The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  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.

  3

  “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

  4

  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).

  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, “[Alexi
s] 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.

  5

  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.