The Bling Ring (35 page)

“So you don't need to have your alarm on. You don't need to have your door locked. It doesn't make it okay for someone to enter and take your property. So that's not an element of burglary. . . .

“[It's] not an element that the victims here were celebrities. It doesn't matter. The fact that you are able to replace property doesn't matter. And, in fact, we heard evidence that in this case some of the folks weren't able to replace any of the property. Some folks lost items of sentimental value.

“And I think the one thing that was abundantly clear from listening to the testimony of all of the victims was what they lost, most importantly, was a sense of security. We tend to think, as a society, that celebrities, you know, people are invading their privacy all the time, taking photos and chasing them around. . . . But you heard from somebody, I think Ms. Lohan said, at different points in your life your home is really the only place you feel private and safe and secure. So whether property is taken, replaced, not taken, returned, is not the issue. The issue is [that] you never really regain that sense of security. . . .

“The question is simply, did these kids, all five of these targets, plan and conspire to burglarize these houses numerous times, and at the very least in the times that are charged in this indictment? And in conspiring, did they then go one step further and enter these residences? Did they do so with the intent to actually steal from these residences? Did they at different times after having entered these residences and taking property from these residences, were they at some point thereafter in receipt of stolen property from these residences? That's all.”

On July 2, 2010, Prugo, Lee, Ames, Tamayo, and Lopez were indicted. The D.A. added conspiracy to all their charges. Prugo was now charged with seven counts of first-degree residential burglary (the D.A. had decided not to pursue the burglary of Richard Altuna, so Nick went down from eight to seven counts) and one count of conspiracy. Lee was charged with two counts of first-degree residential burglary, two counts of receiving stolen property, and one count of conspiracy; Tamayo with one count of first-degree residential burglary, one count receiving of stolen property, and one count of conspiracy; Ames with one count of first-degree of residential burglary, two counts of receiving stolen property, and one count conspiracy; and Lopez with one count of first-degree residential burglary, one count of receiving stolen property, and one count of conspiracy. Their new bail was $200,000 for Prugo and Lee, and $90,000 for Tamayo, Ames, and Lopez.

36

“Burglar Bunch Dude—I Got Screwed” said a headline on TMZ on May 3, 2010. The website had gotten access to court documents showing that Nick's new lawyer, Markus Dombois, had filed a motion to dismiss the charges against Nick based on his cooperation with police. Dombois' motion claimed that police and prosecutors had betrayed Nick by using information he gave them to charge him with additional crimes. Dombois argued that he had an “implied contract” with prosecutors in return for Nick's cooperation. The “prosecution has chosen to exploit Nick Prugo's cooperation” instead of offering him a deal, the motion said. The motion was denied.

“Mr. Prugo and his attorney came forward voluntarily,” Deputy District Attorney Kim said in court.

Nick had fired Sean Erenstoft after finding out that he was being accused of committing several felonies. “When Nick's parents called in me and Dan Horowitz it was like that scene in
Pulp Fiction
where they call in the cleaner [Harvey Keitel],” said Dombois. “Nick's brains were already all over the walls.”

37

In July 2010, Erenstoft was barred for life from practicing law in the state of California. When the news came out, people I'd spoken to on the Bling Ring story were suddenly emailing and texting me again—“Did you hear?” Prosecutors said that while representing a defendant in a stalking case, Erenstoft filed a civil case against the victim in order to pressure her not to testify against his client. They further alleged that Erenstoft then offered to drop the civil case in exchange for favorable testimony at his client's sentencing. He was originally charged with three felony counts, including attempting to dissuade a witness. “The crime is a felony and because it involves ‘the specific intent to impede justice' it also involved moral turpitude,” says Erenstoft's profile on the State Bar of California website. Erenstoft pleaded no contest to one charge of attempting to dissuade a witness, thereby avoiding possible jail time.

I called Nick and asked him what he thought of this news. “I didn't even want to confess,” he moaned. “It was Sean's idea.”

I asked him if his confession were true.

“Yeah, it was all true,” Nick said. “I told the truth. But if Sean hadn't told me to confess, I never would have said anything. I'm so upset right now.”

When I later asked Erenstoft whether he had pressured Nick to confess, he strenuously denied it. “Nick was adamant to tell his story to Goodkin,” he emailed. “Nick reported he couldn't sleep and wanted to come clean—but most importantly, he said he wasn't going to go down alone and was obsessive about the fact that his cohorts were running free.”

38

Nick had been texting me, sounding upset, when it was in the news that
Pretty Wild
was going to air in March 2010. “Should I be upset, because I kind of am,” he wrote. And in another text: “I guess I'm mad because there [sic] using my misery and making profit off it.” And in another: “Please tell me this crap isn't getting ratings! What is the world coming to?? :).”

The fame monster was raging and leaving him out of the limelight. He seemed even more perturbed when the Lifetime movie
The Bling Ring
was announced in the spring of 2011. “I had no prior knowledge of this and am not affiliated in any way,” Nick told TMZ. “I want to sue if possible.” (He never did.) Meanwhile, Tess Taylor asked the gossip website, “Where's the casting? I want to audition for the role.”

The Lifetime movie, which aired on September 26, 2011, starred Austin Butler (formerly of
Zoey 101
) as a kid who appeared to be based on Nick and Jennifer Grey as his Melva-Lynn Prugo–like mom. The last lines in the last moment of the film gave me pause. They seemed to glamorize what the Bling Ring had done, in a way, by suggesting that having access to a certain lifestyle was irresistible, no matter what the costs. Butler, as the Nick character, stares into the camera in his computer screen and says, “I got to be a completely different person”—cut to images of him wearing stylish clothes, partying in nightclubs. “I was the cool one. I had friends. All I had to do was go through. . . .” He'd been talking about going through the “door” of his computer screen, on the other side of which there was another glamorous dimension, full of celebrities.

“Wouldn't you?” he asks.

39

Sofia Coppola didn't seem at all worried that Lifetime was doing a movie with the same name, on the same subject as the one she was working on. “Oh,” she said when I spoke to her after it came out. “I didn't watch it.”

In March 2012, she began filming in Calabasas. When I was in L.A., I went out to watch her film one day. It was striking how very much the set of “Nicki's house” was like Alexis' house, complete with Buddhist statues and a brass gong. Nicki was being played by Emma Watson, the then 21-year-old star of the Harry Potter films. Watson, doe-eyed and beautiful, was outfitted like Alexis in a hot pink sweatsuit and Ugg boots. She told me she had been working with an accent coach on how to speak Val-ley Girl.

They filmed a scene where Nicki accepts a water delivery from a hunky water delivery guy, coming on to him, giving him sultry looks. Leslie Mann, as Nicki's mother, comes over and angrily zips up the front of Nicki's pink hoodie. “Back to work,” Mann snaps, telling her daughter to come back and do more homeschooling; their lesson of the day: a study of their role model, Angelina Jolie, complete with cutout magazine pictures of her on a “vision board.” In a single moment, Sofia had managed to capture several of the themes we'd been talking about over the several months when she was writing the script.

(The real Alexis, by the way, had signed on as a consultant to the film, and seemed to be getting excited about seeing herself portrayed; she'd been re-tweeting Emma Watson's tweets about Nicki, including this one: “Nicki likes Lip Gloss, Purses, Yoga, Pole Dancing, Uggs, Louboutins, Juice Cleanses, Iced coffee and Tattoos.”)

I had lunch with the cast and crew out in the backyard on picnic tables. Sofia told me she had met with Nick to hear his story. “He wanted us to send a car service to pick him up like he was a celebrity,” she said smiling.

Before I left the set that day, Sofia told me that Brett Goodkin was coming out the next day as a consultant on the scene where Nicki is arrested.

40

Goodkin—who in the last year had been promoted from officer to detective by the LAPD—had been hired as a consultant on
The Bling Ring
, but the plan was never to have him appear onscreen. He was just supposed to oversee the scenes of the Bling Ring defendants' arrests and make sure that everything was done according to the LAPD's procedures. Coppola had met with Goodkin previously in L.A. in order to interview him about the case. But on the day he came to the set, it occurred to her and her producers that Goodkin, with his big frame, shaved head, and actual cop clothes, had such a classic cop look that it might add something to the scene. They asked him if he would like to do it and he agreed. He would not be playing “himself,” but a random cop on the scene.

Goodkin went through the motions of arresting “Nicki,” just as he had arrested some of the real Bling Ring defendants in real life (Prugo, Lopez, and Ames). He came into the house, gruffly told Nicki's mom (Leslie Mann) to secure the dog (a Yorkshire terrier). Goodkin, an eight-year veteran of the force, had had another life as a jazz musician and singer as well as a radio announcer, so he had some experience in the entertainment world. And he was a pretty natural actor, especially when he shoves a tearful Nicki into the back of a cop car by the back of the head.

The problem was that Goodkin didn't tell the L.A. District Attorney's Office that he had appeared in a film—a film that fictionalized an open case in which he was the lead investigator—and that he was a consultant on it. He apparently had mentioned his consulting work to his captain, but he never received the proper approval. When it somehow broke in the news that he had appeared in
The Bling Ring
, some of the lawyers for the other defendants jumped on this as a way to discredit Goodkin as a witness. David Diamond, the lawyer for Roy Lopez, subpoenaed payroll records from
The Bling Ring
production office, which revealed that Goodkin had received $12,500 for his consulting gig rather than the $5,000 to $6,000 he had told his bosses. “ ‘Bling Ring' Consulting Cop, Could Have Inadvertently Ruined His Own Case,” said The Huffington Post. Goodkin became the subject of an internal investigation and was placed on desk duty.

“His judgment is as poor as it gets,” Superior Court Judge Larry P. Fidler said in court on July 20, 2012, responding to Diamond's motion to have the entire case dropped due to Goodkin's allegedly “outrageous” and “egregious” behavior.

“It's not outrageous. It's not flagrant. It's not egregious,” Fidler said. “It's stupid. You can have a field day with him.”

“My client would certainly agree that in retrospect he was ill-advised, but nothing my client did impaired the integrity of the prosecution,” said Ira Salzman, Goodkin's lawyer.

“Goodkin's media attention went to his head,” said Robert Schwartz, Courtney Ames' attorney. “He got too big for his britches. He thought he was impervious to everything. As the case unfolded in the court system, Goodkin was seen as a hero in the district attorney's office because he was the guy who put this case together. But eventually that picture started to crack. He was reading his own press clippings.”

“I get what the D.A.'s upset about,” Goodkin told me on the phone. “But the hyperbole never subsided, I do get what they're pissed about it—I messed up. But it has nothing to do with the facts [of the case]. It has to do with perception. I was never alone with any of these people,” meaning the defendants. “Whenever we interviewed anyone, there were about six of us sitting there. Nothing happened in darkness. It was not me against a crime ring—it was me and many detectives.”

But perception seemed to be on the District Attorney's mind. The prosecution, led by Deputy District Attorney Barbara Murphy, now seemed to back down in the wake of Goodkin's blunder. In the latter half of 2012, the three remaining defendants in the case—Tamayo, Ames, and Lopez—were all handed exceptionally good deals. “The D.A. actually came back to us with a better deal than what we had counter-offered,” said Behnam Gharagozli, Tamayo's lawyer. “I was a little shocked, but really happy for my client.”

On October 19, 2012, Tamayo pleaded no contest to one count of residential burglary of Lindsay Lohan and received three years probation and 60 days of roadwork. (Her current immigration status is unclear.)

On November 8, 2012, Roy Lopez pleaded no contest to one count of receiving stolen property and was sentenced to three years supervised probation plus time served in the county jail. “You got a break because of what's happened with this case,” Judge Fidler told Lopez from the bench, apparently referring to the Goodkin mess.

“This was a joke at the end of the day,” said one of the other lawyers in the case. “If this were in any other court in any other county, the D.A. would have shrugged and said, ‘And?' about that stuff with Goodkin. The offers would have gotten a little bit better, but not this much better. The L.A. District Attorney's office was worried about their image, so they just tried to sweep everything under the rug.” (Jane Robison, the publicist for the D.A.'s office, had no comment.)