The Bling Ring (13 page)

“I just found it odd that [Rachel] would want to involve more people,” Nick said. It was becoming a party atmosphere. Now they would hang out in Paris' nightclub room and smoke cigarettes. They would lie on her bed.

Another person Rachel allegedly brought along with them to Hilton's house was Courtney Ames. Ames' lawyer, Robert Schwartz, denies Ames ever entered Hilton's house or was involved in any burglary there. “She's irresponsible, she's a goofball,” Schwartz said. “That's who she is. I'm not here to tell you she had no involvement at all or that she's led an upstanding life. She's had a drinking problem; she has used terrible judgment on many occasions.” But, he said, his client was innocent of all the crimes of which Nick Prugo accused her.

Nick said that although he was initially turned off by Courtney's “hard-rock” exterior, he had grown to like her over time. “Like, there's like two different Courtneys,” he said. “There's the one that, after getting to know Courtney, I kind of understand; she's really like a little girl. She's not really a hard-ass. She tries to be a hard-ass so much. She hangs out with the worst people. She involves herself with the worst boyfriends, the worst kind of things. But, like, inside, just from knowing her for years, I really see a different part of her. I think that's what attracted me to her. It obviously wasn't her looks or her style.”

From Hilton's house, Nick said, they took “jewelry and dresses and leather jackets. Courtney took a leather Diane von Furstenberg jacket.” “She was given the jacket by Prugo,” said Schwartz. “He wanted to be a big shot, a big man.”

19

Nick told police that he, Courtney Ames, and Roy Lopez planned the $2 million heist of Paris Hilton's jewelry in December 2008. (Ames' and Lopez' lawyers, Schwartz and David Diamond, both deny all of Prugo's allegations about their clients. “Roy Lopez was never in Paris Hilton's home,” said Diamond.) Nick knew Lopez from hanging out at Sagebrush Cantina, just off the Mulholland Drive exit in Calabasas, where Courtney briefly worked as a waitress in 2008; Nick said she would serve him and his friends free drinks.

Lopez was the bouncer there; he was barely making ends meet. “He was staying with friends, at shelters, and on the street,” Diamond said. “He could not even afford to get his car, which had no wheels, fixed.” Lopez would see Nick and his friends coming into the bar wearing expensive designer clothes. “To him it seemed like they had a lot of bread,” Vince, my cop source, said. Lopez saw the topless photos that Nick said he'd stolen from Hilton's safe; Nick was showing them around. So when Nick and his friends bragged about hanging out at Paris Hilton's house and stealing her clothes, Lopez had reason to believe that they were telling the truth.

Lopez proposed they do a bigger robbery of Hilton's house, Nick told police. Why settle for these smaller things they were coming away with when there was a whole closet full of jewels just sitting there waiting to be taken? Nick had regaled his friends with how he and Rachel had found Hilton's jewel closet hidden behind a secret door in the wall of the closet with her shoes. He said it was “like a jewelry store,” lined with shelves crammed with velvet-covered stands dripping with sparkling necklaces, bracelets, earrings. “It was like Paris' own personal Tiffany's.”

“Roy [Lopez] promised a ‘cut' of any proceeds from the upcoming burglary for Prugo's assistance” in planning it, said the LAPD's report. “Roy told Prugo that he could expect to receive as much as one hundred thousand dollars after Roy sold the jewelry he expected to steal from Hilton's residence. Prugo readily agreed to . . . Roy's proposition. Prugo stated that he was asked to plan this burglary because of his knowledge of the residence that he gleaned through his prior burglaries at Hilton's residence.”

In the early weeks of December, “Prugo stated that he met with Ames and Roy on numerous occasions to plan the . . . burglary,” the LAPD's report said. “Prugo drew a map of the interior of the Hilton residence, which included the location of the jewelry as well as the location of the surveillance cameras installed on the perimeter of the residence. Prugo explained to Roy that the only way to access Hilton's property was to . . . walk up a hill to the rear of Hilton's property. Prugo also advised Roy that Hilton kept a key underneath a doormat at the front of the residence.”

Hilton said in Grand Jury testimony that on the night of December 18, 2009, she left her house at 10:30 p.m. for three or four hours. (She was meeting friends at Bar Deluxe in Hollywood.) She didn't turn on her alarm, she said, “because, before this, I felt so safe in this gated community, like no one could ever get in, that I sometimes would just go out and not even think to put the alarm on, because I never thought anyone could get in my home.” She also said she usually left her key under the doormat, in a flower planter or “up in a light.”

When she returned between 2 and 3 a.m., Hilton said, “I just noticed that there was, like, kind of shoe marks with dirt on them that were, like, leading up the stairs. And then when I went into my room, I had black carpet on the floor so you could really see there were prominent footmarks, which led into my closet area where my jewelry was.

“My closet where all my jewelry is kept had been ransacked and, you know, basically two full shelves were, I guess, pushed into a bag,” Hilton said in court. Surveillance footage from that night shows a male, about six feet tall and wearing a black hoodie, walking up the stairs to Hilton's bedroom and later coming out with a Louis Vuitton tote bag. Inside the bag was over $2 million worth of jewelry, Hilton said, including heirlooms that had been in her family for generations. Police pictures of the bag (which was later recovered) show a tangled heap of glittering stones, chunky necklaces and bracelets, all wound together, crisscrossed with strings of pearls.

After finding her house had been robbed, Hilton called the police; the next day it was all over the news. “Paris Hilton's Pad Burgled!” said E! Online. “Prugo discovered through the media that Hilton's residence had been burglarized,” said the LAPD's report, “Prugo contacted Roy to congratulate him and ask for his portion of the proceeds. [But] Roy advised Prugo that while the burglary was successful, half of the jewelry that he removed from the residence was inexpensive costume jewelry and that [the] remainder were priceless pieces that Roy's ‘fence' could not sell. Roy advised Prugo that the jewelry was being stored at a location in the state of Arizona.

“Prugo stated that he never received payment for the planning of this burglary.”

“Roy Lopez . . . did not steal anything from Paris Hilton,” said David Diamond, Lopez' lawyer.

20

“Oh, God,
Nick
,” Tess said as she waltzed out of a Starbucks In L.A. “We've known each other since high school.”

She was talking to a videorazzo from the gossip website X17 Online. “He got into some in-ter-est-ing business,” Tess said dryly, “and we really haven't been speaking much since. But, we go way back.”

She was wearing a pair of low-slung jeans and an off-the-shoulder white T-shirt that showed a lot of skin. She had on her black Ray-Bans. You had to wonder how X17 Online knew she would be there.

“[Nick] was accused of breaking into Lindsay Lohan's house and stealing some of her belongings,” the videorazzo said. “Do you know anything about that?”

“Um,” Tess said, circumspectly adjusting her sunglasses. “I didn't really know much about that until the other night when, haha, it came out on TMZ.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“
Yeeeah
,” she said.

“Is that when you were out with Drake Bell?” the reporter asked.

“I was,” said Tess. “We were out hanging out at the Roosevelt. . . . We were hanging out and um, Nick just so happened to be there as well.”

It was October 16, 2009, three days after Tess and Nick had been hanging out with Bell. But Tess seemed to be trying to distance herself from Nick now. In just six days, her “sister” Alexis would be arrested.

“Has [Nick] ever spoken to you about anything that occurred during that time, with the Lindsay thing?” the videorazzo asked. “He's even accused of breaking into Audrina Patridge's.”

“I
heard
about that,” Tess said. “He didn't tell me too much. He told me he knew about it. . . .”

21

A couple of weeks later, on October 29, 2009, a TMZ reporter caught Paris Hilton going into Philippe, a Chinese restaurant in L.A. She was with her sister Nicky. The cameras were flashing.

“What do you think of the Burglar Bunch?” the videorazzo asked.

“They're scumbags,” said Paris.

She looked every bit the star that night: her platinum hair was cascading loosely in an elegant 'do, her lipstick was hot pink. She was wearing a little black cocktail dress with a plunging neckline. She had Old Hollywood glamour to her, although her fame had never been based on anything like Old Hollywood achievements.

In just a couple of years, Paris' star had fallen. She was no longer a staple of the tabloids. Journalists had vowed not to report on her anymore. The Paris backlash was in full swing. By December 2009, CNN was asking, “Why has Paris Hilton disappeared?” “Phase one was the ascension, seemingly out of nowhere,” said Samantha Yanks, editor-in-chief of
Hamptons
and
Gotham
magazines. “That came with a media frenzy, the antics, the partying, the music, the babe-like status, and of course the fashion label. Phase two, she disappears.” Sort of like former president George W. Bush, whose rise and fall Paris' closely paralleled.

Bush, who once enjoyed a 90 percent approval rating (the highest of any president since the poll originated), was now being called the worst president in U.S. history and was largely absent from view. Paris, who could be said to have symbolized the Bush years in some all-too obvious way, was on her way to becoming the most unpopular celebrity in America, according to a 2011 poll. She bristled at a
Good Morning America
interviewer, Dan Harris, who asked if she thought Kim Kardashian was “overshadowing” her. “Do you ever worry about your moment having passed?” Harris said, interviewing Paris in the lavish living room in her home. Paris got up and walked out.

“How much [time] you think they should do in jail?” TMZ asked Paris of the Burglar Bunch, that night in October 2009, a week after they had all been arrested.

“Ten years,” Paris said. “They're a bunch of dirty rotten thieves.”

PART TWO

1

Audrina Patridge was discovered, poolside, at the apartment building where they were set to shoot a new MTV reality show called
The Hills
. It was 2006, and Patridge was then a 20-year-old aspiring model and actress from Yorba Linda, California, about 40 miles southeast of L.A. “The executive producer came up and started talking to me about a new show,” Patridge told Sydney's
mX
newspaper. ‘'He said it was kind of like
Sex and the City
and he really liked what I had going on.” A Lana Turner for the reality age, Patridge had a brunette sex appeal that would carry her through all six seasons of
The Hills
, in which she wore many bikinis and tank tops.

She was a rich girl who starred in a reality show about rich kids who never seemed to work very hard, but wore lots of designer clothes and drove fancy cars. Yorba Linda, where Patridge is from (also the birthplace of Richard Nixon), is consistently ranked by the U.S. Census Bureau as one of the richest cities in America, with a median income of $115,291. Patridge's father, Mark Patridge, is the CEO of Patridge Motors, “an extremely successful family business producing engine parts,” according to his bio page on VH1.com. In 2011, Audrina landed a VH1 reality show—
Audrina
—about herself and her family, produced by Mark Burnett, the reality television mogul behind
Survivor
(2000–) and
The Apprentice
(2004–).