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

News of the kids, so far, didn’t offer many details, and no interviews with the suspects themselves. The six who had been arrested in connection with the burglaries were Rachel Lee, 19—“the gang’s alleged mastermind,” according to the Post ; Diana Tamayo, 19; Courtney Ames, 18; Alexis Neiers, 18; Nicholas Prugo, 18; and Roy Lopez, 27, who had been identified as a bouncer. Lee, Prugo, and Tamayo all reportedly knew each other from Indian Hills, an alternative high school in Agoura Hills (it was “a couple of exits away” from Calabasas, a Southern Californian had told me). The only one who had been formally charged was Prugo, with two counts of residential burglary of Lohan and reality star Audrina Patridge (she was one of the girls on The Hills , a sort of real-life Melrose Place about vacuous twentysomethings in L.A.). Prugo was facing up to twelve years in prison. Another suspect in the case, Jonathan Ajar—a.k.a. “Johnny Dangerous,” 27—who had been identified as a nightclub promoter, was wanted for questioning. TMZ was saying he was “on the run.”

The kids’ mug shots didn’t tell much, either, except that they all looked very young and bedraggled in the way people do when they get hauled into jail. Prugo looked rather cunning (later, he would admit that the black-and-white striped T-shirt he was wearing in his mug shot belonged to Orlando Bloom). Lee and Ames—a brown-haired, light-eyed girl, neither pretty nor plain—looked scared. Tamayo wore a defiant expression. Lopez looked thuggish and resigned.

And then there was this wild picture of two of the other girls—it was like a poster for Bling Ring: The Hollywood Movie (which didn’t exist yet, but would as well). It was of Alexis Neiers and her “sister”—actually her friend—Tess Taylor, 19, a Playboy model and “person of interest” in the case. They were coming out of the Van Nuys Area Jail in the wee hours of October 23, after Neiers had been released on a $50,000 bond. It looked like a paparazzi shot—in fact, it was. You had to wonder who had alerted the paparazzi to Neiers’ arrest.

In the picture, Taylor has her arm protectively slung around Neiers’ shoulder as she hustles her past photographers blasting away. Both girls have lots of lustrous dark hair and perfectly shaped eyebrows and perfectly toned, exposed midriffs. Taylor has on a black tracksuit and Ray-Ban sunglasses, although it’s night. Neiers is wearing what appear to be ice blue Juicy sweatpants and a pair of Uggs. She’s holding the end of a black scarf up around her face, dramatically concealing everything but an expertly made-up eye. The girls look like celebrities. It appears as if they think they are. What had not yet been reported was that they were the stars of an upcoming reality show, Pretty Wild , which was being filmed for E!.

“I didn’t do jack shit, it’s a joke,” Neiers told reporters outside the jail.

Preface Part One THE FAME MONSTER Part Two DANCING WITH THE STARS Part Three ALMOST FAMOUS Author’s Note Bibliography Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. About the Publisher

“You are going to hear about five targets in this case: Rachel Lee, Nick Prugo, Diana Tamayo, Roy Lopez, and Courtney Ames. You are going to hear that these five targets know each other through school, through the neighborhood, with the exception of Roy Lopez, who the other targets know from having frequented a local [Calabasas] restaurant, Sagebrush, where he was working.

“You are going to see photographs of the targets hanging out. You are going to see that they celebrate birthdays together … that they hung out on the computer together, that they eat lunch together.

“They go to hotels together. They party together.

“But you are also going to hear that they commit crimes together, and over the course of the year between the end of 2008 and for about ten months in 2009, they committed burglaries.”

—Opening Statement, L.A. Deputy District Attorney Sarika Kim, Grand Jury proceedings in the People of the State of California vs. Nicholas Frank Prugo, Rachel Lee, Diana Tamayo, Courtney Leigh Ames, and Roy Lopez, Jr., June 18, 2010

Preface Part One THE FAME MONSTER Part Two DANCING WITH THE STARS Part Three ALMOST FAMOUS Author’s Note Bibliography Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. About the Publisher

Some of the views around the edges of Calabasas are almost rural. You can see fields with horses grazing, swishing their tails in the sun, echoes of the days when the residents wore desert boots instead of Louboutins. It makes you feel, suddenly, very far away from Hollywood. The approach to town turns suburban; the inevitable car dealerships, fast food chains, and shopping malls appear. The mountains as they draw closer grow greener and still prettier. Calabasas, meanwhile, is beige. Everything is overcast with a wash of sameness—a clean and shiny sameness, a corporate sameness. It’s as if Calabasas should have a logo.

Once I got to town, I pulled into the parking lot of a Gelson’s market in order to do a Google Maps search on Nick Prugo, ironically enough. Prugo was said to be the Bling Ring’s surveillance-meister, the one who found the celebrities’ addresses and pictures of their homes on the Internet. TMZ, which was all over this story (they were calling the gang “the Burglar Bunch”), had posted a Google Maps search of Orlando Bloom’s home that Prugo had allegedly done on a stolen computer; they were calling the image a “smoking gun.” (It was a bit of a mystery how TMZ was getting its hands on all these interesting things, but more on that later.)

I’d located Prugo’s address using a garden variety people-finding website. More than a decade before, an editor had asked me to do a story on how easy it was to track down the world’s most elusive literary recluse, Thomas Pynchon, with the click of a mouse. Nothing much had changed since then, except that privacy had all but disappeared. Everybody was spying on everybody. Prugo’s data mining was nothing compared to Facebook’s. “It was information anyone in America could get,” he would tell me later.

As I was sitting there trying to get directions, I looked up and saw two funky-looking, middle-aged people hurrying past my car. A couple of photographers were chasing them, shouting, “Sharon!” “Ozzy!” It was the Osbournes. They’d moved to the Valley in 2007 after the success of their reality show, The Osbournes (2002–2005). I’d never seen paparazzi working in quite so mundane a setting before. The other people in the parking lot just strolled along with their carts as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. Ozzy, wearing his signature-tinted granny glasses, looked a little rattled.