Silicon Valley's fanciest stolen bikes are trafficked by a single mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico

The morning of my visit, at the dining room table, Hance's fingers were tracing his keyboard. It logs new stolen bike reports before work in the morning, at lunch and before bed. As he typed, reports of two more stolen bikes landed in his inbox. Both were from California. This didn't surprise him. “San Francisco,” he said, “is really ridiculous right now. »

In the weeks After this information came from Mexico, Hance circulated the curious case of the stolen bikes in Mexico to colleagues, savvy Bay Area bike shop owners, and police officers. He also contacted trusted bike vigilantes who track stolen items. In recent years, a passionate subculture has emerged to combat bike crime, using a mix of old-fashioned approaches and open source intelligence, tracking the publicly available fingerprints that almost everyone leaves behind him online. These amateur detectives often exchange information and methods, sometimes with the ultimate goal of recovering stolen bikes. Call them a participatory Justice League. Bike Index and Hance are major planets in this loose constellation of benefactors. Hance regularly calls on them.

Almost as soon as Hance saw this Facebook page with all the stolen bikes, it disappeared. But soon after, a volunteer — one who had lost $26,000 on bikes and now wanted to help Hance — called to tell him he'd found an Instagram account for Constru-Bikes. The account had accepted his follower request, thinking he was a customer. “Do you want my password?” the guy asked Hance.

Armed with the volunteer's login credentials and a beer, Hance laid down in his hammock and opened the Instagram page.

Holy shit.

The Insta page had many more bikes for sale than the Facebook page. There were mountain bikes, road bikes, electric bikes. There were brands that Hance had never heard of, even though he swam in a world of bikes every day. Fezzari (now called Ari). Braking brake17. Devinci. Argon 18. All beautiful, almost all $3,000 or $6,000 or even $10,000 when new. “It was the Amazon of stolen bikes,” he told me. Each announcement was accompanied by a multitude of photos and close-up details. Hance took screenshots of everything. The photos would help him match the motorcycles he had seen with the owners who had lost them. The photos were also evidence and he wanted to preserve them in case they disappeared.

As Hance worked, he realized many of the bikes looked familiar. Here you have to understand something: for people who really know and love cycling, like Hance, a mountain bike is never just a mountain bike. This is a matte black Niner Jet 9 RDO from 2016. Double suspension. Carbon frame. Maxxis 700C tires. Shimano XT disc brakes. To a cycling enthusiast, these details are like whorls in a thumbprint, marking each bike as unique. Hance possesses almost a savant's ability to remember bikes he's seen and details as small as a scratch on a downtube. He lay in the hammock until dinner time that day, taking screenshots, saving photos, and making mental notes to return to certain bikes.

Soon, he and his fellow hunters began matching ads for bikes for sale on Constru-Bikes' Insta page with those stolen around the Bay Area. Sometimes it was comically easy, thanks to the many detailed photos. One photo showed a white Gorilla mountain bike, a rare brand in Uganda, with the owner's name clearly printed on the rear triangle of the bike's frame. The owner told Hance it was the only bike of its type in the United States and that someone had stolen it in Oakland that same spring. In another ad, for a Bulls Grinder Evo electric bike, the serial number was clearly visible in a photo; it was the same one posted on Bike Index in July 2020. Its owner, a San Francisco techie named Ash Ramirez, had paid more than $5,200 for it and used the bike as his primary mode of transportation in the city, where he played on as many as five softball teams. “I went EVERYWHERE on my bike,» Ramirez later wrote to me, describing how much he loved pedaling in heavy traffic, past the miserable faces of drivers, before the bike was stolen from his Tenderloin apartment building.

Hance called on a San Jose stolen bike Facebook group, which helped him confirm the sale of even more stolen bikes. The number rose to several dozen. Hance took each one personally, not only because he was connected that way, but because he knew firsthand – through his communications with hundreds of impoverished cyclists over the years – that behind every bike lost was a pain of a phantom limb. For many cyclists, a bicycle is more than just an ingenious sequence of gears and carefully chosen components. It's the sum of everything the owner has experienced in the saddle. A triathlon bike is not just a triathlon bike, he told me, but the bike that a former soldier pedaled for eight hours every day after returning from Afghanistan, trying to shed his PTSD.