The Bling Ring (17 page)

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 Religion 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.

Ajar was living the high life; that's how he saw it. “I had a good time,” he told
Maxim
. “Who else can say they had Playmates at their birthday party?” He'd been photographed with Black Eyed Peas member will.i.am. and partied with former Death Row Records mogul and reputed Bloods gang member Suge Knight.

Coming upon Courtney Ames and her friends at the Green Door the night they met, Ajar said he helped them get in, although they carried fake I.D.s. He seemed to like Courtney's tough girl image, so different from the typical airheads that flocked to the nightclub scene. On another night, at Les Deux, he talked Courtney and her buddies into getting body-painted in honor of his birthday (another birthday). Soon Courtney and Johnny were spending time together and she was staying overnight at his apartment in Winnetka.

8

By the spring of 2009, the Bling Ring was in full escalation mode and the kids were hitting Hollywood nightlife hard in their newly acquired clothes and jewelry. They had exciting new things to wear, and now they wanted to show them off—and where better to do that than in the same places where the celebrities they were robbing, and planning to rob, liked to go and party?

Dressed in their new celebrity skins, they gravitated to Les Deux. The French-themed club was popular with underage guests, as it had a garden and a dance floor that made it easy to pass from the restaurant to the bar unnoticed. But the Bling Ring kids never had a problem getting served, or getting in, thanks to their friend, now Courtney's boyfriend, “Johnny Dangerous.”

Alexis Neiers and Tess Taylor actually knew Johnny before the other kids. “He would get us into clubs,” Alexis said when I spoke to her again at her home, after our first meeting in her lawyer's office. She said that she and Tess had been going out since they were 16 and 17, and that's when they started to become a part of “the Hollywood scene. It was
known
that we were out hanging out with Emile Hirsch and Leonardo DiCaprio,” Alexis said, “and just, like, typical Young Hollywood. Paris Hilton's birthday—just typical stuff.”

In her Grand Jury testimony, Hilton testified she didn't know any of the Bling Ring kids; all the other celebrity victims said the burglars were strangers to them. “Every time we were at a club there'd be celebrities there,” Alexis maintained. “That's how I became friends with Mickey Avalon. . . . Mickey's such an awesome guy!” Avalon is a white rapper and former prostitute known for his graphically sexual lyrics.

According to Nick, Alexis and Tess would sometimes exaggerate their closeness to the stars. “They like to make themselves sound like they [know them],” he said, “but they don't. There's a little bit of truth to each of their stories. They might have met someone and hung out with them in a club, but they don't really
know
them. They're really good with embellishing. They sit at these guys' tables, these rich guys and whatever, and then it's over. They're like arm candy. . . . They just get [caught up in] the celebrity, the glamour.”

But the glamour was what Nick wanted, too. And he knew that Tess and Alexis could provide him with that by bringing him into nightlife. “They were the first people that brought me out to clubs,” he said. “They brought me to Beso,” the celebrity hot spot on Hollywood Boulevard. “I started going out with them, started meeting people. Everyone loved me, everyone loved them. We started going out a lot to the hottest nightclubs, celebrity nightclubs—Voyeur, Wonderland, Teddy's at the Roosevelt. They can get in anywhere because they're so hot and gorgeous and young and the celebrity guys love to have them at their table.”

Clubkid Nick was a very different Nick from the boy who, just three years earlier, was too anxious to go to school. Cocaine, perhaps, and a successful robbing spree, along with a fabulous new wardrobe, had given him an edgy self-confidence. Now he was a boy who hung out with beautiful half-naked girls in his room. A picture taken in 2009 (published on the gossip website The Dirty in 2011) shows Nick and a topless Tess in Nick's bedroom, Nick looking suavely into his computer screen as Tess bends over him, looking seductive (she's wearing a bra that's pulled down). Gabby Neiers can be seen in pictures from the same photo shoot, smiling and apparently giggling.