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Iain buys a stolen bike on Facebook Marketplace, with a plan to return it to its owner. But his good act takes an ominous turn when he meets the seller, an erratic man with a troubled past and a head full of conspiracies and violence.
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You should write about my life, the bike theft said, as we rode under the freeway, trucks roaring above us.
Maybe I will, I replied.
I'd gone in trying to get a stolen bike back to its owner.
But now, I realized I was in over my head.
The path was empty. There were no pedestrians, no other cyclists.
Just the two of us next to a muddy creek with trolleys in it and concrete pillars tagged with an old graffiti.
As he hung off my back wheel, I wondered what a bullet would feel like.
Whether you hear it before it hits you, whether it was worth it for story about someone else's stolen bike.
Hello and welcome to Rabbit Holes, a podcast from Escape Collective. I'm your host, Ian Trilor.
Each episode of this podcast takes a deep dive into a story from somewhere in the world of cycling.
And this one is a bit of a hair-raising one.
I went a little bit Gonzo journalist exploring the bike theft economy
and tried to get a stolen bike back to its rightful owner.
In the process, I bought some hot goods and I went for a bike ride with a criminal
and found myself in a pretty dicey situation.
This is the story of one stolen bike's journey home.
Chapter 1. The Psychic Wound
A couple of years ago, I walked out of a bar and found my bike had been stolen.
There were a few phases of grief that I went through in the aftermath, anger, denial, bargaining.
But after that all settled down, I ended up with a kind of numb acceptance.
I think the best way to describe it probably is like a kind of psychic wound.
In the time since, new bikes have come and gone, but the wound remains.
And a ritual has developed. Most days, just on the off chance, I take a quick skim through Facebook Marketplace.
In the hopes that my trusty, crusty old Canon L will show up there.
Maybe clumsily, rattle can sprayed, maybe stripped to parts.
But regardless of condition, I'm certain that I'd still recognise it anywhere.
Probably always will.
My bike hasn't shown up, but in the process I've seen how many other suspicious deals there are.
Bikes that are way nicer than they should be for the prices asked.
Bikes where the seller doesn't really seem to have any clue of what they have.
Now there's a small sliver of this cohort that are just elderly and bewildered.
I got a dusty old canondale from one such guy and I fixed it up for a mate to ride.
That was fine.
But usually there's a combination of indicators that make clear that a bike has probably been stolen.
The photos are usually out of focus and poorly framed.
The details in the listing are limited and the sellers often have recent accounts under fake names.
And whenever such a bike pops up, I look at them and I wonder.
I wonder where the bike came from and how it ended up being sold for a fraction of its worth.
And the kind of desperation that led to it being stolen in the first place.
But there's another part of me that just sees the bike as like a screen on to which the hopes and dreams of the rightful owner can be projected.
And I see these little flickering CPU adventures that they took together.
I mean, I see a bike, but I imagine the owner going through the same emotions I did.
Sad and angry with a psychic wound of their own.
So the other day when one such obviously stolen bike popped up on Facebook Marketplace,
I decided to do what I'd hoped someone else would do for me with my bike.
I decided to try to help that bike find its way home.
Chapter 2. The Listing
When I saw the ad, it was less than an hour old.
I'm not sure what it was that met as algorithms soaring it to bring it to my feed.
There was an asking price of $200 and just four blurry pictures, not one of them showing the bike in its entirety.
There were no sizing details or brands mentioned.
The title of the ad said, quote, graphite mountain cruiser, whatever that even is.
Everything about it seemed deeply fishy.
And then the description read, deep breath, that it was,
twin disc with excellent tires and new type of gear change to make it easy to go up or down roads.
It's very light and only clearing out my garage so grab it as it's price to sell.
That's all one sentence, no punctuation.
But there was some branding, the wheels were from Curve.
The fork looked like it was from Curve 2.
Because the pictures were basically useless at identifying any other specifics,
I then had to make some informed guesses.
The mini tube steel of the frame looked a bit like a Curve,
but with sliding dropouts that I know the brand had last released a bike with about a decade ago.
But even so, despite how rough the pictures looked,
it was obvious that this was worth more than the $200 asking price.
And there were these little purple valve caps in the pictures that told me that once,
it had an owner that loved it.
And there was one other tiny clue to follow.
There was a little round sticker half visible on the frame,
which looked like the branding of a bike shop on the other side of the world.
A British stockest of Curve called gyro cycles.
Now I had no idea what the frame was or how it had ended up in Australia,
but there was at least one lead of where to start looking for its owner.
Within 50 minutes of the listing being online, I was messaging the seller,
who for the purposes of this story I'll call Jack.
I asked for a single clear photo of the bike,
and if he had any idea about sizing.
His response dodged both questions.
He said,
it's pretty good and I'm in Glenroy.
That's a gritty industrial suburb I've never been to on the opposite side of Melbourne.
I asked again for some more pictures,
explaining that I was pretty keen,
but didn't really want to drive for an hour on the basis of almost no information.
No response.
The next morning, before 6am,
a message pinged into my inbox.
I will text you if not bought as I have two people's,
one in this early day and one around two is okay,
and two hundred down in my pocket before travelling on my bike test ride okay.
Thumbs emoji.
As chance would have it, I was up early,
a child had made the night-time shift to the big bed,
her pointy elbows had working me up.
But before that,
it hadn't been a good sleep even so.
You see, I'd spent half the night thinking about how I had this rare chance to help this bike,
find its way back to its home,
and now I realised it was close to slipping away.
I sent another message to the seller.
I would take it sight unseen.
He asked for me to transfer the full amount over to hold it,
which I didn't love,
but we reached a compromise.
$50 deposit,
and it's yours, my friend, he wrote.
Please don't waste my time.
So whoosh went the money from my account to his,
and the deal was done.
Chapter 3,
Into the Unknown.
After dropping the kids off at school,
I checked his profile one last time.
Saw a post he'd made about being,
quote, a gun-licensed outlaw,
Yikes.
And drove for an hour through suburbs
that never been to, over near the airport.
The roads got flatter, less tree-lined.
Finally, I pulled up outside a white brick house,
with a small wire fence separating scrubby grass from the road.
A car with no engine,
sat stripped in the front yard,
a tarpaulin sagged over its missing heart.
An empty cat box sat on the curb beside some steel drums.
The rusty corrugated fence
of the house looked familiar,
as the backdrop from the photos.
I knocked,
and through a thick screen door,
heard movement.
How's it going,
I called into the gloom?
I've been better, said Jack,
as he shuffled outside.
Now I should say I'm not interested
in stigmatizing the addicted and unwell,
but Jack had clearly had a rough life.
As he pulled the bike out from behind the gate,
he immediately led with how he'd got the price wrong.
My brother's gonna kill me, he told me.
Jack was supposed to sell it for $600,
he said,
but he'd listed it for $200.
Everyone wants to buy it,
he said,
pulling out a phone with a cracked screen
that he scrolled through his Facebook messages on.
Look here,
graphite, graphite, graphite,
he said,
pointing out the one by one with a shaking finger.
You've got a bargain, he told me.
I was drunk when I listed it.
Anyway, you fucking owe me $400.
I don't know what to do, mate.
What do I do?
Give you back your money?
I was a bit taken aback.
So you don't want to sell it now, I asked?
No, really, I don't, he said.
I explained that I'd driven for an hour
and that we had a deal.
And then I reminded him that he'd asked me
not to waste his time,
and I expected him not to do the same.
To diffuse the growing tension,
I asked to take the bike for a spin to check its condition.
He asked for my car keys as insurance.
That felt a little bit dicey,
so I gave him the three-folded $50 notes in my pocket instead.
After a quick up and down the street,
with the deals still hanging in limbo,
we chatted some more.
While I'd been riding, he'd popped inside
and emerged with a white coffee in a plastic cup,
and a half-ed and pack of hot cross buns.
Trying to change the subject to bring some normality into it,
I talked about how good hot cross buns are.
Fact check, true.
And he asked if I wanted one.
I said I wasn't hungry,
that I'd just brush my teeth, that he insisted,
and reached in to break one off in the pack,
passing it over to me.
It was a bit stale,
but I picked out it slowly.
At one point, when I stopped eating
to adjust the bike with the folding tool I brought in my pocket,
he noticed, coldly observing,
you're not eating your bun.
I explained that I needed both hands to work on the bike.
After a curdled pause of a few seconds,
he gave a smile to accept my response.
But bikes were a great leveler,
and he invited me through to see the others in his garage.
A new-ish tractor-money, two sizes too big, probably stolen,
and an old truck downhill bike, probably not.
Among the talk about how much travel his bike had,
how you can climb up a wall with the gearing,
the conversation would occasionally
be here towards the violent or the surreal.
At one point, he showed me bullet holes
and a tin fence from a time someone had tried to steal his watch.
He had guns, he said.
Tell me, you don't know who I am, doesn't concern you,
but I could have legally shot the blow
and got away with it.
And then he mined how he'd fumbled the gun as the guy took off
and Jack had gone after him shooting down the road, bang, bang, bang.
I'd later learned that this probably wasn't provato.
Standing in the garage next to the downhill bike
he actually seemed to love.
He's a unicorn, he called it.
Jack told me how his phone was tapped
and that his brother was probably going to spend the money
from the bike on two and a half grams of crystal meth.
I didn't know that was the bike twice exchange rate.
I offered in response.
He dunked his bun in his coffee
and then wet crumbs,
dropped onto the floor.
For another 20 minutes or so we kept chatting
about parenthood and bikes
and some stranger tangents too.
He liked my mustache.
He said that the secret to youth
was to think like a child
and quote,
lose as much blood as you can like women.
It's like changing the oil in a car.
If you take the old blood out, new blood comes in.
After a while with a conversation
heading in increasingly troubling directions,
he pulled the track road bike out of his garage.
As he did so,
I noticed that the little purple valve caps
had moved over to it.
And then he told me that we were going for a ride
down a nearby trail.
I wasn't that keen,
but it didn't sound like a suggestion.
Chapter four,
a bike ride with an outlaw.
The path along the ring road
that he'd wanted to show me
wasn't much to look at.
Cracked bitumen patched
with the reveallets of tar,
dumped mattresses in the grass on the side,
not many people around.
Jack started hanging off my back wheel
and I'd look behind every so often
to see him soft pedaling 10 or 20 meters behind
in my periphery.
Occasionally he'd catch up
and tell me to tell him how smooth the bike goes on was.
Then he'd try to argue the pricing again.
When we were waiting for some traffic lights
to cross a road,
he asked about my sunglasses.
And gently suggested
that I give them to him as compensation.
I declined.
Soon after he wanted to show me a lake
under a freeway bridge,
and with the traffic noise from the trucks
wishing by overhead
and the lack of people around,
I realised our isolation.
From there it was a short step
to wondering what a bullet would feel like.
I'd read once that when you're stabbed
it's like a punch.
It's only when you're bleeding
that you begin to understand
what's actually happened.
Is it bullet the same, I wondered?
Would I hear it before it tore into my body?
Now I didn't get shot.
He'd wanted to show me
where people sometimes come fishing.
But I did drop him on the hill
back up from the lake
after it fumbled a gear change.
And when he caught up again,
he seemed happy
about the fact that we were outriding.
Nothing like it, he told me.
That moment of connection
abruptly pivoted
towards some other conversational gambits.
How COVID is a hoax,
how everyone he knows,
who's had five jabs is dead.
I opted not to volunteer my own status.
And how organs turn from human tissue to jelly
thanks to the vaccine.
In one sentence,
he pivoted from the Epstein files
to how he'd seen a video
of someone eating a human lake once.
He spoke about how his friends
were all dead for one thing or another.
And how he'd put a curse
on the parents of his best friend
after they'd refused
to replace all his blood
and switched off his life support
when he was in a coma.
At one point,
he asked what I did for work.
I'm a writer, I replied.
You should write about my life,
he told me.
Maybe I will,
I told him.
Sounds like he'd done a bit of living,
had a few adventures.
And misadventures, he added.
After half an hour of soft pedaling,
we got back to his house.
And I loaded the stolen bike up
in the boot of my car.
As I took the front wheel off,
he told me that part alone
was worth more than I paid him.
True.
And muddied that it was a shame
I wouldn't even give him another hundred
or my glasses to make up for this absolute steal.
But in the end, we shook hands
and said our goodbyes.
I climbed into the car
and did a three-point turn
as he stood in the gutter,
watching me.
I rolled down the window,
raised a hand in a wave,
and thanked him for the hot crossbow.
Thank you for the hot crossbow as well.
When I looked back
in the rearview mirror
at the end of the street
he was still standing there,
watching me drive off
with a stolen bike
in the back of my car.
Chapter 5.
The Owner.
With the bike now safe,
I braced myself for the long game.
I'd looked up contact details
for the people at gyro cycles
and had visions
of tracking down the owner
through their store,
working out how this strange black bike
had found its way from London
to the south of Australia.
As I drove homewards,
I thought a bit delusioningly
about uncovering
an international bike smuggling ring,
and wondered if this one bike
was just the tip of the iceberg.
In the end, I decided on a kind of hybrid approach.
I'd stopped by curve
on the way back to my place
as it was kind of on the way
and see if they had any record
of the fork or wheels.
Any little clue
from a little sticker
of a bike shop
to a serial number on a fork
could be the difference
between this stolen bike
staying lost
and being found again.
As I rolled the bike in
through the open doors of curve,
a cluster of employees
standing in the workshop
looked up at the ticking of the free will.
What I wasn't expecting
was the tallest of them,
looking at me
with a bit of disbelief to say,
oh, that's my bike!
He clearly recognised it
from a glance from me
to his way.
Cue pandemonium.
Standing there,
we, by which I mean
all the curve folks,
half a dozen of them,
not just the bike's owner.
We all traded stories
about how this needle
in a haystack
had come to happen.
They'd all seen
the graphite mountain cruiser
pop up on Facebook
at about the same time
that I had,
recognising it from a glance,
and had been messaging
Jack about picking it up.
When he was scrolling
through his phone
to show me all the interest
there was,
a chunk of those
buying with me
for the purchase
were from Curve.
The bike had been stolen
from the company's headquarters
six weeks ago.
A thief,
who from CCTV images
I saw,
didn't look like Jack.
Had snuck in
behind some other customers.
And while the stuff
were occupied there,
had ducked into a storage
area of the showroom.
The first bike
that the thief grabbed
had been mid-build
and was unrideable.
So that got quickly
thrown to the side
and this bike had been
grabbed as the plan B.
The guy had been in and out
without anyone
even realising
until the end of the day,
when the bike's owner,
Oli Jones,
Curve's social marketing manager,
went to ride home
and found his commuter
was gone.
Oli has been in Australia
for 18 months
but was originally
from the UK,
where he was a curve
ambassador,
and Jiro Cycles
was his local shop,
hence the sticker.
But the bike hadn't
come from there,
it had been designed
and built up in the room
I was standing in,
with a hodgepodge
of components
from the parts bin.
There was a nice bike,
certainly,
but also an extremely
distinctive one
with some interesting,
kind of weird choices.
And there had been,
as I suspected,
since it had been stolen,
a clumsy,
rattle-can paint job
on the bike.
But I thought
that they'd probably
removed some markings
on the frame.
I learnt that the
frame set never had a
head badge,
or any other markings
on it to begin with.
There was an unreleased
prototype.
There were just a few
in existence.
All of them in the hands
of Curve staff
who were writing them
for testing purposes,
to see if they were
putting into production.
A road beautifully,
I offered.
It reminded me,
like the company's,
steel adventure bike,
the Kevin of Steel,
with sliding dropouts.
My original plan
had been to ask the guys
at Curve to look
up the serial number
as a way of tracing it
back to the owner.
But with this particular bike,
that would have been
a bit more complicated.
Here's Curve's
tech lead,
Jimmy Ruslin.
Our factories
will have a record
of all the serial numbers.
So we can track them
down to the batch
that when they were sent
here, if they were
sent to our Taiwan
warehouse or whatever.
But then every single
bike that goes
out of here,
a frame set,
complete bike,
whatever, we write down
the serial number
of the frame and the fork.
And against the
sales order number,
which is then linked
to either a shop
or a customer.
So if this,
if this bike,
if I hadn't come in today,
and I just said,
this is the serial number,
is this you would have known
immediately what
what bike it was
and who it belonged to?
If it was,
if it was a commercially
sold bike,
then yes,
we would have.
Whereas this was kind of
a prototype special run.
So I had to track down
the serial numbers
because this was the one
batch of serial numbers
that we actually didn't
have written down
because it was just
like a small batch of frames
for in-house use.
But I did track
those serial numbers down.
So yeah.
Detailed tracking
of serial numbers
is commonplace
in the cycling industry
for quality control purposes.
But there's often
a missing link
that only gets as far
as a retailer.
But there's no standardisation
of the process
beyond that point.
Some stores make a record
of the serial number,
linking it to the consumer
in their system.
But this is far from the norm.
And it puts the owners
on the end user
to keep track
of identifying details
and record them
for insurance
and investigative purposes.
Here's to you me again.
With serial numbers,
I guess we are another thing
that should be mentioned
is that you don't rely
on the shop
having your serial number.
Make sure you take
a photo of it,
write it down yourself.
Everyone should do it.
I think we,
yeah, as we learned
with yours,
like we didn't actually
write it down on yours
because it was just
like one of these
one-off bikes.
So yeah.
Learn the hard way.
So, record those serial numbers.
Without a serial number
or identifying markings,
which can be spray-painted over,
the risk of stolen bikes
staying stolen increases.
Chapter 6.
The Bigger Picture
And there are a lot
of stolen bikes
with many more people
if you want to know more
about the serial number
of stolen bikes
with many more people
impacted with this issue
than just me and Oli.
In my home city of Melbourne,
it's got a population
nearing five and a half million.
Bike theft has been
steadily on the rise
for the last decade.
According to Victoria's
Crime Statistics Agency,
there were 8,083 bikes
reported stolen
in the state last year,
an average of 22 a day.
And chances aren't good
of getting a bike
back when it has been stolen.
No matter whether
it's a serial number
or not.
Now, there are varying
degrees of professionalism
of bike thieves.
But most follow the formula
of the bike theft
recovery I'd just been
involved in.
A bike gets opportunistically
stolen, is passed
from one person to another
in exchange for currency
or chemicals,
and might eventually
show up for sale.
But while the scale
of the problem is substantial,
and the impact of it can be
pretty devastating
for the people who have
lost their beloved
possessions,
it's largely a non-violent crime.
And police direct
their resources accordingly.
This is Oli
from Curve Talking.
And with your experiences
with the police in relation
to this bike theft
or other bike thefts
that you've known about,
do you feel that there's
enough that's done
or is it kind of just like
a small problem that's
not looked into?
I mean, I guess that's
a pretty big question.
What, I mean, they seem
to be helpful
and it seemed to be like
responded to,
and I was dealt with
in a promptly
time manner
and everything like that,
as a
in terms of
whether I felt
that they were going to
recover my bicycle,
I'd probably have to say no.
I guess, again,
it's a pretty small issue
for them,
but I guess it kind of,
like I said before,
it comes into one
of those things that,
you know, my bicycle
is my livelihood,
it's my way to get to work,
it is a big issue
for a lot of people.
So it's kind of,
a bit disappointing
to say you feel like
they're potentially
not doing enough
for those smaller issues.
When it showed up on
Facebook Marketplace,
did you have like
an idea of how to get it back?
Did you try
and involve the police
in that sort of decision
or is it just like
vigilante trying to do things
yourself?
As soon as it popped up
on Facebook,
as a marketplace,
I went through to the police,
I gave them, you know,
the guy's name,
the link to the post,
all of these things,
and I said that
I was trying to
message him to try
and purchase it
and get an address
out of the guy,
to no response.
I mean, this was at
three o'clock
on a Tuesday afternoon,
so, you know,
and they were all busy
and it's towards the end
of the day,
but yeah,
didn't really hear anything,
and then updated them this morning,
saying it's come up
pending and sold,
which is obviously
yourself,
kind of as a bit of a,
like I think,
maybe we've missed the vote
on recovering this,
again,
to no response,
it's now,
almost two o'clock
in the afternoon.
But yeah,
I kind of had lost hope of it,
I guess,
seeing it sold, like,
you know, we didn't know
it was going to go.
My only next step
would have been
to probably offer
200 bucks
to whoever bought it
on a bunch of
Facebook pages
and see if anyone
owns up,
or if it had just kind of gone
back into the abyss
of Melbourne's
cycling lanes, you know?
And once it's in that
abyss again,
the bike theft victim
either gives it up
to stores,
or ends up,
like me,
faithfully scrolling
through classifieds
in the slim hope
that their bike will show up,
and then,
competing
with other opportunistic
buyers to get it back.
In a city of millions
of people,
with stolen goods
being shifted
from one place
to the next,
it's sheer luck
if you're able
to reclaim it.
And even if you do
manage to track a stolen
bike down,
as I was about to learn,
there are risks
in trying to get it back.
Chapter 7,
A History of Violence
I'd gone into the transaction
with Jack,
pretty clear-eyed
about the reason
why the bike was
in his possession.
But there was some extra
research that the folks
at Curve had done
that I hadn't.
They showed me a link
that looked up his name
on Google,
and found that he'd
recently been arrested
and charged.
After, allegedly,
firing sporadic
volatility of arrows
into a special needs school.
Police say
special needs students
were in danger
during a series
of attacks
over four months.
He's accused
of endangering vulnerable students
by shooting arrows
into a special needs school.
Did you fire arrows
at the school?
In a raid on the house
I'd just been to,
police had seized bows,
arrows,
and a slingshot.
Now that's obviously
pretty bad,
but it's also just,
just getting started
as I'd learn
when doing some
googling later.
2015 court documents
showed he'd been
in court 34 times
in the past couple
of decades
on 146 charges,
beginning at high school
with the stabbing
of a fellow student.
From there,
followed a litany
of brushes with the law.
Drug use and addiction,
traffic offenses,
a number of serious assaults,
some random,
some targeted,
some on police,
as well as serious
domestic violence,
threats to kill,
and years in jail,
often in solitary confinement.
Next month,
he'll be back in court
for discharging a missile,
willful damage,
and reckless conduct,
endangering serious injury,
relating to those
alleged attacks
on the special needs school.
In my time in Jack's garage,
we'd spoken about people
with disability.
It came up,
kind of, organically.
And he told me how,
quote,
I don't treat them any
differently to how I treat you,
they're the exact
fucking same.
And at the time,
that felt like a glimpse
of a fundamentally
kind man affected
by circumstance.
But with the benefit
of hindsight,
and that backstory
started falling into place,
perhaps that was
no reassurance at all,
but something more ominous,
an equal opportunity approach
to aggression.
At Curve,
Oli and Jimmy took stock
of their prodigal prototype,
returned after six weeks,
being shuffled between criminals.
How is the condition of it?
Is it pretty much as expected?
I mean, yeah,
there's a few
bashed up parts on there.
I had a,
like a nog tracking system
on the bottle cage mount,
which has been gone
through with a mallet a few times.
I think the seat tube has taken
a few pretty hefty knocks there.
And yeah, we were just uncovering,
they've spray-painted
over a bunch of stuff.
But generally,
it looks rightable,
which is pretty good.
I think it's going to be back
on the road pretty soon.
Maybe a bit of a clean,
and then we'll be back
into business, you know?
After the morning that I just had,
we agreed that's about
as good an outcome
as we could hope for.
A bike back in the right hands,
and nobody hurt.
A week later,
I still find myself drawn
to Facebook Marketplace
in search of my own
stolen bike.
I scroll through the listings,
looking for blurry photos
of a canondale
that used to be mine.
And I wonder
about the journey it has been
through in the time
since it was liberated
from my possession.
I wonder about the person
that took it.
And whether they ever
appreciated it,
or just saw it as a means
to an end.
Would I want my bike back?
Yeah, of course.
But then, I think
about my bike ride
with a self-proclaimed outlaw,
and how it could have gone,
and I wonder
whether it would be worth the risk.
And I'm not sure anymore.
Maybe it's easier
to survive a psychic wound
than whatever it takes
to close it.
Phew!
Thanks for joining us
for this episode of Rabbit Holes.
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but I think it's the best
place on the internet
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This episode
was written by me
in Trilor,
and produced
and edited by the team
at Redbricks Media.
Thanks for listening,
and we'll see you next time
down the rabbit hole.
.
