In October 2008, two teenagers from Calabasas, California, climbed a hill behind the guard-gated Mulholland Estates community in Sherman Oaks. Rachel Lee and Nick Prugo had found the address of Paris Hilton’s $5.9 million mansion online, and they wanted to find out if the rumors about her were true, that the hotel heiress really did leave her front door unlocked.
They rang the doorbell first, in case anyone was home. No one answered. When they checked under the doormat for a spare key, they found one waiting. They never needed it. The door was already open.
Inside, Lee made straight for Hilton’s closet and screamed at what she found there. Prugo grabbed a bottle of Grey Goose vodka from Hilton’s private nightclub in the basement on his way out. They each pocketed about $1,800 in cash they found stuffed into Hilton’s purses. It was their first celebrity burglary. It would not be their last.
Two Teenagers From Calabasas
Lee grew up in Calabasas with a deep self-consciousness about money. She has said she felt ashamed of having what she described as the smallest house in her neighborhood, and of struggling to fit in with wealthier classmates. According to the 2023 documentary “The Ringleader,” she was expelled from Calabasas High School after she was accused of stealing another student’s Ugg boots and refused to admit it. She transferred to Indian Hills, an alternative school in Agoura Hills for students who had been expelled or were falling behind, and it was there, around 2006, that she met Nick Prugo.
Prugo had also been pushed out of Calabasas High, for excessive absences. He had once been a child actor, playing a small role in a low-budget 2003 television docudrama about a child’s exorcism. His family had moved to Calabasas only that June, and he later said he felt poor next to classmates who drove Mercedes and Range Rovers to school. Lee, brash and unbothered, was everything he wanted to be. The two became close fast.
Before long, they were “checking cars,” walking the streets of their neighborhood and testing the door handles of parked vehicles. Whatever cash or credit cards they found inside, they spent the next day on shopping sprees along Rodeo Drive and Melrose Avenue. Merchants, Prugo said, never questioned two well-dressed teenagers paying with someone else’s card.
Their first home burglary was not a celebrity’s house at all. Eden Maimon, a friend of Prugo’s known online as Eden Shizzle, posted on Myspace that he was leaving town. Lee and Prugo broke into his family’s home while he was away and found a safe under his parents’ bed. Prugo later said they took about $8,000. Maimon told a different story, claiming the real number was closer to $30,000 to $40,000.
Paris Hilton’s Unlocked Door
Paris Hilton became the pair’s next target, in part, Prugo later said, because they assumed she was careless enough not to notice. After the October 2008 break-in, they returned to her Mulholland Estates mansion at least four more times over the following months. On one visit, Prugo said, he found cocaine in the house and used it.
Their targets were almost always women. Prugo would later explain that this was simple economics: the clothes, shoes, and jewelry the group wanted were the kind only women wore.
Hilton never seemed to notice anything was missing. By that point, Lee had grown so comfortable that she had taken Hilton’s own spare key from under the doormat and added it to her keychain.
The pair brought in new company. Courtney Ames, a longtime friend of Lee’s from Calabasas High School, introduced the group to her boyfriend, Johnny Ajar, a nightclub promoter and former convict who agreed to sell whatever the group could not use. Ames also brought along her coworker, Roy Lopez Jr., a bouncer.
On December 19, 2008, Lopez joined Lee and Prugo for what turned out to be their last trip to Hilton’s house. He left carrying roughly $2 million in jewelry inside a Louis Vuitton duffel bag. This time, Hilton noticed. She filed a police report.
The Ring Grew Larger
Months earlier, while the Hilton burglaries were still underway, Lee had been caught on a much smaller charge. She and a classmate from Indian Hills, Diana Tamayo, were arrested for shoplifting about $85 worth of merchandise from a Sephora store, and both were fined and placed on probation. Tamayo, the student body president at Indian Hills and the winner of a $1,500 college scholarship for aspiring teachers, would soon become one of the ring’s most frequent participants.
On February 22, 2009, the night of the Academy Awards, the group broke into the Hollywood Hills home of reality television personality Audrina Patridge through an unlocked door. They took her passport, her laptop, a pair of custom-fitted jeans, and jewelry, in all about $43,000 worth of property.
Unlike Hilton, Patridge noticed right away. She had security cameras installed, and she posted the footage to her own website, hoping the public could help identify the intruders. She later told Vanity Fair she believed she knew exactly why she had been chosen, recalling that Lee had once been a fan of hers before the obsession curdled into something else. “She’s going to get what she deserves,” Patridge said. The leads went nowhere at the time, and the burglaries continued.
That spring, the group targeted actress Rachel Bilson, breaking into her home as many as six times between April and May 2009 and making off with between $130,000 and $300,000 worth of clothing, shoes, and jewelry. During one visit, on May 9, Lee felt comfortable enough to use Bilson’s bathroom before leaving. The group later sold some of what they had taken on the Venice Beach boardwalk for a few thousand dollars.
Around this time, the circle widened further to include Alexis Neiers, a homeschooled model who was about to start filming a reality series for E! called “Pretty Wild.” Neiers knew Tamayo from Indian Hills and had been introduced to Lee and Prugo through her close friend Tess Taylor, a young woman the Neiers family had informally taken in years earlier.
Bloom, Fox, and Lohan
On July 13, 2009, Prugo, Lee, Tamayo, and Neiers cut through a security fence to break into the Hollywood Hills home shared by actor Orlando Bloom and his girlfriend, Victoria’s Secret model Miranda Kerr. Lee, according to Prugo, wanted Kerr’s lingerie. Inside, by Prugo’s later account, Neiers picked up one of Bloom’s Louis Vuitton bags and started carrying it as her own, while the group also took a one-of-a-kind designer dress belonging to Kerr, Bloom’s collection of vintage Rolex watches, and cash, worth close to $500,000 altogether.
It was the only burglary in which Neiers was caught on security footage. She has said she was intoxicated that night and did not realize a burglary was taking place, and later told police she screamed for someone to get her out of the house. Prugo disputes her account, insisting she knew exactly what was happening and took part willingly.
Neiers has since offered her own explanation for how she ended up there, framing the arrest that followed as a kind of spiritual lesson on her way to a bigger destiny. “I see myself being like an Angelina Jolie, but even stronger,” she told Sales.
The following month, the group broke into the home of actor Brian Austin Green and his girlfriend, actress Megan Fox, entering through a dog door. They took clothing and jewelry. They also took Green’s Sig Sauer .380 semi-automatic handgun, a detail that would resurface, almost as an afterthought, when police later searched Johnny Ajar’s house. Neither Green nor Fox realized they had been robbed until police contacted them about the gun.
By August 2009, Lee had already moved to Las Vegas to live with her father, away from the burglaries and the stolen merchandise piling up in California. But she came back one more time, for the celebrity she called her “ultimate fashion icon”: Lindsay Lohan.
On August 23, 2009, Lee, Prugo, and Tamayo broke into Lohan’s Hollywood Hills home through an unlocked front door. They ransacked the house, taking watches, paintings, an Hermès bag, a custom fur coat, and other items worth roughly $130,000. Three days later, the Los Angeles Police Department released surveillance footage of the break-in to the gossip site TMZ. Combined with Patridge’s footage from six months before, investigators could now see that the same people had hit both houses.
By then, courts would later estimate, the group had stolen close to $3 million in cash, clothing, and jewelry from Hollywood’s elite over the previous 10 months.
The Confessions Began
According to police accounts, the tip that finally named names came from inside the group. Alexis Neiers anonymously called in to identify Lee and Prugo as the figures in the Lohan footage, even though she herself had taken part in the Bloom burglary months earlier.
Investigators matched Prugo’s face from the surveillance video to his Facebook profile. He was arrested on September 17, 2009, and at first said nothing.
The silence did not last. Within weeks, Prugo’s anxiety had grown so severe that he could not eat or sleep, and by his own account, his hair began falling out. He met with the case’s lead detective, Brett Goodkin, and confessed, naming everyone involved and describing burglaries the police did not even know had happened. He told them the group had also attempted to break into the home of actress Ashley Tisdale, fleeing when a houseguest spotted them, and had scouted, without attempting, the homes of Miley Cyrus, Hilary Duff, Zac Efron, and Vanessa Hudgens.
Goodkin later told Vanity Fair the crimes felt almost “stalkerish.”
Word of Prugo’s arrest reached Lee in Las Vegas. While the two were on the phone, Prugo asked which street she lived on. She told him. Police traced the call and arrested her there on October 22, 2009. Within days, they also arrested Neiers, 18, Ames, 18, Tamayo, 19, and Lopez, 27, in the Los Angeles area.
Neiers’s arrest happened to fall on the first day of filming for “Pretty Wild.” The actual moment was never caught on camera. Producers restaged it afterward for the show.
A search of Johnny Ajar’s house turned up three firearms, including the one stolen from Brian Austin Green, along with drugs and a laptop holding aerial photographs of 51 homes across the Hollywood Hills.
The Sentences Came Down
Lee, who pleaded no contest from the start, received the harshest sentence of the group: four years in state prison for the Patridge burglary. Before she reported to serve it, her family hired a prison coach, Wendy Feldman, to help prepare her, and Feldman described Lee to reporters as shy, insecure, and unlikely to have been the criminal mastermind the press had made her out to be. “Rachel has a learning disability, she doesn’t have a particularly high IQ,” Feldman said. Lee was paroled after serving about 16 months.
Prugo pleaded no contest to two counts of first-degree residential burglary, for the break-ins at Patridge’s and Lohan’s homes, and was sentenced to two years. Shortly before he was due to begin serving it in 2012, his own parents had his $200,000 bail revoked after discovering the scale of his drug use, sending him back to county jail to await his court date. He served about one year before his release in 2013.
Neiers pleaded no contest to a single count of burglary, for the Bloom break-in. In May 2010, she was sentenced to 180 days in jail, three years of probation, and $600,000 in restitution to Bloom. She served 30 days, briefly housed in the same cell block as Lindsay Lohan, who was there for an unrelated probation violation.
Tamayo pleaded no contest to burglarizing Lohan’s home and was sentenced to three years of probation and 60 days of community service. Her lawyer said she cooperated with police only after they threatened her undocumented family with deportation.
Ames pleaded no contest to receiving a jacket stolen from Hilton and was sentenced to three years of probation and 60 days of community service. Her more serious burglary charges were dropped after Detective Goodkin appeared in Sofia Coppola’s 2013 film about the case, creating a conflict of interest.
Lopez, who had carried the $2 million in jewelry out of Hilton’s house, pleaded no contest and received three years of probation. Ajar pleaded no contest to selling cocaine, illegally possessing a firearm, and receiving stolen property. He was sentenced to three years in jail and served less than one.
The case did not stay out of the public eye for long. A Lifetime television movie aired in 2011, with the gang members’ names changed and Jennifer Grey playing the mother of the character based on Prugo. Sofia Coppola’s film followed in 2013, built less around Lee and Prugo than around the character inspired by Neiers. Netflix and HBO each released their own documentaries on the case a decade later, in 2022 and 2023.
Lee trained as a hairstylist after her release, graduating from cosmetology school in 2018. Prugo, who now goes by Nick Norgo, married his husband in 2017 and runs an online business; in 2016 he was separately sentenced to probation and community service after pleading guilty to stalking a Los Angeles esthetician.
Neiers got sober, became a certified substance abuse counselor, and now hosts a podcast about her experience. Ames went on to study psychology and child development at a community college in Woodland Hills. Lopez left California for a job in Texas. Gabby Neiers, Alexis’s younger sister, was found with stolen items in her own room during the searches but was never charged; by the time she discussed her involvement publicly in 2022, the statute of limitations had expired.
In March 2010, Vanity Fair published Nancy Jo Sales’s account of the case under the headline “The Suspect Wore Louboutins.” The title referred to a claim that Neiers had worn six-inch Christian Louboutin heels to one of her court appearances.
Neiers said this never happened. She had worn four-inch heels from Bebe, she insisted, not Louboutins. Cameras filming her family’s E! reality series, “Pretty Wild,” caught her trying to leave Sales a voicemail about it, an attempt complicated by her mother shouting in the background loud enough to ruin take after take.
She finally got through a full message. She said the article had left her feeling betrayed, after she had hoped it would show the world who she really was.
Then she ended the call.
“Have a nice life, goodbye.”
