In the burgeoning Hollywood club scene, where ecstasy dealers dine alongside celebrities, and illicit money bubbles up from below like the La Brea Tar Pits, a handsome double-murderer and ex-con of refined wit and taste charmed his way into young Hollywood's most elite social circles. Serving as their hired muscle and arbiter of street justice, he ultimately went on to expose their scandalous, hard-kept secrets -- all the while waging a criminal campaign against the ill-deserving rich and famous.
Filled with sex, drugs, and sudden violence, Six Degrees of Paris Hilton: Inside the Sex Tapes, Scandals, and Shakedowns of the New Hollywood is the shocking true tale of Darnell Riley, a well-mannered middle-class kid from Los Angeles who reinvented himself as a stone-cold gangster in the boxing gyms and bruising streets of South Central, before serving seven years for a double homicide at fifteen. Released at age twenty-three, he infiltrated a far more decadent crowd whose privileged lifestyle is familiar to most only in weekly magazines. During his six-year stab at Hollywood, Darnell ran with its It girls and bully boys: He befriended Paris Hilton; was associated with multiple sex tapes; held Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis at gunpoint and humiliated him on camera; dated models; ran numbers; trafficked in drugs; carried out contract beatings; and "possibly" staged a daring series of home-invasion robberies, many of which were attributed to the infamous Bel-Air Burglar.
In a potent real-life mix of Entourage and The Wire, award-winning journalist Mark Ebner follows Darnell's riveting story, from exclusive interviews conducted inside Corcoran State Prison, through the mean streets of Los Angeles, employing a Rogues Gallery of characters unrivaled in modern crime.
The ultimate expose of the greed, hypocrisy, and vulgarity behind Hollywood's new breed of feral rich and illicitly famous, Six Degrees of Paris Hilton is a front-row seat to the best show in town.
Industry Reviews
""Six Degrees of Paris Hilton" is better than it needed to be for me to endorse it, it is better than you think it'll be--it is nothing short of an awesome book, and I highly recommend it." --Tucker Max, author of "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell"
""Six Degrees of Paris Hilton" takes readers on a wild ride through the life of Darnell Riley -- murderer, extortionist and debt collector who worked his way into the social circle of the Hollywood heiress...It's an incredible story, and Ebner takes the reader on a whirlwind tour from the red carpet to the federal penitentiary." -- Marty Beckerman, "The Daily Beast"
"A totally absorbing, outrageous book." -- Evan Wright, author of "Generation Kill"
"For anyone who still thinks Hollywood is all glitz and glamour, author Mark Ebner has a wake-up call...Ebner's book masterfully exposes a Hollywood where It girls date drug dealers, industry players get beaten down for skipping out on gambling debts and celebrity sex tapes are a dime a dozen." -- ModernTonic.com, January 28, 2009
"Hugely entertaining and terrifying. Ebner found the one untold story left in Hollywood." -- (former) "New York Post" Book Reviews Editor and journalist, William Georgiades
"If you want to discover more of the dark underbelly of L.A., where celebrities hang side-by-side with drug dealers and other criminals, Mark Ebner's upcoming book "Six Degrees of Paris Hilton" is for you." -- Rush & Molloy, "New York Daily News"
"In "Six Degrees of Paris Hilton", Mark Ebner lays bare the dark, twisted heart of a Hollywood so savage, so murderous, so unbelievably drugged-out, degenerate, sex-soaked, weird, and violent that only a journalist with Buick-sized balls and questionable sanity would even dare to go there. Most terrifying of all -- the story is true, and Ebner tells it with a ferocity and heart that will have readers panting and forgetting to wash or eat until they've clawed their way to the end. Forget all the glossy, big name, so-called Hollywood crime books you've ever read. After "Six Degrees of Paris Hilton", they can torch the place and feed the ashes to rats. You'd have to go all the way back to "In Cold Blood" or Ellroy at his best to find a criminal saga any better than this. Let Ebner take you on a tour of shiny hell. You hold in your hands something very close to a masterpiece." -- Jerry Stahl, author of "I, Fatty" and "Pain Killers"
"Lurid and masterful reporting. Every word rings true with an insider's absolute knowledge of Hollywood's rich and famous. Fiendishly ingenious and shocking. Mark Ebner is a born storyteller who has seen it all, from the mean streets to Bel Air mansions." -- Robert Graysmith, author of "Zodiac"
"Part pit bull, part Columbo whacked out on a pot of espresso, they don't make investigative journalists like Mark Ebner anymore. Mr. Ebner is one of the few writers left today willing to get down in the gutter with his subjects just to hear their truth." -- Joseph Lindsey, "Big Hollywood"
"This book is a celebrity-soaked bitches' brew bubbling over with toxic-shocked debutantes on a collision course with miscreants and the maladjusted...Ebner keeps writing the story as it rolls out in almost real time, chronicling duplicity and depravity with fierce insight and rich, meaty prose, discovering art thefts, fraud and a bottomless cesspool of shattered dreams and feckless, reckless abandon." -- Lisa Derrick, HuffingtonPost.com
