Then came a day that July 1999 when Nick disappeared after an argument. I went out of my mind with worry. Where could he be? What could have happened?
A little while later, we got a call from Ben saying that Nick was with him and that he and his girlfriend were talking to him to get him cooled down. Nick had “run away” by calling Ben on the house phone, then walking around the corner and waiting for him. Later, Ben suggested that he’d like to keep Nick for the night and would get him to summer school on Monday morning. Ben brought Nick home to us after school, but Nick was still angry. “I don’t want you keeping me from Ben,” he said. “He’s my brother and I love him.”
How do you explain to a fourteen-year-old that you’re only trying to protect him? How can he see into the future and know that when he’s twenty-four, or thirty-four, he’ll understand why we did the things we did?
We couldn’t, so we called in a mediator. We also attended family counseling with Nick to try to help us get him to understand that we weren’t trying to punish him by keeping him away from Ben—we were just trying to get him on the right path and away from trouble.
Ben was a strange paradox when it came to Nick. On the one hand, as we’d later learn, he punched a cousin when he found out that the cousin had smoked pot with Nick and Ryan—their first time getting high. The last thing he wanted, he said, was for Nick to follow in his footsteps. And yet before long, he was getting high with Nick, too, and introducing him to friends of his who dealt drugs. Mostly, Nick “just” smoked pot, but he apparently occasionally tried harder drugs. And for a couple of weeks, Nick was a “self-proclaimed pot dealer,” selling dime bags to his friends, Ryan later said. I had no idea.
Everyone in school who knew Nick also knew Ryan, and vice versa. They shared most of the same friends, but Nick had some groups he hung around with separately, too. He loved to play board games, while Ryan didn’t get that at all—he was more of an outdoors type. So Nick found some “board-game friends” to play with, too.
Ryan’s family had a tradition that they would all graduate from Bryn Athens school in Pennsylvania, so that’s where he went for school his sophomore year. It was a big adjustment for the two best friends to be apart. They’d been inseparable since kindergarten, and after just a month, Nick flew with Ryan’s aunt and mother to visit Ryan just before his own sophomore year started.
We continued seeing the counselor, where we tried to work on our problems—primarily, that Nick was still angry with us. When Leah’s daughter was born, and everyone was celebrating, Nick was oddly sad. He watched Ben hold the baby, but he couldn’t seem to bring himself to hold her.
“She’s not really my niece,” Nick told Ben.
“Of course she is. What do you mean?” Ben asked.
“I feel like we’re not really related. You’re her uncle, but who am I?”
Nick always felt the strains of the separation—the “half” part of “half siblings.” Ben and Leah were the only siblings he had, and he didn’t want there to be anything distancing them. In part because I hated seeing him so torn, and in part because Ben was now responsibly working with his dad, and—to my knowledge—no longer involved with drugs, I let Ben and his girlfriend move into our house. Maybe Nick will stop being so angry with us, I thought.
Not only did Ben’s return go peacefully, but something unbelievable happened . . . I started talking to his mother. After all those hateful years, the two of us came to a sort of understanding and said we would try to put the past behind us for the kids’ sake.
As we got closer to New Year’s Eve, I felt more and more that it was an important occasion—it was a new millennium, after all! I didn’t want to ring in the year 2000 by phone with my loved ones; I wanted them all to be together so I could hug them. So I planned a party at our house and told Nick to invite his friends, too.
We covered the tables with black and gold lamé fabric and had black and gold balloons covering the ceiling. A Ping-Pong table, pool table, and darts stayed in use the whole night, and loud music blared from the stereo. The neighbors didn’t complain, because they were all there!
Ben and Leah’s mom came too, and we toasted to the New Year together. It felt like a night of peace and new beginnings—we even shared a cigar and let the kids paint our faces with an “invisible-ink” marker that showed up only under black light. Boy, were they lousy artists.
It was one of those nights I never wanted to end. And I was oblivious to the fact that, in the next room, Ben had just slapped Nick across the face in front of all his friends because Nick had taken some kind of a pill and was stoned out of his mind. All I knew was that it looked like everyone was having fun.
Leah tried to tell us what was going on, but Jeff and I weren’t listening. She liked to tell us how blind we were to what he was doing. Maybe I was blind, but Nick’s behavior just looked like normal teenage rebellion to me. I suspected he might have tried smoking pot, but things were already so touchy with him that I didn’t want to come down too hard. I wanted him to know he could always talk to us.
Ben and his girlfriend didn’t stay with us for long. He found out that she was doing hard drugs, and he was trying to clean up his life. I think he told us he was going to take on a new construction job. We didn’t leave off on bad terms, though, and Nick didn’t seem so mad at us anymore.
The rest of the school year was pleasantly uneventful. On our drive each morning, Nick would point out the falcon or two perched up on the light posts along our route. He said falcons were some of his favorite birds.
“They always seem to be there,” he said.
“Maybe they’re watching us,” I said.
Nick was an outdoors person, like his dad. In Jeff’s youth, he had a motorcycle to get around, and now that Nick was fifteen, Jeff thought it would be fun for the two of them to graduate from Rollerblades; he bought two Yamaha 225 motorcycles, and they puttered around the neighborhood and to the beach, and they’d ride to the park to play tennis and then to the movies together once a week. Early in Nick’s “training,” they went into a canyon that normally didn’t have much traffic, but a car passed and it startled Nick; he rode to the shoulder of the road and braked, and the bike slid out from under him. He was pretty badly bruised and cut up, and the bike was damaged. Jeff felt guilty and responsible.
I took Nick to the emergency room the next morning to get his wounds cleaned properly, and Jeff said, “I hope this is the worst thing that ever happens to him.”
With Nick in high school and the other kids out of the house, I thought it would be good for me to take on a part-time job and make a little spending money, so I started folding clothes at Nordstrom’s Rack—a local outlet where you could pick up a dress worth $150 for $19 on a lucky day. The only problem was that I didn’t make any money there; I “reinvested” it all in the business. I actually paid to work there!
Nick’s friend Ryan came back home for the summer, and it seemed like we were whole again. We went camping, like we did just about every summer. Sometimes it was just us, but in recent years, Nick had usually brought a friend. We’d go for anywhere from two days to a week, usually to somewhere within about an hour from home. On some of the trips, I’d take the kids, and Jeff would join us only at night after work—that was his idea of a vacation.
Nick absolutely loved camping. We’d fish for trout and catfish using Velveeta cheese for bait, play board games, toss around Frisbees and baseballs, and eat sandwiches . . . which usually fell on the ground at some point and became literal sandwiches.
Soon after we came home from one of these camping trips, Nick was in such a good mood that a miracle occurred: he washed my car, without my even asking. Now, it’s possible that he was just being a terrific son, or maybe it had something to do with that new learner’s driving permit that was now hung on the refrigerator. It was getting close to his sixteenth birthday and the start of his junior year. He had just passed his written test and was going to learn how to drive. Maybe he was looking at th
e car and thinking, “This baby is going to be mine someday soon.”
On the days when I was working, either my mom or Jeff would supervise Nick. My mom was in charge of the house one day in August, and Nick loved her dearly. He still called her Grandma Pooh, which had been her dog’s name when he was a little boy. He was listening to music with his friends when he stopped in to check on her.
“Is the music too loud for you?” he asked.
“No, I’m just reading. If it gets too loud, I’ll take out my hearing aids.”
He laughed, gave her a thumbs-up, went back to his room, and turned down the music anyway.
Three days later, the world ended. At least, mine did.
CHAPTER 5
THE OPENING ACT
Ben and Jesse James Hollywood had known of each other since their Little League baseball days, though they weren’t close friends. Hollywood had played on the Pirates team, which his father coached. He was a good shortstop, though some of the parents noted that he could get bratty and throw tantrums on the field. Some of his friends were also on the team: Jesse Rugge, William Skidmore, and Ryan Hoyt.
Ben was two years older, so he wasn’t on the same team, but he was an All-Star player and knew all of the boys by sight, and he and William Skidmore’s older brother had played together. It was, by all accounts, a tight-knit group—both the kids and the parents. The parents ran the Snack Shack, where they took turns flipping burgers, serving hot dogs, and pouring sodas. I often went to the games, sometimes sitting next to Ben’s mother. After their games, the Pirates would sometimes go back to the Hollywoods’ house to swim in their pool. I wonder how many parents knew what Jack’s real occupation was.
It wasn’t until Ben was about twenty years old that he began to socialize with Jesse James Hollywood’s group. One of the first times Ben went out with them was at a party in an upscale gated community. Ben was standing nearby when Ryan Hoyt got into a fight with another young man at the party. Before long, the man had Hoyt down on the ground with his head pinned against a stucco wall and was about to kick his head like a soccer ball.
Ben and one of his friends intervened, sending the man fleeing to his car. Afterward, Ben took Hoyt home with him and helped him get his wounds cleaned up, because he was in pretty bad shape. It was a show of mercy he would come to regret deeply. Shortly thereafter, Ben approached Hollywood to ask if he was interested in dealing drugs to him. Ben had burned his bridges with most of the other local dealers by that point, running up bad debts with each of them, so he needed a new supplier. He liked the quick money that selling drugs provided.
Hollywood agreed, and was soon fronting Ben between ten thousand and forty thousand dollars’ worth of marijuana per week. Ben would pay Hollywood back the next week for his debts. At times, Hollywood himself could collect more than one hundred thousand dollars in a single drug transaction. In addition to the drug dealing, though, they became friends. Ben was an everyday member of this little clan.
Hollywood had a pit bull named Chump, but Ryan Hoyt was the real chump of the group. Of all the kids, Ryan was probably the one closest to the Hollywood family, starting in early childhood.
Ryan’s parents divorced when he was five years old, and his grandmother would later say that his mother was “unstable” and that his stepmother seemed to hate him. His father was no Mike Brady, either. He reportedly beat Ryan’s mother while she was pregnant, and he beat up his sons as their stepmother yelled at them. His sister was a heroin addict, and his younger brother would become a convicted felon, serving twelve years for armed robbery.
With all the trouble in both his homes, Ryan went looking for a new family and latched onto the Hollywoods, regarding Jack Hollywood as a father figure. He became very ingrained in their everyday lives, taking family vacations with them and even babysitting for Jesse Hollywood’s younger brother, J. P.
For one of Ryan’s birthdays, Jesse James Hollywood had bought him an inexpensive car, plus some money for new tires and registration—but Ryan didn’t get around to switching over the registration and racked up almost one thousand dollars’ worth of parking tickets in Hollywood’s name. To bail him out of that one, Hollywood fronted him half a pound of marijuana to sell, but Ryan didn’t come through on that, either.
Now he owed Hollywood money, which was exactly the position Hollywood liked to be in. Having people owe him money gave him power . . . and having people like Ryan owe him money was the sweetest of all. Ryan had no sense of self-worth. He would do whatever Hollywood told him to do, and that now included cleaning his house, painting his fence, getting his little brother from school, and picking up after his pit bulls. In effect, Ryan Hoyt became Jesse James Hollywood’s personal servant. Everyone in the group saw it, and most of them thought it was pretty funny.
“I think Hoyt got a lot more crap than everyone else did,” said Hollywood’s friend Casey Sheehan.
Even Ryan Hoyt’s grandmother could see that her grandson was inappropriately kowtowing to Hollywood.
“This young man has been a friend of yours for a long time, but he does not run your life,” she once told her grandson, according to a Santa Barbara News-Press article. “It’s time you get a decent job and figure out what you’re going to do with your life.”
Aside from drug dealing, Ryan also had a job working at a local market, but it seemed he was working there only to pay off Hollywood—and when he didn’t have enough for his weekly payment, Hollywood would tack on high “interest.”
One time in February 2000, as they videotaped themselves smoking from a bong, drinking, and playing cards, Hollywood turned the camera on Hoyt and asked, “How much money you got in the bank?”
“Uh . . . I got four . . .”
“Tomorrow, I want the money you got in the bank.”
“All right.”
On the same tape, Hollywood bugged Hoyt about the money a second time. Hoyt stood with his backward blue baseball cap pulled nearly down to his eyes, looking like a dog that’s getting kicked.
“What’s gonna be there tomorrow, Hoyt? I’m serious, man.”
“Stop recording.”
“What’s gonna be in the bank?”
“Five hundred. At least five hundred. Now stop fucking recording.”
Hollywood was accustomed to having people do whatever he said, whenever he said. That was the direct opposite of Ben’s personality. Ben was one of the main underlings in Hollywood’s orbit, but he didn’t act much like an underling . . . which is where the trouble started. Ben called himself “Bugsy” after volatile Mob leader Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.
Hollywood’s position was strange for a man of his small stature: five feet four inches and 140 pounds. About average size, for a teenage girl. He took muscle supplements and lifted weights daily to try to look more imposing, but it was of little use. But Hollywood’s power didn’t come from his physique. It came from his mouth, his father, his army of sycophants who owed him money, and his gun collection.
At El Camino Real High School, he played second base on the junior varsity baseball team, where his coach remembered him as a serious player and an emotional kid. Toward the end of his sophomore year, he was expelled for a violent fight with an administrator, reportedly stemming from concerns over the tank top he’d been wearing, and was transferred to a different school. The principal never fully explained that one to the media when they asked about it, except to say that it was a pretty bad fight. Likewise, Hollywood was suspended a week before his graduation at his second high school, though the principal there wouldn’t explain why either.
But for Hollywood, it didn’t matter much. One hardly needs an outstanding academic record to make a living selling drugs. Despite being self-described as obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness, Hollywood liked to throw parties and be the center of social attention. Looking like a mini thug with his backward baseball caps and tank tops, he barked out orders, and people jumped. His position as the leader of his clan of miscreants had gone unchallenged—unti
l Ben decided he wasn’t backing down anymore.
It started with a drug deal gone bad. Hollywood was talking about going to San Diego to collect on a drug debt of about two thousand dollars, and not in a polite way. Ben was friendly with the debtor, so he said, “Wait a minute, I know the guy. Let me go down there with you and handle it.”
They hopped into Hollywood’s black Mercedes and drove. In Hollywood’s trunk was a duffel bag with duct tape in it, and a bat. But once they got there, they could see that there was no chance of collection no matter what kind of violence they dished out—the guy had no money at all. So Ben helped the guy cook up a scheme to save himself.
The guy was friendly with an Ecstasy dealer, which got Ben’s wheels turning.
“It would be a good idea if you have your friend come over here with the Ecstasy, and we’ll make it look like we just jacked you.” When the debtor hesitated, Ben told him, “It’s probably better that you don’t owe Hollywood the money. Owe it to some other dude instead.”
The guy called his friend and asked for two hundred pills, saying that someone who wanted to buy them was out in the car. When the first guy came to the window, pretending to show them the drugs for inspection, Ben and Hollywood grabbed the bag and drove off, making it look like a robbery.
Now Ben told Hollywood that he’d take on the debt himself, and pay it off by selling the pills for twenty dollars apiece—keeping the two-thousand-dollar profit after he repaid Hollywood his two thousand dollars. But after Ben handed off the drugs to someone to sell at a party, he got a complaint from a customer who said that the pills weren’t doing anything. So Ben took one himself—sure enough, it had no effect. Later, he went to Hollywood’s house.
“These things are bunk. I don’t know what you want me to do,” Ben said. He told Hollywood that he wasn’t going to sell them anymore, which meant he wasn’t going to pay back the rest of the money. He gave Hollywood about six hundred dollars from what he had sold at that point, plus another two hundred dollars that he borrowed from his dad. He told Jeff he needed it toward rent because he was staying with Hollywood part-time.
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