The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  In 2008, Lindsay was accused of stealing an $11,000 mink coat from a 22-year-old Columbia University student, Masha Markova, at the New York nightclub 1 OAK. She eventually returned the coat after Markova saw pictures of her wearing it in paparazzi shots and reportedly had her lawyer call Lindsay’s lawyer.

  When I interviewed Lindsay in 2010, she said, “I’m a completely different person now. . . .I think self-control is something I’ve learned over the past few years.”

  In 2011, surveillance cameras caught her walking out of a Venice, California, jewelry store wearing a $2,500 necklace she was accused of stealing. “Lindsay Lohan is a thief” turns up over four million links on Google.

  33

  On August 20, 2009, Rachel Lee was back in L.A. for a hearing in her shoplifting case. It was her first offense, and she and Diana Tamayo were sentenced to a year’s probation and fined an undisclosed sum. It had been almost a month since Rachel had been in L.A., and in the time she was gone, her friends had been involved in some high drama. There had been an accident. Courtney Ames was driving her car with Nick Prugo in the seat beside her when they wiped out in Hollywood early one morning.

  “I was in the front seat of her car,” Nick said. “Courtney was driving at seven a.m. We left a bar,” Miyagi’s on Sunset. “She was drinking from midnight to seven a.m.” (Courtney’s lawyer, Robert Schwartz, had no comment.) “She got behind the wheel on Sunset and Crescent Heights,” Nick said. “She makes a left-hand turn into a car, crashes into this van. Airbags go off. . . . I didn’t even have a scratch, thank God, maybe a little whiplash. There were four people in the backseat of her car. Courtney got taken to the hospital.” She had broken her collarbone. She was charged with D.U.I.

  With Rachel gone, Nick had been hanging out with Courtney, Tess, and Alexis more often. He missed Rachel. But he said he didn’t miss the risk of doing the burglaries, or the anxiety it had caused him. He was surprised and reluctant, he said, when, upon her return, Rachel said she wanted to “go on a mission” to Lindsay Lohan’s house. He said that he told her he thought it was too risky, that they were pushing their luck; but Rachel couldn’t resist pulling off one last heist. “Rachel’s like, biggest conquest was Lindsay Lohan,” Nick said. “It was her ultimate fashion icon.”

  Despite all her highly publicized personal problems, Lindsay was still considered something of a fashion goddess at the time, particularly among a young, celebrity-obsessed subset of the fashion-buying public. She’d been the face of a number of labels, including Jill Stuart, Miu Miu, and Dooney & Burke. She’d been on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Marie Claire, Allure, and scores of other fashion magazines. She was a model before she was an actress, landing a contract with Ford when she was only 3 and appearing in over 60 commercials before the age of 11 (she had supported her family while her father was in jail). A self-confessed “fashion junkie,” she once told a reporter she’d dropped $100,000 clothes shopping in one day. She had her own line (of course), 6126, named for the birthday of her idol, Marilyn Monroe (it started with leggings). In August 2009, the month that she was robbed, she was a guest judge on Project Runway. She had a sexy, rock star style that reflected her rebellious behavior.

  On the night of August 23, Nick said, he and Rachel drove with Diana Tamayo to Lindsay’s house in the Hollywood Hills. They went in Diana’s car this time and parked down the street, he said, down a hill from the residence. It was a three-bedroom rental Lindsay had moved into in February, after moving out of Samantha Ronson’s house, nearby. It was surrounded by tall hedges. The street was quiet, empty like neighborhoods in L.A. always seem empty, except for the sound of traffic somewhere off in the distance.

  Surveillance footage from that night shows three people, a boy and what appears to be two girls, approaching the entrance to the house, an arched doorway inside a gated entryway paved with tile. The visitors appear to be trying to conceal their faces. The girls wear hoodies over their heads. One wears a hoodie and a scarf, while the boy wears a hat and a scarf as well. The boy’s long-brimmed baseball hat looks a lot like the one worn by the boy in the Audrina Patridge surveillance video. It’s Nick. He’s smoking a cigarette.

  “I didn’t even want to go into Lindsay’s that night,” Nick said. “ ’Cause our thing was always, when we’d walk up to the door, we wouldn’t be masked. We’d be really inconspicuous, like teenager kids. We wouldn’t be looking like we were doing anything wrong. . . . I thought, when we were, like, casing the house, that if people were driving by, I didn’t want to look like we were suspicious and so I wouldn’t cover myself. I was just, like, innocently there.”

  But now they felt like they couldn’t go anywhere without concealing themselves; not after Rachel and Diana had had mug shots snapped. “And I knew if my face was on camera,” Nick said, “and anything was taken, I knew that video would be released, just like Audrina’s. But Rachel was like, We’re here, Lindsay’s gone. I wanna do it, this is our opportunity.

  “She said, let’s just go in—no one’s here. You’re on camera, but it doesn’t matter. You’ll be fine. Audrina was fine, you’ll be fine with this one. And so we went in,” Nick said. “Obviously it wasn’t fine ’cause someone said something to the police and the police came to my house.”

  In the surveillance footage, you can see the burglars ring the bell several times; and then, when no one answers, they walk around to the side of the house. They were looking for unlocked doors and windows, Nick said, “but the house was completely locked.” He said they found a window in the kitchen at the side of the house, which Rachel proposed forcing open. “We had a screwdriver in the car,” he said. “Rachel took the screwdriver, jimmied open the window. Diana crawled through the window into the house, unlocked the door,” and then let them in. Tamayo would later claim that it was Rachel who crawled in the window.

  There was “no alarm,” Nick said, “no nothing.”

  The house was “messy,” he said, “just clothes everywhere”—bags and bags from shopping trips and freebies delivered from clothing stores and fashion lines. It looked to Nick like the home of a “compulsive shopper. . . .There was so much stuff that hadn’t even been worn, with the tags still on. . . .It was obviously heaven for [Rachel and Diana]. They were freaking out, like, ‘These are the clothes! This is my dream!’ This was the wardrobe [Rachel] wanted.” Clothing and shoes and handbags and gowns by Alexander Wang, Chloe, Gucci, Chanel, Donna Karan, Christian Louboutin, Fendi, and Givenchy. . . .

  “They started filling up suitcases and bags,” Nick said. “And I’m kinda like, standing there like I don’t know what to take. After the first ten minutes passed I wanted to go. But they wanted the clothes, they wanted the purses, they wanted the shoes. . . .” He said Rachel told him, “You’re already here. You might as well get something for yourself.”

  “I took, like, a Juicy men’s T-shirt,” Nick said. “I took one shirt. I took, like, a little picture of some Ed Hardy skull.” Actually, he also took some Louis Vuitton luggage and jewelry. That same weekend, he was arrested for driving under the influence.

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  Lindsay told the Grand Jury that on the night of August 23, 2009, she left her house around 9 p.m. to go visit friends in Malibu. When she returned home about 3:15 a.m., she said, she noticed “my front door wasn’t locked, and it usually always was. My alarm didn’t sound, and usually I had to turn it off. . . . I noticed that the side door” leading upstairs into her kitchen “wasn’t locked at all.”

  Inside the house, she said in court on June 21, 2010, she saw that “everything was all over the place. . . . Everything that I had was kind of thrown [around], and everything was pretty much disheveled.” She said she started looking to see if any property was gone, and right away she found two watches were missing. “One was a gift,” she said, “so it was pretty sentimental.” The other missing watch was a Rolex watch with a blue face—the same type shown on the wrist of someone in a photo that Nick had given to the LAPD; he said it was Rachel’
s wrist.

  Also missing, Lindsay said, were “a lot of shoes . . . bags were taken . . . It was a lot of stuff that I had accumulated over a long amount of time and that I have worked for. . . . Hundreds of thousands of dollars” worth of stuff—an estimated $128,000 in all. A Hermes bag was gone, a Louis Vuitton bag, a custom-made black mink coat, and two paintings—one depicting a skull—and a beaded rosary Chrome Hearts necklace. Assistant District Attorney Sarika Kim showed Lindsay a picture of a rosary necklace by Chrome Hearts. “And do you recognize it as property that belongs to you?” she asked. “Yes,” Lindsay said. It was the same type of necklace that had been spotted by an LAPD detective and taken off the neck of Courtney Ames at her arraignment on December 2, 2009.

  On the lower level of her house there was a closet in which there was a safe. When she went to look at it, Lindsay said, “It was as if someone was trying to move it. And there was like a black lacquer on it, so I could see the fingerprints in trying to move it on the white walls.

  “I had just gotten back that day from a trip,” she said. “So I had things still packed in my suitcase,” which was also gone. “That night that I went back to the house, I just felt, to be honest, so violated and uncomfortable that I literally packed as much stuff as I could [and left]. Because it wasn’t about the things that were taken, it was just the fact that someone came into the only private space that I have in my life at this point. And my sister,” Ali Lohan, “was with me and she was really upset and scared. So I literally packed as much as I could and left that night and still have not gone back to that house since that night. I left that house. I stayed in a hotel, and then I moved into an apartment building.

  “And I don’t ever plan on going back to that house,” Lindsay said. “It was, like, such an invasion of privacy, and it’s just eerie.”

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  The next morning, Nick drove Rachel to the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank to catch a Southwest flight back to Vegas. He said he would never forget the image of her walking away, strolling into the airport. “I don’t know if there’s some airport video,” he said, “but she was, like, rolling Lindsay’s suitcase, wearing Lindsay Lohan’s purse and Lindsay Lohan’s clothes—she was just, like, fully Lindsay Lohan.”

  He said it was the first time he had ever felt a pang of doubt about Rachel. “It was just so crazy,” he said, “to be walking into a place like that, with so much security, so many surveillance cameras, with all that stolen stuff. It was like Rachel really didn’t believe anything could happen to her.”

  Since she’d come back to L.A. and said she wanted to “go shopping” at Lindsay’s house, Nick said that he had a feeling this was how they were going to be caught. He’d already taken most of his stolen belongings and moved them to his grandmother’s house, which, he said, “I feel really bad about.” He didn’t want to get rid of them completely—he wanted to keep them, all “the beautiful, gorgeous things”—but “I put it all out there ‘cause I thought something might happen and . . . it was kind of a precaution.” (His grandmother didn’t know that the boxes her grandson put in her basement were full of stolen property.)

  Two days later after Rachel left, on August 26, the LAPD, with Lohan’s permission, released the surveillance footage of her home to TMZ. Now there were two videos circulating, Lohan’s and Patridge’s, making it all but plain to see that they had captured images of the same people, and that there was a connection between the Hollywood Hills burglaries.

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  In the last week of August 2009, Brian Austin Green’s home was robbed. Nick couldn’t really account for why he decided to do the job without Rachel there. It was just a week after he and Rachel, and Diana had burglarized Lindsay Lohan’s house. Nick knew his image would once again appear on surveillance footage that would be posted on TMZ—“I just had a feeling,” he said. The Green burglary happened a week after Rachel had gone back to Vegas, so Rachel wasn’t pushing him to do it.

  Green, Nick said, had been on their hit list, and they’d already done the surveillance of his home; he said Rachel had been interested in the wardrobe of Green’s girlfriend, Megan Fox. But Nick didn’t want Megan Fox’s clothes.

  Fox, then 23 years old, was an actress from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who’d appeared in a succession of roles highlighting her smoking hotness—she was on a 2004 episode of Two and a Half Men in which she played an underage girl lusted after by Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer; she was the hot pants-wearing love interest of Shia LaBeouf in Transformers (2007) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009). She also played an aspiring actress in Whore (2008), about a group of teenagers who come to Hollywood with hopes of becoming famous, but wind up becoming “whores.”

  Why would Nick risk doing another burglary at this time? Was it because his anxiety about being identified was now so excruciating that he was unconsciously trying to speed up the inevitable? Was it because, for once, now, with Rachel gone, he wanted to be in charge of a burglary—to finally rob someone who might have clothes he wanted? “I feel stupid now,” he said, “but I used to get into fights with her ’cause it was like, this is all for you, this is all women’s fashion, what’s in it for me? This is all women you’re picking, and like she’d be like, No they have boyfriends, you’ll get something, and I’d be like, okay, just trying to make her happy. I didn’t want confrontation and so I just went along with it.”

  Was it because part of him missed Rachel, and this was a way of making her jealous . . . maybe making her want to come back? Or was it just because he wanted the money? “I guess it became like an addiction,” Nick said.

  In the last week of August, he said, he went to Green’s four-bedroom Tudor home in the Hollywood Hills with Courtney Ames and another friend, a girl I’ll call “Sherry.” (Ames’ lawyer, Robert Schwartz denied Ames participated in the burglary of Green.) Sherry was a graduate of Calabasas High—“a really cute, pretty blond girl,” Nick said, who was petite enough to reach up through the doggy door in a side entrance of Brian Austin Green’s house and unlock the door. “She had problems with Xanax and, like, pills,” Nick said. “She would take pills and want to do these things with me, burglary things.”

  Nick said that Ames stayed in the car, acting as a lookout, while Sherry reached through the flap and opened the door. “And then we walked in,” he said. “The alarm was off. There was a bunch of nice TVs, gamer systems. We didn’t take any of that. We just went to the [bedroom] closet, took some clothes, kind of with the idea that if we take a little, no one will notice. And they didn’t notice. They had no idea until I talked to the LAPD and the LAPD contacted them and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, that makes sense now.’ ”

  Brian Austin Green told the Grand Jury on July 18, 2010, that it wasn’t until almost two and half weeks after the burglary that “I went to look for jewelry that I normally wore and it was missing.” Among the missing jewelry was a Rolex watch.

  It was Nick’s style to be stealthy. And maybe also this burglary was Nick’s way of proving to himself, and to Rachel, that his way had been right. Be safe, be careful, be like mice. Take only a little. They have so much, they’ll never notice it’s gone. Green hadn’t even noticed the theft of his Sig Sauer .380 until the police called him and told him they had it.

  “There was a lock box under the bed,” Nick said, “and I thought there was maybe cash or jewelry or something in it.” So he took it. He said when Courtney later saw the box, “She was like, ‘That’s a gun, that’s a gun.’ So I’m like, ‘I don’t believe you.’ Then we go to Johnny’s house. Open the box. There’s a gun in there. I hate guns. I didn’t even touch it, I didn’t want to touch it. Courtney picks up the gun. Wipes it off. Gives it to Johnny. We sell it to him for three hundred bucks and the gun’s gone. You know, because I hate guns. They freak me out. So, I got rid of that. Kept some clothes, and, you know, that was really it. . . .

  “That wasn’t really a big robbery.”

  Days later, Nick returned to Green’s house with Diana and another acc
omplice, he said, and raided it a second time. Tamayo’s lawyer, Behnam Gharagozli, denies his client burglarized Green.

  PART THREE

  1

  On September 1, 2009, the Hollywood Area Commanding Officer of the LAPD, Captain Beatrice Girmala, received a call from a man named Paul Wolcott, a retired cop who was the Security Manager of CNN’s West Coast offices. Wolcott had some startling information about a couple of high-profile burglaries that had taken place in the Hollywood Hills. It seemed the robberies had allegedly been committed by two teenagers, Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee. Wolcott had heard this from a CNN employee who didn’t want to be named—the LAPD would refer to her as “Protected Witness #1.” She was a young woman who had a friend, another young woman, who hung out in Nick and Rachel’s social scene. The LAPD would refer to this second source as “Protected Witness #2.”

  Protected Witness #2 had contacted her friend at CNN and told her that “while attending a party, she overheard both suspects boasting that they had committed both. . .burglaries together”—that is, the Patridge and Lohan burglaries. “During their boasting, the suspects mentioned the names of both celebrity victims,” according to the LAPD’s report. Protected Witness #2 emailed links to Lee and Prugo’s Facebook pages to Protected Witness #1, who then forwarded them to Wolcott, who sent them to Captain Girmala. Girmala notified LAPD Detectives Steven Ramirez and John Hankins, who had been working on finding out the identities of the people seen in the Patridge and Lohan surveillance videos.

  Up until this time, the detectives at Hollywood Station didn’t have any firm leads about the string of celebrity burglaries that had been taking place over the last eight months. They hadn’t even connected them to one another. “Initially, investigators had no evidence that suggested that these crimes were related,” said the LAPD’s report. Cops had interviewed some of the victims; checked out the crime scenes; taken fingerprints and DNA samples—for example, off cigarette butts found in an ashtray on Lindsay Lohan’s balcony (which they later found to be covered with Nick Prugo’s DNA). But they didn’t necessarily think that there was an organized crew behind any of this, and certainly not that it was a band of teenagers. “They were a very successful crime ring,” Vince, my cop source, said. “They were just really bad at not getting caught.”