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

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. *

“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.

“I wanted to keep her from being charged,” he said, “and I’m not happy that she was.”

On October 28, 2009, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office had formally charged Neiers with one count of residential burglary for the robbery of Orlando Bloom. (Taylor was never charged.) That same day, Nick Prugo was also charged with six additional counts of residential burglary—for Bloom, Hilton, Bilson, Green, as well as an Encino builder and developer named Nick DeLeo and a Hollywood architect, Richard Altuna (whose home Prugo had apparently mistaken for celebrity D.J. Paul Oakenfold’s). There were two counts against Diana Tamayo (for Lohan and Ashley Tisdale); one against Courtney Ames (for Hilton); and one against Roy Lopez (for Hilton again). Each count of burglary carried a potential sentence of two to six years in prison.

A warrant had been issued for the arrest of Jonathan Ajar for possession of narcotics and a stolen handgun found in his apartment in a police search on October 22. But so far, curiously enough, Rachel Lee had not been charged. “I was blown away when she wasn’t charged,” Rubenstein said. “She thinks she’s smarter than anybody else, and, guess what, I think she might be.

“This case has been amateur hour,” in terms of the justice system, the lawyer complained. “The other lawyers have made every amateur hour move that can be made. Everybody wants publicity. Even the police. And somebody’s talking to TMZ.” He frowned.

“One of my threats if Alexis was charged was to go on a media blitz,” he said. “I believe her story is compelling and I don’t think she was a principal.”

I asked him what her story was. Why did she have stolen property in her house? Why was she arrested for the Bloom burglary? “I can’t talk about that yet,” Rubenstein said, “but we will . She wants her story known.” He further said Neiers “seemed to be a good girl” and had achieved the “highest level in Pilates you can earn.” (When I later contacted the Pilates Method Alliance, the governing body of Pilates in the United States, they said no such ranking exists.)

I asked Rubenstein if I could ask Alexis about her upcoming reality show, Pretty Wild .

He said, “I have to get clearance.” He didn’t tell me he was also going to be a character on it.

Now Rubenstein’s colleague, Susan Haber, brought Alexis and her mother, Andrea Arlington Dunn, into the room. Dunn was tall and curvy and wearing a fuzzy bronze-colored Juicy sweatsuit. A pair of headphones dangled from her ears, connected to a cell phone inside her purse. She had highlighted, shoulder-length brown hair and wore a startled expression. There was a flirtatious lilt to her voice, which brought to mind sex kittens of another era.

And then there was Alexis. She was a leggy five-foot-nine, wearing black tights, a long gray sweater, and six-inch heels. She had big hypnotic green eyes and a cascade of chestnut hair. On her wrists there were tattoos of cherry blossoms—“a sign of consciousness,” she told me—and on her hand there was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for life. She was like something out of a Philip Marlowe tale, the beautiful suspect whose story sounds a bit suspect as well.

“I’m an indigo child,” Alexis said in her squeaky baby voice, after she’d settled into a chair. “Which means I have a special energy, a spiritual energy.”

Her mother nodded, wide-eyed, from Rubenstein’s couch. I was trying to remember when I had seen a mother look on her daughter with such devotion—it was Kathy Hilton, mother of Paris.

An “indigo child,” I later learned, is a tyke who’s said to be blessed with extraordinary and supernatural gifts, according to husband-and-wife New Age self-help gurus Lee Carroll and Jan Tober in The Indigo Children (1999).

“I believe that I’m an old soul,” Alexis said.

“Yes, she is,” Andrea murmured.

They told me that they lived by a spiritual philosophy, which relied heavily on the teachings of The Secret , the 2006 self-help best-seller by Australian television writer and producer Rhonda Byrne, which posits that wealth, health, happiness, and weight loss are all achievable through positive thinking.

“It’s the law of attraction,” Andrea said. “It’s the study of man’s relationship to the divine. It’s not Scientology. It’s not Christian Science….”

“My mom is a minister,” Alexis offered. “She’s been a masseuse. She’s an energy healer. She does holistic health care for people with cancer.”

“I don’t serve at a church currently,” Andrea interjected.

She later told me that she’d been ordained through an online course, “the Ernest Holmes *Religious Science Ministerial Program, whose teachings include ancient wisdom principles from spiritual teachings since the beginning of time.”

“Our church does a yearly trip to Africa where they build wells and schools for the kids,” said Alexis.