The Bling Ring
Page 27
“Yeah, but you were famous,” said Richie.
“I don’t even call myself famous, I was a fucking drug addict,” said Alexis.
“It was about getting as far from reality as possible,” she said. “Drugs and alcohol were” a way of “seeking acceptance. That goes hand in hand with this whole celebrity thing. . . . Our culture as a whole idolizes this behavior.” She attributed her problems to the sexual abuse she said she had experienced as a child by a person close to her family; and to the influence of Tess: “We are like fire and gas.”
Alexis seemed almost like a different person now. The squeaky baby voice was gone. The spiritual clichés had vanished. She seemed sober. And then Richie started asking her about her involvement in the Orlando Bloom burglary—for which Alexis had already done her time.
“I was not there for it,” she said flatly. She denied that the LAPD had ever found any stolen items in her house. She said she was “not on any surveillance” footage. “I only knew Nick [Prugo] for four months really, during this whole thing,” she said.
44
“I’m in this recovery journey and it’s been an incredible learning experience for myself,” Alexis had said in one of her post-rehab blogs. She was sitting on her bed, wearing a blank tank top, showing off an armful of new tattoos. She looked as glamorous as ever, if in a different mode. She was recovery Alexis. She was styled like her idol, Angelina Jolie.
“I know who I was,” Alexis said of her former incarnation. “I was a dope fiend, alcoholic, lying, cheating girl, and it was not a pretty picture by any means.”
And then she started talking about Tess. “It’s nice when you find out stuff about your sister on a media outlet,” Alexis said, laughing softly. She was referring to how TMZ had reported that Tess had been arrested in January 2012 for drug possession. Alexis said she hadn’t spoken to Tess since Tess left the SOBA Recovery Center, where she had briefly spent time in 2011 getting help for her own addiction problems. “I’m really, really happy to say Tess checked herself into treatment again,” Alexis said. “She checked into the Pasadena Recovery Center. . . . TMZ did another story about that. She’s not doing the whole celebrity rehab thing. I’ve gone to visit her several times now and I can really see the growth and the change and the lightbulb really starting to turn on. And it’s really an incredible thing to watch. To see someone really getting to know who they are is a beautiful, beautiful thing.”
Alexis tweeted that she’s having a daughter.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In researching this book, I relied on many sources, including L.A.P.D. officers, officials in the L.A. District Attorney’s office, and defendants in the Bling Ring case, including Nick Prugo, Alexis Neiers, and Courtney Ames. I spoke to their friend Tess Taylor, as well as Alexis’ mother, Andrea Arlington Dunn; her father, Mikel Neiers; and her sister, Gabrielle Neiers. I interviewed Ames’ stepfather, Randy Shields, and Elizabeth Gonet, the mother of co-defendant Jonathan Ajar. I interviewed friends and classmates of several of the defendants. I spoke to lawyers for all of the defendants, sometimes multiple lawyers for a single defendant.
As further sourcing I used police documents such as the L.A.P.D.’s report on the case and search warrants for the defendants’ homes. I viewed surveillance footage of the burglaries at the homes of Audrina Patridge and Lindsay Lohan, which were made available publicly, and Orlando Bloom, which was shown to me by an L.A.P.D. detective. I read the Grand Jury proceedings which took place in June of 2010, at which all of the celebrity victims testified. I used accounts from newspapers, magazines, and online news outlets.
I did not speak to Rachel Lee, although I made many attempts to do so through her lawyer, Peter Korn. I spoke to Korn only once, when he told me that he did not wish to participate in any media regarding the case, and did not want his client, Lee, to do so either. The case against Lee is detailed in the Grand Jury proceedings and in the report of the L.A.P.D.’s investigation. I sent Lee a letter to her prison address, asking her to respond to allegations made in those documents as well as allegations made by other sources, but she did not respond. I sent letters to Lee’s mother and father, Vicki Kwon and David Lee, neither of whom responded.
I have relied here on interviews I did with Nick Prugo in the fall of 2009. I communicated with Prugo in person and, later, by telephone and text messages. As Prugo was himself charged in multiple burglaries, his credibility as a witness was called into question by some of the lawyers for other defendants. However Prugo’s confession was the basis for the L.A. District Attorney’s case, and his testimony led to the discovery of stolen goods in some of the defendants’ homes. The participation of some of the defendants in the burglaries was then verified by other police work.
I relied very little on Detective Brett Goodkin in telling this story, mostly via the L.A.P.D.’s report on the case, which Goodkin wrote. The report was not his work alone, however, but the product of several other detectives on the case, including Detectives Steven Ramirez and John Hankins. The basis for the report was largely Nick Prugo’s confession, which, again, was a jumping-off point for further investigation.
In the last year Goodkin has been the subject of media attention and criticism from some of the attorneys in the case for having appeared in Sofia Coppola’s film, The Bling Ring. However, several of the lawyers involved told me that they did not think Goodkin’s movie appearance diminished the credibility of his police work. “Goodkin’s movie participation has nothing to do with his conduct at the time,” wrote Daniel Horowitz, Prugo’s current lawyer, in an email. “I’m still not sure what he did wrong. Certainly he did nothing that would affect his investigation of the case.”
The Bling Ring case, involving several teenage defendants, became one of “he said-she said,” as criminal cases often do. Defendants made allegations about each other’s participation in the burglaries. As I researched, I made all of the defendants aware of any allegations that were being made against them, and gave them an opportunity to respond. In some cases their lawyers chose to respond and in other instances they declined.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my editor Carrie Thornton for suggesting this book and for all her great questions and answers which helped me figure out how to make it work. Thanks too to Sofia Coppola for seeing something bigger in the story, which became her wonderful film. Thanks also go to my agent Sarah Burnes for taking me through the process of book writing for the first time, for her humor and unfailing support.
Much gratitude also goes to Graydon Carter for assigning the Bling Ring story and for his incredible kindness over the years, and to Dana Brown, my editor at Vanity Fair, for editing that story and for always encouraging me to be myself.
Thanks also to Jenny Allen, a talented writer whom I was lucky to have as a fact-checker and confidant. Thanks to Brittany Hamblin at HarperCollins for all her help with acquiring photos and generally making things happen.
Thanks to my sparkling daughter Zazie for putting up with many nights of take-out from Wild Ginger when I was busy working, and for keeping me laughing and dancing. And thanks to my darling Henry for saying “yes, you can,” when I was worried that I couldn’t. Thanks to my mom Alice and my dad Ronny (may he rest in peace) for everything, especially teaching me how to work hard (and not burgle). Thanks to my dear friend Calvin Baker, a great writer, for all his good advice, and my late friend Donald Suggs for talking me through this story even on the night he died, making me laugh on the phone by saying, “This is upper-middle-class crackhead behavior.” I miss his wisdom and bon mots.
COPYRIGHT
Photographs on pages 6, 59, 88, 209, 236 courtesy of Splash News and Picture Agency; photographs on pages 66, 82, 172 courtesy of X17, Inc.; photograph on page 108 ©Warner Bros./Getty Images; photograph on page 129 ©AFP/Getty Images; photographs on pages 137 and 146 ©Susanna Howe/ Trunk Archive; photograph on page 161 ©WireImage/Getty Images.
THE BLING RING. Copyright © 2013 by Nancy Jo Sales. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FOOTNOTES
1. See Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin 2012).
2. A psychostimulant used for the treatment of ADHD.
3. An antidepressant.
4. In 1989, along with his older brother Lyle, in Beverly Hills.
5. The phrase appeared in Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes (Crown, 2002), largely the basis for the movie Mean Girls.
6. See Dr. Drew Pinsky and Dr. S. Mark Young, The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America (Harper, 2009).
7. In the 1920s, Holmes was a founder of the spiritual movement Religious Science, or “Science of Mind,” a precursor to New Age thought.
8. A detective at Malibu/Lost Hills Station, which covers Calabasas, told me that he couldn’t discuss the alleged crimes Nick discusses here due to the alleged perpetrators’ juvenile status at the time they were committed.
9. The “Bel Air Burglars” who robbed dozens of homes between 2005 and 2008 targeted the rich, but not the famous.
1
0. In the 2003 video, a Quebec high school student awkwardly brandishes a golf ball retriever as if it were a lightsaber from Star Wars. His friends put it on the Internet without his knowledge.
11. Winslet won, for The Reader.
12. See Grandmaster Flash “The Message” (1982), Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (1988), KRS-One’s Stop The Violence Movement (begun in 1989), and more.
13. “Meridian tapping” is a New Age holistic healing technique whereby people tap on their bodies in the hopes of undoing disturbances caused by negative emotions.
14. As the dancing troupe on the variety show, Solid Gold (1980–1988), they were once the gold standard for female jiggle—outside of Vegas showgirls or actual strippers—in American entertainment.
15. None of Nick’s accomplices were charged in the Altuna burglary, and, due to legal complications, can’t be named.