Hollywood Hills by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online

and was charged with receiving stolen property and other related crimes. LAPD and LASD detectives believed that perhaps two dozen burglaries were committed during a two-year period.
    Defense lawyers negotiated, offering to discuss the return of missing property if new felony counts were not filed, but it all ended in what detectives said was akin to "a failed hostage negotiation" after one of the attorneys walked out, saying, "I'm not in the property business."
    Another defense attorney, whose young client claimed to be working for a Christian organization that assisted people in need of housing, seemed to believe every word that his sobbing client told him. A detective said of the lawyer, "He's the kind of guy who goes to a strip club and believes that the lap dancer really loves him."
    None of the young people were hard-core junkies but some of them smoked OxyContin, the equivalent of synthetic heroin, th e d rug du jour of countless young Americans and a powerhouse opioid that had even addicted America's leading conservative talk-show host, Rush Limbaugh. The news photos of the pretty, female suspects in their low-rise jeans, hiding their faces but not their firm bare bellies, provided weeks of entertainment for TV and tabloids. They were dubbed "The Burglar Bunch" and "The Hollywood Hills Burglars" and, even more provocatively, "The Bling Ring."
    Local and national media described their antics as cautionary tales of the dangers to young people posed by the Hollywood celebrity lifestyle. The rationale was that it was constantly in their faces thanks to websites that detailed the shenanigans of celebutantes, along with reality shows that portrayed people their age living the life in Hollywood nightclubs. According to celebrity commentators who never eschewed a cliche, an abundance of danger to young people was out there on those "boulevards of dreams."
    There were a number of boulevard dreamers who couldn't get enough of the Bling Ring, one of whom was twenty-two-year-old Jonas Claymore. He was a dropout from Hollywood High School who'd smoked way too much crystal meth during his final year of school and had never gone on to community college or done much of anything that his working-class parents had expected of him. The meth eventually led to terrifying attacks of paranoia where he became convinced that he was under twenty-four-hour surveillance by LAND narks, and on one unforgettable evening, two of his former schoolmates decided to wean him off methamphetamines by introducing him to the wonders of 80 mg green tablets of OxyContin and other oxycodone drugs like Percocet, Percodan, and Tylox.
    His current housemate, Megan Burke, was a twenty-year-old high school graduate from Bend, Oregon, who had been a good student, popular, and college-bound, before she'd developed a yen to "experience Hollywood," as had so many thousands before her. She could not have specifically defined what that meant. Of course , she would have been embarrassed to admit that there were vague fantasies involving the movie business, and even then, she was too mature to think that she would be "discovered." Yet it was always there at age eighteen, the notion that where life moves at twenty-four frames per second, anything is possible.
    She had persuaded her mother to let her come to Los Angeles for the summer before college with a list of places in Southern California that she wanted to visit. She had explained to her mother that this was her "odyssey," the journey of self-discovery that she and many of her classmates believed was essential for self-fulfillment. The original plan was to stay for two months working at the Gap for a former Bend neighbor who had moved to Los Angeles and managed the store. The woman had even arranged for Megan to share an apartment with two other girls, and the money she earned selling clothing had allowed Megan to support herself. She had hoped to send part of her earnings to her mother, who had raised Megan and her