The components, meanwhile—the lights, seats, handlebars, derailleurs, and brakes that turn a frame into a ridable bike—can go for hundreds of dollars each on the black market. With no serial numbers, these parts, unlike frames, are untraceable. “As long as you’ve 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 isn’t necessarily better.
“The garages are such a soft target, and they’re 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 bike’s fate. When she did, it wouldn’t be from the Seattle police. (...)
Justin, our University Ave source—twentysomething, buzzed reddish hair, a valiant attempt at a goatee—recalls 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 return—“I boarded around a little bit, smoked some weed”—he said to himself, “Fuck it.” He grabbed the bike and started rolling downhill. Before he’d gone more than a few blocks, a guy on the sidewalk waved at him to pull over. “And this guy’s like, ‘Hey, you wanna sell that bike? How much you want for it?’ And I’m like, ‘Twenty bucks and like a bag of weed right now.’ ” The buyer counteroffered $10 and a gram of marijuana. “Deal.”
“It’s 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 existence—save the meth pipe in the glove box.
