When thieves stole his beloved commuter bike on a busy street in broad daylight, PATRICK SYMMES snapped—and set out on a cross-country plunge into the heart of America’s bike-crime underbelly. What he saw will rattle your frame.
Certainly the king of bike thieves has been found. In 2008, a quirky Toronto bike-shop owner named Igor Kenk turned out to have 2,865 stolen bikes squirreled away in his store and various warehouses. Kenk, considered the most prolific bike thief in the world, is a messy, dyspeptic Slovenian intellectual who before he was caught lived in a fancy house and associated with the classical music scene. Yet his method was brutally mundane: Kenk was finally caught pointing out bikes he wanted stolen to a mentally ill person, whom he paid with drugs. He served just over a year in jail and is already back out.-Outside
