The Bling Ring (24 page)

So when Rachel Lee wanted Miranda Kerr's clothes, we can guess she wanted to look sexy. To steal the lingerie of a lingerie model—and the Bling Ring stole Kerr's underwear as well—is on some level an attempt to steal her sexual mojo. When I asked Nick Prugo what he thought Rachel's motivation in the burglaries was, he said, “I know it sounds dumb, but, like, she wanted the clothes. She wanted to look pretty.”

But it wasn't only Kerr's wardrobe that might have appealed; it was her lifestyle as well. She was dating a star—a particularly hot star, one of
Teen People
's “25 Hottest Stars Under 25” of 2002 and
People
's “Hottest Hollywood Bachelor” of 2004. Orlando Bloom, then 32, had starred in three of the
Pirates of the Caribbean
films (2003, 2006, and 2007), in which he played the blacksmith Will Turner, a sensitive and gifted swordsman. He had starred in all three of the
Lords of the Rings
films (2001, 2002, and 2003), in which he played the elf prince Legolas, a sensitive and gifted archer. His image had been made into 22 different plastic action figures (10 for Legolas, 12 for Will Turner). He'd appeared in four of the 20 highest grossing films of all time (all three
Pirates of the Caribbean
movies and
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
). Which meant that he and his girlfriend were living very well. They were also Buddhists.

“I see myself as a genuine person who wants the best for everyone,” Kerr told the
Daily Telegraph
in 2007. “I believe we're all equal and we all have our purpose in life. We all have our karma that we need to fulfill and I'm here fulfilling mine.”

She sounded a lot like Alexis Neiers. Or maybe vice-versa.

28

Alexis told cops that she and Nick were drinking at Beso in Hollywood on the night of July 13, 2009, when Nick got a call from Rachel telling him to come and meet her somewhere. She said she knew that Nick, Rachel, and Diana Tamayo had been burglarizing the homes of celebrities, including those of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Audrina Patridge, and others she “was not sure about.” Alexis said she was drunk and “not sure what was going on” as Nick parked his white Toyota on the road up the street from a house in the Hollywood Hills. Later, she said, she would find out that it was the home of actor Orlando Bloom.

Alexis said that she and Nick met Rachel and Diana on the road down the hill from Bloom's home. (Tamayo's lawyer, Behnam Gharagozli, denies his client was involved in the Bloom burglary.) It was a 3,248-square-foot house the actor had purchased in 2007 for $2.75 million. It was looming, black, and surrounded by lush landscaping. Alexis told cops she didn't want to go inside. Surveillance footage of Bloom's home from the night of July 13 shows four figures walking, four abreast, uphill toward the house. One of the lights on the street is out, so you can't see their faces; but you can see that two of them are taller; two are shorter. One of the taller ones is wearing what appear to be light blue pants. They all appear to be wearing hooded sweatshirts, with the hoods pulled around their faces.

As they get closer to the house, it becomes clear that they're walking backwards—backwards up a hill—as if they're aware that they're being filmed by a camera mounted above them, and they're trying to conceal their identities. As they get closer to the house, they suddenly dash toward it—again, seemingly trying to avoid having their faces caught on camera. When they get to the call box at the front of the house (the entire compound is surrounded by a large fence), they ring the bell several times. The postman always rings twice, but the Bling Ring rang three, four. . . .

Apparently satisfied that no one is home, one of the smaller figures attempts to hop the fence, but she can't make it over. She then kneels down and starts working on the fence from the bottom. Alexis and Nick both said this was Rachel, unbraiding the links of the fence, forming an opening. They said she made a hole in the fence and then slipped through, accidentally knocking over a large planter on the other side. The broken planter was found by police when they came to the house two days later, after the burglary was reported.

Surveillance footage shows the lights of a car going on in the courtyard in front of the house (the key was left in the ignition). It was Rachel checking the car for valuables, Nick and Alexis both said, but she didn't find any. The lights of the car are left on briefly as the burglars make their way up to the house. They walk around the perimeter, checking doors and windows, until they find an unlocked door by the pool area. Bloom's master bedroom.

The lights in the house flicker on successively as the burglars make their way from room to room. Once they were inside, Alexis said that Nick, Rachel, and Diana began to “ransack the home and remove property,” “taking numerous items and putting them in bags.” She said she saw they were wearing gloves.

“What are you doing?” Alexis said she screamed. “Get me the fuck out of here!” Then, she said, she went outside and threw up and peed in the bushes.

Alexis also said she “specifically observed Prugo walk out with a leather bag filled with items.” She said she “told Prugo that she wanted to leave,” and that “they all walked back to the cars with Bloom's property.” She said she “did not take anything,” “but assisted Prugo with the leather bag through the fence.” “Lee and Tamayo [then] stated they were going back into Bloom's home to recover more property,” Alexis said, while she and Nick “left the area and drove home.” Rachel called Nick “as they were driving home,” she said, “and told him they had taken numerous watches, jewelry, clothing, and paintings.”

Surveillance footage shows the burglars were at Bloom's house for about three hours, and that three or four times during their visit they came out of the house carrying bags to their cars—bags so large and so heavy with stolen goods that, at one point, the one in the light blue pants stumbles, walking up the hill, dropping a bag in the road.

29

Nick scoffed at Alexis's version of events. “We didn't even go to Beso that night,” he said. “We've
been
to Beso—we've gotten wasted at Beso—but this had nothing to do with that night. Alexis just said that as a cover, I think, to make herself sound like” she was drunk and unsure about what was happening.

“Alexis was staying at my house” that night, Nick said. “My parents went out of town and I had the house to myself. Alexis' mom had kicked her out of the house for, like, a learning lesson, so Alexis moved in with me. Alexis' boyfriend was a drug dealer. Her family didn't like him 'cause Alexis had had problems for smoking heroin for a while, and Oxycontin—‘O.C.' I've seen [her] smoke it.”

“Obviously, it's not true,” Alexis said when I later asked her about her alleged drug use. “I would never want something like that said about me.”

“Oh God, Alexis and Tess got into the hugest fight over me,” Nick said. “Tess was originally supposed to stay with me for those two weeks and Alexis stayed with me instead, and I guess Tess got upset about it. Tess felt threatened that Alexis was taking her friend. . . . And I felt like Alexis was trying to do that to Tess just to make her jealous.

“So Alexis was staying with me,” Nick said, “and this was the time when Alexis was into the whole ‘I want to rob,' thing. Easy money and whatever.” (Neiers' current lawyer, Lesli Masoner, declined to comment.)

Nick said it was Rachel's idea to burglarize Bloom. “Miranda Kerr, the Victoria's Secret model, was dating Orlando Bloom,” he said, “and Rachel wanted Victoria's Secret model clothes. So we mapped out Orlando Bloom's house. We knew he was out of town through the Internet—you'd Google his name, see ‘Orlando Bloom is shooting a movie, he's with Miranda Kerr in New York.' We planned to meet there, me and Alexis met Rachel and Diana, and we just kind of went from there. We went up to the house—in the video you can see Alexis is walking backwards up the hill. How would a drunk person, so sick, throwing up, be walking backwards up a hill?” he asked.

“That's her Juicy sweatsuit,” Nick went on, “those blue pants are her Juicy sweatsuit, guaranteed they're at her house right now.” He sounded a bit upset. “I'm more than happy to get on the [witness] stand and give them whatever they need,” he said. (Masoner declined to comment.)

Aside from the big robbery of Paris Hilton's jewels—the proceeds of which Nick never saw, as Roy Lopez was never able to sell them—the theft of Bloom's Rolexes was their most valuable haul to date. Bloom's watch collection included over 40 timepieces, some of them quite rare. He had an anti-magnetic Rolex Milgauss from the 1950s and a Rolex Submariner—special items known to collectors.

“Rachel found them,” Nick said. “She was in the bedroom. . .and there was like a wall, and Rachel pushed on the wall and it opened up. It was like a bookcase in the wall . . . . I looked in and at the bottom there was a case full of Rolexes and, like, fifteen hundred dollars. So I picked it up and put it on the bed, opened it and we all saw the cash and the Rolexes.”

“Alexis was, like, in the house running around,” Nick said, “rocking” that Louis Vuitton laptop bag she'd found “like a purse.” “Miranda Kerr also had a dress there by Alex Perry, who's an Australian designer,” he said, “like a one-of-a kind dress, a fashion runway dress. [Alexis] took that . . . . She had that dress; she had the bag. . . . Everyone just went into the house—you grabbed a suitcase and filled it up with whatever you wanted. Just throw everything in, go back to your house and look through it, and whatever you don't want, just throw it out.”

Then “we all left,” he said. “We went to the cars and Rachel came up to me and she said, ‘I want to go back in. I want artwork 'cause I'm moving to Vegas. I want stuff to decorate my house,' and I'm like, okay. . . .”

It was the first time Nick had heard that Rachel was leaving town.

30

Orlando Bloom told the Grand Jury that he was in New York on July 15, 2009, when he got a call from a woman named Maria Skara, a friend of his girlfriend Miranda Kerr. Skara said that when she went to Bloom's house to pick up some things for Kerr, she found the place had been robbed.

“I called my cousin, Sebastian Copeland,” Bloom told the court on June 21, 2010, “and asked him to go up to my house and see what happened. He went to my house, and he called me and said, ‘Dude, you have been burglarized. You have been broken into. Yeah, dude.'. . . He said it was a mess.”

In testimony, Bloom, the suave-looking action star, detailed the psychological effects of the burglary on him and his girlfriend. He seemed still shaken from having seen his house trashed, and pained about the way in which the crime had caused him to suspect those close to him.

“There were things everywhere,” Bloom said. “It's an awful, awful violation. [My girlfriend's] property, my property, my underwear—you know, everything [was taken]. Personal items, things that I cherish and treasure. It was very hard—it's very invasive, obviously. You don't know until it happens, but it's an awful thing to go through.

“It was immediately apparent that there were painting and photographs [missing],” Bloom said. “It was immediately apparent that everything of any sort of real value had been sort of lifted. . . . There was a painting in the dining room . . . a picture in the hallway. There [were] photographs in numerous rooms around the house. There was a painting taken from the guest bedroom.

“[They took] jackets, T-shirts, underpants. There was a bag full of clothes that was stolen. And I think my girlfriend had a lot of her clothes [taken]. . . .

“I collect watches,” Bloom said, “and I had a collection of watches stolen, and a ring. . . . I had a box with [ten] watches and some stuff in it, and that was all gone. . . . There was a ring, and there was some of my girlfriend's jewelry, and some cash that I had in the house for emergencies and stuff . . . Of course I kick myself now because I don't have a safe. But I had [the watches and jewelry] in a box that I thought [I had hidden] quite carefully.

“There's a wall that has . . . a secret [cupboard] in it,” he said. “If you look carefully, you can tell that there's a cupboard there, but then there was bookshelves [in front of it]. And at the bottom [of the cupboard], I hid a box, like a briefcase box with my collection of watches and some other personal items in it at the back. I sat books around it, [so] it just would have looked, like a bookshelf—somebody would have to have
known
.

“I mean, that was one of the things that was really freaky about the robbery,” Bloom said. “I thought, because they had found those [watches], that somebody who I knew personally must have broken into my house. To know that I even
had
the watches, because it's not something that I talk about particularly. . . . The books were stacked so that it made it not obvious for anyone to look. Everything had been pulled out and dislodged in order to find them. . . . Not a single person in the world knew where I put those.”

Also stolen, Bloom said, was “a rug. It's a very odd thing, because things sort of hit you later.” The total amount of his loss, he said, was “in the region of five hundred thousand dollars. The watches were of particular value.

“I was really, really freaked out that somebody, and somebody who I knew, who was close to me, who I work with, had somehow been connected to this,” he said. “And that for me was the worst thing about it. My housekeeper, [I] was pretty set on [her] . . . as my idea. And so she sort of declined to work.” In other words, she quit. “And I have since sent her flowers and stuff, you know.”

“You are suddenly second-guessing everything,” said Bloom. “You are like, ‘Who has been in my house?' The value of things kind of fades away. It's really about who is it? Who am I starting to question? You wind up looking around at people who are [your] friends [and asking]. . .who it is that could have been involved in this?”