end of 2008 and for about ten months in 2009, they committed burglaries.”

—Opening Statement, L.A. Deputy District Attorney Sarika Kim, Grand Jury proceedings in the People of the State of California vs. Nicholas Frank Prugo, Rachel Lee, Diana Tamayo, Courtney Leigh Ames, and Roy Lopez, Jr., June 18, 2010

Some of the views around the edges of Calabasas are almost rural. You can see fields with horses grazing, swishing their tails in the sun, echoes of the days when the residents wore desert boots instead of Louboutins. It makes you feel, suddenly, very far away from Hollywood. The approach to town turns suburban; the inevitable car dealerships, fast food chains, and shopping malls appear. The mountains as they draw closer grow greener and still prettier. Calabasas, meanwhile, is beige. Everything is overcast with a wash of sameness—a clean and shiny sameness, a corporate sameness. It’s as if Calabasas should have a logo.

Once I got to town, I pulled into the parking lot of a Gelson’s market in order to do a Google Maps search on Nick Prugo, ironically enough. Prugo was said to be the Bling Ring’s surveillance-meister, the one who found the celebrities’ addresses and pictures of their homes on the Internet. TMZ, which was all over this story (they were calling the gang “the Burglar Bunch”), had posted a Google Maps search of Orlando Bloom’s home that Prugo had allegedly done on a stolen computer; they were calling the image a “smoking gun.” (It was a bit of a mystery how TMZ was getting its hands on all these interesting things, but more on that later.)

I’d located Prugo’s address using a garden variety people-finding website. More than a decade before, an editor had asked me to do a story on how easy it was to track down the world’s most elusive literary recluse, Thomas Pynchon, with the click of a mouse. Nothing much had changed since then, except that privacy had all but disappeared. Everybody was spying on everybody. Prugo’s data mining was nothing compared to Facebook’s. “It was information anyone in America could get,” he would tell me later.

As I was sitting there trying to get directions, I looked up and saw two funky-looking, middle-aged people hurrying past my car. A couple of photographers were chasing them, shouting, “Sharon!” “Ozzy!” It was the Osbournes. They’d moved to the Valley in 2007 after the success of their reality show, The Osbournes (2002–2005). I’d never seen paparazzi working in quite so mundane a setting before. The other people in the parking lot just strolled along with their carts as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. Ozzy, wearing his signature-tinted granny glasses, looked a little rattled.

It got me thinking about the Lady Gaga song “Paparazzi” (2008), which was still all over the radio at that time. It seemed like an anthem for our celebrity-obsessed age, or at least for this story I was working on. Gaga equates modern love with a love of fame—to be in love is to be a celebrity stalker, a paparazzi: “I’m your biggest fan/I’ll follow you until you love me/Papa-paparazzi….” Now it was as if everybody had become their own fan. Everybody was broadcasting themselves on social media. Everyone was their own paparazzi.

And I thought of Lady Gaga—born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, four to five years before the Bling Ring kids, in New York. She’d dropped out of college and hustled her way to superstardom. She often talked about how bad she’d wanted it. “In the book of Gaga,” she said in an interview, “fame is in your heart, fame is there to comfort you, to bring you self-confidence and worth whenever you need it.” In Gaga’s world, she was a prophet of fame and fame was a kind of god.

I drove up into the hilly streets of Calabasas, which were lined with lavish homes, some so big they looked like hotels, resort hotels, with enormous driveways and burbling fountains. I gave myself a tour. There were faux Colonial McMansions and Tuscan McMansions, each one like a different theme park attraction. “Living out here is sort of like living at Disneyland,” said a kid in the teenager-produced video, Calabasas: Behind the Glamour, which I’d watched on YouTube. “It’s not like real life.” (In the same video, the kids try and trick Calabasas residents into being mean to a fake homeless person, but they only catch one trying to shove money at him.)

And then there were streets with smaller homes—modest ranch-style ones and Spanish-style ones that looked like the humbler, distant cousins of the opulent spreads. I remembered a line from Double Indemnity (1944), one of my favorite films, where Fred MacMurray says in voice-over, “It was one of those California Spanish houses everyone was nuts about ten or fifteen years ago.” Prugo’s house, on a narrow canyon road, had a wistful look. The lawn was in need of attention. I parked across the street and stared at it awhile, waiting to see if anyone would come out of it. The Bling Ring kids had apparently done the same thing—sat and observed their targets’ homes, scoping for Intel on how to get in and rob, and maybe hoping to catch a glimpse of a star.

On September 17, the LAPD had swarmed Prugo’s house and searched for items belonging to celebrities. They found “several pairs of designer sunglasses, luggage, and articles of clothing.” Prugo denied any involvement in the burglaries at that time. His mother, Melva-Lynn, watched as police led him away in handcuffs. Melva-Lynn ran a dogwalking service. She was from Idaho. Prugo’s father, Frank (or like his son, Nicholas Frank), who was originally from the East Coast, was a senior vice president at IM Global, a film and television sales and distribution company. Founded in 2007, IM Global had handled the international rights for Paranormal Activity—a “supernatural shockumentary” about a couple being haunted in their bedroom at night by a menacing presence. The film would go on to become the most profitable movie of all time, based on return on investment. With a budget of $15,000, it grossed nearly $108,000,000 in the United States and close to $200,000,000 worldwide. It was released on September 25, eight days after Prugo’s arrest. Prugo’s lawyer, Sean Erenstoft, told me Prugo’s father seemed upset that his son’s legal troubles were overshadowing his success.

“He’s having the best year of his life,” said Erenstoft. “Mr. Prugo is completely distraught. He is concerned about his son, but he said, look, my name is Nicholas Frank Prugo and that’s my son’s name too.”

The younger Prugo had been in trouble before. In February 2009, he’d been arrested for possession of cocaine. He’d pleaded guilty and entered an 18-month Deferred Entry of Judgment program, a kind of drug treatment program that allows the offender to avoid a criminal record. TMZ had posted a video, taken off that same allegedly stolen computer, of Prugo sitting at his desk in front of the computer smoking weed and singing along to the Ester Dean dance hit “Drop It Low” (“Drop it, drop it low, girl”). The bedroom behind him is Everyboy’s room, sneakers strewn across the floor. Prugo gazes at his image onscreen, cocking his head this way and that, making “sexy” faces, checking himself out. Inspired, he gets up and lifts up his shirt, showing off his bare midriff. Then he turns around and does a booty dance for the camera. It was like an updated, computer literate version of Tom Cruise’s underwear dance scene in Risky Business (1983).