The Hollywood Bling Ring
The Glitter Gang
Easy money and lots of it was the motive behind a group of former high school friends who allegedly robbed some of Hollywood's young A-listers. The gang wanted the Hollywood lifestyle: expensive lunches at the in Hollywood haunts, the diamond bracelets and necklaces like those worn by the stars they idolized and the $300 designer jeans the famous actresses wore. And they wanted it for free.
They wanted what most of the young people who arrive every week in Hollywood want: to live like those bejeweled and fashionably, expensively attired actresses and models splashed in the pages of Us Weekly. This group of friends wanted everything they saw around them growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles.
Courtney Ames and Roy Lopez
Most star-struck arrivistes try to reach these goals by working for them. Some do eventually hit the starlet jackpot and become the real deal, joining the likes of Scarlet Johansson or Nicole Kidman on the red carpet. Some end up never quite making it, perhaps surviving doing commercials and reality television, or drifting into the region's extensive porn industry. Others keep waiting tables for years while they chase the dream.
But the so-called Hollywood Bling Ring took a different path entirely. The premise was simple: Why work for the bling, when you can just take it?
This appears to be the philosophy of seven suspects, most of whom knew each other from a high school in the San Fernando Valley, who allegedly went on rob such high-profile Hollywood celebrities as Megan Fox and Orlando Bloom.