The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico

On the eating room desk on the morning of my go to, Hance’s fingers spidered throughout his keyboard. He logs new stolen-bike stories earlier than work within the morning, and at lunch, and once more earlier than mattress. As he typed, stories of two extra stolen bikes landed in his inbox. Each had been from California. This didn’t shock him. “San Francisco,” he mentioned, “is fucking ridiculous proper now.”

Within the weeks after that tip from Mexico, Hance circulated the curious case of the stolen bikes in Mexico to colleagues, savvy Bay Space bike store house owners, cops. He additionally reached out to some trusted bike vigilantes who hunt stolens. In recent times a passionate subculture has emerged to battle again in opposition to bike crime, utilizing a mixture of old-school legwork and open supply intelligence, following the publicly out there fingerprints that almost everybody leaves behind on-line. These beginner detectives usually swap info and strategies, typically with the last word intention of recovering the stolen bikes. Name them a crowdsourced Justice League. Bike Index and Hance are main planets on this free constellation of do-gooders. Hance commonly calls on them.

Virtually as quickly as Hance noticed that Fb web page with all of the stolen bikes, it vanished. Earlier than lengthy, although, a volunteer—the man who’d misplaced $26,000 in bikes and now needed to assist Hance—referred to as to say he’d discovered an Instagram account for Constru-Bikes. The account had accepted his request as a follower, considering he was a buyer. “Would you like my password?” the man requested Hance.

Armed with the volunteer’s login credentials and a beer, Hance lay down in his yard hammock and opened the Instagram web page.

Holy shit.

The Insta web page had so many extra bikes on the market than the Fb web page did. There have been mountain bikes, street bikes, ebikes. There have been manufacturers that Hance had by no means even heard of, although he swam in a world of bikes day-after-day. Fezzari (now referred to as Ari). Breakbrake17. Devinci. Argon 18. All of them good-looking, virtually all of them $3,000 or $6,000 and even $10,000 when new. “It was the Amazon of stolen bikes,” he recounted to me. Each advert got here with a slew of close-up photographs and particulars. Hance took screenshots of every thing. The pictures would assist him match the bikes he noticed with house owners who’d misplaced them. The images had been additionally proof, and he needed to protect them in case they vanished.

As Hance labored he realized that many bicycles appeared acquainted. Right here, you want to perceive one thing: For individuals who actually know and love bicycles, as Hance does, a mountain bike is rarely only a mountain bike. It’s a 2016 matte-black Niner Jet 9 RDO. Twin suspension. Carbon body. 700C Maxxis tires. Shimano XT disc brakes. To a motorcycle geek, such particulars are like whorls in a thumbprint, marking each bike as distinctive. Hance possesses almost a savant’s capacity to recall the bicycles he has seen, and particulars as small as a scratch on a down tube. He lay within the hammock till dinnertime that day, taking screenshots and saving photographs and making psychological notes to circle again to sure bikes.

{Photograph}: Cole Wilson

{Photograph}: Cole Wilson

Quickly, he and his fellow hunters started to match advertisements of bikes on the market on Constru-Bikes’ Insta web page with ones stolen from the Bay Space. At instances, it was comically straightforward, because of the various, detailed photographs. One image confirmed a white Gorilla mountain bike, a uncommon model from Uganda, with the owner’s identify clearly printed on the rear triangle of the bike’s body. The proprietor informed Hance it was the one bike of its type within the US and that somebody had stolen it in Oakland that very same spring. In one other advert, for a Bulls Grinder Evo ebike, the serial quantity was plainly seen in a photograph; it was the identical as one posted on Bike Index in July 2020. Its proprietor, a San Francisco tech employee named Ash Ramirez, had paid greater than $5,200 for it and had used the bike as his main technique of transportation across the city—the place he performed on as many as 5 softball groups. “I went EVERYWHERE on my bike,” Ramirez later wrote me, describing how he liked pedaling by means of heavy site visitors, previous the depressing faces of drivers, earlier than the bike was stolen from his Tenderloin house constructing.

Hance enlisted assistance from a San Jose stolen-bikes Fb group, who helped him affirm nonetheless extra stolen bikes on the market. The quantity climbed into the handfuls. Hance took every one personally, not simply because he was wired that method however as a result of he knew directly—from communication with tons of of bereft cyclists over the years—that behind every misplaced bike was a phantom-limb ache. For a lot of cyclists, a motorcycle isn’t simply an ingenious concatenation of gears and punctiliously chosen elements. It’s the sum of every thing the proprietor has skilled whereas within the saddle. A triathlon bike isn’t only a tri bike, he informed me, however the bike an ex-soldier pedaled for eight hours day-after-day when he returned from Afghanistan, making an attempt to shake his PTSD.