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.

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.

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.

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 this apparatus of theft 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.

“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.

Hance grew up in the little college town of Westerville, Ohio. One of his first memories is of his mother strapping him into a child’s seat on her bike and riding to a nearby produce stand. Eventually he graduated to a Huffy with a banana seat, then his father’s 10-speed. As kids, he and his brother rode their bikes everywhere. “It was your first little taste of freedom,” he said.

As a student at the University of Arizona, Hance studied journalism and computer science. It was the mid-’90s and not long until the liftoff of the first dotcom boom. Databases fascinated him. He helped put the student newspaper online. He helped stream the radio station.

One morning in 1996, when he was a few semesters into college, Hance stood in his Tucson living room in a bath towel, dripping. Something’s wrong, he thought. Minutes before, his mountain bike had stood right there. Someone had entered and grabbed it while he showered. Hance had really gotten into mountain biking. He’d recently splurged on a blue Cannondale M300. Now it was gone. “A fucking knife in the heart,” he recalled. The theft was nearly three decades ago. When he recalls the incident, he’s still clearly furious.

Tucson authorities were useless, Hance told me. On one side of the street, stolen bikes were handled by campus police; on the other side, he filed a report with the city police. And the two sides didn’t share information. This is insane, he thought. If no stolen-bikes database exists, I’ll build one.

The initial 2005 website was amateurish. But it worked. Then he got busy with life and never improved it. Years later, a bike mechanic outside Chicago named Seth Herr set up a Kickstarter to get people to register their bikes when they bought them, in hopes that it would help if a bike was later stolen. In 2013 Hance and Herr merged their efforts and called it Bike Index. Today, along with the free registry, the site also sells registration systems and other tools to cities, universities, and the like. The database now contains more than 1.2 million bikes.

At the dining room table on the morning of my visit, Hance’s fingers spidered across his keyboard. He logs new stolen-bike reports before work in the morning, and at lunch, and again before bed. As he typed, reports of two more stolen bikes landed in his inbox. Both were from California. This didn’t surprise him. “San Francisco,” he said, “is fucking ridiculous right now.”

In the weeks after that tip from Mexico, Hance circulated the curious case of the stolen bikes in Mexico to colleagues, savvy Bay Area bike shop owners, cops. He also reached out to some trusted bike vigilantes who hunt stolens. In recent years a passionate subculture has emerged to fight back against bike crime, using a mix of old-school legwork and open source intelligence, following the publicly available fingerprints that nearly everyone leaves behind online. These amateur detectives often swap information and methods, sometimes with the ultimate aim of recovering the stolen bikes. Call them a crowdsourced Justice League. Bike Index and Hance are major planets in this loose constellation of do-gooders. Hance regularly calls on them.

Almost as soon as Hance saw that Facebook page with all the stolen bikes, it vanished. Before long, though, a volunteer—the guy who’d lost $26,000 in bikes and now wanted to help Hance—called to say he’d found an Instagram account for Constru-Bikes. The account had accepted his request as a follower, thinking he was a customer. “Do you want my password?” the guy asked Hance.

Armed with the volunteer’s login credentials and a beer, Hance lay down in his backyard hammock and opened the Instagram page.

Holy shit.

The Insta page had so many more bikes for sale than the Facebook page did. There were mountain bikes, road bikes, ebikes. There were brands that Hance had never even heard of, though he swam in a world of bikes every day. Fezzari (now called Ari). Breakbrake17. Devinci. Argon 18. All of them handsome, almost all of them $3,000 or $6,000 or even $10,000 when new. “It was the Amazon of stolen bikes,” he recounted to me. Every ad came with a slew of close-up photos and details. Hance took screenshots of everything. The shots would help him match the bikes he saw with owners who’d lost them. The pictures were also evidence, and he wanted to preserve them in case they vanished.

As Hance worked he realized that many bicycles looked familiar. Here, you need to understand something: For people who really know and love bicycles, as Hance does, a mountain bike is never just a mountain bike. It’s a 2016 matte-black Niner Jet 9 RDO. Dual suspension. Carbon frame. 700C Maxxis tires. Shimano XT disc brakes. To a bike geek, such details are like whorls in a thumbprint, marking every bike as unique. Hance possesses nearly a savant’s ability to recall the bicycles he has seen, and details as small as a scratch on a down tube. He lay in the hammock until dinnertime that day, taking screenshots and saving photos and making mental notes to circle back to certain bikes.

Soon, he and his fellow hunters began to match ads of bikes for sale on Constru-Bikes’ Insta page with ones stolen from the Bay Area. At times, it was comically easy, thanks to the many, detailed photos. One picture showed a white Gorilla mountain bike, a rare brand from Uganda, with the owner’s name clearly printed on the rear triangle of the bike’s frame. The owner told Hance it was the only bike of its kind in the US and that someone had stolen it in Oakland that same spring. In another ad, for a Bulls Grinder Evo ebike, the serial number was plainly visible in a photo; it was the same as one posted on Bike Index in July 2020. Its owner, a San Francisco tech worker named Ash Ramirez, had paid more than $5,200 for it and had used the bike as his primary means of transportation around the city—where he played on as many as five softball teams. “I went EVERYWHERE on my bike,” Ramirez later wrote me, describing how he loved pedaling through heavy traffic, past the miserable faces of drivers, before the bike was stolen from his Tenderloin apartment building.

Hance enlisted the aid of a San Jose stolen-bikes Facebook group, who helped him confirm still more stolen bikes for sale. The number climbed into the dozens. Hance took each one personally, not just because he was wired that way but because he knew directly—from communication with hundreds of bereft cyclists over the years—that behind each lost bike was a phantom-limb ache. For many cyclists, a bike isn’t just an ingenious concatenation of gears and carefully chosen components. It’s the sum of everything the owner has experienced while in the saddle. A triathlon bike isn’t just a tri bike, he told me, but the bike an ex-soldier pedaled for eight hours every day when he returned from Afghanistan, trying to shake his PTSD.

Take Jorge Parraras and his relationship with his fixie: Parraras came to the US from Nicaragua in 2005, when he was 18. In time he grew addicted to the freedom of pedaling around San Francisco. Around 2016, Parraras spent more than he should have—$2,500—on a handsome, custom, fixed-gear bike. Every afternoon he rode it to his job as a bartender. At night when his shift ended, he would put in his earbuds, turn up the music, and climb on. The city belonged to him after midnight, the streets open and fast and treacherous with the fixie’s lack of standard brakes, and his body hummed with the thrill of it. The bike was transportation, but it also was freedom, and a sense of command. “All I can say is I was kind of in love with riding my bike in the city,” he told me. One night the bike vanished from outside Parraras’ apartment. Last year it appeared on Constru-Bikes. “I don’t know how to explain it to you,” Parraras said. “It is like half of my heart.”

People tell Hance stories like this all the time. “They’re just vehicles for good,” he told me as we rode around Portland. He laughed at himself. “That sounds like a manifesto,” he said, “but I think life is better on a bike.”

This is why he hates bike thieves so much. Thieves wreck all of this.

Before the Facebook page for Constru-Bikes disappeared, Hance had written down an email address listed on it as a contact. He plugged the address into Google. This took him to different web pages, some of which had bikes for sale, too, and contained more breadcrumbs of information. On one page he found a phone number. He plugged the number into Google. This took him to still other websites. The digging also led to cached pages with an advertisement for a raffle, of all things, with bikes as prizes. The ad bore a phone number and, oddly, bank account information where people could send money to enter that raffle. And right there on the raffle’s ad, he came across a name: Ricardo Estrada Zamora. The man’s nickname, the web told him, was Ricky.

Eventually, Hance discovered that the Constru-Bikes Facebook page hadn’t disappeared entirely; whoever was running the page had simply blocked users in the US from seeing it. Hance used a VPN to route his internet traffic through another country and regain access to the page. Now he could see both Constru-Bike’s Facebook page and its Insta account, and that bikes would appear for sale on both accounts, only to be taken off the Facebook page once they sold. Hance and the people helping him could now see the full scale and history of the business—and just how many bikes were coming and going.

Soon, Hance and a volunteer found Zamora’s personal Facebook page. They saw that he lives in La Barca, a city of about 68,000 people in southern Jalisco, more than an hour outside Guadalajara. They also found ample evidence that Zamora and Constru-Bikes were one and the same. The same bicycles often appeared on his personal page. And for a period of time the owner of the Constru-Bikes Instagram page had forgotten to turn off the geotagging feature, so Hance could see that some images were tagged as La Barca. Hance also noticed that certain architectural features appeared in the background of many bike ads and in photos of proud customers standing with their new bikes. One day during my visit with Hance, he surfed over to Google Street View and typed in the address they had found for Zamora: There, within feet of the address, was a golden garage door; bits of an address on a wall; the same vibrant, tropical paint—the same details I could see clearly in the bike ads.

Zamora didn’t seem to be hiding at all, other than restricting his social media pages. Here was a picture of him with his wife and child on a hike, everyone having a great time. Here was a proud shot of his just-washed Volkswagen, its license plate clearly visible. And here was the man himself—mid-thirties, lean, handsome, with a dark, neat beard and Hilfiger shirt. Zamora was an active cyclist, and occasionally he wrote about local races or racers, or posted pictures of women cyclists dressed in snug racing kits, with leering captions underneath. Over time, Hance began to get to know Zamora in a way that was oddly intimate. The smiling, clean-cut portrait seemed incongruous with the crimes he was investigating. One day Zamora even complained on Facebook that a man he’d hired at his architecture and construction business had stolen a set of his tools and then vanished. In his next social media posts, Zamora—who would later, in a phone call with WIRED, deny having anything at all to do with selling bicycles—offered more stolen bikes for sale.

By the summer of 2020, so many stolen bikes were being offered for sale on Constru-Bikes that Hance gave up trying to alert every victim. It was all he could do just to take screenshots of the ads, with all their photos, and file them away. There were hundreds of bikes, thousands of photos.

Sometimes the listings didn’t even try to hide that a bike was stolen. One day Hance came across an ad for a candy-apple-red Intense Primer mountain bike that still bore a hang tag, or price tag. It read “$6,999” and said “Cambria Bike.” I know that name, Hance realized. On a stormy night over Super Bowl weekend 2019, thieves pulled up behind a 30,000-square-foot warehouse in Paso Robles, on the central coast of California. The building belonged to Cambria Bicycle Outfitters, a longtime bike seller. The thieves cut a hole in the warehouse’s wall, evaded a motion detector, and made off with roughly 90 bicycles worth nearly $500,000. “This is like Ocean’s 14,” Cambria CEO Clay Akey told a local TV news station. Several weeks later thieves stole two bikes worth about $10,000 from Cambria’s nearby showroom, Akey told WIRED. The thefts had been so damaging that Cambria lost its insurance carrier over the claim, then ended up paying more than double for a new policy. Now, one year later, Hance was looking at one of the bikes from these heists.

One day, a volunteer found that Zamora had family in Silicon Valley and that he sometimes traveled there. They found Zamora’s personal Instagram account, which showed a picture he had posted of a stolen mountain bike resting beneath bruised skies in the treeless foothills above San Jose. “Testing what we sell,” the caption read, in Spanish. There were other pictures of Zamora with other bikes.

Is he the Pink Panther of bike poachers, Hance wondered, swiping all of them himself during his trips north? But security camera footage collected from victims showed a wide variety of thieves. Ah, so he’s the tail end of the chain. And he’s clearly got help up here.

To Hance, the fact that Zamora was an avid rider, a member of the cycling community, made his actions so much worse. It was not only a crime, it was betrayal.

I spent days looking through hundreds of Zamora’s ads myself. For sale was a Ventum that had been custom painted in black, red, and gold to resemble the national flag of Germany, a Boo Bicycles road bike fashioned of bamboo and carbon fiber, and a hand-built Low MK1 racing bike that cost more than my used car. These were bikes to dream about. Zamora and his Facebook friends had slang for them: aviones. Airplanes. Bikes with wings. What struck me most was how casual and commercial the criminality was. Not many illicit enterprises print up their own trucker hats, with a logo, as Constru-Bikes did. The banality itself was a taunt. Zamora seemed to know that Uncle Sam’s long arm wasn’t long enough, or wasn’t resolute enough, to reach all the way to a town in central Mexico, to punish a guy for selling other people’s bikes. He appeared to feel no fear.

Looking through the ads, I was awed by the scale of the operation, then made dizzy, and finally nauseated.

“How do they do it?” a commenter on Constru-Bikes asked in Spanish one day beneath a post showing a pickup truck laden with a half-dozen more mountain bikes: the latest shipment. “Where does such beauty come from?”

“Tenemos gente robando todo el mundo,” the Constru-Bikes account replied.

We have people stealing all over the world.

Several times, Hance tried to get police around the Bay Area interested in what he uncovered. For a little while at least, a cop at the San Francisco Police Department seemed to take an interest. But given everything else going on—the pandemic, racial justice protests, spikes in other crime—police seemed less able than ever to deal with stolen bikes. And cops didn’t seem to know what to do with this obsessed citizen, Hance, and the outlandish story he had to tell. Meanwhile, Zamora just kept making money: From late 2020 to June 2024, Hance estimates, Zamora may have sold some 654 bikes for a total of as much as $2.1 million.

Bike Index tried to get Meta—then Facebook—to remove Constru-Bikes’ Facebook pages. The efforts hit a brick wall. The company directed Bike Index to click a button to report criminal behavior—“which does nothing,” said Hance. “We clicked it dozens of times,” he told me. “It’s like the button at the crosswalk.” He finally reached an engineer (and cyclist) at the company who said they’d relayed Hance’s concerns to a team that deals with such issues. The reply: The team is focused on other issues, and “there wasn’t much that could be done,” Hance relayed to me. “There’s just nobody at the helm, just nobody fucking driving the bus,” Hance said. (In an email, Meta told WIRED that it prohibits the selling or buying of stolen goods on Facebook and Instagram, and encourages people to report such activity—as Hance has done repeatedly—to the company and the police. The Constru-Bikes pages were still online as of press time.)

The league of bike hunters briefly considered charging down to Mexico and confronting Zamora, then quickly decided that option was insane. They weren’t violent vigilantes. Plus, they had no idea who Zamora might be in bed with.

Finally, out of options, Hance and others decided Bike Index would publicly reveal Zamora online with a long post documenting what the group had uncovered over many months. And Bike Index would publish a huge database of every confirmed stolen bike that Constru-Bikes had posted for sale. It was hardly the satisfying conclusion anyone wanted. But it might dent Zamora’s business for a while—and perhaps pressure Meta to take down his page. “We can’t arrest guys. What I can do is paint the bad actors with the ugly brush,” Hance told me.

Then, before they could do so, Hance finally caught the break he’d been hoping for. It was Valentine’s Day 2021. During a regular sweep of Zamora’s ads on Constru-Bikes, Hance figured out that Zamora had “gloriously fucked up.” Instead of simply posting a picture of a bike for sale, he had posted a screengrab taken from a smartphone which seemed to show an album of related photos. The album’s name was visible: “Victoriano.”

Hance suspected he was looking at the name of Zamora’s US bike supplier. Almost immediately, someone at Constru-Bikes took down the photo. It was too late: Hance had grabbed a screenshot.

Now, Hance again went on the hunt. On Facebook he found that Zamora had a friend named Victor Romero—short for Victoriano. Romero ran Tepeke Transmissions, an auto shop in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley.

Well, that’s an intriguing coincidence.

Hance surfed over to Tepeke Transmissions’ Facebook page. Pictures showed that Romero was a mountain biker too. He liked to ride in San Jose’s Alum Rock Park, where Zamora had ridden when he’d come to town. Romero straddled a different model bike in nearly every photo. And Romero appeared to advertise some of the same bikes that Zamora was selling. With every detail, the space between the men collapsed further.

The clincher though, was a small detail that many people might overlook. Hance didn’t: Ads on Constru-Bikes often showed a stolen bike leaning against a backdrop of orange shelving. Now, Hance peered inside Tepeke Transmissions via the photos of the shop on Facebook. Boom—the same bright-orange shelves lined the walls of Romero’s business, all of them holding rows of greasy auto transmission cases.

So this is the guy we’ve been looking for. This is the beginning of the pipeline that ends in Jalisco.

In the late winter of 2021 Hance handed all of this information to the San Francisco law enforcement officer who’d shown some interest in his tips before. 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. The bike had been posted for sale on Constru-Bikes about a week earlier. They also found $206,000 in cash.

News of the raid wasn’t made public, and Hance could only piece together hints of what had happened. But he was over the moon about it. Finally, Zamora’s reign might end. For a while, the pipeline to Mexico seemed seriously damaged. No new bikes appeared for sale.

And then … nothing happened. Weeks turned into months. The waiting was agony. Sometimes, authorities contacted Hance to ask how to locate information on specific bikes that had been for sale, since he knew Zamora’s operation better than they did. Hance heard a rumor that because of the large cash seizure, the Feds might even take an interest in the case. But mostly he was kept in the dark, and he fumed. Meanwhile, Zamora’s operation revved up again. Within several weeks stolen bikes appeared for sale from other cities—San Diego, Los Angeles, the mountain-biking mecca of Bend, Oregon. Zamora was tapping new locales. He was selling stolen bikes from Colorado. He had branched into consignment, advertising stolen bikes on his popular page that others were selling elsewhere. This wasn’t a single pipeline, or even a damaged one. It was a hydra.

One day in June 2022, Hance texted me a picture of a 2017 Lynskey Cooper CX that Zamora had put up for sale just hours before. The bike had been stolen just 20 minutes away from Hance’s home in Portland. Hance and the victim even had mutual friends. A few months later, Hance noticed more than a dozen bikes worth roughly $50,000—the majority of them stolen in Portland—appeared on Zamora’s site. Hance had been chasing his nemesis for two and a half years. Now, it was as if Zamora was reminding Hance that he was powerless to stop him.

More than a year passed. One afternoon in early February 2024 my phone pinged with a message while I was driving. It was Hance:

Hey!

ITS FUCKIN GO TIME

call me

Arrest made

😀😀😀

As soon as I got good cell coverage I called Hance. Romero, he told me, had been arrested and indicted in federal court—nearly three years after police had descended on Tepeke Transmissions. So the Feds had taken an interest in stolen bikes after all.

Hance sounded ecstatic. The words tumbled from him as he speculated about what might happen next. The world-weariness that he so often put up like a shield had been lowered. Maybe, he ventured, the whole awful thing was about to be over, and Constru-Bikes would be shut down for good.

But when I sent Hance the actual indictment, along with the press release from the US Attorney’s Office, his mood went south. It alleged that Romero was part of “a complex, international fencing operation” that bought its merchandise from known sellers of stolen bikes in the Bay Area, knowing they were stolen, and shipped them to Mexico. But the indictment only mentioned nine bikes—among them that pricey Bulls ebike whose owner played on five different San Francisco softball teams. The hundreds of other stolen bicycles that Hance had documented over the years were completely missing from the legal filing. “It’s like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the whole thing,” he said.

Worse, Zamora’s name didn’t even appear in the court documents. The indictment simply described an “Unindicted Co-Conspirator 1” based in Jalisco, who sold the smuggled bikes on social media accounts that were blocked outside Mexico, sometimes marketing them with photographs taken in front of his own home address. It was just as Hance’s detective work had laid out. But much to his frustration, Bike Index got no shout-out from the government.

Hance felt defeated. Maybe, he wondered aloud, the Feds would move on Zamora later? But his voice no longer held any hope. He was exhausted. Hance was ready to close the book on Constru-Bikes. Bike Index would publish its massive, searchable database of four years of bikes Zamora had sold, many of which Bike Index could document as stolen, in hopes of busting wide open what the Feds had not. It would be a takedown, of a kind. Then he could move on from Zamora, and move on with his life, he told me. I doubted that he would, though. Hance wasn’t a guy to let go of things.

Romero has pleaded not guilty and faces a maximum sentence of 25 years if convicted on all charges. When we contacted him by phone, he asked to be texted, then didn’t return our messages. Reached by WIRED, Abraham Simmons of the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of California wouldn’t comment on whether the investigation was now over or whether anyone else—in the US or Mexico—would ever be charged.

And Zamora? Last week a translator and I called him in Mexico. To our surprise, he picked up the phone. He was polite, almost pleasant, addressing the translator cordially as “miss.” He said he didn’t know why we were asking about bikes. Didn’t he run the Constru-Bikes pages? we asked. “No,” he said. “I’m an architect.”

You don’t sell bikes?

“No.” The timbre of his voice became more brittle. Why do people think you sell stolen bikes? we asked.

“Maybe because I’m a high-performance cyclist,” Zamora replied.

Of course you’re a good friend of Victor Romero, we pressed.

“I don’t know Victor,” he said.

But Romero’s indictment clearly refers to you, we said. Why do you think the US government has got it wrong?

“Maybe because I’m guapo,” he said. “Handsome.” He translated this last word into English himself. Now I recognized the same arrogant persona I’d gotten to know in years of Constru-Bikes posts. We mentioned the photos of bikes for sale in front of his house. “I don’t even have a house,” he said. Zamora was agitated now.

We wanted to talk more, but he was done. He signed off with a vulgar anatomical slur, directed at the translator, then hung up. In the next day or so the Constru-Bikes Facebook page offered five more bikes for sale.

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