The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  “I had all these things running through my mind. You always thinks burglars are these big scary figures—from watching movies you think criminals are big scary guys. And so my brother-in-law called the police and I threw on my robe and ran downstairs. I literally ran out of my house as fast as I could. I got in my car and drove to the gas station. I sat there until the police came. They came home with me and checked all the rooms.

  “When I watched the surveillance videos, it ended up being two kids, a girl and a guy. I felt so violated, so frustrated. Why did they do this? And they came back again after that! I had gotten home twenty minutes after they left. We could tell from the surveillance video—they came twice in the same night, all in a few hours. They left; they took bags of stuff. They kept coming back and leaving.

  “I can’t believe it’s a group of kids doing this,” said Patridge. “Somebody should make a movie about this. You never expect the burglars to be kids. I got my laptop and my luggage back; so far that’s it. Half of the stuff I didn’t even list—stuff I had in my storage room, bags of clothes, accessories. I don’t even know what they took from back there. I think it was about $50,000 worth—that’s just the stuff I know for sure they took.” The police reported the value of the haul at $43,682.

  “They came in here and took stuff in such a rush,” she said. “I have one shoe, the left, to a pair, ’cause they forgot to take the right one of the pair. They were just getting luggage, trash bags, anything they could find to carry stuff in.

  “After it happened, for like two weeks my brother was staying with me a lot; I didn’t want to be alone. I thought, What if they come back? Nowadays I feel like so many people can find celebrities if they want to—they know where you are, what your schedule is. I’m always in the public eye, whether it’s from the show [The Hills] or from paparazzi taking my picture or, like, Twitter or MySpace. Now fans are able to stay in close contact with you all the time. They always know what we’re doing and I didn’t think about it until now, and it makes me conscious of where I go and who’s around me.

  “I feel like these kids, like Rachel Lee was a big fan of me,” Patridge said. “The police said I was her target. She came to my house and went shopping. They would see us on the red carpet and see things that they liked and they would come in here and try to take it. Now they’re caught, and they’re gonna have to face the consequences. I’m speechless. I don’t know why they would do this—you don’t go into someone’s house.

  “Rachel Lee, she’s a little obsessed girl,” said Patridge. “I gotta tell you it was definitely her,” on the surveillance video. “I have a clear view on my surveillance.

  “She’s gonna get what she deserves.”

  3

  The day after the robbery, Patridge took the footage from her surveillance camera and put it on her website, AudrinaPatridge.com, in the hopes that someone would recognize the burglars and notify the police. “I had a pretty clear image of their faces,” she said. “I did it for my fans. I said, ‘Please if you guys recognize these people, please help.’ That’s how TMZ got it.”

  On February 24, 2009, TMZ posted the footage with the headline, “Patridge’s Pad Pilfered—Caught On Tape.” Soon the story was all over the Internet. “The loser duo who broke in didn’t do a very good job disguising themselves,” said The Hollywood Gossip website. “If you were the type of lowlife miscreant who would go and pull a stunt like this, wouldn’t you at least be a little inconspicuous with your appearance?”

  The story also made it to the local L.A. news station, KTLA. That’s where Nick first saw it. “I was watching KTLA News,” he said, “and I saw us on the news and I just broke down. When I saw the video of me and Rachel at Audrina’s house it really hit me for the first time,” that what they were doing could have consequences.

  He said he called Rachel “right away—we were constantly on the phone, trying to figure things out.” But “Rachel made it seem okay. . . .She would be like, this is fine, this is okay, why are you tripping out?”

  Still, Nick said, “I was worried, scared, just uneasy all the time, anxious, anxious. I’d been an anxious person even before this happened and now. . . .I saw myself on the news and I was staying up till five a.m., I couldn’t sleep at night.”

  However nothing happened because of the release of the video, miraculously enough. No one ever called; Nick and Rachel were never identified; and “so it was kinda swept under the rug,” Nick said. “It was in the news for like a month and nothing happened. It was past history and it was fine. . . .

  “We kept doing it.”

  4

  “Why were they so ballsy?” said Vince, my cop source, who always saw things from the most practical perspective. “ ‘Cause they never got caught.”

  But I had to think there was more to it than that—particularly from the standpoint of Rachel, who, according to Nick, was the one who kept pushing for them to do more burglaries. Did she want to get caught? It was rudimentary psychology, but I had to wonder. If she couldn’t be famous . . . did she want to be infamous?

  After all, infamy wasn’t what it used to be. Now it was just another kind of fame. There was no shame anymore—people were infamous without shame; they were shame-ous. (Seamus?) There were celebrity sex tapes, reality television. There were YouTube videos in which people, often teenagers, beat up on and bullied each other. There were women who became famous for having had sex with famous men. Some of the women who romped with Tiger Woods offered up their steamy text messages and cell phone pics to the highest bidder.

  In December 2012, a pretty blonde 19-year-old Nebraska girl, Hannah Sabata, was arrested for bank robbery a day after posting an eight-minute YouTube video in which she blithely bragged about her crimes. “I just stole a car and robbed a bank,” she announced in the video’s online description. “Now I’m rich, I can pay off my college financial aid and tomorrow I’m going for a shopping spree. Bite me. I love GREENDAY!” She was wearing the same clothes in the video that she had worn to the bank robbery.

  And then there were criminals who planned out media strategies before committing unspeakable acts. Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech student who murdered 32 people and himself, on April 16, 2007, sent out a media package to NBC News. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold filmed themselves arguing over who was going to make a movie of their life story—Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino?—before they went on their shooting rampage at Columbine High.

  Robbing Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan hardly registered on the same horror level as those acts of violence. In fact, I was surprised, as I started talking to people about this story by how many seemed to find what the Bling Ring did amusing or even kind of marvelous. “Good for them,” said a young woman I talked to in a hair salon. “Tell them to bring me a Gucci bag.” “They have enough”—meaning the celebrities, said a New York taxi driver, sounding a lot like Nick Prugo. “They won’t miss it.” It made me wonder if there were some kind of growing resentment toward the rich (a precursor to Occupy Wall Street sentiment?). Or was this just a sign of the kind of kick people get out of teenagers doing outrageous things? Is that why Rachel thought she could get away with it? Because she was a teenager, and she knew people expected teenagers to act wild and crazy?

  Historically, America has always had a conflicted relationship with the rebellious spirit of teens, which has been seen as both thrilling and threatening. The American Revolution probably never would have come off without the energy and fight inherent in a population that, in 1776, was roughly 50 percent under the age of 16. “Young people were everywhere in the Revolution,” writes Thomas Hine in The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (1999). The middle of the 18th century saw widespread rioting on college campuses about everything from King George to the quality of the food. The Sons and Daughters of Liberty, the patriot protest groups, were full of teenagers stirring up revolutionary fervor. Sixteen of the 116 known participants at the Boston Tea Party were teenagers. The Continental Army was filled with boy
soldiers, some as young as 12. Future President James Monroe was just 17 when he became an officer serving under General George Washington, Alexander Hamilton only 19 when he became a famed pamphleteer. Girls were active in the Revolution, too—16-year-old Sybil Ludington, “the female Paul Revere,” rode more than 40 miles from her home in Fredericksburg, New York, in an attempt to save Danbury, Connecticut, from a British attack. (It didn’t work, but she tried.)

  Young Americans helped make America, and America has been forever impressed—and conflicted. Our history is full of alarms over the behavior of teenagers. Apparently we’ve been asking “What’s the matter with kids today?” since the Puritans, who were obsessed with the salvation of children’s souls and worried kids were leading us to ruination. “As young people [in colonial America] grew more assertive,” writes Steven Mintz in Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004), “adult anxieties rose, provoking the first of many moral panics that would characterize American attitudes toward the young. . . .Further adding to the fears of moral decline was the emergence of a distinctive youth culture.”

  In perhaps the first description of “juvenile delinquency” in America, Jonathan Edwards, the formidable preacher and leader of the First Great Awakening, the Christian revival movement of the 1730s and ’40s, wrote deploringly in 1730 of how “licentiousness for some years prevailed upon the youth of the town” of Northampton, Massachusetts. “There were many of them very much addicted to night-walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices, wherein some, by their example, exceedingly corrupted others.”

  The fact was that American kids became precocious because they had to work—on farms, in factories, and in shops—in order to help their families survive. Teenage labor was enormously important in the development of the country. But the products of this early introduction into the adult world of work were often strong-willed, rambunctious teens, given to an attraction to pleasures considered beyond their years, and this frightened their parents and the general population. In the 19th century, reformers—influenced by the Romantics, who had decided that children were not sinners but pure, intuitive beings in need of sheltering—worked to save children from the abuses of the workplace and to make schooling the responsibility of the state, in a bid also to reign in what was seen as the problem of out-of-control youth.

  A growing influx of beleaguered immigrants gave rise to a population of neglected and unattended teens, street kids, and gangs. By the early 1800s, New York State had a Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, which in 1827 issued a report bemoaning the difficulty of reforming poor kids who were “returned destitute from the same haunts of vice from which they had been taken”—a lament which persists today.

  Juvenile delinquency was seen as the result of poverty and deprivation—a notion which was shockingly overturned in 1924 when two privileged boys, 19-year-old Nathan Leopold and 18-year-old Richard Loeb, brutally murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks, believing themselves to be Nietzschean supermen, above the law. “The killing was an experiment,” Leopold later told his defense attorney, Clarence Darrow. Leopold and Loeb were the first bad rich kids of the American narrative. They were also bad rich kids who wanted to be famous. “This will be the making of me,” Loeb said after he was arrested.

  “Leopold and Loeb invited all that attention,” writes Peter J. Spalding in “The Strange Case of Leopold and Loeb” (2011). “They took to the spotlight like natural celebrities: they read all their own press clippings, they made sure to look good on camera, and they knew just what to say to push reporters’ buttons. On June 1 [1924],” a day after they made their confessions, “they showed the police how they’d committed the murder, and they let the press come along on a tour of the crime scenes. Along the way, the boys spouted off plenty of sound bites.”

  The disturbing case also added to a sense among middle- and upper-middle-class parents that their children were becoming unrecognizable. The 1920s experienced the true “generation gap” that would be identified as such some 40 years later. Parents who had grown up in the rustic 19th century gave birth to the children of modernity. Telephones, cars, and movies changed everything—communication, transportation, entertainment. Now women had the right to vote, and many girls no longer felt like being demure. Flappers with bobbed hair in short skirts smoked, drank, and danced the night away to music created by blacks; jazz was not only a musical but also a cultural movement celebrating social and sexual freedom. Public consternation was severe and often racially charged. In 1921, Ladies’ Home Journal endorsed campaigns to ban jazz music, declaring, “jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds.”

  Fears of juvenile delinquency plagued the 1940s, too, when anxiety about keeping control over life at home increased due to the outside threats faced during the war. In 1943, more than 1,200 magazine articles appeared on the subject. “Here’s to Youth,” a popular radio program, ran segments on “Young America in Crisis.” Hollywood produced shorts stirring up concern over teenage carousing. “Where is your daughter tonight?” asked a movie advertisement. “In some joint . . . lapping up liquor . . . petting . . . going mad?” “Thanks to the war,” writes Grace Palladino in Teenagers: An American History (1996), “younger teenagers were on their own in greater numbers than ever before, and they were getting into trouble. . . .Juvenile court dockets overflowed with complaints of vandalism, auto theft, and teenage petting and drinking parties.”

  In the 1950s, with the publication of The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Holden Caulfield unseated Huckleberry Finn as the quintessential American boy: Huck was an adventurous innocent, vulgar and rough but fundamentally good; Holden was louche, morally flexible, a charming depressive—and a rich kid. But he was essentially cynical on the matter of his privilege. In fact, what seemed to be at the root of his discontent was his sense of coming from an elite class full of “phonies” and “crooks.” Rebel Without a Cause (1955) continued on the theme, with its well-off suburban teens acting out against their parents’ hypocrisy and materialism. “Don’t I buy you everything you want? A bicycle? . . . A car?” Jim Backus, as James Dean’s father, demands plaintively of his rebellious son, who tries to make his family understand: “You’re tearing me apart!”

  As the country grew more affluent during the post-war boom, the youth of the 1960s channeled their rebelliousness into a rejection of materialism in favor of making “love, not war.” Civil rights, women’s rights, and protesting the war in Vietnam were their passions—not shopping. Revisionist historians have liked to minimize the impact of 1960s activism, but Nixon himself admitted after leaving office that student protests had influenced his decision to withdraw troops from Indochina. “Young people were at the cutting edge of cultural and social change,” writes Steven Mintz. “Their protests and actions transformed not only their sense of self, but the very character of American culture.” In the 1970s, punk rock hardened the 1960s’ message, pushing antiestablishmentarianism toward the edge of a nihilism brought on by what was seen as a lack of any real systemic change. The national hysteria over hippies and punks alike fell right in line with Puritan minister Ezekiel Rogers’ admonition of 1657: “I find great Trouble and Grief about the Rising Generation. Young People are stirred here [in the colonies]; but they strengthen one another in Evil, by Example, by Counsel.”

  And then something different happened. In the 1980s and ’90s, more so than at any other time in American history, youth culture wasn’t challenging the status quo. Young people didn’t want to change the system—they wanted to game the system. They wanted money. The pursuit of the almighty dollar had always been the purview of soulless grown-ups and parents, but now kids—certainly not all kids, but youth culture overall—were promoting the idea that “getting paid” was cool.

  The goal wasn’t the traditional sort of American success popularized by Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick stories of the 19th century, where a boy would go from rags to
riches through hard work and ingenuity. The goal was success that came from the ruthless pursuit of money for its own sake—in fact, often the more ruthless the pursuit, the cooler it was thought to be. I first noticed this trend being expressed in Risky Business (1983), in which Tom Cruise plays a cynical rich kid who gets into Princeton after entertaining the school’s college admissions officer with the prostitutes Cruise is pimping out of his parents’ home while they’re away on vacation. This was a big switch from Dustin Hoffman’s disaffected college graduate in The Graduate (1967) who’s repulsed by his society’s materialism (in a famous moment a friend of the family encourages him to consider a future in “plastics”) and the moral dysfunction of his parents’ generation. At a reading in 1997, I met the late Budd Schulberg, author of the classic novel What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), about an unprincipled Hollywood hustler named Sammy Glick. Schulberg told me that while his book was once understood to be a dark portrait of a despicable young man and the hollowness of success achieved through dishonest means, young people now approached him saying, “Sammy’s my idol! Sammy’s my Bible!”

  Just as it had once been considered the thing to do to “drop out,” in the 1980s, the thing to do was to join the club. “Wall Street seemed very much like the place to be at the time,” wrote Michael Lewis in Liar’s Poker, of going for a job at Salomon Brothers upon graduating from college in 1984. “I was frightened to miss the express bus on which everyone I knew seemed to have a reserve seat, for fear that there would be no other.”

  But it wasn’t just privileged white boys from Princeton who wanted a seat on the money train. It was kids from the ghetto as well. “I want money like Cosby who wouldn’t,” Jay-Z rapped in “Dead Presidents, Part 1” (1996). Hip-hop music, which started out socially conscious and politically radical,12 became about gangsterism, robbing, drug dealing, and making money by any means necessary (“Gimme the Loot,” said the Notorious B.I.G. in 1994). There was necessarily something subversive about young black men from the projects exalting in their wealth—in a country with a history of slavery, segregation, and persistent racism, it was triumphant (“Money, power, respect” said the LOX in 1998). When Puff Daddy appeared on the cover of Fortune in 1998, it was a crossover moment of significant proportions. But that was just it—it was about joining the establishment, not fighting it.