How to get your stolen bike back.

The saga of my past two months ended with the most whirlwind, petrifying two days. Without any further exposition, here we go.

In December of 2008, Harry decided he wanted to get an awesome bike. He had been riding the same Centurion for years and wanted to upgrade to something new. Still vintage, but with nicer components. Something that could still take a beating. I had also made this decision since I had just gotten my first big girl job and was commuting via train. There’s only so often I want to lift a 35 pound bicycle. So I called a guy in San Jose that had a really beautiful bike that I was interested in. He had already sold it, but asked what I was looking for, because he sells a lot of bikes. I told him what I wanted, and I also told him what Harry wanted. That night, he emailed me with a link to the most beautiful Bianchi I’ve ever seen. It was $550 and I took the train to San Jose (Harry was in Austin) the next morning at 6 a.m. to pick it up before work.

He rode it for three months. The only thing changed was the addition of SPD pedals instead of the Look pedals that came with it. The little thing was a champ - needed a new tire at one point, and the bottom bracket was kind of squeaky, but these are things that happen with used bikes.

On March 19th, Harry went to the 16th Street Safeway and locked up with a cable lock to their bike rack. The bike rack is right outside the doors and is under a box that people would presume holds a security camera. He locked up at 7:30. At 7:55 I got a text saying the bike was stolen. This, of course, makes me lose my damn mind. The Safeway manager refused to speak with him until a police report was filed and pointed him instead to the security for the complex. He filed a report with them, and they were all too fast to tell him that he box hanging above the rack doesn’t have a camera in it, so there’s no footage to review. Called the police, waited for hours, ended up coming home when they never showed.

I made a post on the 20th to craigslist saying it was stolen, showing photos of it, and hoping that someone would see it around the mission and give us a tip. (San Francisco has an amazing, very large cycling community, and I figured it would help.) No leads, but I got a lot of emails relating similar stories, sharing tips about where I could look, and just outright sympathy. The outpouring of concern over a bicycle that didn’t mean anything to anyone but us was overwhelming and I am truly grateful for it. It helped me to mourn the loss of bike that I really, really loved.

Mourning didn’t mean giving up. Mourning meant spending every day for the next two months repeatedly checking craigslist for it. And not just San Francisco - L.A. and Sacramento too, as I was told that sometimes bikes are stolen in huge groups in one city and then transported to another city in order to make them harder to trace. So all three craigslists were constantly on my radar. My heart would skip every time I saw a 57cm Bianchi, but they were never the right bike. The stickers on the frame were wrong, the stem was wrong, the bars weren’t wrapped right, the brake hoods were the wrong shape, and it just goes on and on. I knew this bike.

On May 7th, I was just searching for bikes - by now I was still searching for the Bianchi every day, but I had started to let it go. I knew we were never seeing it again. And then, there it was.

Bianchi Roadbike: Celeste & Campy– 57cm – [fits 5'10 - 6'0] (mission district)

The tires were changed, the saddle was different, and there was a new blue bottle cage on it. This was the bike. And I started to panic.

I immediately pulled out all of our photos. I uploaded six decent res (1100x800) photos to Flickr the day we got it. I took a photo of it on the train on my way back from buying it to send to all my bike nerd friends. The ad had super high res photos as well that helped me to compare important pieces of information about it. We didn’t have a police report. How were we possibly going to get this back? So I did what any girl living in a city where she doesn’t really know anyone would do: I contacted the internet.

“The internet”, in this case, is Allan Hough, writer and editor of Mission Mission, one of the most read blogs in San Francisco. “Dear Allan, you’re my only hope.”, the hyperbolic email started. So he emailed me back within minutes saying he was happy to do a post to raise awareness, but didn’t know anything about the legal aspects. Harry and I debated a lot over what to do. Would the seller see the post and disappear with the bike? Because ultimately, this was not about revenge or screwing someone over, this was about getting my bike back to me, right the hell now.

We did three things. Allan made his post with all of my information proving that it was our bike. Harry sent the seller an email expressing interest in buying it. And I sent an email saying that it was my stolen bike and I would like it back.

My email is the controversial one. But I truly believed - and still do, beyond a shadow of a doubt - that the seller is not the person who stole my bike. And I don’t think the person who sold it to him is who stole my bike. Flipping bikes is a big market here. I believe the bike changed hands many, many times, and there is no way to get back to the person who stole it. I didn’t want this kid to get screwed, but I wanted to rely on his potential kindness and see if I could just get the thing back. This was a suggestion from Allan - who ended that same email with “I dunno. Might get shot.”

He posted it, and I was off to my favorite home base, Shotwell’s. I spoke with the bar patrons there (we’re all regulars) about how nervous I was. I checked the MM comments obsessively looking for new advice. Harry came to the bar after work, and what we ultimately decided to do was go to the cops.

They were, let’s say, uninterested. (I will say incredibly good things about the SFPD soon, but that time has not yet come.) We filed a report, but they did not believe it was our bike. They only cared about a serial number. Not a single one of them knew anything about bikes and assumed all bikes were identical - you buy it from a shop, it looks like this, they made thousands of them, we can’t prove this one was yours. This was not a stock bike. Most older bicycles aren’t. I’d think that living in a huge cycling district, they would know that. But they didn’t. We filed our report, dejected, and went home. They gave us a number to call the next day where we could give our further information and plead our case that it belonged to us.

When I got home, I had an email from the seller. He bought it from someone else at a bike swap, a guy who’s relatively well known in the cycling community and used to be a coach, thought it was a good deal and he wanted to spruce it up a bit and resell it. He would be happy to give it to me, but spent $400 on it and just wanted his money back.

And I can understand that. If I was in his position, I wouldn’t want to lose $400. I debated a long time over how to handle this and not screw this kid over. I, of course, posted this to the MM comments. People were on the side of not giving him $400, under any circumstances. I needed to figure out some way to get this back and not lose $400, and I also needed to not get hurt. One of us is 5'10", super athletic, super skinny and fast. One of us is 5'4", a little chubby, and totally nonthreatening. We do not have big friends. There’s no “busting heads” that will occur here.

While at Shotwell’s on Thursday, I wrote a haiku and drew a little illustration of the bike. Dave, one of my two favorite bartenders in this city (for the curious, the other one is Tom, who co-owns the same bar) posted it up on their wall and drew people’s attention to it. This sounds stupid, but that little haiku generated a lot of conversation. When I rolled up into the bar the next day, people asked me about it. And they asked me about the MM post, which had been by now lovingly picked up by SFist. “You’re not going to give him $400, are you?” I wasn’t.

We went to the cops. Harry had called the inspector earlier in the day and told him we had a meeting set up. He said to come to the mission police department 90 minutes before the meeting and that there would be someone to accompany us. The police there gave me a phone number of an undercover cop, who asked me to meet him at Weird Fish, a restaurant just a block down.

I don’t want to post the whole story - and I know this is a letdown if you’ve followed this saga so far - because it was a truly beautifully organized operation that went down, and I don’t want to compromise that security for future operations. I had no idea they actually operated like this and even now that I’ve been a part of it, it’s insane to believe that it happened. The two brilliant, wonderful SFPD officers we met at Weird Fish were bike people. We talked components, we talked frame, I talked so much that they eventually laughed and told me that I could stop because they had long believed me. So the details are going to be left out, but here’s the jist:

We were both taken to a restaurant we had agreed to meet the guy at. We looked the bike over, had a chat with him. It took me less than ten seconds to know it was our bike. The signal was for Harry to take his hat off. And about twenty seconds later, four police officers, two undercover and two in black and white, appeared out of nowhere and guided the young gentleman to the side. They were as discreet as four cops outside a restaurant with a patio can be. Cuffed him and guided (actually guided, not pushed) him over to a wall so he could just lean up against it and not have every passerby know he was handcuffed. I didn’t overhear the conversation, because I didn’t want to. I am sincerely sorry this kid got caught up in the middle of it. It’s not his fault that he’s a casualty. But after everyone’s advice, I decided that I can’t take responsibility for him. He is not my problem: getting my stolen bike back was my problem.

And there it was. We put the Bianchi in the back of the car. A police officer drove us back to the station and we were free to go. I was told that the kid wouldn’t be arrested, because he had a good chance to explain his story too. The police were understanding and firm at the same time. They were in it to defend us, and they were in it to defend against bike theft. The amount of care they put into my silly bicycle was absolutely astonishing and I can’t be more pleased with how the situation was handled.

So here are the tips I picked up along the way, things I legitimately didn’t know and got to learn through the power of the internet.

- Keep a file with your serial number in it. Take a photo of it with your phone and keep it with you. The serial number is not important to people who know bikes, but the initial police officers will not even have a conversation with you if you don’t have this number. That is the only reason we needed it, and we didn’t have it, because we are idiots.

- Document everything. Photos of all the components, of the whole bike, of you with the bike. Date them somehow.

- Do something noticeable to the bike. The chain lock that he used to keep on his seat tube rubbed against the frame and scratched the paint. We knew this and it ended up helping. If you don’t want to scratch your bike up, and you shouldn’t, keep a photo of yourself in the seat tube. That way you can take the seat post out and pull the photo out and show them that it’s yours. No one else should have a photo of you in their bike.

- You can file a police report online. Harry waited for hours and gave up because he was hungry, mad and tired. Police respond to calls with three levels of importance. A stolen old bike is of C level importance, and in a neighborhood like this, they just don’t have time to get to all of it. We could have filed a report online, but didn’t know any better and didn’t think to look.

- Cable locks are worthless. The SFPD actually advised us against full-size U-locks and said mini u-locks are the way to go. Large ones can be pried apart. Mini ones are going to be too tight to get anything else inside and you can’t get any leverage.

Special thanks here go to the SFPD, obviously, because they were amazing, Shotwell’s Bar at 20th & Shotwell (and obviously David Hall and Tom Madonna, who were incredibly supportive and almost as excited as we were about getting it back), Brock Keeling and Allan Hough. I don’t know many people here. I am a nerd. The only thing I could think of to do was raise awareness. The amount of publicity we got - there are people I don’t hardly know that hugged me when we rolled up into Shotwell’s for the second time on Friday night and Harry got off the Bianchi. Everyone I met was talking about it, and that is not a thing I could do just by myself.

It also got people talking. So many people with stolen bikes that have all this knowledge that can help out. I didn’t have any idea what to do and I didn’t know anyone personally who could help me, so the internet gave me a hand. Emailing Allan was the greatest thing I could have possibly done to raise awareness and get people talking about an all-too-common serious problem. We have our Bianchi back. If this happens to you, I sincerely hope you can be as lucky as we were and get your bikes back where they belong.