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The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico
“We have people stealing all over the world.” A digital sleuth named Bryan Hance has spent the past four years obsessively uncovering a bicycle-theft pipeline of astonishing scale.
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. 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. At the end of April, after investigating Hance’s tips, the San Francisco cops served a search warrant at Tepeke Transmissions and found Romero at the shop—along with a stolen Kona Process 153 mountain bike worth nearly $5,000, disassembled and packaged for shipment.
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