The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  In 1998, I did a story for New York my editor headlined “Make Moves, Blow Up, Get Paid,” after a quote from one of the sources, about New York kids who were eschewing college in favor of going out in the world so they could make money immediately. Their dreams were tied to getting famous—through acting, modeling, rapping, fashion designing, screenwriting—but their ultimate goal was getting rich. And they idolized Puff Daddy for his brand of branding. “Puffy is a genius,” Paris Hilton told the New York Times in 2005, discussing her inspiration as a businesswoman. “He does everything. Music. Clothing. I totally look up to him and Donald Trump because he’s built this whole empire—hotels, casinos, resorts, a television show.”

  Bobby Kennedy was gone; and Donald Trump was a new hero. One of the kids I interviewed for another story in the 1990s told me of his admiration for Michael Milken, the “Junk Bond King,” who went to prison in 1990 for securities and tax violations. “He basically got off, considering what he really did,” the kid said approvingly, referring to how Milken had escaped convictions of racketeering or insider trading. “He’s a gangster.” The “prep school gangsters” I followed around in those days ran in neighborhood gangs with names that expressed their devotion to self-interest through criminality: Out For Self (OFS), Who’s King Now (WKN). “Somehow we became like movie stars,” one gang member told me. “We’re like gods to kids.” They were a legend in their own minds, for sure, but they were also the products of their parents, who included wealthy bankers, a media mogul, a famous actor, and a member of the Mafia.

  By the 1980s, kids were looking around at a country where lawbreaking and lawlessness were no longer conditions of poverty and life in the inner city alone. Now these were omnipresent aspects of American business, politics, and the media at the highest levels. “There were no rules governing the pursuit of profit and glory,” Michael Lewis wrote of the culture of Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. “The place was governed by the simple understanding that the unbridled pursuit of perceived self-interest was healthy. Eat or be eaten.”

  “Today,” writes Glenn Greenwald in With Liberty and Justice for Some (2011), “in a radical and momentous shift, the American political class and its media increasingly repudiate the principle that the law must be equally applied to all.” It gives one pause to consider what the Founding Fathers would have thought of the pardoning of Nixon after the Watergate scandal; the overturning of the convictions of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and former National Security Advisor John Poindexter after the Iran-Contra scandal; or the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping, politicized prosecutions, torture, and “black sites”—for which no one was ever prosecuted. Every step along the way has been an even bigger departure from the insistence of the framers of the Constitution that in a democracy everyone must be equal before the law. Meanwhile, Greenwald laments, “the media [directs] its hostility almost exclusively toward those who investigated or attempted to hold accountable the most powerful members of our political system.”

  And then there was the financial meltdown of 2008 that brought the world economy to its knees. While its causes have barely been investigated or made transparent, it has become sufficiently clear that the crisis was largely the outcome of widespread fraud and lawbreaking. Yet there has been virtually no prosecution of those responsible. “There is no fear of individual punishment,” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi said in an interview in 2012. “That’s the problem.”

  So why did Rachel Lee think she could get away with stealing celebrities’ clothes? Maybe Vince was right, after all: ’Cause she hadn’t been caught. Yet.

  5

  In the first two weeks of May 2009, the Bling Ring burglarized Rachel Bilson’s house five times. They went back again and again, trying on her clothes, picking out clothes, looking through her things. They put on her makeup and examined her jewelry. They went “shopping” and then decided they wanted to go shopping again. “Ms. Bilson was probably the most emblematic of how this group typically worked,” Officer Brett Goodkin told the Grand Jury on June 22, 2010, “where the accomplice,” allegedly Lee, “identified [Bilson] as a target and Mr. Prugo went to work and they committed numerous burglaries all within an approximate two- to three-week period.”

  By now, they had gotten it down. Rachel picked Bilson as the next victim on her list, Nick said. “She loved her clothes.” Like so many young actresses today, Bilson, then 27, was admired as much for her fashion sense as for her work. She appeared at entertainment and fashion industry events in an array of dazzling gowns and around L.A. in unfailingly eye-catching ensembles. She was the object of many a “style crush” among young women and girls. She had a vintage, boho style which she told reporters was inspired by Diane Keaton and Kate Moss. In 2008, she worked with DKNY Jeans to create the junior sportswear line Edie Rose.

  Ever since the fashion world success of Paris Hilton, P. Diddy, Jennifer Lopez, and other celebrities, having a clothing line—one of the potentially most lucrative franchise opportunities for a personal brand—has become de rigueur for starlets and reality stars alike. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Jessica Simpson, Nicole Richie, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Lauren Conrad, Selena Gomez, Mandy Moore, Kelly Osbourne, Hillary Duff, Whitney Port, and Avril Lavigne, all have had lines, to name a few. In 2010, Women’s Wear Daily reported that The Jessica Simpson Collection had become the first celebrity clothing line to top a billion dollars in retail sales. Simpson’s reality and fashion stardom would seem to suggest her as an object of Bling Ring interest; but they never targeted her. “Rachel would never, like, carry a handbag that wasn’t made of real leather,” said Nick, referring to Simpson’s more downscale merchandise.

  Rachel Bilson, on the other hand, offered Rachel Lee a whole sleek package of things Lee admired: she was beautiful, stylish, famous, rich, designed for Donna Karan—plus they had the same name. “Rachel-Rachel,” Nick said. “Rachel identified with her.” Both Rachels were from the Valley. Bilson was raised in Sherman Oaks. Her mother Janice was a sex therapist, her father Danny Bilson a Hollywood writer, director, and producer. Her great-grandfather ran the trailer department at RKO, and her grandfather was a director on 1960s sitcoms such as Get Smart and Hogan’s Heroes. So if she wasn’t quite Hollywood royalty, she was landed gentry.

  Nick did the research. He found out the location of Bilson’s four-bedroom, 3,662-square-foot home in Los Feliz, an L.A. neighborhood popular with Young Hollywood. Bilson had purchased the white Spanish-style house for $1.88 million in 2006, three years into her role as Summer Roberts, the unashamedly shallow rich girl on The O.C. (2003–2007). When the Bling Ring kids were robbing Bilson, they were also robbing Summer—which for them, it seemed, was a form of flattery as much as it was a crime; the character was the embodiment of the sarcastic, slack-mouthed, eye-rolling mode of discourse (“Seriously?”) so prevalent now among teenaged girls on television and, consequently, in real life. Summer’s catty dialogue included the phrases “Ew,” and “Random,” “Ew. Random,” and these bon mots:

  “I suffer from rage blackouts.”

  “I guess I really will end up bitter and alone.”

  “I’m gonna study this thing so hard I’m even gonna out-Jew you.”

  “Way to go, Wonder Whore.”

  And this exchange:

  Summer: “My dad [a plastic surgeon] says chins are the new noses.”

  Anna [a friend]: “Picasso thought so, too.”

  Summer: “Really? What hospital does he work at? Kidding! I’m not that dumb. Just shallow!”

  Summer sounded a lot like a reality show star named Paris Hilton. The acerbic attitude of The O.C. was catnip to teens seeking validation for their desire to appear cynical and rude—just like a spoiled rich girl. And The O.C. had romance, nerd-bitch romance. Bilson’s on and off-screen entanglement with Adam Brody, who played the adorkable Seth Cohen, had been a big deal for 15-year-olds when Rachel Lee was 15. Summer was a girl who could handle herself, once telling a presumptuous suitor, “I’m
not gonna be your sloppy seconds, assface.” Not exactly Elizabeth Bennet putting Mr. Darcy in his place in Pride and Prejudice but critics hailed the show as “clever” anyway.

  But in real life—not the fake reality of The O.C.’s simulated reality TV moments—Bilson was a girl who’d had problems of her own. During a self-described “rebellious, self-destructive period” in her teens, when she was “hanging out with people she shouldn’t have” and dating a bad boy, she was in a serious car accident, a head-on collision which left her in a coma for days, and from which she still suffered migraines and memory loss. Another passenger in the car became paralyzed. (Bilson was not driving.) Because of the experience, she told reporters, she “changed” and “[went] in a different direction,” becoming an actress. She dropped out of Grossmont College, in El Cajon, California, after a year and made her screen debut in 2003, appearing in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003).

  Nick and Rachel scoped out Bilson’s house, Nick said, doing their usual reconnaissance. Sometimes they just sat and watched with binoculars, and sometimes they did leisurely drive-bys, casually searching for clues about how best to get in and do the job.

  For a couple weeks, Nick checked on Bilson’s comings and goings around L.A. “This was their operating norm,” Officer Goodkin told the Grand Jury. “Mr. Prugo would go to work with doing his kind of back-office research on the Internet, finding out where that victim lives, where is the primary residence, and then culling through Internet source stuff to determine is this a victim that travels a lot, is this a victims that’s not at home very often.” Nick discovered Bilson was planning a trip to New York for a couple of weeks with her then fiancé, Shattered Glass (2003) star Hayden Christensen. As soon as the paparazzi shots of her at LAX appeared, the Bling Ring was on its way.

  Nick said he and Rachel and Diana Tamayo burglarized Bilson’s home four times in the beginning of May, entering through an unlocked door. (Tamayo’s lawyer, Behnam Gharagozli, denies Tamayo had anything to do with the burglaries of Bilson.) Nick said they took Bilson’s designer clothes—pieces by Chanel, Roberto Cavalli, Zac Posen—and her vintage shoe collection; she was a size 5, too small for either of the girls, but they wanted the shoes anyway. They took Bilson’s handbags and extensive stash of Chanel makeup, her Chanel No. 5 perfume, her jewelry, “underwear, bras. With these celebrities everything’s brand-new,” Nick said, “they still have the tags on the items. But of course they would take dirty or non-dirty and wash ’em, whatever—anything and everything that would fit, that they liked, they would take, and being that these were all women there wasn’t a lot of stuff for me. . . .”

  Rachel, he said, had gotten so comfortable with the routine that during one of the burglaries of Bilson’s home she took time out to have a bowel movement. “We were in Rachel [Bilson’s] bathroom and Rachel just had to go, so she just. . .yeah. I remember the incident so well. I can recall the smell, which is really nasty, disgusting. I know I would never, like . . . When you’re in there,” robbing someone’s house, that is, “you have a rush, like I’ve had to pee when I’ve been in there, but I would never use their bathroom, just in fear of that maybe some type of evidence would be left there. I think that’s weird, personally. But yeah, she did.”

  The fifth time at Bilson’s house, Nick said, he went with Tess Taylor and another girl who was a minor at the time. When Nick met Tess in 2007, she was just another pretty girl on the Valley scene; now she was a fixture on the Hollywood nightclub circuit, going out almost nightly, and so Nick thought she might like some fashionable new items to add to her wardrobe. He said they took purses, clothes, and a studded, light-blue leather vest. When I spoke to Taylor in December 2009, she denied going with Nick on any burglaries and said she wasn’t even aware that he had been engaged in any criminal activity.

  They took so much from Bilson, Nick said, he and Rachel “got a lot of her stuff together and sold maybe thirty purses” on the boardwalk on Venice Beach. “During the day there’s these stalls you can rent where you can set up like a shop to sell things to people that walk along,” he said. “We came up with maybe a thousand dollars each from Venice, just like selling [purses] for like fifty bucks a piece. We had all these designer things and people would jump at the chance.”

  6

  On June 18, 2010, Rachel Bilson told the Grand Jury:

  “I got a phone call from my mother while I was away,” in New York, in May 2009, “and she said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ And I said, ‘Yes. Why?’ I was really concerned. And she said, ‘Your house has been burglarized.’ And immediately my reaction was I was crying, and, you know, a little horrified. And then she went on to describe what she came home to [see], what the house was like. . . .It’s really a feeling of violation and invasiveness.

  “When I came home,” Bilson said, “walking into the house . . . [I got] just a really bad feeling. My whole upstairs, where my bedroom is and my closet and everything, everything was out on the floor, drawers were pulled out, just totally scattered, and everything was in disarray.

  “All of my, I guess you would say, higher-end shoes, purses, clothing, those were all taken. My jewelry, some irreplaceable things that were sentimental, in like, my jewelry boxes and things, all of those were stolen. . . . My grandmother’s jewelry, and my mom’s engagement ring that she had set for me when I turned 16, that was taken; things like that were hard to accept.

  “And a TV was taken and a DVD player. Lots of DVDs. Actually, a whole cabinet of movies were—it was emptied . . . downstairs.” Bilson estimated the total loss to be around $128,000.

  “There was no forced entry anywhere,” she said. “I had an alarm system. It wasn’t set at the time of the burglary.

  “It took me a while to feel comfortable staying there. I wouldn’t sleep in my bedroom for about a month. I would stay in. . .a downstairs room. And I was convinced [for a time] that I needed to sell my house and get out of there, because I was very scared.”

  7

  On November 4, 2009, Jonathan Ajar turned himself in to Hollywood Station. He was accompanied by his then lawyer, Jeffrey Vallens, and a Maxim magazine writer named Mark Ebner. Ebner had been traveling with Ajar for the past few days, having tracked him down to Las Vegas through Ajar’s mother, Elizabeth Gonet. Gonet was afraid her son—who was being called “armed and dangerous” and was the object of an LAPD manhunt that had become national news—was going to perish in a hail of bullets, Dillinger-style, if the cops tracked him down, so she had encouraged him to let the reporter escort him back to safety.

  And maybe Ajar also liked the thought of Maxim magazine fame. The night before he turned himself in, Ebner made a video of him announcing his intentions, which Ebner posted on his website, Hollywood, Interrupted. It was instantly picked up by TMZ, the gossip website Gawker and news media all over the country.

  “What’s your name?” Ebner asked Ajar, a lumpy young guy with droopy eyes and a goatee; weighing in at about 250 pounds, he wore an oversized T-shirt and baggy jeans. He looked like a white homeboy as played by Mall Cop actor Kevin James.

  “Jonathan Ajar. A.k.a. Johnny Dangerous,” Ajar said with a sly smile.

  “Media reports are calling you armed and dangerous. How would you respond to that?” Ebner asked.

  “Not right now,” Ajar said offhandedly.

  He was a 27-year-old ex-con who had spent a year and a half in a Wyoming state prison for drug trafficking between 2005 and 2006. He had grown up poor and sometimes homeless near Reseda, California, about 30 minutes northwest of L.A. When the LAPD searched his apartment in Winnetka, a small, predominantly Latino town in the Valley, on October 22, 2009, they reportedly found “a large amount of narcotics and paraphernalia,” including the prescription drugs Clonazepam, Lexapro, and Oxycodone; some allegedly stolen property, including a diamond-encrusted Cartier Tiger watch, a Montblanc watch, gold and diamond bracelets and rings, purses by Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, and Chanel, Gucci eyeglasses, a Blackberry, True Religi
on jeans; a bag of loose diamonds totaling 42.94 karats; “two stolen semi-automatic handguns,” “one semi-automatic shotgun,” a cache of live ammunition, and a ballistic vest. One of the handguns, a Sig Sauer .380, was registered to the actor Brian Austin Green.

  “Mr. Ajar did come into possession of a few items, which were apparently stolen by Mr. Prugo and his friends, according to Mr. Prugo,” said Ajar’s lawyer, Michael Goldstein.

  In the parking lot of Hollywood Station that November day, Ajar allowed himself to be handcuffed by Officer Brett Goodkin before he was led inside. A videorazzo from TMZ called out from behind a chain link fence, “Hey Johnny, man, who’s the ringleader? How’d you meet these kids? Johnny, where were you hiding out this whole time, bro? Johnny Dangerous!”

  Squinting in the sun, Ajar looked a bit stunned by his predicament. It was as if he suddenly couldn’t quite believe that he was going back to jail because of these “fucking idiots,” as he called the Bling Ring kids. He would be charged with 12 felony counts, including for possession of drugs for sale, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, possession of ammunition, and receiving stolen property. He was held on $85,000 bail.

  How did he get there? According to Ajar, he met Courtney Ames one night in the spring of 2009 at the Green Door, a Hollywood bar-restaurant that was very hot at the time (and since has cooled). Heidi Klum had thrown a Halloween party there, Orlando Bloom liked to have dinner there, and Prince had performed there in 2008. Ajar was a marginal figure on the L.A. nightlife scene, working as a promoter for Les Deux, another Hollywood club that was having a moment (it closed in 2010), with patrons like Leonardo DiCaprio, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and the girls on The Hills—Lauren Conrad, Whitney Port, and Audrina Patridge.