BRYAN HANCE WAS sitting in his basement one Sunday afternoon in June 2020 when he got an email about a secondhand bike for sale. A BMC Roadmachine 02 from a Swiss company, the bike was painted the color of a traffic cone, with goblin-green racing stripes. It was gorgeous. The bicycle boasted some of the fanciest components anyone could buy, like sleek Zipp wheels and electronic shifting. It was the kind of ride that made other cyclists envy it and its owner as they blew past on a straightaway. Hance guessed that a bike like that probably cost $8,000. Yet it was being offered for a fraction of that amount.
Hance wasn’t in the market for a new bicycle, though. What intrigued him about the bike was something else: It was stolen.
Hance is the cofounder of Bike Index, a site where people can register their bicycles (for free) and record when one has been stolen. This allows cyclists, and law enforcement, to keep their eyes peeled for a swiped bike. Since it was started in 2013, Bike Index has helped recover more than 14,000 stolen bikes, from Sacramento to Saskatchewan and as far away as Australia.
Hance’s passion is bicycles, or to be more precise, the sense of community and general goodwill that a life in the saddle fosters. Every message that offers tips on a missing bike is cc’ed to him.
Two weeks earlier, the owner of that Roadmachine had reported it stolen from the secure bike room of an apartment building in Mountain View, California. This latest email about the bike was from an anonymous source. The tipster pointed Hance to a Facebook page where there were more stolen bikes for sale—like a sweet 2018 Pivot Mach 4 mountain bike that sells new for about $7,000 and had been pinched from a San Jose garage two months previous; and a Specialized Stumpjumper Comp Carbon in space blue that had vanished nearly three weeks prior from Santa Clara, about 45 miles south of San Francisco. All of the bikes were late-model and pricey. All had disappeared recently from around Silicon Valley, where cycling was fashionable among tech workers. All were for sale at about one-third of their original prices. Hance thought he’d seen everything in his years bird-dogging stolen bikes. But this put him on his heels.
Hance’s passion is bicycles, or to be more precise, the sense of community and general goodwill that a life in the saddle fosters. Every message that offers tips on a missing bike is cc’ed to him.
Two weeks earlier, the owner of that Roadmachine had reported it stolen from the secure bike room of an apartment building in Mountain View, California. This latest email about the bike was from an anonymous source. The tipster pointed Hance to a Facebook page where there were more stolen bikes for sale—like a sweet 2018 Pivot Mach 4 mountain bike that sells new for about $7,000 and had been pinched from a San Jose garage two months previous; and a Specialized Stumpjumper Comp Carbon in space blue that had vanished nearly three weeks prior from Santa Clara, about 45 miles south of San Francisco. All of the bikes were late-model and pricey. All had disappeared recently from around Silicon Valley, where cycling was fashionable among tech workers. All were for sale at about one-third of their original prices. Hance thought he’d seen everything in his years bird-dogging stolen bikes. But this put him on his heels.
Not so long ago, bike theft was a crime of opportunity—a snatch-and-grab, or someone applying a screwdriver to a flimsy lock. Those quaint days are over. Thieves now are more talented and brazen and prolific. They wield portable angle grinders and high-powered cordless screwdrivers. They scope neighborhoods in trucks equipped with ladders, to pluck fine bikes from second-story balconies. They’ll use your Strava feed to shadow you and your nice bike back to your home. A product designer who lives in an affluent neighborhood of Silicon Valley told me how, when he left his garage door open a crack for just an hour one morning in early 2020, thieves stole his $8,000 customized enduro mountain bike. He and his wife bought an alarm system. One night not long after, when the couple had latched the garage but forgotten to turn on the alarm, thieves broke open the door and stole his replacement bike, and this time grabbed his wife’s too—$26,000 in bikes lost in three months. Her bike was now for sale on that Facebook page.
These were crazy times. The pandemic had been great for bike theft, because it had been great for bicycling. With so many Americans stranded at home, terrified of public transit, retail bike sales grew 65 percent in 2020, according to the NPD Group, which tracks such things. Sales of ebikes—bikes with electric motors—jumped 145 percent, the marketing consulting group found.
These were crazy times. The pandemic had been great for bike theft, because it had been great for bicycling. With so many Americans stranded at home, terrified of public transit, retail bike sales grew 65 percent in 2020, according to the NPD Group, which tracks such things. Sales of ebikes—bikes with electric motors—jumped 145 percent, the marketing consulting group found.
Thieves sniffed opportunity.
In the first six months of the pandemic, bike theft jumped by nearly one-third in New York City. Robbers in New York stripped the pandemic’s ubiquitous food-delivery drivers of their ebikes, which were crucial to their livelihood. In Portland, Oregon, where Hance lives, thefts rose 20 percent, to what some police called an all-time high. This atop a surge in bike crime that was happening even before the coronavirus struck.
But one detail flummoxed Hance. The tip had come from Mexico. The tipster had found the bikes for sale there, on the Facebook page of a company called Constru-Bikes, though the spelling sometimes varied slightly, which appeared to be based in the state of Jalisco. Hance had heard rumors of transnational bike crime for a long time, but they were only that: rumors. Bike Index scarcely even had a presence in Mexico.
In the first six months of the pandemic, bike theft jumped by nearly one-third in New York City. Robbers in New York stripped the pandemic’s ubiquitous food-delivery drivers of their ebikes, which were crucial to their livelihood. In Portland, Oregon, where Hance lives, thefts rose 20 percent, to what some police called an all-time high. This atop a surge in bike crime that was happening even before the coronavirus struck.
But one detail flummoxed Hance. The tip had come from Mexico. The tipster had found the bikes for sale there, on the Facebook page of a company called Constru-Bikes, though the spelling sometimes varied slightly, which appeared to be based in the state of Jalisco. Hance had heard rumors of transnational bike crime for a long time, but they were only that: rumors. Bike Index scarcely even had a presence in Mexico.
What was this company, Constru-Bikes, that was selling the bikes? Hance wondered. And how in hell were bikes that were stolen in the Bay Area traveling almost 2,000 miles, to be sold south of the border? What Hance didn’t realize was that the crime he’d begun to uncover was massive—perhaps one of the largest of its kind anybody had ever seen. Nor did he realize that he’d ultimately become so obsessed with the case that, by the end, the only thing he’d want as much as justice was to be free of it.
IN LATE JANUARY 2021, I sat across a dining room table from Hance in an Airbnb in Portland. As he gulped the day’s first coffee, Hance opened his laptop and showed me his morning routine. First, he counted the stolen bike reports that had arrived in Bike Index’s inbox since 11 pm the previous night. Fifteen messages waited for him. “Slow day,” he said. The emails had arrived from London, Australia, New Orleans, the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle.
IN LATE JANUARY 2021, I sat across a dining room table from Hance in an Airbnb in Portland. As he gulped the day’s first coffee, Hance opened his laptop and showed me his morning routine. First, he counted the stolen bike reports that had arrived in Bike Index’s inbox since 11 pm the previous night. Fifteen messages waited for him. “Slow day,” he said. The emails had arrived from London, Australia, New Orleans, the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle.
“Stealing from UW Medicine during a pandemic. Way to go, you piece of shit,” he muttered to the thief, wherever they were. Working quickly, Hance approved each report so that the bike would appear on Bike Index’s searchable database of stolen bikes. At that time, once a bike was listed as stolen, Bike Index also tweeted it out.
As we talked, Hance pulled up security camera footage from a 2019 Portland break-in. He wanted to show me what bike owners were up against. We watched as three thieves gained access to a secure bike room in an apartment building and stole five bikes worth $10,000 in fewer than four minutes. Once inside, the thieves didn’t bother with the bike locks; they simply removed the cheap bike racks directly from the walls.
Hance is 48, tall, genial, and floridly profane. By day he is a senior systems engineer protecting computer systems on some of the world’s flashiest mega-yachts. “And by night,” he told me, “I do stuff that actually affects my community,” by which he means Bike Index. When Hance is exasperated, which is often—with the sluggishness of police response to bike crime, say, or with the sundry iniquities of humanity—he lifts both hands and runs them through his hair, which falls away from his face in dark wings that call to mind a mid-’80s yearbook photo.
Hance possesses a hypertrophied sense of right and wrong and an empathy meter that is tuned a bit higher than in most people. He’s the kind of guy you read about in the local news who donates a kidney to a distant college friend—which he did, in 2018. Bike Index is his manifest belief that technology, and sharing information, can help rebalance the scales between order and chaos.
For all his work with bikes, Hance considers himself only a casual cyclist, splitting rides between an old Surly Pacer commuter bike, a Faraday ebike, and a Diverge gravel/road bike. “I just want to get from A to B. And I want to do it on a bike … I don’t want the planet to burn,” he told me. Still, he’s probably on two wheels more than many cyclists who bray about it. One morning we hopped on bikes so Hance could show me Portland’s extensive web of paths and bike lanes. We rode downtown and then around Inner Southeast Portland and along the Willamette River’s esplanade. He pedaled with the full, liquid strokes of a man who for one five-year stretch didn’t own a car. I had trouble keeping up.