At the dining room table the morning of my visit, Hance’s fingers ran across the keyboard. He logs new reports of stolen bikes before work in the morning, at lunchtime and again before bed. While he was writing, reports of two more stolen bikes arrived in his inbox. They were both from California. This did not surprise him. “San Francisco,” he said, “is fucking ridiculous right now.”
in the weeks After that tip from Mexico, Hance circulated the curious case of the stolen bikes in Mexico to colleagues, knowledgeable bike shop owners in the Bay Area, and police officers. He also contacted some trusted bike wardens who hunt thefts. In recent years a passionate subculture has emerged to fight bicycle crime, using a combination of old-school legwork and open source intelligence, following the publicly available fingerprints that almost everyone leaves online. These amateur detectives often exchange information and methods, sometimes with the ultimate goal of recovering stolen bicycles. Call them the collaborative Justice League. Bike Index and Hance are important planets in this flexible constellation of do-gooders. Hance visits them periodically.
Almost as soon as Hance saw that Facebook page with all the stolen bikes, he disappeared. However, before long, a volunteer, the guy who had lost $26,000 on bikes and now wanted to help Hance, called to say that he had found an Instagram account for Constru-Bikes. The account had accepted his request as a follower, thinking he was a customer. “Do you want my password?” the boy asked Hance.
Armed with the volunteer’s login credentials and a beer, Hance lay down in his backyard 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 and electric bikes. There were brands Hance had never heard of, although he swam in a world of bicycles every day. Fezzari (now called Ari). Brake brake17. Devinci. Argon 18. All of them beautiful, almost all $3,000 or $6,000 or even $10,000 when new. “It was the Amazon of stolen bicycles,” he told me. Each ad included lots of close-up photos and details. Hance took screenshots of everything. The footage would help him match the bikes he saw to the owners who had lost them. The photographs were also evidence and he wanted to keep them in case they disappeared.
As he worked, Hance noticed that many bikes looked familiar. Something needs to be understood here: for people who really know and love bikes, like Hance, a mountain bike is never just a mountain bike. It’s a 2016 matte black Niner Jet 9 RDO. Double suspension. Carbon frame. Maxxis 700C tires. Shimano XT disc brakes. To a bike fanatic, these details are like spirals in a thumbprint, marking each bike as unique. Hance has almost a savant’s ability to remember bikes he’s seen and details as small as a scratch on the down tube. That day he lay in the hammock until dinnertime, taking screenshots, saving photos, and making mental notes to get back to certain bikes.
Photography: Cole Wilson
Photography: Cole Wilson
Soon, he and his fellow hunters began comparing ads for bikes for sale on the Constru-Bikes Insta page with ones stolen from the Bay Area. It was sometimes comically easy thanks to the many detailed photographs. One image showed a white Gorilla mountain bike, a rare brand from Uganda, with the owner’s name clearly printed on the rear triangle of the bike frame. The owner told Hance that it was the only bicycle of its kind 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 that was published in Bike Index in July 2020. Its owner, a San Francisco tech worker named Ash Ramírez, had paid more than $5,200 for it and had used the bicycle as his main means of transportation around the city, where he played on up to five softball teams. “I went EVERYWHERE on my bike,“ Ramirez wrote to me later, telling me how he loved pedaling through heavy traffic, past the miserable faces of drivers, before his bicycle was stolen from his apartment building in the Tenderloin.
Hance enlisted the help of a San Jose stolen bike Facebook group, who helped him confirm that there were still more stolen bikes for sale. The number rose to dozens. Hance took each of them personally, not only because he was connected that way, but because he knew firsthand (from communication with hundreds of bereaved cyclists over the years) that behind every lost bike was phantom limb pain. . For many cyclists, a bicycle is not just an ingenious concatenation of gears and carefully chosen components. It is the sum of everything the owner has experienced while behind the wheel. 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 when he returned from Afghanistan, trying to overcome his post-traumatic stress disorder.