Nancy Sales - The Bling Ring - How a Gang of Fame-obsessed Teens Ripped off Hollywood and Shocked the World

He said he didn’t really know why he got like this—troubled, scared. He wasn’t always this way. When he was a kid, he said, he felt good enough about himself to perform in plays. He was in all the plays in school. His parents had seemed proud of him then. His mother seemed excited and happy for him when he got a part in a documentary for the Discovery Channel called Little Lost Souls: Children Possessed? (2003). It was about children whose parents think they’re possessed by evil spirits. He played a kid named “Kenny” in a re-enactment—it was somewhat corny, but it was a real job, and it was like being a real actor. He thought about becoming an actor one day. Why not? His dad was in the business.

And then something happened around the time he turned 14. It was like somebody pulled out the rug from under him and he was falling through the floor. Suddenly, he couldn’t feel comfortable in his own skin, he was so aware of people looking at him, judging him. He became self-conscious about his face, his body, and his clothes. “I genuinely felt that I was ugly,” he said. “I never thought I was an A-list looking guy”—not like the models in magazines or the actors on TV, the really truly good-looking people with their perfect skin and perfect bodies and perfect hair and teeth. He felt “self-loathing things.” It was getting harder and harder to do anything. He didn’t want to go to school anymore.

His family moved back to Calabasas and he spent ninth grade at Calabasas High. But he didn’t like it there—the atmosphere could be very intimidating. All the kids seemed really rich—“everybody else had, like, BMWs and I had a Toyota,” he said. They were ambitious and focused on getting into good colleges. The school was ranked one of the top high schools in the state—it had won some “blue ribbon” award from the government, and you never stopped hearing about it. If you did well there, then you were on your way to having this awesome life, they always seemed to be telling you, but if you couldn’t cut it…. There were kids who seemed to smirk if you couldn’t keep up. Meanwhile the most notable person who had ever attended that school was Erik Menendez, who killed his parents. *Oh, and Katie Cassidy, David’s daughter; she was on Gossip Girl .

Nick stopped going to class. He “couldn’t deal with the whole going-to-school thing every day. It didn’t fit me. I didn’t want to get up…. I wouldn’t want to go to school—for stupid things, like, oh, I had a pimple.” Eventually he was kicked out for excessive absences. Some people wondered if he were doing drugs, but “this is the crazy thing,” he said, “I didn’t even smoke cigarettes. I didn’t smoke weed. I didn’t do coke, I didn’t do anything, right? I think I was just … depressed and had anxiety issues and other stuff.”

And then, in tenth grade, he went to Indian Hills. It had a reputation for being a school for burnouts and fuck-ups. He was afraid it was going to be some kind of horrible place, but actually, it was a welcome change, a haven. “Everyone talks about it like it’s all these drug addicts,” Nick said, “but some of the kids just can’t do the school thing every day—they learn different from other kids. The people I involved myself with, they weren’t drug addicts—they were unconventional.”

It was at Indian Hills that he first saw Rachel Lee. It was hard not to notice her. She was a “really attractive girl.” And she had the most stylish clothes. But it wasn’t just her clothes, Nick said, it was the way she wore them, like someone who really knew about fashion and had a sense of what looked good. That was so rare in Calabasas. Rachel wore clothes like she deserved to look good. She had this amazing confidence. It fascinated Nick. He noticed Rachel because he was into fashion, too. He “liked clothes,” he “liked to think” he “was a stylish guy.” But he had never met anyone he could talk with about fashion. He’d never had many friends at all, and fashion wasn’t something he felt he could discuss with his family. Imagine, asking his dad what he thought of Charlize Theron’s gown at the Oscars.

He and Rachel “bonded over fashion naturally.” “She liked fashion, she liked celebrity, she liked clothes.” Nick had never thought about designing clothes before, but now he did. Rachel wanted to design clothes; she said that some day she would have her own line. She wanted to go to FIDM, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, in L.A. Lauren Conrad from The Hills went there. “A lot of the Hills girls went to FIDM. Rachel loved The Hills ,” Nick said. Before too long he found himself at Rachel’s house, hanging out and watching The Hills , laughing over the stupid catfights on the show and talking about the clothes. Now Nick and Rachel were going on style websites together and checking out the fashions worn on her favorite shows and finding out where you could “get the look.”

“She was the first person I felt was, like, my best friend,” Nick said, and it made him so happy, “sometimes I almost felt like I could cry over it.”

With Rachel, he could talk about anything. They could talk about clothes and try on clothes. He could even put on eye makeup with Rachel, if he wanted to, just for fun; Rachel didn’t judge. But it wasn’t only fashion they were bonding over. They were telling each other about their lives. Nick had never done this with anyone before. He told Rachel about his “turmoil”; how he was feeling estranged from his parents. It seemed his problems in school and emotional struggles had caused a breakdown of communication. “Me and my parents kind of had a falling-out,” he said. “It was an awkward time for me and them.”

Rachel listened. “She really sympathizes with whatever your situation is,” Nick said. “She puts herself in there to understand you, to feel your pain. She builds on that. She really knew where I was at and she knew how to comfort me and be a friend to me, and I think that’s why I trusted her so much and why I got involved with her so much….

“I loved her,” he said. “I really did, she was the first person I felt was like my best friend…. I really thought I loved her—just as a person, not as a girlfriend. I just loved her almost as like a sister and that’s what made this situation so hard….”

Now they were in constant contact, talking on the phone, IMing, texting. “People would call Rachel and be, like, oh, you’re with Nick. People would, like, know that we were together all the time, every day. Every moment we were together. We were like a one-man-one-woman show. It was me and her till the end, death do us part. We were inseparable.”

And Rachel was telling Nick about her problems, too. Her parents had divorced when she was young. Her father moved to Las Vegas, and Rachel and her older sister, Candace, had stayed with their mother in Calabasas. Then Rachel’s mother married a man named Phil with whom, Nick said, Rachel didn’t get along. “Rachel hates her stepfather,” he said. “She just had her issues with him as any stepkid would.” He said her stepfather had children of his own, and there was tension in the house. Nick comforted her as she had comforted him. “It was so much more than a friendship.”

Through Rachel, Nick was making other friends—“just normal kids, maybe more upper-class, with money, but normal, nothing out of the ordinary.” He met Rachel’s friend Courtney Ames, who went to Calabasas High. Rachel had known Courtney since seventh grade. Courtney would skip school and come out to smoke weed with them, Nick said. She was kind of a tough girl, not fashionable like Rachel, but Nick “bonded” with her because she was Rachel’s friend. It seemed that Rachel and Courtney were close because they had known each other for so long; they were certainly very different. Nick got to know Courtney at the many parties someone was throwing “every other day.” For the first time in his life, he knew what it was to be part of a social scene.