The Bling Ring (31 page)

Alexis had told me that Nick's dad “was very stern. . .he was really tough on him. . .he didn't trust him at all. He was just like very strict about keeping the house clean, very anal.” Erenstoft had said that Nick's father was “kind of a hothead.” He said he thought his dad “pretty much stayed out of Nick's business, not knowing about the turmoil Nick might be suffering.” “His mom was a sweetheart,” Alexis said. “Nick cussed at her all the time. He was just really mean and constantly arguing.”

Nick's current lawyer, Daniel Horowitz, said Nick had a warm relationship with both his parents.

I asked Nick about Rachel.

“I've really, like, cried over the fact that I've been so attached to her,” he said, “and this whole thing's been really hard 'cause I still care for her. I still love her to this day, but it doesn't excuse what happened.”

And then he started talking about the burglaries. He said, “If you look at the celebrities that have been victimized, they're all women with, like, you know, fashion sense. . . .These women were all very successful and they all had expensive clothes.” He talked about how he and Rachel “started getting into checking up on these celebrities, all the websites and everything—she would be on it, I'd be on it, we'd be like a little high-tech research team.” He talked about robbing Paris Hilton's house and burglarizing Audrina Patridge, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Miranda Kerr, Brian Austin Green, Megan Fox, Nick DeLeo, and Richard Altuna. He told it all in a restrained, unemotional way; he didn't seem to want to glamorize it.

“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.

“I've been charged with eight burglaries,” he said, “I've got nothing to hide. Open book here. I want to make everything clear. Everything I've been in possession of, I've returned, even down to. . .a little picture of some Ed Hardy skull from Lindsay Lohan's house, I gave it back. Like I gave every single thing back and my friend—I don't want to name her name, she's not involved in this at all—she made me realize maybe the reason I'm not sleeping at night is I'm sleeping in a room full of all this beautiful gorgeous stuff but it's not mine, and getting rid of it made me feel I can sleep at night. I feel so much better. I had like ten Louis Vuitton suitcases. I had the most gorgeous, like, Marc Jacobs, Gucci, Yves St. Laurent—it was really hard for me to do that, give it all back, but it wasn't mine anyway so I'm a piece of shit for taking it, that's why I gave it back. I shouldn't have taken it in the first place. I could breathe. I could sleep at night; when this all first came out I wasn't sleeping, I was even losing hair. . . .It was really hard for me to be comfortable with myself and now that I've helped the police—I've given everything back, I've really tried to make amends with these people; I'd love to maybe get some apology out to them at some point that I'm sorry.”

“You mean you want to apologize to the celebrities?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” Nick said. “I mean I don't even know how they'd take it 'cause I don't know what they're thinking.”

“What would you say to them?”

“You know, I'm sorry—I mean, personal invasion, to be a victim like that, to have someone in your house where it's your most personal of sanctuaries; your most private of things go on there. If someone did that to me, I'd have to move. I wouldn't want to sleep there another night. I know it's such a high level of privacy invasion—I don't blame them.”

“So why'd you do it?” I asked.

“At the moment I wasn't thinking,” he said. “I was following Rachel. This was the person that I loved, the person I trusted to have my best interests at heart, and I put all my faith in that person. I learned late in life how to make friendships, how to trust people, and I kind of messed up about that.”

18

A man and a woman, connected by crime. . .Nick was right that it was a scenario that has long attracted the American imagination. Bonnie and Clyde, with their gang of outlaws, robbing banks and killing cops at the height of the Great Depression, were two of the first celebrity criminals of the modern era. In their abandoned Joplin, Mississippi, hideout, in 1933, police found rolls of film the pair had shot of each other, posing with Browning Automatic Rifles; there was Bonnie toting a pistol and smoking Clyde's cigar. Like Nick and Rachel, they liked to take pictures of each other. They clearly saw themselves as very glamorous. Personal photography was relatively new and it was exhilarating in its power to assist in the creation of a self—for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, a criminal self. You have to wonder what they would have done with Facebook.

“The Joplin photos introduced new criminal superstars with the most titillating trademark of all—illicit sex,” Jeff Guinn writes in
Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde
(2010). “With her sassy photographs, Bonnie supplied the sex-appeal, the oomph, that allowed the two of them to transcend the small-scale thefts and needless killings that actually comprised their criminal careers.”

Like Nick and Rachel, it was Bonnie and Clyde's penchant for drawing attention to themselves that led to their undoing—and eventual demise. Their gang seemed to go out of its way to make a ruckus wherever it went, partying in hideouts, running loud, drunken card games into the night. They were kids: Bonnie was 20 and Clyde 21 in 1930, the year they met at the home of a mutual friend. Pretty blond Bonnie was a waitress in the then backwater town of Dallas; she loved the movies and dreamed of the life of a movie star, as she would write in a diary she briefly kept. Clyde, born into a poor farming family that had moved from rural Tellico, Texas, to the slums of West Dallas, was sent to Eastham Prison Farm in April 1930 after a series of arrests (he robbed stores, stole cars, and cracked safes). In prison, he beat to death an inmate who had repeatedly raped him. He vowed to get even with the Texas Department of Corrections, to liberate Eastham Prison, which he did, to some degree, in 1934, orchestrating the escape of several inmates.

Bonnie and Clyde were said to be instantly smitten with each other. Bonnie was the follower, passionately in love, and devoted to Clyde no matter what he did. They knew their crime and killing spree meant death in a shootout or on the gallows, and historians have speculated whether it were not one long suicide mission on the part of Clyde Barrow. Bonnie's 1932 poem, “The Story of Suicide Sal,” tells the story of a “gangster gal” who vows to follow her outlaw lover to the end: “For him even now I would die.” Twenty thousand people attended Bonnie's funeral in Dallas after she and Clyde were gunned down by police in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, in 1934.

There has been speculation, too, as to whether Clyde Barrow was gay. Arthur Penn's 1967 movie
Bonnie and Clyde
starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty alludes to Clyde's possible impotence with women. They were in love, that was for sure, but not necessarily physically intimate. Thinking of them made me remember how a lawyer for one of the Bling Ring kids said his client said that Nick and Rachel used to take showers together.

19

“It was weird,” said Nick, “like, I was just, like, I loved her—like she was the first person that befriended me. She was the first person that, like, actually paid attention. I'm sure it wasn't the best judgment, but I really felt she cared for me.”

He talked a lot about how deeply drawn he was to her and how much he needed her approval; how he “didn't want to upset her”; just “wanted to please her”; and “loved her . . . loved her.”

What he didn't love was doing the burglaries, he said. “Like, the process was tolerable, but then actually going in—it was just so stressful. But then after the fact, when I walked out, I guess was the only part that was, like, enjoyable, because I could breathe. I was relaxed. It's like, it was over. I guess that was the best part. When it was over.”

I asked him if doing a burglary was scary.

“Oh my God,” he said, “just like being there and the feeling of hearing a noise—just like anything you'd hear, like a car driving by or a little creak in the floorboard, I would jump, I'd run for the door. Rachel was just like, it's okay. I was terrified all the time.”

“Does it scare you now to think back on what you did?” I asked.

“Oh my God,” he said, “every day. Any time I walk into someone else's house, even when I'm invited, it's weird. It's like a haunted feeling. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's like I'll walk in and I'll feel uncomfortable. Like I don't why. Maybe I'll learn that later in life, but it haunts me. To this day. . . .It brings back really uneasy feelings, bad memories. . . .

“I couldn't sleep at night,” he said again. “I was so stressed out, I was so, like—everything [stolen] had been moved. . . . And then I made a decision to just make an inventory of everything I had and give it back—come clean with everything just so it wouldn't haunt me and I could breathe at night. I could sleep, actually, for the first time in years. I felt comfortable with myself. I felt okay, and like I was a good person. I was doing the right thing—which was really hard, especially when I felt like I was also betraying all these people that had been my best friends.”

“At first you tried to protect Tess and Alexis,” I said.

He said, “At first I tried to minimize their roles.” It wasn't until after Tess appeared on X17 Online, distancing herself from Nick that Nick alleged to police that she had been involved. (Again, Tess was never charged with any crime and denied ever being involved in a burglary.)

“Why them and not Rachel?” I asked.

“Like, they were my current friends. Rachel moved to Vegas. She wasn't really in my life as much,” Nick said. “Tess and Alexis kind of filled that void.”

20

Did Nick confess, in part, because he was angry at Rachel for leaving him? I wondered.

It was just a couple weeks after he came back from moving Rachel to Vegas that he was arrested. “And then,” he said, “we were on the phone doing constant communication. Her dad came out here, talked to me, went back. . . . He called me to meet with me, to give me advice on what to do. . . .Rachel told me he was coming. . . . He came here for some business, or to pick something up, but he stopped to see me, to help me. . . . He was trying to help me I guess. So he suggested to me, you know, stay out of the limelight. Maybe join the military. Move to Idaho, because I have a house in Idaho. . . . I think he was just trying to really help and make it go away. I don't know if that was necessarily right. I feel like his heart was in a good place, but he maybe could have executed it differently.”

(David Lee did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Have you talked to Rachel since you confessed to the police?” I asked.

“No. God, no,” Nick said.

“Have you tried to contact her?”

“I feel like it would be in vain,” he said. “I think, ‘What's the point?' I know that she has preconceived notions about everything. As do I. . . .It was a real friendship, and this whole thing's been really hard.”

After he got arrested, he said, “I had no idea what to do. I went at this alone. As soon as I was arrested everyone was kind of like, ‘You're on your own.' Which also made me feel abandoned. . . .No one was trying to help me. Everyone was just, like, okay, it's all on you. And I didn't know what to do. So I was like, what do I need to do for myself?

“And then, I met Sean,” he said. “I met him at a restaurant; I introduced myself to him. I saw him. . . .And I talked to him a little bit; clicked with him. I felt like he would, you know, be a better attorney than what I had. And I went to his office the next day. I met with him. He advised me to come clean. And I did. I really think that was the right decision. To this day, I really—even though I was charged with more, you know, things, or whatever—I really feel like it was the right thing to do. I feel like I'm a better person for it, and I will be a better person in the future for it. I have nothing over my head. I feel like that was the turning point in my life.

“I feel like it was the turning point in my life,” he said again. “It really made me. I had no respect for authority. I hated the police. I just had no respect for anything. And after meeting Sean, I really had a respect for the law. I had a different outlook on life and how to be a good citizen and not just to defy everything just because you want to defy it, but to actually try for something and be a good person and have morals and just, you know, it's a completely different outlook on everything. And like, I'm so grateful. It saved me. Really, it saved me—because if I had continued with Rachel and I didn't get caught, who's to say where I would end up? Who's to say where I could have been when I was twenty, twenty-five—it would have been a lot worse. So, I'm almost grateful for this. You know? What happened. It sucks, of course.”

21

“For young people, where do you think the obsession with fame comes from?” I asked.

“The media. The Internet,” said Nick. “America is just focused on—I mean Paris Hilton is famous for what? A sex tape? The values and stuff that America has are so wrong—people should focus on the politicians and the inventors and the important people. It shouldn't be about fame and celebrity and people famous for doing things that are not really important and are not helping society.”

He talked about how Rachel loved celebrity, how she followed the stars and where they lived and what they wore; what parties they went to, who they were dating, where they ate and vacationed.

Erenstoft was sitting with us on the couch, now, listening; his girlfriend was putting her kids to bed. “Was there anyone, any talent that was off-limits in your mind?” he asked Nick.