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

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СКАЧАТЬ hideaway with bigger houses—Clark Gable and Carole Lombard made a love nest there, and so did Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Jimmy Cagney moved out to play gentleman farmer, Barbara Stanwyck to run a thoroughbred ranch, but somehow the place never became glamorous. Something was always off. After the war, the population exploded, and the Valley became the defining American suburb, a sunny Eden of split-level homes, electric blue swimming pools, and kids living seemingly perfect childhoods. The Brady Bunch were tacitly Valley folk.

      Frank Zappa’s song “Valley Girl” (1982) introduced the world to a young white Southern California female whose main interests were shopping, pedicures, and social status: “On Ventura, there she goes/She just bought some bitchen clothes/Tosses her head ’n flips her hair/She got a whole bunch of nothin’ in there….” Zappa learned about Valley Girls from his then 14-year-old daughter Moon Unit, who encountered them at parties, bar mitzvahs, and the Galleria mall in Sherman Oaks. The film Valley Girl, released in 1983—adding “space cadet” and “gag me with a spoon” permanently to the lexicon—explored Valley kids’ longing to be part of the supposedly cooler, star-studded world of Hollywood, so close but so far away.

      Calabasas (population 23,058) was said to be a typical Valley hamlet, but with more celebrity residents, including (then) Britney Spears, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett and their already famous kids, country singer LeAnn Rimes, Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe and Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi, former Nickleodeon star Amanda Bynes…. Weirdly, Calabasas was also a Fertile Crescent for reality television. One of the first big reality shows featuring a (sort of) famous person, Jessica Simpson, and her then husband Nick Lachey, was shot there: Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica (2003–2005). So was Spears’ burps-and-all look at life with her then husband Kevin “K-Fed” Federline: Britney and Kevin: Chaotic (2005). And so is the Queen Mary of all reality television: Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007–). In each of these shows, Calabasas looks like Xanadu with SUVs, a place of SoCal-style easy living, where everybody’s wealthy.

      And Calabasas is rich, relatively speaking; the median income is about $116,000, more than twice the national average. According to the online Urban Dictionary (albeit an opinionated source), “The typical Calabasas resident is young, rude, rich…. You’ll see … 10-year-old girls with their Louis Vuitton purses and Seven jeans giggling to their friends on their iPhones.”

      It was interesting to see how media coverage of the Bling Ring was playing up the burglars as “rich.” Said the New York Post: “A celebrity-obsessed group of rich reform-school girls allegedly waged a year-long, A-list crime spree through the Hollywood Hills, ripping off millions in cash and jewels from the mansions of such stars as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan….” People always seemed fascinated by stories about rich kids. I should know, I’d done a few myself. Editors seemed to like such stories, especially if the kids were behaving badly. Readers seemed to love to hate these kids. I once received a letter, in response to one of my stories about bad rich kids in Manhattan, from a World War II veteran demanding, “Can the prep school gangsters fly a B-29?” That was a very good question.

      But it was clear the appeal of the Bling Ring story wasn’t just the wealthy kids; it was one of those stranger-than-fiction tales that hits the Zeitgeist at its sweet spot, with its themes of crime, youth, celebrity, the Internet, social networking (the kids had been advertising their criminal doings on Facebook), reality television, and the media itself, all wrapped up in one made-for-TV movie (which didn’t exist yet, but would). The wall between “celebrity” and “reality” was blurring faster than you could say “Kim Kardashian.” Celebrities were now acting like real people—making themselves accessible nearly all the time; even Elizabeth Taylor tweeted (“Life without earrings is empty!”)—and real people were acting like celebrities, with multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts and sometimes even television shows documenting their—real and scripted—lives. It was all happening at warp speed, affecting American culture on a cellular level and, if you wanted to get fancy about it, begging the age-old question of “What is a self?” (And, “If I post something on Facebook and no one ‘likes’ it, do I exist?”) The Bling Ring had crossed a final Rubicon, entering famous people’s homes, and their boldness felt both disturbing and somehow inevitable.

      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.

      

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ