The Bling Ring (28 page)

“When I met [Nick] that night,” at Miyagi's, Erenstoft said, “he talked to me. He said, ‘Sean, I want to be able to sleep. I want to come clean. I want to figure out a way to do it. I don't trust the authorities.' And he said, ‘Will you help me find a cop that you trust, because I have a feeling that I'm about to make this cop famous.” His rendition of Nick's dialogue didn't sound quite like an 18-year-old boy to me, but I guessed this was just his interpretation of their conversation.

“No one has solved these capers up until now,” the lawyer went on, supposedly quoting Nick, “and I need to come clean for my own life's sake. . .I need to make the victims whole,” in other words, to confess and return their stuff. “I've realized this is fucking serious.”

“So I met him the next day, I met him in private,” Erenstoft said, stabbing at a piece of pricey raw fish with his chopsticks. “He had gathered from meeting me that I was a sensitive kind of attorney. It wasn't just about deny, deny, deny—I happen to be a judge also here in L.A. . . . Sometimes I tell the D.A.'s I work with, my guy did not do it and I'm willing to do battle, and sometimes I say, my guy fucked up, I'm not gonna fight as hard on this one. . . . When Erenstoft's gonna try a case, he does. And then sometimes you want a guy like me saying, here's my sense of justice: I know the case better than you. I know my client better than you, and you need to take my lead. You need a guy like me to dole out what justice should look like.”

Erenstoft said that after his second meeting with Nick, he contacted Brett Goodkin at Hollywood Station. He knew Goodkin was not a detective, he said, he'd just been one of the officers at Nick's arrest. “I knew he was a good cop,” said Erenstoft. “Andy Griffith, that's who we're dealing with. . . . I said we're definitely not going to the detectives on this case 'cause these jackasses don't know what they're doing.

“After this he's gonna have a stripe,” Erenstoft said of Goodkin.

But according to Goodkin, it was just a coincidence that Erenstoft reached out to him. “Sean called me 'cause Nick Prugo's mom had my business card,” Goodkin told me. “I left it with her when we arrested him; it was standard procedure. That's the only business card they had.” But because Erenstoft called Goodkin with Nick's confession, Goodkin became the lead investigator on the case.

4

On October 6, 2009, Goodkin and Detectives Steven Ramirez and John Hankins went up to Erenstoft's offices on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. His suite was in a brown brick high-rise along a main drag dotted with palm trees and bank branches. The meeting was voluntary, arranged by Erenstoft. The men met with Erenstoft first, without Nick there, in his office, where he laid out his client's general involvement in the crimes to which he was about to confess. Erenstoft asked if Nick's cooperation could be relayed to the District Attorney's Office. The detectives said that “should Prugo's level of cooperation rise to the level of which Erenstoft represented,” they would write a “Letter of Accomplishment” to the D.A. and “would not oppose a disposition favorable to Prugo”; however they “did not offer immunity or otherwise promise leniency for Prugo,” according to the LAPD's report.

After their initial conversation, the men went into a conference room to meet with Nick. He “seemed like a smart kid, very matter-of-fact,” Goodkin said. In a straightforward manner, “like he was describing a trip to the store,” Goodkin said, Nick proceeded to tell them a story that surprised even these seasoned law enforcement officials. He talked about doing a string of burglaries of the homes of some very famous people—Paris Hilton, Audrina Patridge, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Lindsay Lohan. He said that he had also participated in the burglary of a house on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino (Nick DeLeo's). He confessed to robbing the home of an architect named Richard Altuna. He said that he'd mistakenly thought Altuna's house in the Hollywood Hills belonged to the celebrity D.J. Paul Oakenfold, but realized his mistake when he saw mail in the house that was addressed to its true owner. He said that he and his friends robbed the place anyway, taking a Nikon digital camera, which they sold to their fence for $700. They also discovered $5,000 in cash in the house, which, Nick claimed, they split among themselves.
¹⁵

Nick said that he had been accompanied on these burglaries by several different accomplices—among them Rachel Lee, Diana Tamayo, Alexis Neiers, and Courtney Ames. (It was in a later meeting that he alleged the involvement of Tess Taylor.) He told of how Jonathan Ajar, a club promoter he knew, had acted as their fence, and how he—Nick—had planned out a bigger robbery of Paris Hilton's jewelry along with Ames and a bouncer he knew only as “Roy” (Lopez). (Ames and Lopez's attorneys, Schwartz and Diamond, again, deny their clients had anything to do with the burglary of Hilton.)

“He confessed to crimes we didn't even know he committed,” Goodkin said. “He told the truth even when it only hurt himself. He seemed like he wanted to come clean.”

“He went into it not getting any assurances,” Erenstoft told me that night at Iroha. He seemed to be struggling with conflicting feelings about having allowed his client to confess. “I'm a righteous guy,” he said. “I feel like I see justice. . . . I believe I have the pulse on what is right and wrong. . . . I know the difference between chaos and order and I have a complete true sense of how it should be helped. . . . I am pompous enough to think that I have a greater sense of justice here.

“I take a lot of responsibility,” he said. “I know I have the respect of prosecutors and judges.
He's a fair guy
.
Justice seems to get done on his watch
. This is the first time I'm thinking, wow, my client's neck is so far out there and I'm letting him take so much responsibility—if he gets his neck cut off on this thing I'm going to scream bloody murder!”

As the night went on, Erenstoft told me about his past. He seemed haunted by his childhood. He said, “I got kicked out of the house at seventeen. You didn't deserve it but you still think you did something wrong—why do I feel so alone? I know Nick Prugo. When Nick said, ‘I need to sleep, I don't know what to do,' I understood.” Then he left the restaurant and went home in his Porsche.

5

After our meeting that night, I went back to my hotel and thought about Erenstoft's story; it seemed odd. Why would Nick confess to crimes the police didn't know about and might never know about? And why would his lawyer let him do that? Erenstoft claimed that Nick had confessed in order to ease his conscience, and that he, Erenstoft, had endorsed this plan because of his “greater sense of justice.” It all sounded very noble. I wanted to believe it.

I called my friend Kent Schaffer in Houston. Kent's a well-known criminal defense attorney. I met him while doing another story. I wanted to know what he thought of Nick's confession. “In thirty years practicing criminal defense law,” Kent said, “I've never told someone to confess. Once you confess, your options are down to nothing—you're at the mercy of the state. ‘Okay, I did it, everything I am accused of doing'—there's not much the lawyer can do for you after that. You just have to hope that the state takes over representation of your client's interests. It makes no sense. If the guy had kept his mouth shut he never would have had a prosecutable case.”

There's an argument for a client confessing, say other attorneys. Daniel Horowitz, Nick's current lawyer—also a well-known criminal defense attorney, practicing out of San Francisco—actually defended Erenstoft's strategy when I asked him about it. “[Erenstoft] counted (perhaps) on his relationships with prosecutors to cure the problem,” Horowitz wrote in an email. “Most prosecutors will do ‘what's right' and help an early cooperator regardless of whether promises were made.”

And yet Horowitz and his colleague Markus Dombois still brought a motion in 2010 to have Nick's confession suppressed, based on Erenstoft's failure to adequately represent his client by encouraging him to talk to the police. The motion was denied.

When I asked Brett Goodkin what he thought of Nick's confession, he said, “It was the right thing to do.”

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Based of Nick's confession, the LAPD now moved ahead with searching the homes of the other suspects. Their search warrant for Courtney Ames, Alexis Neiers, Diana Tamayo, Roy Lopez, and Jonathan Ajar dated October 22, 2009, said they were looking for “hats, purses, designer bags and/or luggage, watches, silver and/or gold jewelry, sunglasses, coats, clothing, scarves, personal computers, laptop computers, gloves, photos, cameras, rugs, paintings, and Hilton Family heirlooms” allegedly taken from celebrities' homes; also “narcotics, dangerous drugs, marijuana, and paraphernalia related to the use and/or sale of such substances as hypodermic syringes, hypodermic needles. . .spoons, balloons, condoms, measuring devices, badges, pipes, cutting agents. . . .as well as large sums of cash.” They were looking for any sort of communication “boasting about the burglaries.” They were afraid the suspects would find out from each other that the heat was on and let each other know, so the searches were to be conducted simultaneously. So many cops were needed for the five-residence sting that Hollywood Station, which has a relatively small force, was pulling officers and detectives out of all its departments, including homicide. The Bling Ring was about to be busted.

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When the police arrived at Diana Tamayo's Newbury Park apartment, only Diana was at home. They went in with guns drawn, as was their protocol. Diana was cool and collected as showed them into her bedroom, where they found several items they felt were “consistent with that taken during this crime spree.”

They'd determined beforehand that they only needed to find one thing in each residence in order to make an arrest. In Diana's room they allegedly found a Chanel makeup bag, Chanel No. 5 perfume, “a Louis Vuitton brown leather purse, stacks of assorted perfumes, including the Paris Hilton signature brand, a Hermes black leather purse, and designer shoes.” They also found a photo album with pictures of Diana posing, out partying, with Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee.

At Hollywood Station, Diana repeatedly refused to consent to an interview with police. She said she would talk only in the presence of an attorney; her mother was working on getting her one. Diana allegedly told officers, “Those other guys were fuckin' stupid to talk to you guys. . . .All that stuff in my house I bought at the swap meet.”

She was in jail for four days, until October 26, when she was released from LAPD custody to U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). Her lawyer, Behnam Gharagozli, would later complain that Goodkin, “with the assistance of Detective James Martinez,” had “improperly obtained knowledge” of Diana's illegal status and given her over to ICE as a means of intimidating her into confessing. (LAPD Special Order 40 states that “officers shall not initiate police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person.”) In July 2012, Superior Court Judge Larry P. Fidler dismissed the motion to drop the charges against Diana on this basis.

On October 26, 2009, Diana was released from ICE back into the custody of the LAPD. She had agreed to be interviewed. “You promise this ICE crap isn't gonna be on me, right? No ICE hold anymore?” she asked Goodkin, according to complaint filed by Gharagozli. “No ICE hold on you. I promised you. I promised your attorney,” Goodkin allegedly said.

“Her confession was coerced,” Howard Levy, Diana's lawyer at the time, told me. Levy was, however, present in the room when Diana admitted to cops that she had accompanied her friends Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee on a burglary of the home of Lindsay Lohan. According to Gharagozli's complaint, Levy had told police, “Okay, she'll talk, but she's only going to cop to one of them, Lohan.”

In her videotaped interview, Diana said that on the night of August 23, 2009, she and Rachel had decided to go out to dinner—“sushi or something.” Diana said that Nick was with them in her Navigator, which she was driving, when Rachel suggested, “Let's go look at some really pretty houses.” Diana said that she then overheard Nick and Rachel discussing the location of Lindsay Lohan's home. Nick directed her where to drive, Diana said; and then, all of sudden, there they were, on Lindsay Lohan's street. Diana said that Nick got out of the car and started walking toward a house—it was Lohan's house—and then suddenly they all were going toward it.

“What did you think you guys were gonna do when you walked up to the house?” Goodkin asked.

“Go into it,” Diana said.

She said that Rachel had “told her things she had done in the past.”

“Okay,” Goodkin said, “so you figured that they were probably just gonna break in?”

“Yes,” Diana replied.

She claimed it was Rachel, not she, who entered Lohan's kitchen through a window and then let her and Nick inside. Diana said that she took just one pair of the actress' shoes from the house that night, but later discarded them in the trash.

Diana said that she and Rachel had also approached the Toluca Lake home of Ashley Tisdale in late July. She said that Rachel rang Tisdale's bell, but when a housekeeper answered, they “ran away.” Tisdale would later tell police that the two young women her housekeeper had seen had actually entered her residence before they fled.

8

“Nick was the brains, Rachel was the balls, and Diana was the lookout,” Courtney Ames told the LAPD in her videotaped interview at Hollywood Station.

As the camera rolled, Courtney stonewalled the room full of cops and detectives asking about her alleged involvement in her friends' criminal activities. “She was tough. She was smart. She was almost like a lawyer,” said a lawyer for one of the other defendants, who had viewed the tape. “She just kept saying, why should I answer your questions? How will this benefit me?”