The Bling Ring (27 page)

“That wasn't really a big robbery.”

Days later, Nick returned to Green's house with Diana and another accomplice, he said, and raided it a second time. Tamayo's lawyer, Behnam Gharagozli, denies his client burglarized Green.

PART THREE

1

On September 1, 2009, the Hollywood Area Commanding Officer of the LAPD, Captain Beatrice Girmala, received a call from a man named Paul Wolcott, a retired cop who was the Security Manager of CNN's West Coast offices. Wolcott had some startling information about a couple of high-profile burglaries that had taken place in the Hollywood Hills. It seemed the robberies had allegedly been committed by two teenagers, Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee. Wolcott had heard this from a CNN employee who didn't want to be named—the LAPD would refer to her as “Protected Witness #1.” She was a young woman who had a friend, another young woman, who hung out in Nick and Rachel's social scene. The LAPD would refer to this second source as “Protected Witness #2.”

Protected Witness #2 had contacted her friend at CNN and told her that “while attending a party, she overheard both suspects boasting that they had committed both. . .burglaries together”—that is, the Patridge and Lohan burglaries. “During their boasting, the suspects mentioned the names of both celebrity victims,” according to the LAPD's report. Protected Witness #2 emailed links to Lee and Prugo's Facebook pages to Protected Witness #1, who then forwarded them to Wolcott, who sent them to Captain Girmala. Girmala notified LAPD Detectives Steven Ramirez and John Hankins, who had been working on finding out the identities of the people seen in the Patridge and Lohan surveillance videos.

Up until this time, the detectives at Hollywood Station didn't have any firm leads about the string of celebrity burglaries that had been taking place over the last eight months. They hadn't even connected them to one another. “Initially, investigators had no evidence that suggested that these crimes were related,” said the LAPD's report. Cops had interviewed some of the victims; checked out the crime scenes; taken fingerprints and DNA samples—for example, off cigarette butts found in an ashtray on Lindsay Lohan's balcony (which they later found to be covered with Nick Prugo's DNA). But they didn't necessarily think that there was an organized crew behind any of this, and certainly not that it was a band of teenagers. “They were a very successful crime ring,” Vince, my cop source, said. “They were just really bad at not getting caught.”

Booking photos of Nick and Rachel from previous arrests (hers for petty theft at Sephora; his for D.U.I.) showed them to resemble the people in the Lohan and Patridge videos—especially Patridge's, in which you can see both of their faces in the bright light shining from above the front door. When investigators checked out Nick and Rachel's Facebook pages, it became evident that they were indeed “friends” with each other. From Facebook, they also learned that the two had attended Indian Hills High School in Calabasas, California, together. They saw that they liked to post pictures of themselves wearing designer clothes and jewelry; that they liked to party; and they seemed very interested in celebrities.

In addition to the call from the source at CNN, cops were now also receiving tips from random citizens. “Who does this sound like to you?” Vince asked me, playing a voicemail message that had been left for detectives at Hollywood Station. The voice on the phone sounded a lot like one of the Bling Ring suspects, anonymously identifying other defendants.

“Armed with the above information, search and arrest warrants were penned and executed at the homes of Lee and Prugo,” said the LAPD's report.

2

On September 17, 2009, the morning he was arrested, Nick said, “I was laying in my bed. My mom walks in the room crying. It's like seven a.m. I already feel something in the pit of my stomach. She comes in my room and says, ‘You need to get dressed. They want you to come outside.' Just hysterical. I felt like the worse piece of shit ever.”

His parents, Nick said, “knew something was not right but they didn't know anything” about why the police might be there. But, he said, he knew, “after, obviously, the Lindsay thing.”

The heavily armed police detail that had been sent to the Prugo house was considered routine. In California, burglary is a “strike” offense under the state's “three strikes” law, and burglars, if convicted, can face sentences from 25 years to life in prison, so there's thought to be the potential for someone to try to run or fight arrest. “It was people with, like, machine-gun-looking guns pointed at my family,” said Nick.

Under California's Penal Code Section 459, the definition of burglary is entering a structure with the intention to steal or commit a felony. Nick's house was being searched that day on suspicion of burglary and possession of stolen property.

“They didn't even come into my house,” at first, Nick said. “I walked out to them. They patted me down—actually they patted my mother down. I felt like so responsible. I felt such shame.”

Since he'd already moved most of his stolen possessions to his grandmother's basement, there wasn't much for the police to find—at least nothing they could recognize. “They searched my house and they left [stolen] property there 'cause they didn't know what they were looking for,” Nick said. “I had shirts and jeans and T-shirts from these [celebrities] but they didn't know, so they left it.” They took a pair of designer sunglasses they presumed belonged to Orlando Bloom—but actually, Nick claims, these were his. “I may have bought them with stolen money,” he clarified, “but I didn't steal them.”

“I just went quietly,” he said. “I made it as easy as possible. I went down to Hollywood Station. I was there all day. Seven a.m. to eleven at night.” His bail was set at $20,000. “Eventually, I was bailed out,” he said. “I stayed quiet.”

When he was grilled about the burglaries of Audrina Patridge and Lindsay Lohan, Nick told police he didn't know anything. That was what Rachel had told him to say if he were ever questioned, he said. “She was just like, keep denying it, there will be no evidence. There's no fingerprints. It's just your face. They can't prove anything with just a face.”

Nick denied that he had done anything wrong, or that Rachel had, either. He admitted they knew each other and hung out together, but that was it. He covered for her.

After not finding Rachel at home that day, the LAPD didn't try to apprehend her in Vegas. Apparently they felt there wasn't enough evidence yet to warrant an out-of-state arrest. Immediately upon his release, Nick said, he called Rachel at her father's house. He said she sounded “relaxed. . . . She said she hadn't heard anything” from the police. She knew about Nick's arrest, having seen news of it all over the Internet. “Arrest Made In Lindsay Lohan and Audrina Patridge Burglaries,” said People Online. “Yes, we have found [him]. God is good,” Dina Lohan, Lindsay's mother, told the website.

Nick said Rachel also told him that she'd sent emails to several celebrity news outlets including TMZ, planting a story that Nick was a friend of Lindsay Lohan's and had been “hanging out” with her on the Burbank, California, set of the ABC Family film
Labor Pains
(2009). When asked why she had done this, Nick said, Rachel replied that it was to throw the police off the scent, to arouse suspicion that Lohan was involved in the burglary of her own residence. It seemed to work: “LiLo May Have Connection to Burglary Suspect,” TMZ posted on September 22, 2009. “I think she's in on it,” wrote one commenter. “He's probally [sic] her coke dealer,” wrote another.

Rachel told Nick not to worry, he said, nothing was going to happen to him. It was all going to blow over.

And it might have blown over, if Nick had not confessed. The police, at this point, did have very little evidence. They had no stolen property. They had some fingerprints they couldn't place. The Patridge video was grainy enough that some good defense lawyer conceivably could have argued it away. If Nick hadn't confessed to committing multiple crimes with his friends, it's possible that nothing much would have ever happened to any of them. Why he did confess is one of the most puzzling aspects of this story.

3

My early conversations with Sean Erenstoft, Nick's former lawyer, all took place when he was in his car. Once when we were talking, he told me he was “in [his] Porsche” and so, if I lost him, he would call me back.

“I'm in a unique position,” Erenstoft said as he Porsched along. “I've got inside information about what's going on.”

In the next few weeks, Erenstoft would share some of this information with the “Sunday Styles” section of the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
,
People
, The Daily Beast, and TMZ, to name a few of the places he was quoted. I started to wonder whether it was Erenstoft who was the source of the “inside information” about the Bling Ring that was flowing to TMZ, but there were so many other possible candidates—some of the other lawyers, who didn't seem averse to publicity; cops; and the Bling Ring defendants themselves, who seemed to feel no hesitation about trashing each other.

In our initial conversations, Erenstoft sounded like a sharp guy who knew how to help a reporter out while still protecting his client's interests. He would divulge details about the other Bling Ring suspects while minimizing Nick's role in the burglaries. “Rachel's in possession of a lot of property,” he told me. “She stashed it before the cops could get to her. . . . Courtney Ames was sleeping with [Johnny Ajar]. She's the wannabe gangster type.”

But every now and then the lawyer would say something that would make you want to squint. “Even I have been around Paris Hilton when she's snorted coke,” he said. “If you're a night owl in L.A., you're gonna run into any one of these people. We all feel like we know Paris.”

Erenstoft seemed to be bothered personally by what the Bling Ring kids had done and to feel that they should be punished. He told me a few times, “I've been a prosecutor.” He said, “I don't know where people get the gumption to step in someone else's home. When I was a kid you weren't supposed to touch stuff that wasn't yours. I'm troubled by the new generation.”

Nick met “Sean,” as he called him, in late September at Miyagi's, a darkly lit Asian fusion restaurant on Sunset near Crescent Heights—it was the same place where Nick and Courtney had been drinking the night Courtney crashed her car in August 2009. Once a hot spot with a lot of celebrity clientele, it was now somewhat past its prime (and has since closed). Nick was close with someone who worked there, and his friends said they could get served drinks there even though they were underage. “They serve children at Miyagi's, when you're under eighteen,” says the girl with Courtney in the TMZ video where Courtney's outside the Studio City tattoo parlor Obsession Ink in January 2010.

It was a chance encounter between Nick and Erenstoft. They were introduced through Nick's friend at Miyagi's. Hearing he was a lawyer, Nick started telling Erenstoft about his legal troubles. Nick had just been arrested and was out on bail. He had another attorney at the time. But somehow by the end of the conversation, he was convinced that Erenstoft was the lawyer for him, and had decided to hire him to defend him.

I've wondered if Nick, who'd been abandoned by Rachel, and seemed to crave the direction of a strong personality, had now found this in his new lawyer. Erenstoft is a guy with strong opinions who isn't shy about voicing them; there's something of the old movie cop about him; he actually looks a bit like Dick Tracy.

One night in November 2009, I met Erenstoft for dinner at Iroha, a Japanese restaurant in Studio City that he'd chosen. We sat at the sushi bar, where he kept ordering from the sushi chef with a pronounced Japanese accent. He wore a suit, and seemed to have recently had a haircut. He was all angles, square haircut, and square jaw.

That night, Erenstoft admitted to me that “the cops didn't know anything” about what Nick had really done before Nick confessed. “As far as the cops were concerned,” he said, “Nick was [only] in receipt of stolen property. He had come and talked to me in private,” at his offices, after their first meeting, “and he said, ‘look, I saw the surveillance videos on TMZ. It was supposedly me and I went oh my God, oh my God, this is serious!'

“This was his reaction,” the lawyer explained. “He realized he had some major issues to deal with, because now he wasn't sleeping. He thinks he's losing his hair over it; he's not eating; he can't hold food down—[he has] all of the nervousness of a very, very scared man. Basically, for the first time in your life, you realize this isn't child's play. It was Rachel's idea—let's go out and have some fun, and now he's being hunted,” after the surveillance videos had been released.