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

Then the phone starts to ring and Prugo answers it, demanding in a jocular tone, “Why are you ruining my life? I don’t really want to….” Watching it, I wondered if he were talking to Rachel Lee and she was inviting him out to a burglary.

After a while I drove on to Rachel’s house. She lived on the west side of Calabasas, not far from Agoura Hills, in a development bounded by a couple of two-lane highways. The house was large and boxy, like the cookie-cutter homes on Weeds. (In fact, the satellite picture from the show’s opener for seasons 1 through 3 was a shot of Calabasas Hills, a gated community in Calabasas.) On September 17, the LAPD had served a warrant here, too, but Rachel’s mother told police that Rachel had moved to live with her father in Las Vegas. You had to wonder if she was running.

Rachel’s mother, Vickie Kwon, was reportedly a North Korean immigrant—an unusual thing to be, since North Korea has strict emigration laws—and the owner of a couple franchises of the tutoring company Kumon. It was “the world’s largest after-school math and reading academic enrichment program,” according to its website. Kwon sounded like an immigrant success story, which no doubt made it awkward for her that, while she was helping other people’s children excel academically, her daughter had been kicked out of Calabasas High School for disciplinary problems and transferred to Indian Hills. In July 2009, Rachel had been arrested for shoplifting makeup at a Sephora in Calabasas and sentenced to a year’s probation. On October 22, she was arrested at the Vegas home of her father, David Lee, a businessman.

I drove on to Diana Tamayo’s residence, an unremarkable-looking apartment building near a freeway in Newbury Park, about fifteen minutes west of Calabasas. Tamayo shared a two-bedroom rental unit with her parents and two younger brothers. Her parents had been described to me by a cop on the case as “hardworking illegals” from Mexico. Her mother, Aracely Martinez, was a swap meet vendor. Tamayo drove an expensive car, a Navigator.

In her bedroom, police said they found “several items allegedly belonging to celebrities,” including Hermes, Chanel and Louis Vuitton bags, Paris Hilton brand perfume, and four pairs of designer heels. After being arrested on October 22, Tamayo spent four days in jail until her family could raise her $50,000 bail. The LAPD discovered her to be an undocumented immigrant, exposing the illegal status of other members of her family. (She’d come to the United States when she was six; her brothers were born here.)

She’d been class president at Indian Hills and earned a $1,500 “Future Teacher” scholarship after graduating in 2008. A teacher had called her a “spectacular student.” She’d been named “Best Smile” in the 2007 yearbook and voted, along with her boyfriend Bobby Sanchez, “Cutest Couple.” According to my cop source she was “best buddies with Rachel.” They were arrested shoplifting together at Sephora in July, and Tamayo had also been sentenced to a year’s probation.

Courtney Ames lived in a small but centrally located Calabasas home on a climbing mountain road. There was a lone rocking chair on the bare white front porch, which seemed like a failed attempt at coziness. I’d heard her stepfather was Randy Shields, a former U.S. Amateur Light Welterweight boxer who beat Sugar Ray Leonard for the National AAU title in 1973. I’d watched a YouTube video of Shields going 12 rounds with a powerhouse named Thomas Hearns, another former welterweight champion, in 1981. Howard Cosell, who’d announced the fight, said, “As you look at that kid you have to give him all the credit in the world,” watching a bloodied Shields being led away after the fight. Now Shields sometimes worked as a bodyguard. In 1994, he’d told the Los Angeles Times he wrote screenplays in his spare time.

Ames had graduated from Calabasas High in 2008. That same year, she was arrested for allegedly fighting with a co-worker. She pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of disturbing the peace and was sentenced to 24 months probation. “She was always looking for trouble and always looking to fall into the wrong crowd,” one of her neighbors had told the Post. “People would make fun of her. She alienated herself on purpose.” She drove an Eclipse, a gift from her stepfather, who “bought her everything,” a source told The Daily Beast.

In 2009, Ames was arrested for D.U.I. and sentenced to community service. Making light of paying her debt to society, she’d posted on her Facebook page: “Cal trans”—the state agency responsible for road maintenance—“at 5 am you can all look for me on the side of the road ill be in that hot orange vest picking up [after] all you dirty motherfuckers.” She was arrested at home on October 22 in connection with the Bling Ring burglaries.

It wasn’t clear yet how she knew the other suspects, but she knew Roy Lopez from a former job. In 2008, Ames worked as a waitress at a local Calabasas bar and restaurant, Sagebrush Cantina—a rowdy pizza-margaritas-and-burgers joint with live music and Harley-Davidsons parked out front. Lopez was a bouncer there. He was essentially homeless, my cop source said: “He lives on people’s couches. He’s the only person who ‘needed’ to steal.” He had a minor juvenile arrest record, but had never been convicted of a crime. “A review of Lopez’s criminal history reveals that he is a Pinnoy Boys gang member who uses the street name of ‘Bugsy,’ ” said the LAPD’s report on the Bling Ring case. (Lopez’s lawyer, David Diamond, denied his client had any gang affiliation.)

“While this activity started as a twisted adventure for Prugo and his small group of friends fueled by celebrity worship,” the LAPD’s report said, “it quickly mushroomed into an organized criminal enterprise and—inevitably—the introduction of hard-core criminals, such as Jonathan Ajar and Roy Lopez.” (Diamond called this characterization of his client “wrong.”)

Lopez was arrested on October 22, along with all the others in the Bling Ring sting, after being located sitting in a car at a stoplight by a police surveillance team. “Is this about the Paris Hilton thing?” he spontaneously inquired, according to LAPD Officer Brett Goodkin.

Finally, I drove by the home of Alexis Neiers in Thousand Oaks, about 20 minutes west of Calabasas. Thousand Oaks is another prosperous bedroom community that has basked in the light of many local stars, including Heather Locklear, Sophia Loren, and Wayne Gretzky. Neiers’ home was on a rolling road with a cul-de-sac, flanked by camouflage-colored hills. It was a two-story, yellow stucco house with a tile roof and a lot of foliage around the front porch. Andrea Arlington Dunn, Neiers’ mother, was a former Playboy model, sometime masseuse and holistic health care practitioner. She was married to Jerry Dunn, a television production designer who had worked on Disney shows, including Hannah Montana and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.

Neiers had been homeschooled. She had a little sister, Gabrielle, then 15. Neiers’ connection to the other burglary suspects was still unclear. On her MySpace page, she had described herself this way: “I am currently working as a full-time model and actress but in my spare time (when I have any haha) I am a Pilates, pole dance and hip-hop instructor.” Her father, Mikel Neiers, a director of photography on Friends between 1995 and 2000, told People, “[Alexis] was in the wrong place at the wrong time, associating with the wrong people. She got sucked into this. We’re standing by her. I’m sure [the case against her] is going to be thrown out of court.”

She had no criminal record except for a misdemeanor warrant for “Driver in Possession of Marijuana.” On October 22, she was arrested at home after police found a black and white Chanel necklace allegedly belonging to Lindsay Lohan and a Marc Jacobs purse allegedly owned by former star of The O.C. Rachel Bilson in her little sister’s bedroom.

I headed over to the Commons, the snazzy local mall, hoping to run in to some teenagers who knew the Bling Ring kids or could offer some speculation about why they did it—which is what everybody wanted to know. Why would a bunch of kids who had everything risk everything to steal a bunch of famous people’s clothes?

But it was clear from driving by their homes that the kids weren’t as rich as everyone seemed to want to believe. Everybody wanted them to be the like kids on Gossip Girl, but it seemed they lived more like typical teenagers. They were better off than many kids, at the dawning of the Great Recession; but they didn’t appear to be wealthy in the way of the new elite class that had been engaging in the deregulated accumulation of capital for the better part of three decades. They weren’t as rich as other people in Calabasas, or their victims, either. Which made them wannabes.

The first person I ran into at the Commons wasn’t a teenager, however, but Kourtney Kardashian, sister of Kim. “Looking good, Kourtney,” said a paparazzo in tow. Being in Calabasas was like having a strange dream where celebrities popped out from every corner, like funhouse clowns. Kardashian was very pregnant (with her first child with her boyfriend, former teen model Scott Disick) and wearing what appeared to be a small fortune in tight-fitting maternity wear. She was carrying a bag that cost about the same as many Americans’ monthly salaries. She was coming out of the mall entrance laden down with shopping bags. Her lip gloss glimmered in the sunlight.

Later, I would learn that Kardashian’s Calabasas home had been robbed on October 18, 2009, and that the burglary bore all the marks of a Bling Ring job. Except for Prugo, none of the kids in the gang had been arrested at the time of the heist. One-hundred-eight-thousand dollars in diamond jewelry, Rolex and Cartier watches had been stolen. Cops were never able to put any of the Bling Ring kids at the scene, but they suspected a connection (and still do; the culprits in that burglary have never been apprehended).

“It’s boring here,” said the girl in Starbucks. “There’s nothing to do. A lot of people drink.” Now I was sipping sugary coffee drinks with three teenagers, two girls and a boy. They asked me not to use their real names; they said they could speak more freely that way. I’ll call them Jenny, Justin, and Jill. They were recent graduates of Calabasas High School, all attractive and fit and sporting bright, sporty gear. They were enrolled in a local two-year college, Pierce, in nearby Woodland Hills.

“A lot of people around here get D.U.I.s,” Justin said.

They talked about knowing Courtney Ames and hearing about her recent D.U.I. “I heard her blood alcohol level was point-thirty,” said Jenny. “You can die from that—or at least go unconscious.”

Ames’ Facebook page was full of partying bravado and references to drinking and getting high: “Beer pong, keg, the normal”…. “Wanna smoke a bluuunt.”

“I heard she was, like, a white supremacist,” said Jill. “People called her ‘White Power.’ She had tattoos all over her and was always listening to hip-hop and acting like she was some big gangsta chick.”

One of the arresting officers at Ames’ home on October 22 told me that in her bedroom he found notebook papers filled with numerous “generic white power kinda stuff. And the ‘n’ word.” When he asked her what this was doing there, he said she told him, “I was into that in high school but I’m not into it anymore.” (Robert Schwartz, Ames’ lawyer, had no comment.)

“She was always talking about going into Hollywood to party,” said Jenny.

“Most people don’t want to go into Hollywood,” said Jill. “We’re like in a bubble out here. We’re in a bubble.”

“People hang out at the mall,” said Jenny. “Hang out at Starbucks.”

“Go to Malibu or Zuma Beach in the summer. Go to the Promenade in Westlake,” said Jill.

“Make bonfires,” Jenny said.

I asked them if it was strange growing up in a community surrounded by so many celebrities.

“It is strange,” Justin said. “There’s a lot of people with money who think they’re better than everyone else. It’s the haves and have-nots.”

“They act like they’re, like, the people on The Hills,” said Jill. “They wear, like, three-hundred-dollar jeans.”

I asked them what they thought motivated the Bling Ring kids.

“Kids are very influenced by the media,” said Justin, looking thoughtful. “They’re constantly seeing movies and TV shows telling them a certain lifestyle is better, and if you don’t live that lifestyle you can’t be happy. You’re like a loser. So people want what they don’t have.”

“Everybody wants to be famous,” said Jenny.

“No,” said Jill. “Everybody thinks they are famous. I call it ‘FOF’—Famous on Facebook. It’s like they think they can just put themselves out there and don’t even have to work for it.”

I told them I’d just seen Kourtney Kardashian.

“We see them all the time,” said Jill. “They have really big butts.”

“I saw Britney at the gas station,” Jenny said. “Even though she’s gained some weight I still think she’s really cute.”

When I got back to my hotel in L.A. that night I thought about what it must be like growing up in an America where everybody wanted to be famous. An awards show was on, the American Music Awards. I watched the stars gliding up the red carpet, and thought of Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee watching it, somewhere, transfixed. Then Jennifer Lopez was singing her song “Louboutins” (2009): “I’m throwing on my Louboutins … Watch this Benz/Exit that driveway….” I turned it off.

If the kids at the Calabasas Commons were right, then everybody not only wanted to be famous, but thought it was within their reach. It’s telling that the most popular show on television between 2003 and 2011—in fact, the only show ever to be number one in the Nielsen ratings for eight consecutive seasons—was American Idol, a competition program celebrating the attainment of instant notoriety. “This is America,” said Idol co-host Ryan Seacrest in 2010, “where everyone has the right to life, love, and the pursuit of fame.” As proof of this, Seacrest is also the executive producer of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

The narrative of fame runs deep in American culture, dating back to A Star Is Born (1937) and beyond (arguably to the spread of photography in the 1850s and 1868’s Little Women—Jo wants to be a famous writer—which isn’t quite the same as wanting to be on The Real Housewives of Atlanta). But it’s safe to say there’s never been more of an emphasis on the glory of fame in the history of American popular culture. There are the countless competition shows (The X Factor, America’s Got Talent, The Voice, America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway); awards shows; reality television, on which even “hoarders” and “American pickers” can become famous. There are Justin Bieber and Kate Upton, self-made sensations through the wonders of self-broadcasting. Explaining the success of YouTube in 2007, co-founder Chad Hurley said, “Everyone, in the back of his mind, wants to be a star.” There’s the new 24/7 celebrity news industry exemplified by TMZ and gossip blogs. There’s the way in which even legitimate news venues have become infused with celebrity reporting.

Unsurprisingly, the massive growth of the celebrity industrial complex hasn’t failed to affect kids. To put it mildly, kids today are obsessed with fame. There’s already a fair amount of research about this—it seems we’re obsessed with how obsessed kids are with becoming famous. A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds said their most or second-most important life goal—after becoming rich—was becoming famous. In a 2005 survey of American high school students, 31 percent said they “expect” to be famous one day. For his book Fame Junkies (2007), author Jake Halpern and a team of academics conducted a survey of 650 teenagers in the Rochester, New York area. Among their findings: Given the choice of becoming stronger, smarter, famous, or more beautiful, boys chose fame almost as often as they chose intelligence, and girls chose it more often. Forty-three percent of girls said they would like to grow up to become a “personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star”—three times more than as chose “a United States Senator” and four times more than chose “chief of a major company like General Motors.” When asked whom they would most like to have dinner with, more kids chose Jennifer Lopez than Jesus. More girls with symptoms of low self-esteem said they would like to have dinner with Paris Hilton.

Interestingly, kids who read tabloids and watch celebrity news shows like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood are more likely to feel that they, too, will one day become famous. Girls and boys who describe themselves as lonely are more likely to endorse the statement: “My favorite celebrity just helps me feel good and forget about all of my troubles.”

The fame bug is more prevalent in industrialized nations than in the developing world. A 2011 survey by the ChildFund Alliance, a network of 12 child development organizations operating in 58 countries, found that a majority of children in developing countries aspire to be doctors and teachers—when asked about their top priorities, they talked about improving their nations’ schools and “[providing] more food”—while their counterparts in developed nations want to grow up to have the kind of jobs that will make them rich and famous—professional athlete, actor, singer, fashion designer.

Or for the less hardworking, there is burglar.

It occurred to me, while looking over the careers of the Bling Ring victims, that not only were they rich and famous, but nearly all of them had been in movies or on popular TV shows about people who were rich and famous or wanted to be rich and famous. They provided the burglars with an enticing image of fame within fame, imaginary wealth rewarded by actual wealth. There was a double mirroring with all their targets, as deliciously full of things that were bad for you as a double-stuffed Oreo.

There was Paris Hilton, whose “heiress” background was the premise for her reality show The Simple Life (2003–2007), in which she and her friend Nicole Richie invaded the lives of working-class people and made fools of themselves and their hosts. There was Lindsay Lohan, famous since the age of eleven, who had appeared in a movie, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004), about a girl who is consumed with wanting to become a famous actress. And there was Rachel Bilson, who had starred on The O.C., about rich kids in Newport Beach, California. (Josh Schwartz, who created the show, now had another hit with Gossip Girl, about rich kids in New York.)

The Bling Ring had also burglarized the home of Brian Austin Green, who had starred in the 1990s teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210, about rich kids in Beverly Hills. Their real target in hitting Green was his girlfriend (now wife), actress Megan Fox, who had co-starred with Lohan in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, playing a rich mean girl. Then there was Audrina Patridge of The Hills, a reality show about rich girls trying to find themselves in L.A. Spencer Pratt, another regular on the show, was apparently also a target, but the Bling Ring was busted before it had a chance to rob him.

Rachel Lee and Diana Tamayo allegedly fled from the home of High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale in July 2009 after encountering her housekeeper at the front door (Tisdale was in Hawaii). The High School Musical phenomenon hit when the Bling Ring kids were entering high school. The first installment in the three-part Disney franchise appeared in 2006. Although it was geared more toward tweens, no one could escape the hype, which made stars of newcomers Tisdale, Zac Efron, and Vanessa Hudgens (all three were Bling Ring targets, although none was ever successfully burglarized). The squeaky-clean movies, shot in squeaky-clean Salt Lake City, are about high school kids vying for roles in a high school musical, but their true message is about the thrill of fame. Tisdale’s character, Sharpay Evans, a spoiled rich girl seemingly modeled after Paris Hilton (she’s a platinum diva who carries a lapdog), announces she will “bop to the top” and have only “fabulous” things in her life. The final number of the first High School Musical movie declares, “We’re all stars.”

And then there was Miley Cyrus, another target on the Bling Ring’s list. Her wildly popular tween comedy, Hannah Montana, ran on the Disney Channel from 2006 to 2011. It was, famously, about a high school girl who lives a double life as a famous pop star. Miley the regular teen has dark hair, while Hannah the celebrity dons a platinum wig and flashier clothes. “You get the limo out front,” Cyrus sang in the show’s theme song. “Yeah, when you’re famous it can be kinda fun.” Hannah Montana attracted more 6-to-14-year-old viewers than any other show on cable, and 164 million viewers worldwide.

A study of the effect of celebrity culture on the values held by kids found that the TV shows most popular with 9-to-11-year-olds have “fame” as their number one value, above “self-acceptance” and “community feeling.” “Fame” ranked number 15 in 1997. “Community feeling” was number one in 1967. I searched YouTube for a typical episode of The Andy Griffith Show from that year, and found one that showed Aunt Bee fretting over the responsibilities of jury duty (and mind you, this show was a big hit). Meanwhile, a typical episode of Hannah Montana from 2009 has Hannah fretting over her overbooked schedule—how will she juggle a concert and a radio show? Or for older kids, there was a 2008 episode of Entourage in which Vince the movie star (played by Adrian Grenier) worries over whether he should take a part in a movie, and what it will do for his image.

But it may be too easy to blame pop culture and the media for promoting the “value” of fame. Movies and TV shows and popular music are often more of a reflection than an engine of cultural trends. I think when we talk about the obsession with fame, we’re also talking about an obsession with wealth. Rich and famous, famous and rich—they seem connected as aspirations. Interviewing teenagers over the years, I’ve often heard them talk about wanting to be famous, but almost always in the context of being rich and the “lifestyle” fame ushers in. “Lifestyle” is a word that comes up a lot. “We put them up in the nicest hotels,” said X Factor judge Demi Lovato of the contestants on the show, “because we want them to get a taste of the lifestyle that fame can bring them.” (Sadly for Lovato and also former X Factor judge Britney Spears, “the lifestyle” of fame has also included time in rehab, where they both landed in 2010 and 2007, respectively.) When the kids in the Starbucks at the Commons in Calabasas started talking about fame, they immediately started talking about money. It’s striking that while there seems to be much consternation about kids wanting to be famous, there seems to be little concern about them wanting to be rich.

America has always offered a dream of wealth; in “the land of opportunity,” anyone who is willing to work hard can make a good life for himself and his family. But the idea of what constitutes a good life hasn’t always included private planes and 50,000-square-foot homes and $100,000 watches and $20,000 handbags. We are living in a new Gilded Age, with a “totally new stratosphere” of financial success.*

As we’ve become aware in the national conversation about the one percent, income inequality has increased dramatically since the late 1970s. Then, the top 1 percent of Americans earned only about 10 percent of the national income; now they earn a third. In terms of total wealth, they control about 40 percent. Meanwhile the 99 percent has been going into debt trying to keep up with the newly extravagant lifestyle the one percent inhabits.