The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  “I do remember talking to the Border Patrol about whether the bikes were stolen or not,” Zúñiga said. She reported that agents inspected bikes for details that might indicate whether the vehicles had been used to smuggle drugs—in the tubing or tires, for example. No drugs were found. Then the Border Patrol researched the serial numbers on all of the bikes the agency took into custody. No evidence of theft was suggested by those checks, either. “But, yeah,” Zúñiga said on recollection—she’d lived in Mexico City and knew the border culture as well—“they were definitely US bikes.”

  There is not a lot to learn from the serial numbers that manufacturers stamp onto the frames of bicycles. In code, some will relay the production year, the model, and the factory in which the bike was built. Each manufacturer uses a different method in formulating a serial number, so there is no set sequence. And some numbers may not relay even the basic information. Serial numbers are there mainly to reunite an owner with a lost bicycle. But law enforcement does not keep a national database of serial numbers, either of the bikes they’ve impounded or of those reported stolen. A private enterprise called the National Bike Registry (NBR) charges owners ten dollars to register their serial numbers online, and if a registered bike turns up after being stolen, law enforcement can access the information attached to that serial number. The NBR claims that 48 percent of stolen bikes are recovered by law enforcement, but only 5 percent are returned to an owner. This is because, they say, most owners never register their serial numbers or even write them down. Unless Border Patrol agents at the Imperial Beach station accessed the NBR archive and punched in the serial number of a bicycle registered with the NBR by an owner—in the past ten years—it is likely that number wouldn’t have told the agents more than they could gather by looking at the bike itself.

  At the height of the phenomenon, Border Patrol began to drive their jeeps and kilo trucks over abandoned bicycles. Rims were “tacoed” and frames bent. Some agents on foot slashed bike tires with pocketknives. The desire to disable the vehicles, and prevent their further use by a migrant, explained some of this activity. But some of it may have been born of frustration. Storage capacity at the station was maxed out, and they had no concrete way of knowing where the bikes were coming from or where they were headed. And regardless, the agents were not bike caddies. Better to wound the bikes and leave them in the dirt.

  The question of theft drew me back to the Kimzey place to kick some tires and poke at Terry’s pile again. This time I took a closer look at the frames. Like a raucous house party reaching its crescendo, the collection was a colorful, moving, shifting affair. You never knew who might show up—new bikes caught my eye even while I was reassessing my opinion of an old acquaintance. Plus, I wouldn’t know for some time afterward, but Terry was actually storing the best bicycles in a prefab wooden shed stationed right next to the stack of motley passers-through. If I considered the shed at all, I probably assumed it was filled with manure-laden rakes and shovels, not gold. It was like a backstage party at the party, and the bikes most likely to have been registered by their owners were attending this one, coolly out of view.

  Still, there were things to learn from the pile. I was looking for stickers of origin: shop emblems, school and club affiliations, municipal tags, etc. I mentioned this to Terry, and he looked at me like I’d missed something as big as the wooden shed right in front of my face. He reiterated that he’d found whole groups of bikes tagged with police auction stickers. Terry then began to list the cities and towns across the Southwest that the stickers represented. The list of police auctions sounded something like an intro to a blues song about old US 80, the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway: Dallas, Fort Worth, Las Cruces, Phoenix, San Diego. He ended with, “And someone was hauling ’em through to Mexico!”

  Two journalists I admire for their love of their bicycles independently followed their own missing wheels into what was termed the “underworld” of bike theft. This included homeless encampments, drug corners, back alleys, chop shops, flea markets, and police property rooms.

  Even for experienced international correspondent and author Patrick Symmes, the hustle of missing bicycles proved formidable. His initial inspiration was to attach various GPS devices to a series of bikes and observe where they ended up via his laptop computer. Symmes’s technological rabbit hunts spanned the bike-crazy cities of New York, Portland, and San Francisco. Symmes even succeeded in enlisting the aid of the San Francisco Police Department and the Portland Police Bureau, which was a bonus because, as San Francisco’s Sergeant Joe McCloskey put it bluntly, “[Bike theft is] just a low priority.”

  Although promising, the GPS trap yielded a mixed bag of results. The first test bike was locked behind the author’s apartment, but soon disappeared without a trace. The bike and GPS unit might have been ferreted away to an underground garage where the GPS signal could not reach satellites. But the unit could have suffered a coincidental failure. Or maybe the thief was on to the ruse and disabled the device. Technology has its limits. Another bike trap the author set remained locked to a New York parking meter for weeks. But as Symmes learned, the bike’s mass was slowly being reduced as thieves parted it out—the brakes, the seat, cranks, etc. Symmes set a third bike trap against a mailbox in Portland. The bike disappeared two hours later. Symmes tracked it around town on his computer screen. At some point, the GPS showed the bike’s movements vacillating at a slow pace along the river promenade—the Waterfront Bike Trail. Symmes feared that the reason the bike was traveling at walking speed was that the thief was trying to make a sale to a passerby. The amateur investigator wanted the thief, not the buyer. So he cabbed it down to the waterway and immediately ran into the purple Giant Yukon, and the bearded old man on top of it. Instead of trying to sell the bike, however, the man began to spout conspiracy theory. He’d been separated from his fortune, he said. He was the son of King Richard III. Symmes thought he’d set a trap for a bike thief, but now he realized that what he’d caught was a schizophrenic.

  Justin Jouvenal wanted his specific black-and-gray Fuji Touring recovered, and lacking Symmes’s resources, he set out into the San Francisco streets on foot. The journalist visited a back-alley fencing operation where a couple of sweaty guys sold bikes and parts out of a van. He stopped by an informal but well-known market in the parking lot of a Carl’s Jr. drive-thru. There, he was offered a steal-to-order service. If Jouvenal named the bike he wanted, it could be his. But he didn’t want someone else’s Fuji. Suspecting that his ride was in the process of being parted out and sold as a Franken-bike, Jouvenal visited an open-air chop shop in Golden Gate Park, where squatters tore bikes down and swapped parts to disguise their identities. The tactic blurred the trail for theft victims. Finally, he was introduced to the SFPD’s stolen-property facility at Hunters Point: “[Lieutenant Tom] Feney ushered me through a metal door to the warehouse and then swept his hand through the air as if pointing out a beautiful panorama.”

  Jouvenal looked over “a cache of stolen bikes so big that it dwarfs the stock of any bike store in the city.” And yet, the warehouse did not contain his beloved Fuji.

  In a 2014 survey of everyday cyclists conducted in Montreal, researchers at McGill University reported that 50 percent of their subjects had been victims of bike theft, and that many active riders had had their wheels pinched more than once. To give an indication as to the size of the market, a 2011 FBI fact sheet listed 189,428 bikes reported stolen, a number up 4.2 percent from 2010. But these were just the reported thefts. The cycling advocacy group Transportation Alternatives in New York City claimed that actual thefts were more likely four to five times the reported figure.

  “In America’s rough streets,” wrote Symmes, “there are four forms of currency—cash, sex, drugs, and bicycles. Of those, only one is routinely left outside unattended.”

  The economic journalists at the website Priceonomics, however, considered that the financial upside for bike thieves seemed “limited.” Analyzing bike theft using conv
entional economic theories—risk vs. reward, for example—Rohin Dhar asked, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” His conclusion: “The illicit bike trade isn’t a very easy way to make a lot of money.”

  In major cities, most cyclists know at which locations their wheels are most likely to get pinched. And most people know where hot bikes are sold cheap—in places like the Porta Portese market in The Bicycle Thief. These days, victims also know to check websites like Craigslist and eBay, where stolen bikes increasingly turn up. With a bit of investigative work, Jouvenal found a chop shop, fencing operation, and street market for stolen goods. Police also know where these activities occur, but because bike theft is not a law-enforcement priority, there is a low probability that criminals will be caught. Despite the princely sums fetched by a few high-tech bikes, the act of stealing one is often considered a misdemeanor and is rarely prosecuted. There’s just not much squeeze.

  But because there is little risk, the activity is more pervasive and the market is flooded, so there’s not much juice either. According to the NBR, thieves can fetch only 5 to 10 percent of a bike’s fair market value. In fact, the more expensive the bicycle, the lower the percentage a thief can get: “A bicycle that sells for $200 new will sell for $20 on the street when stolen, and a new $2,500 chrome alloy machine will sell for as low as $125 [or 5 percent].”

  Professional bike thieves do exist. In 2012, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department routed a trio of young men who combed websites for sales of high-end bikes. The ring posed as potential buyers and contacted sellers via the ads, thereby gaining location information. The thieves then broke into suburban garages and houses by cutting holes into the tops of garage doors, using a handmade tool to pull the release strings. A bike shop owner in Los Angeles helped the thieves fence the bicycles by parting them out, a tactic that pulls in 25 percent of the fair market value as compared to the 5 to 10 percent fetched by a complete, stolen bike.

  The common narrative pushed by Symmes and Jouvenal—that the mass of bike thefts is committed by drug addicts and petty criminals—seems self-evident, apparent in what is most visible on America’s streets: bare rims chained to parking meters, broken U-locks clanging around signposts, and grubby idlers trying to pawn off suspect wheels to passersby. But the numbers required to support a full-time bike theft “underworld” just aren’t there. And as Dhar pointed out, even for opportunistic thieves, bike theft is an inefficient use of criminal tendencies. The squeeze of the law may be tender, but the risk won’t yield much juice.

  So what is actually happening to the hundreds of thousands of bicycles stolen in the United States every year?

  The US Department of Justice commissioned a series of “Problem-Specific Guides” intended to aid police departments with academic studies and policing advice on a number of crimes. In 2008, the authors of “Bicycle Theft: Guide No. 52” presented their law-enforcement audience with some humbling data, one set of which suggests that “clearance rates”—the rate of successful arrests in relation to a given crime—for bicycle theft can be as low as 1 percent. That’s only arrests, not prosecutions. To place this dismal rate into context, the clearance rate for bank robbery is as high as 60 percent.

  The guide suggests some reasons for these rates, the most poignant being that few victims can prove ownership. “The majority of bicycle owners cannot supply sufficient details to assist in an investigation. As a consequence, even when an offender is detained, the suspect may be released without charge and may be given the stolen bike on release.”

  And not all of the wheels in police custody are hot in the traditional sense. Cops glean abandoned bikes from the streets, impound them during routine arrests, and confiscate them as evidence in unrelated crimes. In places like Philadelphia, the city makes semiannual sweeps for bikes locked to parking meters and other municipal property.

  This conglomeration of cycles in custody, piled in warehouses and property rooms, may be explained by a pattern the authors of the Department of Justice guide are clear about: “Where the quantity of stolen cycles recovered is high, a high proportion of offenders are probably joyriders.” That’s right—joyriders. I’m on foot, I see your bike is unlocked, or easy to unlock, and I ride your bike to my destination and ditch it to the fates—and you know what? I enjoy it. The joyride has inspired multiple films, dozens of songs, a Transformers character, a video game—and at its heart, is a theft that one engages in for something other than profit, like a fun bike ride. Wheels are “recovered,” most often, because they have been abandoned. The Justice Department guide cites police recovery rates as indicators of joyridership—from 25 percent in Ellensburg, Washington, to 80 percent in Dayton, Ohio, the latter “suggesting that many more offenses were committed for the purposes of transportation or enjoyment than for financial gain.”

  And it’s old, this thing. The following passage appeared in a 1919 article in the Messenger Index of Emmett, Idaho: “The theft of bicycles from the high school building is almost an everyday occurrence, but so far the police have not been able to catch the culprits. Most of the thefts seem to be committed from pure cussedness rather than to profit thereby, as most of the wheels are taken to an out of the way place and wrecked.”

  The incidents of casual theft are compounded by what is called a “crime multiplier.” For example, your bike is stolen. So you buy an obviously hot bike off the street because it’s cheap, and you knowingly receive stolen property. Or you need to get to work immediately, so you grab another bike and you’re off. This is the penultimate scene of The Bicycle Thief: having exhausted all other options without retrieving the Fides—even when he has caught the actual thief—Ricci decides to steal a bike. But then he is caught by the bike’s owner, and shamed by the growing crowd. Further, his son, Bruno, sees that his father is a scoundrel as despicable as the one they’ve been chasing. Of course, this is the fiction of the film. Few thieves are caught. What really happens is so much more complicated: A joyrider steals a bike and dumps it; the bike is picked up by another rider, who drops it in front of a house; a homeowner finds the abandoned bike and takes it into the garage, where it sits for years, until it’s time to clear the garage, and the bike is sold at a rummage sale. Or not: The homeowner’s son “borrows” the bike to ride down to buy some crack but is snatched by police. The bike is impounded. Meanwhile, the original owner has joyridden a number of bikes to make up for the loss.

  “A single bicycle theft does not necessarily equate to one offense,” says the Justice Department guide, “but may lead to a series of related crimes.” Receiving stolen property, fencing stolen property, and vandalism are some of the obvious examples.

  Partly because I like vintage bicycles, I’ve owned only one bike with a crystal-clear provenance, and that was the blue-and-white BMX Huffy that was stolen from me by local toughs and, I was later told, smashed down an anonymous manhole. But to complicate matters to a cosmic scale, I’ll agree to what the statistics allege:

  I didn’t rescue Derek’s bike, I stole your bike. I gave your bike to Derek and let him walk right on out the door with it. He probably sold the cruiser for drugs. What’s more, long ago when I was just forming as an independent person, just learning my multiplication tables, you stole my little Huffy even though it was too small for you to ride, and, for fun, you stuffed it down a manhole. Some poor sap of a city worker probably found the Huffy down there in the sewer, pulled it from the shit pipes, washed it, and turned it over to the police, who sat on the cycle for a while before selling it at police auction. And now, decades later, it looks like a couple of migrants from distant Michoacán or Sinaloa have illegally crossed the US–Mexico border on your and my bikes both. Not only are you a thief, you are complicit in human trafficking.

  17

  El Indio, Javy, Juan, and Solo prepared to pass nine pollos through the little canyon across from the Comercial Mexicana. It was about ten on a weekday morning. The blue sky was striated with the last bands of a tropical storm that had withered and dif
fused hundreds of miles away. The air still hung thick with scents of the southern latitudes. Indio’s crew had progressed to crossing in broad daylight as long as all of the other factors came into agreement. The high visibility left an even tighter margin for error, so they arrived earlier than usual. Each bike was double-checked, and the migrants seemed eager.

  East along the fence, a tan-colored pit mine defaced the west side of Bunker Hill. It didn’t seem so much like a pit, rather as if someone had cut the rounded hill with a cake knife and taken a piece. The border fence looked dangerously close to falling in with the sage and scrub as trucks withdrew more and more cobbles and dirt. The access road that served this operation also dipped down into the canyon, almost to the polleros’ camp. Betraying its scarce use, however, the rutted track dwindled and died out before it reached El Indio and his band of gold miners.

  At about 10:15 AM, a white-and-blue Tijuana police truck entered the access road at the dirt excavation. It was not an uncommon sight. The polleros knew that cops often chased vagabundos and indigentes up the hill. The hurry-scurry was entertaining but not dramatic—like obese terriers loping after lizards. But this particular vehicle slowed at the entrance, and then descended toward the fence. The smugglers caught the faces of a familiar officer and his female partner. This pair sometimes brought bicycles they’d snatched from riders they’d stopped on minor infractions—leaving the commuters to hoof it. Indio and his workers paid $100 for each of these stolen bikes, and considered it a pretty good deal to receive a bicycle out of what was essentially an extortion situation. They could easily have gained nothing and still had to pay. Locally, the cop was known as Gordito—Little Fatty. He was chubby, the partner even more so. Along with the bikes, Gordito sometimes brought pollos he’d stolen off of area recruiters. He received $150 for each of these. The victimized enganchador, in order to smooth business relationships, was also paid by Indio, receiving $100 for each of the pollos stolen and delivered by Gordito.