The Bling Ring (12 page)

The celebrities who'd been burglarized lived in a succession of fancy digs: Orlando Bloom's large ranch-style house looked like a Bat Cave, painted black and surrounded by its own small secluded forest. Lindsay Lohan's modest Mediterranean-style home was surprisingly tasteful for such a flamboyant young woman. Brian Austin Green had the kind of charming Tudor cottage only lots of TV residuals can bring. Audrina Patridge lived in a small, Spanish-style house, the perfect starter home for a young celeb. Rachel Bilson's suburbanish home (it was actually in Los Feliz—I'd driven there first) looked like it could be the setting for a sitcom about rich kids living in L.A. and running a burglary ring.

It was hard to imagine having the nerve to just walk into these people's homes and steal their stuff. What, I wondered, had made the Bling Ring kids so bold? Was it that they'd been able to find out the location of the houses so easily? Was it just because they could? Were they high, drunk?

It was odd, when you thought about it, that Hollywood had never seen a burglary ring on this scale before.
⁹
Hollywood, in the words of Vince the cop, had “shit to steal.” And Hollywood has never been shy about showing off its wealth. If all the valuable things up in the Hills weren't enough to attract gangs of thieves, then there was the added attraction of these things belonging to celebrities. In terms of the marketplace, celebrity stuff is sprinkled with magic dust. Look at the boon it affords private dealers and auction houses. Christie's took in nearly $137 million auctioning off Elizabeth Taylor's jewels—a world record for a private collection of baubles, almost three times the record for any other single collection, and that was the Duchess of Windsor's.

So why wasn't Hollywood always getting robbed? (Ironically, the movies specialize in glamorizing thieves—see
The Thomas Crown Affair
, 1968;
How to Steal a Million
, 1966;
The Italian Job
, 1969. . . .) Especially in hard times like the Great Depression, when Hollywood flaunted its wealth as unabashedly as now. Think of all those sumptuous Hurrell photographs of actors and actresses lounging in luxurious settings, looking mystically bored. Or
MTV Cribs
. Or the spreads on celebrities' homes in magazines like
InStyle
and
Ocean Drive
.

And yet, the burglary rate among Hollywood's celebrity population has always been remarkably low. Could it be that criminals assume that famous people have better security, better moats? Maybe, but security never stopped bank robbers. It's not as if some enterprising burglar couldn't figure out where all the celebrities lived, even before the Internet. There have always been maps of the stars' homes and bus tours leaving on the hour. In an episode of
I Love Lucy
, Lucy jumps off a tour bus and does a B&E on Richard Widmark's property, climbing over his wall to steal a grapefruit souvenir. (No doubt the Bling Ring would have made off with some of his wife's dresses.)

More likely, I thought, it was fame itself that had acted as a shield, an invisible fence keeping the non-famous out. Until recently, the fame bubble has always seemed magical, impossible to pierce, like the protective force field thrown out by Violet, the “super” girl in
The Incredibles
. Cary Grant's cufflinks would be a score, sure—but who would want to rob Cary Grant? He was respected and admired. “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” Grant once said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

Criminals have loved their stars, too—they're often wannabe stars themselves, flocking to the same nightclubs and vacation spots. The Mob loved Sinatra not just because he was Italian-American, but because he had crossed over into a nether world in which they could never belong. And he got there because he could do something few people in the world could do as well, and no one in the same way: he could sing.

The history of celebrity has been a history of excellence. Sir Joshua Reynolds could paint; he was an Annie Leibovitz for the Age of Reason, both famous and able to make someone famous with his idealized portraits. Lord Byron, the original bad boy, could write; Sarah Bernhardt could act (and knew how to drive her public wild with stunts that would make Lindsay Lohan blush). Louis Armstrong could play the trumpet like Gabriel himself. Fred Astaire could dance. And while there have always been flash-in-the-pan personalities sensationalized by tabloid media, opportunists who took their fifteen minutes and ran, only to disappear, the real stars—the ones who made it all the way up to that peak where they've been granted by adoring fans an almost godlike status—have always been special in some way, blessed with dazzling gifts and/or beauty, both talented and given to hard work.

“Stars—they're just like us,”
Us Weekly
tells us. Well, now they are. Reality television leveled Mount Olympus like a nuclear bomb. On reality TV, even truly gifted and talented celebrities can be seen acting “real”—sometimes too real, like when the late Whitney Houston was taunted by her husband Bobby Brown on
Being Bobby Brown
(2005) for how he had manually assisted her with a bowel movement. A friend of mine remarked, “That was the end of civilization.”

The Internet made stars of us all—even the reluctant ones, like the “
Star Wars
Kid” (the unwilling subject of one of the most famous viral videos of all time).
¹⁰
“Why is she famous anyway?” President Obama joked at the 2012 White House Correspondents' Association dinner; he was talking about Kim Kardashian. As probably even the president knows, Kardashian's fame originated with a sex tape, an unthinkable phenomenon fifty or even fifteen years ago. Kardashian saw her friend Paris Hilton's star rise after the release of a sex tape in 2003, and in 2007, her own semi-nude romp with the singer Ray J suddenly appeared. It was supposed to be for private viewing only, but somehow it was leaked, and voila, Kardashian, who formerly had a job organizing closets for the rich and famous, was famous.

Her mother, Kris Jenner, had been shopping around a reality show tied to the fame of her husband, Olympian Bruce Jenner, but now it sold with the help of Kardashian's sex tape fame. Kardashian, guided by her mother, now also her manager, followed her friend Paris' celebutante business model with just a few variations. After the reality show came endorsements, clothing, fragrances, personal appearances, books, and then spin-off shows for her sisters, Khloe and Kourtney. But, more important, Kardashian had a more sustainable image: she didn't do drugs or get arrested for D.U.I. or go to jail, and she didn't toss around offensive words (as Paris had). She was the nice Paris. In 2010, the Kardashian franchise earned $65 million.

So why was Kim Kardashian famous? Because she was very good at marketing herself, that was all—and today, that was enough. Corporations are now people and people are now products, known as “brands.” At a time when the 1 percent was getting richer, the 99 percent was suddenly trying to keep up with the Kardashians.

Maybe, I thought, the Bling Ring kids felt they could just walk into the stars' homes because stars no longer shined. Maybe the Bling Ring, for all its silliness, represented a turning point in America's relationship to celebrity.

18

Nick said they visited Paris' house four times between October and December 2008. Paris never seemed to notice that they'd even been in her house, much less that they'd stolen anything. She never reported anything to the police. Nick was always Googling her, checking the news for any signs of trouble. Paris just put another key under the mat, replacing the one they'd taken. Nick said Rachel put that key on her keychain.

“Paris never really knew anyone was in her house—this was my assumption,” Nick said. One reason for this might have been that, in the beginning, they would only take a few items at a time. “Why not take a little bit,” he said, “I guess my thought was. You know, take a little bit so they don't notice. Don't take everything and really screw them over.”

On those repeated missions to Paris' house, he said, he felt like he got to know her; he “saw her more as a real person. Being in someone's house when they're not there you see all kinds of things.” Sometimes Paris' house was a mess, and there were signs that she'd been in a hurry, upset, or possibly in a rage. Once, Nick said, a mirror was cracked, as if something had been thrown against it. Maybe a cell phone, he speculated. Sometimes there would be clothes everywhere, as if Paris had tried on a million different things, unable to choose what to wear. He knew the feeling. He'd read that Paris said she'd been diagnosed with ADHD when she was young and was prescribed Adderall. He'd been diagnosed with ADHD, too, and knew lots of kids who took that drug. When Paris was a teenager she'd reportedly been sent to the exclusive CEDU High School for troubled teens in Running Springs, California. It was sort of like being sent to Indian Hills, but with rehab.

And then there was Paris' cocaine. “We found about, like, five grams of coke in Paris' house, or Rachel did,” Nick said. He said they snorted in her house and left. “We drove around Mulholland having the best time of our lives.”

“I don't know why anyone would listen to allegations made by a self-confessed thief,” said Dawn Miller, a rep for Hilton.

Often after doing a mission, Nick said, they would drive around pumping club hits like Lil Wayne's “Got Money”:
“Got money and you know it/Take it out your pocket and show it/Then throw it like/This a way, that a way. . . .”
They would get a high just off having done something so wild—like Lil Wayne in the music video for the song, where he robs a bank and then throws the money to grateful pedestrians. Except Nick and Rachel were the pedestrians.

“You know,” Nick said, “unbeknownst to us, mentally we were acting insane, but it felt so glamorous and wonderful.”

They went back and back, he said, becoming addicted in a way that mirrored their addiction to cocaine—and to each other. He said that Rachel's boldness grew despite the fact that once they were almost discovered. One night they when were walking up to Paris' house, “we see these cops and we jump in the bushes,” he said. “We're sitting in the bushes for maybe an hour. These cops are just sitting there, looking around with their lights. We're for sure we're getting screwed; we're sitting in the bushes not moving, freaking out. I'm pooping in my pants—like, I'm
scared
. And then they drive away. So we leave. We don't even go into the house.”

But then, he said, “We go back on another occasion. We go back in. It didn't seem to faze [Rachel] every time we would go into this house.” It was the lure of the things, the intimacy of the things. And the intimacy of the space, and Paris not being there in it.

Sometimes the things they took were intimately mundane, like a pair of sneakers that belonged to Benji Madden, Paris' boyfriend. Nick wore them around. And sometimes the things they took were more personal. Nick said Paris had a “safe room and in her safe—it was completely unlocked—she had a thing of, like, maybe eighteen pictures of herself topless and rubbed with, like, some tanning color all over her body.” So they took them. “We thought we might be able to sell them to a tabloid,” he said. “We thought it would be profitable at the time, but after looking into it we were told everyone has seen Paris Hilton naked so it didn't really matter. So Rachel just kind of hung on to those.” And Nick did as well.

Meanwhile, he said, his anxiety over their new hobby grew. When he'd voice his concerns to Rachel, “she'd say like, ‘It's okay, you're freaking out over nothing,' minimizing anything I would worry about. And I would believe that 'cause this was my best friend.” It was, “ ‘I love you. I'd do anything for you.' ”

“She was like a family member,” Nick said. “I'd bring her over and we'd celebrate my sister's birthday together.” His little sister Victoria went to Calabasas High School; he said she was a sweet girl and a good student and knew nothing of his criminal activities.

“Rachel was my family,” said Nick. “She was my family, I was her family.”

And that's why it felt wrong when she started involving other people in their “secret.” “It was, like, our secret,” Nick said, “but Rachel would tell her best friends and I would tell some of my best friends. . . . Rachel kind of recruited Diana [Tamayo] through Indian Hills.” After graduating from high school in 2008 Diana had enrolled in Pierce College, where she was taking business classes.

“At first I didn't like Diana,” Nick said, “because I didn't know her. . .It's not that I didn't
like
her, it was [supposed to be] me and Rachel—it was our friendship, our thing; and I didn't really agree with bringing other people into it and making it, like, a big thing. I didn't think it should go that far. . . .Rachel asked me is this okay, should I bring Diana into this? I didn't feel that should even be an option; I didn't think it should grow, but it eventually did and Diana came to be involved.”

Tamayo's lawyer, Behnam Gharagozli, denies all of Nick Prugo's allegations about his client. “I don't agree with the contention that Rachel started the whole thing,” he said. “I don't think she was the ringleader. Nick had heavy involvement in this whole thing.”

Once, Nick said, when they went on a “mission” to Hilton's house, Rachel brought along her former boyfriend (he was a minor at the time). He was a good-looking kid who resembled James Franco when he played bad boy Daniel Desario on
Freaks and Geeks
(1999–2000). According to the LAPD's report, this boy was arrested for possession of an unregistered handgun in February 2009. At that arrest, “several items of jewelry” were “recovered. . .and booked into evidence by the arresting deputies.” A few months later, in November, after the Bling Ring was busted, the jewelry was shown to Hilton, who recognized it as hers. (Rachel's ex was never charged for the burglary of Hilton's home due to reasons that are still unclear—probably his minor status, which would have complicated the Bling Ring case for the L.A. District Attorney's office; minors are more difficult to prosecute.)