A key member of a group of suburban burglars accused of breaking into and stealing items from celebrities’ homes was sentenced to four years in state prison as part of a plea bargain.
Rachel Lee, 21, pleaded no contest last month to charges she and several others broke into the home of reality TV star Audrina Patridge, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop a felony count of conspiracy to commit burglary and other offenses. Police found items stolen from the homes of actors Orlando Bloom and Lindsay Lohan at Lee’s family home in Las Vegas.
Four members of the alleged burglary ring are still awaiting trial. Lee has been described as the second-in-command of the crew.
The crew is accused of stealing more than $3 million in jewelry, designer clothes and accessories from the homes of Bloom, Lohan, Paris Hilton, Rachel Bilson, Brian Austin-Green and Megan Fox, Ashley Tisdale and Patridge between September 2008 and August 2009, police say.
Hilton, Lohan and Bloom all testified before a Los Angeles County grand jury in the case against five reputed members of the “bling ring,” who authorities say repeatedly broke into the stars’ Hollywood Hills homes. Bilson’s home was burglarized three times and Hilton’s twice.
The L.A. Times said the robbers were mostly young women who attended a continuation high school in Agoura Hills, an affluent suburb in the San Fernando Valley. They used celebrity gossip websites to find addresses and determine when celebrities would be absent from their homes.
Lee and accomplice Nicholas Prugo were caught on security cameras breaking into the homes of Lohan and Patridge, the newspaper reported, and were also “overheard ‘boasting’ at a party that they had committed the burglaries.”
Lee’s mother is an immigrant from North Korea, according to Vanity Fair, and her father is a businessman living in Las Vegas.
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