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

He also met Tess Taylor, who went to Oak Park High. “Tess really liked me,” Nick said. “I would go hang out with Tess. We would smoke together…. She’s pretty. She’s gorgeous. She’s a really good storyteller—she’s really good at getting people believing her stories…. Basically, if she wants to make it happens she’ll make it happen, she’s really smart like that.” And through Tess, Nick met her friend Alexis Neiers, another pretty girl, one grade younger, who was being homeschooled because her mother believed in all this New Age spiritual stuff.

“This was the social group,” Nick said, “This was the Valley group…. And this group is sympathizing with me; they’re caring for me. I felt like they understood me. It was the first time … I felt like I had a support system outside of my family, and someone my own age I felt loved me.”

Tenth grade was wonderful. It was Nick and Rachel, a couple of “carefree kids,” “smoking weed,” “hanging out at Zuma Beach” near lifeguard stand No. 7, “going to parties with a lot of underage kids doing beer pong,” Nick said. “It wasn’t something devious or ill.” He never wanted it to end.

“I guess I was a little naïve about everything,” he said, “but I was like, I’m gonna do whatever makes this person happy.”

And that’s why, he said, when Rachel “sort of let it drop” that she had gone into someone’s house and stolen some money, he didn’t make a big deal of it. “She said this one time before I even knew her she had, like, gone into this person’s house when they were out of town and taken money from them. In my mind I’m like okaaay, whatever, just wanting to please her.”

And then, he said, Rachel asked if he knew of anyone who was out of town. This was the summer after tenth grade, now 2007. “And,” Nick said, “I was like, this guy’s out of town, why?” The guy’s name was Eden. Nick had met him on MySpace. They’d been getting to know each other, “hanging out.” Nick told Rachel that Eden and his family had gone to Jamaica for two weeks; and before he knew it, he said, he and Rachel were driving to Eden’s house in Woodland Hills, about ten minutes from Calabasas.

It was night. They parked on the street and rang the bell, checking to make sure no one was home. They never had any trouble getting into anyone’s house, Nick said, there was always a way in, usually through an unlocked door. And there was always the cover of their youth and presumed cluelessness if anyone noticed them trying door handles or windows. They could say they had forgotten their keys, or they were helping a friend who’d forgotten theirs. Usually they just walked in a door someone had forgotten to lock. Who’s that careful in a nice neighborhood? They walked right into Eden’s house. Nick said he immediately felt like running back out….

But now, he said, Rachel was strolling through the place, looking at everything, picking stuff up. “I’m in the house, walking back and forth,” he said, “freaking out. I mean, it’s weird, to go through somebody’s things; it’s unnatural, it’s not something, like, you know how to deal with.”

But then “[Rachel’s], like, looking under the bed,” he said, “and she finds a box full of, like, eight grand in cash. This is the first time I’ve ever been involved in something like this, so naturally it’s like, oh my God , you found eight grand ? …

“So we each get four grand,” he said. “And it was like, wow. That was so easy…. We didn’t do anything so bad. We didn’t kill anybody…. It wasn’t murder.”

The next day, he said, they went back to the house and took Eden’s Infinity out for a spin. Rachel had found the keys in the house.

“We went to Rodeo Drive,” Nick said. “We went shopping.”

*A psychostimulant used for the treatment of ADHD.

†An antidepressant.

*In 1989, along with his older brother Lyle, in Beverly Hills.

“Nick’s got some self-esteem issues he’s working through and he’s seeing a psychiatrist,” Sean Erenstoft, Nick’s lawyer, told me on the phone. “He’s going to drug rehab—he had a drug bust,” for cocaine possession, “earlier in the year and so his world collapsed. Inward he’s a kid; he’s still eighteen and lives with mommy and daddy.

“Rachel’s very much the ‘A’ type,” Erenstoft said. “She’s the lioness, very much a leader, very influential. Rachel was actually able to lead some other pretty good kids into what seemed like fun—sounds like this Diana Tamayo was the class president and most-likely-to-succeed type girl and the next thing you know she’s being arrested for burglary.”

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].”