THIS IS WHAT

HAPPENS TO YOUR
BIKE AFTER ITS
STOLEN
Seattle Met
Published Oct 1, 2014
By Casey Jaywork

that while about half of the citys cyclists had been victims of bike
theft, only about a third (one-sixth of all cyclists) reported their theft to
police. Here, where biking, like espresso and drizzle, is part of the
citys essence, an estimated 4.1 percent of commutes are by bike,
according to the Seattle Department of Transportation. The citys rife
with pedal powerweekday commuters, recreational cyclists, bike
messengers, fast food deliverers, and pedicabs.
Look hard enough in nearly any neighborhood and youre bound
to see the lonely skeleton of a bicycle stripped to the frame like a
carcass. Downtown has a high concentration (one reported theft
per day during the first half of August), as do the U District and
Fremont, but the locations of bike thefts are literally all over the map,
with no part of the city left untouched.
And its probably going to get worse. The city is pouring as much
as half a billion dollars into bicycle infrastructure over the next two
decades in hopes of thinning auto traffic and pollution. A boost in

To the prepared thief, every bike rack is a buffet. You think a

cable lock will keep your beloved wheels in your life. The thief
knows a simple pair of aviation snips cuts through that cable like
butter. Youre convinced a locker-style combination lock will outsmart a crook. He pops it in seconds with a shimjust slides it in
between the body of the lock and its fishhook tip, and your bike
is his. (A good bandit can make a shim in about five minutes with
nothing more than a beer can and a pair of scissors.) U-locks?
Routinely opened with a Bic pen jammed into the keyhole. Even
with that rare unbreakable lock, a bike is no safer than its anchor;
outside Guthrie Hall at the University of Washington sits a metal
rack that bike thieves have sawed straight through.
The components, meanwhilethe lights, seats, handlebars,
derailleurs, and brakes that turn a frame into a ridable bikecan
go for hundreds of dollars each on the black market. With no
serial numbers, these parts, unlike frames, are untraceable. As
long as youve got the proper tools, Justin, a University Avenue
fixture who has swapped stories with more than one bike thief
and asked that his last name be withheld, explained, you can
just walk up to a bike and be like, I want those rims, I want those
handlebars, I want that seat. A buffet.
Not that your bike is safe indoors. Whitney Rosa, a customer service manager at a medical firm and self-described avid
bike commuter, thought the locked communal storage room of

the Capitol Hill condo building where she rented an apartment

was secure until her $8,300 Seven Mudhoney disappeared on
December 31, 2011.
Her ride, with its custom titanium frame painted like a pair of
blue and brown argyle socks, became one of 824 reported
stolen bikes in Seattle that year, according to city data (by 2013
the number rose to an annual 1,121, three per day on average).
Had police given it to her straight, Rosa would have learned that
only 1 percent of stolen bikes make it back to their owners. And
thieves rarely get caught in the act. Someone leaning over a bike
to unlock it looks pretty much the same to passersby as someone
leaning over a bike to hack or cut its lock. And as Rosa now realized, inside storage isnt necessarily better.
The garages are such a soft target, and theyre typically
[easy] to get into and chock-full of stuff you can steal, says
Bryan Hance, who runs the online antitheft database bikeindex.
org. One idiot with [the right tools] can get in and get a lot of
valuables really fast, really quietly.
Still, Rosa filed a police report and waited for the cops to
solve the caper. And waited. It would be nine months before she
received word of her bikes fate. When she did, it wouldnt be
from the Seattle police.
The actual number of bikes stolen in Seattle last year was likely
far greater than the reported 1,121. A study in Montreal found

To the
prepared bike
thief, every
bike rack
is a buffet.

cycling plus growing economic inequality equals a situation primed

for increased bike theft.
Justin, our University Ave sourcetwentysomething, buzzed
reddish hair, a valiant attempt at a goateerecalls once finding an
apparently abandoned bike stashed behind a bush in the U District.
After waiting for an hour to see if its owner would returnI boarded
around a little bit, smoked some weedhe said to himself, Fuck
it. He grabbed the bike and started rolling downhill. Before hed
gone more than a few blocks, a guy on the sidewalk waved at him
to pull over. And this guys like, Hey, you wanna sell that bike?
How much you want for it? And Im like, Twenty bucks and like
a bag of weed right now. The buyer counteroffered $10 and a
gram of marijuana. Deal.
Its all drugs, says Hance of bikeindex.org. Bikes become a
sort of currency. You can rip off a bike and trade it for a $50 bag
of drugs pretty easily, and then that guy turns around and trades it
to another guy, and so on. One UW police report describes the
arrest of a man busted for selling stolen bicycles via Craigslist. A
search of his sedan revealed clothes, toiletries, cellphones, and
tools for stealing bikes. An utterly spartan existencesave the meth
pipe in the glove box.
Speaking of craigslist, when it comes to bicycle larceny the famously uncorporate site is, according to Hance, a nightmare. The
classifieds emporiums glowing blue hyperlinks represent a well-traversed highway for stolen goods, largely due to its managements
distaste for both self-regulation and external auditing.
Whereas eBay and Facebook feature back doors for law enforcement to track suspected thefts, Hance says, Craigslists tiny San
Francisco staff relies on users to flag illegal or inappropriate posts.
But read the fine print: Craigslists terms of use stipulate that when
it comes to site moderation, the company has 100 percent authority and 0 percent responsibility, making it difficult for aboveboard

users to organize against illicit

sellers. The minute you start
pointing out that theyve got
stolen goods, youve violated their terms of service and
theyll send you a cease and
desist, Hance says. The terms
also nix bots that can comb the
site for postings whose descriptions match stolen goods, as
part of a larger strategy by the
for-profit company to prevent
competitors from using its data.
Craigslist did not respond to
multiple requestsvia email,
the website contact form, and
Twitterfor an interview or a
comment for this story.
But Tom Fucoloro did.
You would never set up
a Craigslist sting to get your
Xbox back, says the founder
of Seattle Bike Blog, which
covers everything from gre-

enway infrastructure to traffic

fatalities to theft. A bike is
something really personal, he
adds, scratching his beard.
There are all these little details
that make it specially yours.
You have adventures with
your bike.
That ephemeral bond led
Fucoloro to madly pedal down
an alleyway on a winter night
in 2013 in an attempt to
reclaim a friends cream-colored Soma road bike. Hours
after it was nicked outside Zeitgeist Coffee in Pioneer Square,
Fucoloro had spotted the bike
on Craigslist. When he and
the friend contacted Seattle
police (in person, after trying
and failing to use the departments phone tree), the cops
brushed them off. As Fucoloro
later reported on his blog, SPD

told the friend to call 911 once he had physically seen the bike
and the suspect.
So they set up a buy.
Fucoloro played the purchaser, planning to take the bike on a
test ride that hed never come back from while the friend called
the cops. What they didnt count on was that police would take
their sweet time showing up, or that the thief would only let Fucoloro test ride in an enclosed alleywhich is how he found
himself straining to pedal forward as the seller, enraged, grasped
Fucoloros sweater and dragged him to a stop.
Get the fuck off my bike, dude! Get the fuck off my bike,
dude! the seller shouted. The two men were close enough to

A bike is something
really personal...There
are all these little
details that make it
specially yours. You
have adventures with
your bike.

embrace: Fucoloro frozen to the handlebars, one leg half extended over the frame, the seller behind him and to the left, frantically
yanking the bike up and down.
Then the screwdriver came out. Im gonnaIm gonna fuckin stab you with this, the seller babbled.
As soon as I saw the screwdriver, Fucoloro says, I said, Okay, Ive made a series of bad decisions.
Weighing his options, Fucoloro dismounted. That bike is stolen, he said. Stolen my asshole, the seller replied, trotting down
the alley.
When an SPD cruiser finally showed up a couple cigarettes later, police informed the dispirited blogger that the alley where
hed almost gotten screwed was technically outside city limits, in White Center. So Fucoloro called the King County Sheriff, then set
up another buy using a different cellphone.
Fucoloro later recalled the conversation on his blog: You dont have a beard, do you? the guy asked. No, clean shaven, [Fucoloro] lied. Good, cause there was this crazy guy with a beard who just tried to take my bike.
A few minutes later, King County Sheriff officers had both the seller and the bike in custody.

All told, SPD has recovered four different stolen bikes from
his shop. According to sergeant Chris Hall, the architect of the
bust, the shop could still have other bikes whose serial numbers
never made it into the police database, since the vast majority

For Fucoloro, the capture isnt so much a victory as the lesser of

two evils: Most bike thefts are acts of desperation, he says, and
this was no exception. He only wishes that he hadnt been driven
to take such risks in reclaiming the bike. I dont really think that
vigilante justice is a good thing, he says. It would have been
really great if the Seattle PD had shown up[but it was] as if they
just left me out to dry.
Filching an entire bicycle and trying to sell it whole, however,
is amateur hour. Any bike thief worth his shim knows youve got to
liquidate the rolling booty via parts. Its really easy to work with
a bunch of thieves in your neighborhood, Bryan Hance says,
and say, Hey, you bring bikes to me, Ill give you cash or dope.
And then you quote-unquote improve them by taking the seat off,
taking the pedals off, doing a paint job.
Welcome to the chop shop, where seasoned mechanics chop
several bikes up into their constituent parts and reassemble those
components into new creations, effectively camouflaging the
product. Its not supercommon, but one of those guys could have
300 bikes in his backyard, says Hance. (In June 2014, a woman
in California was caught with 139 stolen bikes and frames.
Here in Seattle, police say theyve busted one chop shop
running inside a used bike store. Eric Patchen, owner of Belltowns
Bicycle Pull Apart, was arrested in March for allegedly trafficking
stolen property, released with a warning, and raided by police a
month later.

of [victims] dont know their serial number.

Sergeant Hallstout, balding, mellowsays that for years
hed heard rumors about Bicycle Pull Apart. Once he began
digging he found that more than half the stores purchases or
pawns last year were from convicted felonsalmost all for
property crimes or drug crimes. Pawnshops and similar used
goods stores are required by city law to keep online records
of their transactions, including serial numbers and customer ID
info. Several of these customers names were entered incorrectly, and one entry listed the wrong serial number for a stolen Litespeed Tuscany worth $835. Upon seeing the imprinted serial
number, Hall wrote in his arrest report, I can only conclude it
was intentionally mistyped as the number was clear.
The inside of Bicycle Pull Apart is a bike punks dream: Old
bikes in various stages of repair flood the floor; spokeless
wheels, handlebars, seats, chains, rear and front racks, derailleurs and other varied cycling accoutrements carpet the ceiling
and walls. Patchens dog, Porkchop, silently pads around the
shop floor, a gentle mastiff mutt who nuzzles up to customers.
Sitting at a nearby cafe on a recent afternoon, Patchen
wears the expression of a man leaning over the edge of a cliff.
Beneath blocky black spectacles and what looks like a quilted
fedora, the 40-year-olds boyish face is flecked with graying
stubble; his muscular frame hunches slightly forward. In Patchens telling, hes an up-by-the-bootstraps entrepreneur who has
overcome bad credit and hostile landlords to bring affordable
biking to Belltown. He says he does everything he can to filter
out stolen bikes from the flow of legitimately used ones that are
Bicycle Pull Aparts life blood.
Its overwhelming how much [used] bicycle product is out
there, he says, good, bad, and ugly, and it comes across my
door every day. Do stolen bikes come to my shop? As far as

I know, I do the best I can to

make sure they dont. But you
cant catch every single thing.
He insists his shop is an
easy scapegoat for lazy cops.
Theres been a rash of theft
all over the place in recent
months. And thats what kills
me. [The police] know who
these people are. They know
whos stealing these bikes.
Convincing others of his
version, though, has been
a challenge. At some point
you just Occams razor the
whole thing and walk away,
Hance said in an email, pointing to some bizarre rejoinders Patchen has lobbed at
online critics. Stolen bikes in
the shop + shitty reputation +
super aggro response + inconsistent stories = Case closed.
Patchen is awaiting trial,
but punishmentdeserved or
nothas arrived early. I dont
know whats gonna happen
here, he says. Im really
at deaths door here. The
moneys gone, you know, with
the lawyers, and the customer
base is gone too. Im moving
out of my place in a few days,
and essentially I dont have
anywhere to go, he says. So
if Im some mastermind, Im
really a shitty mastermind.
I have found your stolen
bike. Whitney Rosa thought
she was looking at the subject
line for spam. It was September 2012, nine months after
her $8,300 Mudhoney vanished from the storage room of
her Capitol Hill apartment, and
she was on a work trip in Los
Angeles. She almost deleted
the email, assuming it was a

ruse by an especially clever

bot that had noticed some of
her posttheft web traffic.
Hello! the email continued. I have spent the entire
day trying to find the owner
of this bike! The sender, a
scrupulously honest bike buff
in Maryland, explained that
he had bought the used frame
on eBay. Wary of purchasing
stolen goods, he asked for the
bikes serial number during
the online auction. The seller,
streamline6868, had emailed
back that they were in the
mountains, out of cellphone
range and did not have the
serial number with them, but

assured the Maryland buyer

that the bike has not been reported stolen, and...the serial
number is clear.
False and false. When the
Maryland buyer received the
frame he checked its serial
number with the manufacturer.
After they told him it had been
reported stolen, he contacted
Seattle police, eBay, other customers, and (via Hances stolen
bike website) Whitney Rosa.
When
Whitney
Rosas
$8,300 Seven Mudhoney disappeared she filed a police
report, but it took nine months
before she learned of the
bikes fate.
Streamline6868 responded:
It has come to our attention
that you have broken a serious
eBay policy and contacted
past buyers regarding transactions they completed with us.
This is harassment & a serious
eBay policy violation Please
stop playing vigilante. The
email ended with a desperate threat: I also noticed that
you sell Baltimore street signs
on your eBay site, which I am
sure that you know is illegal.
Tipped off by the Maryland
buyer, Rosa began investigating streamline6868. She
tracked the account back to
a home three blocks from her
own in Capitol Hill. Police told
Rosa they were well aware
that the couple who inhabited
the house, Rabindranath and
Tanya Darling, were moving
hot merchandise. But they
didnt have enough evidence
for a bust. Frustrated with the
cops inaction, Rosa banged
out an email to the neighbor-

For most, a
bicycle becomes
a sunk cost the
moment it goes
missing.
hood news blog, Capitol Hill Seattle, outlining her case against the Darlings. But CHS didnt have
anything solid enough to publish.
Fortunately for Rosa, the Darlings were also allegedly fencing electronics, allowing the owner
of a stolen iPad to track his missing tablet to the same apartment via an iPhone app connected to
his iPads GPS. This gave police probable cause. On November 2, 2012, two weeks after the
Maryland buyer tipped off Rosa, the cops served a warrant to search the Darlings apartment and
adjacent shed, which allegedly turned up, in addition to methamphetamines, a trove of merchandise that required more than three police vans to haul away, including DJ equipment, electronic
pianos, scuba gear, a saddle, Tiffany jewelry, and a Rolex watch. Oh, and under a tarp in the
yard, a pile of bicycles.
To the prepared thief, every bike rack is a buffet. Locks deter, but so long as theres profit to
be made, they wont prevent a theft. Addicts whose bottom line is a fix ally with websites whose
bottom line is clicks, while legit secondhand stores struggle to cull their wares. A few riders like
Whitney Rosa and Tom Fucoloro hit on just the right mix of luck and determination to reclaim lost
mounts.
For most though, a bicycle becomes a sunk cost the moment it goes missing. If you love your
bike, write down the serial number, take some photos, register online, and buy a lock commensurate with its value. And if you ever do find yourself staring at a bike rack in disbelief, the frayed
ends of your lock dangling like entrails, remember: You werent the first.
And you wont be the last.