The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-obsessed Teens Ripped off Hollywood and Shocked the World. Nancy Sales Jo
low-slung jeans, tight long-sleeved Ts and a lot of dark eye makeup. Monica was smoking.
We went and sat on the bleachers of the playing field, which was empty except for a couple boys running around the track. Monica said she was sent to Indian Hills for “drugs”; Ashley because “I have trouble learning.”
“She was toootally into herself,” said Monica.
“Oh, I liked Rachel,” said Ashley. “She could be sweet.”
Monica raised an eyebrow. “Sweet? You mean mean,” she said.
They said they knew Rachel Lee, Nick Prugo, and Diana Tamayo, having gone to school with the older kids before they graduated in 2008. “Everybody knew what they were doing”—that is, burglarizing the homes of celebrities, said Monica.
“They bragged about it. At parties and stuff,” said Ashley.
“Most people didn’t believe it,” Monica said. “People thought they were just talking shit.”
I asked them why no one ever reported it to the police.
Monica made a face. “You don’t do that. They would wear like, Paris Hilton’s stuff, and say they were wearing it. I would have sold that shit.”
TMZ would post a picture of Nick wearing a “P” necklace allegedly belonging to Hilton; across the picture Nick had scrawled, Perez Hilton–style, “Hey Paris, look familiar?”
“Rachel had really nice clothes,” said Ashley. “Everyone else would be dressed, like, casually, in jeans and shorts, and she would be wearing like some designer top and heels. She looked like a celebrity. She looked like someone in a magazine.”
“Yeah, Burglars’ Magazine,” said Monica.
“Prugo stated that Lee was the driving force of the burglary crew and that her motivation was based in her desire to own the designer wardrobes of the Hollywood celebrities that she admired,” said the LAPD’s report.
I asked the girls if they knew how Rachel afforded her stylish wardrobe. “A lot of people in this area have money,” Monica said, shrugging.
“She acted kind of spoiled,” said Ashley. “I heard she didn’t get along with her mom but then she would have all this really nice stuff so I thought maybe her mom was trying to win her daughter by giving her stuff—I don’t know. I heard she didn’t like her stepfather. She had a really nice car, an Audi A4.”
“Rachel’s a mean girl,” Monica said with a click of her tongue. “She was backstabby. When people say Nick was the ringleader, I don’t believe it, ’cause he could never do that by himself. He was too nervous.”
I asked them about Diana Tamayo. “Always getting into fights,” Monica said. “She used to, like, yell at the Agoura Hills kids ’cause they act like we don’t exist.”
The boys running around the track ran by.
“It’s not all bad here,” said Ashley after a moment. “Heather Graham,” the actress, “went to Agoura.”
“And Brad Delson, the guitarist from Linkin Park,” Monica said. They seemed almost proud of it.
“We’re a very small group,” said Ashley said, “but Rachel and Diana definitely ruled.”
“They thought they were The Plastics”—the popular clique in the movie Mean Girls (2004), said Monica.
“Once Rachel told me she liked my shoes—they were just some flip-flops but they had a bow—and, I don’t know, it made me feel good that someone with that much style liked what I was wearing,” said Ashley.
It all started, Nick said, when he met Rachel at Indian Hills in the fall of 2006. He’d come back to Calabasas after a year in Idaho, where his family had moved for a while, in part because he was having difficulties. He’d become “anxious and depressed.” He’d been “seeing therapists and psychiatrists.” He “had issues,” he said. “I was trying to figure out who I was.” He’d been diagnosed with ADHD when he was 12, but didn’t “think that was a true diagnosis.” He didn’t think it was “accurate.” He could concentrate on schoolwork, he just didn’t want to. They put him on Concerta* anyway and he “lost a bunch of weight.” He got skinny. He wasn’t eating. His parents took him off that when they saw he was “getting weak.” Then they put him on Zoloft† for his “anxiety issues,” but he didn’t think it was helping either.
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