The Bling Ring (8 page)

It was November 2009 when Erenstoft and I spoke a few times—he still hadn't made up his mind about whether he was going to allow Nick to talk to me. Meanwhile I was travelling back and forth from New York to L.A., meeting with cops and other lawyers in the case. I was beginning to worry about making contact with the defendants—any of the defendants; their attorneys had them all on lockdown. But this story wouldn't be any good without hearing from the kids. They were the only ones who could really say why they did it or what it all meant.

I was starting to suspect from my conversations with Erenstoft that he was the reason for all the media reports on how Rachel was the “ringleader” of the Bling Ring gang; he was getting out in front of the story, minimizing Nick's role, depicting him as a follower. Nick “will be found to have played a very, very limited role,” Erenstoft had said in a phone interview with the
Today
show in October.

Of course, the person I wanted to speak to most of all was Rachel herself. I tried repeatedly to make contact with her, but her lawyer, Peter Korn, would not allow it. What was Rachel's story? I wondered. What was her motivation? Why did she want celebrities' clothes? Was she really the one influencing all the other kids? Or was Nick just selling her out to save himself?

“Even if it Prugo was the ringleader, what was he getting out of all this?” my cop source asked. “Those kids stole
women's
clothes. It's kind of a bizarre thing for a teenage boy to be doing.”

But American boys were doing all kinds of troubling things, I was learning, reading up on what was going on with kids. “It's a bad time to be a boy in America,” wrote Christina Hoff Sommers in
The War Against Boys
(2000). This now popular notion gained traction in the aftermath of the Columbine shooting on April 20, 1999, when teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and wounded 24 others at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, before turning their guns on themselves. The massacre raised concerns about the state of American boys: what was wrong?

By the turn of the 21st century, boys were dropping out of school, being diagnosed with psychiatric conditions, and committing suicide four times more often than girls; they were getting into more fights, were 10 times more likely to commit murder, and 15 times more likely to become the victim of a crime. Boys were less likely than girls to go to college, were more often labeled “slow learners” and assigned to remedial education; and far more boys were being diagnosed (some say misdiagnosed) with ADD and ADHD and placed on prescription drugs like Adderall and Concerta. Boys in 2007 were 30 times more likely to be taking these types of drugs than boys in 1987 were.

But American girls were having a hard time, too. If we're going to talk about the Bling Ring burglaries as iconic crimes, then we have to begin with the fact that, as my cop source pointed out, they were mostly girls robbing mostly girls. There was Rachel the “mean girl,” the arch fashionista; Courtney Ames and her blasé attitude toward getting high; Diana Tamayo, the good student who got into physical altercations; and Alexis Neiers with her pole dancing and exulting over her friend Tess Taylor getting tapped to pose for
Playboy
: “Tess and I woke up to a call from Hugh Hef,” Neiers tweeted on April 15, 2009. “Letting her know that she got a 6 pg layout and the cover for playboy! He asked me too but idk [I don't know].”

They were like four faces of the crisis in what is sometimes known as “Girl World.”
⁵
Meanness, alcohol and drug abuse, aggression, “hypersexuality”—these were all symptoms of a plague of seemingly bubonic proportions that was robbing girls of their childhoods and making them confused and depressed and hard. Once upon a time, the American girl was a shining symbol of something fresh, spirited, and fully self-confident. Mark Twain said, “The average American girl possesses the valuable qualities of naturalness, honesty, and inoffensive straightforwardness; she is nearly barren of troublesome conventions and artificialities.” Now, the American girl is often associated with the raunchy style of the girls on
Girls Gone Wild
(1997–). She sometimes seems unhappy and out of control, and nobody seems to know quite what to do about it.

I had a little girl of my own at home. She was lovely, then age nine. Travelling back and forth to L.A. from New York on this story, I would have to leave her for a few days at a time. I didn't like to leave her, even though she was always with someone I trusted to the core. There was something about this story that was making me anxious to be near her, with her, watching over her. This story was making me think about what a tough time it was to be a girl growing up in America.

The statistics are all so dismal. Nearly a quarter of American girls now say they start drinking before age 13. Between 1999 and 2008, the number of females arrested for D.U.I. rose by 35 percent. A 2012 study by the Partnership for a Drug Free America found a 29 percent increase in marijuana use among teenage girls from the year before, with close to 70 percent agreeing that “using drugs helps kids deal with problems at home.” The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that as many as 10 in 100 American girls and young women suffer from an eating disorder. Over the last two decades, the number of arrests of females age 10 to 17 for aggravated assault has nearly doubled. In 2005,
Newsweek
ran a cover story headlined “Bad Girls Go Wild,” calling “the significant rise in violent behavior among girls” a “burgeoning national crisis.” In 2004, the FBI released data showing an increase in arrests of girls between 1991 and 2000, with arrests of girls now accounting for one in three of all juvenile arrests. Boys commit suicide more often than girls do, but girls attempt it three times more often.

Why were girls being so self-destructive? There's certainly no lack of positive role models for girls in America (Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Ellen Ochoa, and Serena Williams come to mind), but there's also no question that there's a disproportionate amount of coverage of women you wouldn't necessarily want your daughter to emulate. When the Bling Ring girls were coming of age, there were four other girls in the public eye with very similar problems—except that they were very, very famous. In roughly the four years before the burglaries began, between 2004 and 2008, there had been a frenzy of news about the misadventures of a group of Young Hollywood personalities known as the “starlets”—Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, and Britney Spears, a panties-flashing coterie of paparazzi bait who were BFFs and frenemies in real life.

The starlets seemed just as fame-obsessed as the consumers of the gossip about them, staging catfights for the cameras, calling the paparazzi on themselves. But they also had real problems. Paris, Nicole, and Lindsay had all been arrested for D.U.I. and done brief—sometimes very brief—bids in jail. (In 2007, Nicole did 82 minutes of a four-day sentence for D.U.I. That same year, Lindsay did 84 minutes of a one-day sentence for D.U.I. and misdemeanor cocaine use.) Nicole had admitted to using heroin, while Lindsay had been found with cocaine. In 2010, Paris was arrested for cocaine possession as well. Nicole and Lindsay had struggled with anorexia and bulimia, respectively. A 2006 paparazzi shot of them both looking skeletal, in designer gowns, is still shocking. Britney shaved her head and beat a paparazzo's car with an umbrella in a bizarre public meltdown. Nicole, Lindsay, and Britney had all sought help in rehab. Nicole flashed her breasts for the audience at a fashion show.

The starlets had the misfortune of having shot to fame just as the celebrity news business was exploding like a mushroom cloud. TMZ chased after them as if they were their own personal Furies. They were perfect fodder for the new, mean style of celebrity reporting, being young, “hot,” female, and fairly troubled. A picture of Lindsay passed out in the front seat of a car, a photo of Britney strapped to a gurney, on her way to a psych ward, became indelible images of the new celebrity culture. But sometimes the starlets seemed to be milking their misfortunes for attention. Paris and Lindsay made use of their paparazzi-documented walks in and out of courtrooms and jailhouses, working them like runways. The public seemed to revel in their growing disrepute as much as they were outraged by it. The white, skintight Kimberly Ovitz minidress that Lindsay wore in February 2011 when she attended a hearing for grand theft felony sold out across the country almost immediately.

The national preoccupation with the trials and tribulations of these young women—who seemed to spin more out of control the more preoccupied people became—got so bad that former vice president Al Gore felt moved to weigh in, denouncing our “serial obsession” with “Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole” in his bestselling book,
The Assault on Reason
(Penguin, 2007).
Newsweek
decided that the influence of the starlets was becoming a matter of national concern and in 2007 did a cover story, “Girls Gone Bad,” which hovered on the edge of parody: “Paris, Britney, Lindsay and Nicole. They seem to be everywhere and they may not be wearing underwear,” said the magazine. “Tweens adore them and teens envy them. But are we raising a generation of prosti-tots?” An accompanying poll found that “77 percent of Americans believe that Britney, Paris and Lindsay have too much influence on young girls.”

But were the starlets really a source of trouble in Girl World, or just another one of its symptoms? Weren't they just girls themselves, exhibiting in a public arena behaviors that had already become widespread? News of their misadventures was a powerful distraction from some of the more worrisome headlines of the day. How did it feel to be a kid in America? By 2008, the same year Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee began their burglary spree through the Hollywood Hills, we'd just lived through what might be considered some of the darkest eight years in American history. We'd been attacked by terrorists; engaged in two very bloody and unpopular wars. The Bush administration had sanctioned torture. We'd grown accustomed to the drone strike as a form of warfare, and had seen our fellow citizens left to perish on rooftops after Hurricane Katrina. If, as Joseph Stiglitz said, “trickle-down behaviorism is very real,” then there was plenty of meanness and aggression to trickle down.

Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008 promising hope and change; but nothing changes overnight. The number of drone strikes has increased. There have been 15 more mass shootings. As of 2013, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other industrialized country. And Lindsay Lohan is still getting arrested.

10

On a bright afternoon in L.A. in November 2009, I went to meet with Alexis Neiers at the offices of her lawyer, Jeffrey Rubenstein. Rubenstein had a suite in an orange-colored high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard. After much back and forth on the phone he'd agreed to let me talk to his client, saying it was an opportunity for her to “protect her interests” in the face of a “prejudicial media storm.” In the press release he'd put on his website he maintained her innocence, saying she had been “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

This press release included a picture of Rubenstein and Neiers and Tess Taylor (also then his client) meeting in his office and poring over papers together. Taylor had on a halter-top that revealed some cleavage and some of her seventeen tattoos. Rubenstein had advised me that Taylor was “going to be a Playmate.”

“We think it's a fun case,” Rubenstein had said on the phone. He'd told me he couldn't discuss the particulars of Neiers' situation, but he would talk about the Bling Ring generally based on information he had learned from the police.

“These kids went on shopping sprees,” he said. “It's like they went shopping online. They'd look at a picture on some website of a celebrity holding a Marc Jacobs bag, and they'd say, instead of going to a Marc Jacobs' store and getting a bag like that, I want
that
bag that Lindsay is carrying—I want
Lindsay's
Marc Jacobs bag.”

Images taken off the recovered computer allegedly stolen by Nick Prugo showed a gallery of photos of celebrities in designer clothes and bling—Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Audrina Patridge, Britney Spears, Hayden Panettiere, Rihanna, Jessica Biel. It had a Google Images search with the heading “Audrina Patridge diamond watch” and photos of Lohan and her then girlfriend, D.J. Samantha Ronson, out shopping for Rolex watches in L.A.

“In some ways they were very unsophisticated,” Rubenstein said, “and in some ways they were right out of
Ocean's Eleven
. My understanding is they did really detailed surveillance of these people. They'd drive by their homes and check out the places to see how they would enter. You know when you were a kid and you and your friends would break into your parents' pool house and steal beer? There was some kind of clubhouse thing going on with these celebrities' houses. They were hitting the homes more than once. They weren't into hot prowls; they weren't trying to find these people at home. But there was something very weird going on. This is a Dr. Drew book.
⁶

“What started off as trespassing,” he said, “became burglary and then something much scarier. There's elements in this stuff of—well, somebody brought up the Mansons.”

I asked him why he thought they did it.

“I wanna feel like they look,” said Rubenstein, riffing, “and if I have what they have then I'll be like them. If I can dress like they dress, my problems will go away, my pain will go away. . . .”

When I arrived at his office, Rubenstein got up from behind his desk and came over to greet me. He was a bullet of a man with a shaved head and dark blue eyes, which matched the indigo of his Armani jacket. There was a panoramic view of L.A. behind him and a framed picture of him with Neiers on his desk. “Even if I never get paid, I'm gonna get this little girl off,” he told me firmly.