KVUE Austin On Bike Theft

Interesting blip from KVUE Austin, with on a video of a building maintenance worker catching two bike thieves in the act and then mixing it up with them a little bit before one of them pulls a knife.

In light of the asshat who was ripping of high end bikes in the Pearl district in Portland, it looks like condo and residence storage lockers are the new target of choice for these guys ...

Serial numbers nail a bunch of thieves in Colorado Springs

Just another tidbit re: a bunch of thieves/idiots in Colorado Springs. (From "Serial Number, Not Locks, Was Bike Thieves Undoing")

Couple of interesting points in here are in noted in bold.

A bicyclist who took the rare step of reporting a serial number after his bike went missing earlier this year helped police disrupt a theft ring targeting Colorado College and downtown Colorado Springs, an investigator said.

Police found the ID number during a routine search of sales records from El Paso County pawnshops. The records led investigators to the seller and four other people they believe acted as accomplices in the yearlong thefts.

...

The arrests on Tuesday ended the search for 64 stolen bicycles that went missing over the past year, many of them high-end brands including Specialized and Gary Fisher that can sell for hundreds and even thousands of dollars apiece, police said.

The thieves mixed and matched bicycle parts to avoid detection - swapping gear sets, derailleurs and shocks - before selling the bicycles on the street or at pawnshops.

The theft ring did not involve Internet sales, and Schiffelbein said there was no evidence it had ties to other cities in Colorado.

...

Their approach varied, police said, but one or more often approached locked bikes in well-lit areas and used bolt cutters to break through bicycle locks. A file could get through a cable lock in a matter of seconds, police said.

The pawn shop angle is an interesting one because cops have a lot of leftover registration/identification rules specifically for pawnbrokers and the like to combat this problem. These idiots probably would have been better off using Ebay ...

James Clayton / James Hogue is the story that keeps on giving

Jesus! This is the just story that keeps on giving.

(update: bah, red herring, apparently. See the note @ the bottom of this post)

Remember 'James Clayton'? The (alleged) bike-thief/asshat that the Austin bike community just popped for allegedly befriending people with nice bikes so he could break into their homes to steal them? The one who's still in jail?



As it turns out, James Clayton just might be James Hogue, a damn-near celebrity fraudster and con man best known because he once fraudulently entered (and defrauded) Princeton University by posing as a self-taught orphan.

What's odd here is that the only mention of this connection seems to be a comment on the atxbs.com "wall of shame" -- I don't think the media has picked this up yet, which is interesting because this guy is practically the king of identity fraud and theft. Bike theft just seems to be this guy's thing.

Just ask the New York Times. Or Wikipedia. Or perhaps you'd like to just rent Con Man, the movie that presents "intimate and disturbing profile of ... elusive con artist" James Hogue. Or perhaps you'd just like to pick up a copy of "The Runner", a book by David Samuels that details how James Hogue's massive, sprawling lie of a false life came undone when he was CAUGHT FOR HAVING A BUNCH OF STOLEN GODDAMN BICYCLES.

Hell, I was living in Tucson when this guy got nabbed by the US Marshals for a bunch of theft and fraud warrants out of Colorado - where he had previously been arrested for .... wait for it .... BIKE THEFT. I remember this, it was a big deal then, and I remember reading about his fake life as the runner and track star Alexi Santana at Princeton.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that once you've had a book and a movie and a bunch of press coverage about your life of crime in the New York Times about your life as a con man, you've got some cojones or a severe lack of grey matter to keep on being a goddamn con man.

So: Is James Clayton really James Hogue? Let's take a look at con man James Hogue's mugshots:






Compare these with the recent mugshots of 'James Clayton':






... you have to admit, there's something there.

The guy's court date is Friday, March 6th. Grab some popcorn, folks, 'cause this is going to be something.

03/06/2009 Update: Andrea Ball of the Austin American-Statesman dropped me an email reply to a question I ran by her re: this possibility - and says James Hogue is still in jail. Thanks Andrea :)

Guess I'll get my tinfoil hat back out.



Images from:
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/6780316/detail.html
http://www.atxbs.com/?q=node/655
http://www.atxbs.com/?q=node/406

Hunting down the owner of a found LOOK

Every now and then I get an email from someone who finds a bike and needs some help in locating the rightful owner.

This is the exception to the rule, natch, and not a primary goal of the website. But it demonstrates several parts of the bike theft and recovery equation that I'd like to talk about ...

All this week I've been working on locating the owner of a stolen LOOK carbon fiber [[model redacted]] racing bike found outside of Austin, TX. Long story short, there's an honest guy who found this insanely expensive, kitted-out LOOK bike stashed in the weeds on a rural field in the middle of backwoods nowhere Texas. Thinking that it was likely stashed there by someone waiting to come back and get it, this guy loaded it up, took it home, and started looking for an owner.

He tried the cops, and got nowhere there. He tried some local shops and a biking friend, who "posted it online" with no results. (Turns out this friend's entire post was "Anybody missing a LOOK? Friend of mine found one." I found the original post. Not such a great help, actually ...)

I got an email re: this bike about 7 days ago. Now, this is easily a $3k bike gone missing, so somebody out there has to be looking for it. Since contacted I've posted it to Atxbs, TXRBA, and Craigslist for Dallas/Austin/Houston, along with about a half dozen other smaller websites and biking forums.

(Little known fact, by the way - many carbon fiber bikes (and high end bikes in general) don't have serial numbers. Needless to say this makes recoveries way more difficult...)

So the word's out there, and we have all kinds of identifying details about the bike - this thing should be a slam-dunk recovery, right?

Unfortunately not.

So far we've had about a dozen inquiries, a couple of near misses, and a couple of wrong models/wrong color mismatches.

What depresses me (besides the asshats that accuse me of posting this just to get website traffic - those guys can go f themselves) is all the email people have sent me that doesn't have to do with this bike. The people sending me info about their own missing bikes is now three to one up on the inquiries about this stand-out bike that we actually have. I have five or six emailes re: other missing carbon fiber bikes, two re: store break-ins, and two or three re: bikes taken from inside people's homes.

Combine this with that James Clayton idiot they nailed in Austin and, man ... all I can say is that the situation's a lot worse than I thought.

And let's not forget the Craigslist scammer asshats who try and pry just enough information out of you so they can claim their 'lost' bike. Tell Craigslist responder A that it's a Grey model 1337-X - a model that doesn't even exist - and in half an hour you'll have Scammer asshat responder B emailing you and asking if you've found his Grey 1337-X.

I hate these people, and someone should find them and neuter them with a fork for wasting everybody's time and generally being lazy, moronic thieves.

Meanwhile, we'll keep looking for the owner of this LOOK. If you know anybody missing a LOOK within, oh, 100 miles of Kingsbury, TX, drop me a line.