The Denver Gazette

AG: Bike theft ring has ties to Mexico

BY EVAN WYLOGE AND CAROL MCKINLEY The Denver Gazette

Just after midnight on Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2019, a huge banana-yellow moving truck with the company name “Denver Small Moves” emblazoned on the side circled a neighborhood bicycle shop. Surveillance video shows a man dressed in black get out of the truck and creep across the sidewalk, casing the expensive merchandise in the store windows of Cyclery. He then jiggles a loose security fence, returns to his truck and takes a practice run before he full-throttles in reverse through the fence, obliterating the storefront.

It was one of eight times Cyclery was hit before the year’s end.

“I was massively stressed out,” owner Harley McClellan told The Denver Gazette. “I didn’t want to go to sleep wondering which night the alarm would go off.”

Since just before the pandemic, smash-and-grabbers have terrorized bike shop owners up and down the Front Range. The Colorado Attorney General’s Office launched an investigation dubbed “Operation Vicious Cycle,” resulting in the arrests of eight men

believed tied to an organized criminal ring with links to Mexico, where bicycles stolen from Colorado are turned around and offered on Facebook at premium prices.

The AG’s office described it as ruthless organized crime. But bikes are also being stolen from individuals at an alarming rate. Bicycle theft reports in Denver are up about 50% over the past five years, with a significant surge since the beginning of the pandemic, Denver police data show.

About 4,500 bikes were reported stolen in 2020, and about 3,900 in 2021, both years far outpacing the preceding years. And those numbers likely undercount the true number of stolen bikes because often people don’t bother to report them.

Denver Police Sgt. George Kenny says it’s best to either write down or use your phone to take photos of the bike’s serial number, as well as the bike itself, so that police can track it once it’s gone. Police recommend using a U-lock over a cable lock and also to secure it to the bike’s frame and front wheel rather than to the back wheel.

“We see a majority of bike thefts from people’s open garages and from bikes left in alleyways,” Kinney said. “They’ll cut locks off of apartment storage units and take bikes.”

Kinney also said bikes aren’t safe on car racks as thieves can easily cut them off.

Standing bicycle racks are common in Denver, with 600 of them scattered about downtown. Kenny says bikes are less likely to get stolen if they’re secured on a rack under a street light, or near a security camera. Downtown, where young professionals often live and work, free locked indoor bike storage has become a sales angle for high rise and condo developers looking for renters.

No locale is immune to bike theft. Two days before Christmas, someone entered Charlie Madden’s Boulder garage and hauled away a Specialized Stumpjumper, an E-bike, a single speed bike, a child trailer and a baby bike seat he’d bought for his one year old.

“Why they took that, I don’t know,” said Madden, who is not sure whether or not his garage door went down the night before.

Thanks to a concerned citizen who took the time to snap a photo when he saw a guy who he thought looked suspicious riding the Stumpjumper, Boulder police recovered it. But Madden is not counting on ever seeing his other bikes again.

“At least we have our health,” the Boulder dad laughed.

Big business items

The rise in bike thefts isn’t isolated to one-off crimes of opportunity. The $2,000 to $8,000 price tag on upscale bikes means big business, made evident by the multi-agency criminal sting operation led last year by the Attorney General Phil Weiser’s office.

Operation Vicious Cycle uncovered a lucrative $1.5 million bike theft ring that was stealing mountain bikes from

mom and pop stores and transporting them across the border to Mexico. An online bike tracking index believes the bikes were taken to Juárez, Mexico, where they were advertised for sale on a Facebook page called “Alexander’s Bikes,” and sold for close to dealer’s price.

The investigation focused on six months of the ring’s criminal activity. Eight suspects were arrested. However, there’s now reason to believe the ring has started up again.

The eight men were indicted last November on 227 counts for a brazen heist operation carried out in 2019 and 2020. The charges included violating Colorado’s Organized Crime Control Act, second degree burglary and aggregated vehicle theft.

In a scene reminiscent of an action film, the indictment described an operation where thieves stole vans and moving trucks from various businesses, including a nonprofit which provides lunches for at-risk children.

Then they crashed the vehicles into storefronts, smashed shop windows with landscaping rocks or used bolt-cutters to get in, then stole as many bicycles as they could, tossing them into the waiting stolen vehicle. They then drove off with the goods before police could catch up.

In the November 2019 caper at Cyclery, the indictment describes an almost “dumb criminal” scenario where the suspects stole a van that was so big and brightly yellow it was impossible to miss. Suspects drove the 16-foot-long vehicle from Aurora to Denver to Highlands Ranch in a bike-stealing spree which involved alluding the Greenwood Village police in a car chase.

The thieves then abandoned the damaged truck on a Denver street, and a concerned citizen called it in from the company phone number painted on the side. When it was eventually recovered, two stolen bicycles were still inside.

Contacted by The Denver Gazette, Denver Small Moves’ Jay Hernandez said he was surprised that the truck even started. “It was our first truck so it was old and we used it for storage. We were shocked. Who steals a moving van?”

The suspects made plans over Facebook Messenger, according to the indictment, including arrangements to have the pilfered bicycles transported from Denver to El Paso, Texas, in a white box truck. The driver, Luis Saenz, then drove the truck across the border to Juárez 158 times and walked across nine times in just one year, starting in August, 2019, the document reported. Investigators tracked large cash withdrawals in Denver and deposits in El Paso associated with the bank account of another man who owned the box truck.

Salvador Mena-Barreno told law enforcement that he made some of his fortune in the El Paso flea market business and denied that his truck ever crossed the border.

Both Mena-Barreno and Saenz are among the eight who are facing criminal charges for the bike thefts. Another, Maurice LeDay, accidentally left his cellphone near the driver door of a stolen truck.

The wealth of data detectives found in his social media accounts plus his fingerprints were major clues in the case.

Returning to the scene

The bike robbers seemed to gravitate toward the same shops over and over, the investigation found, once returning to an Evergreen bike store by remov

ing plywood owners had installed over windows which were broken in an earlier theft.

Denver’s Mojo Wheels at Sheridan and Dartmouth got hit, only to get hit again. According to the indictment, the first Mojo Wheels heist happened overnight on Friday, Sept. 7, 2019, when thieves broke into the Denver Public Schools parking lot at 2320 West 4th Avenue with a plan to steal a van. After failing to start two vehicles, they were successful with a third. Once they got to Mojo Wheels, they stole six bikes worth $30,000.

“Everyone thinks they’re in an action movie. They rammed in from the front, stole a bunch of new bikes and customer bikes in a smash and grab,” Mojo Wheels sales manager Less than a month later, the same group of criminals hit eight more bike stores along the Front Range, according to the indictment.

“It was horrible,” remembered Mike Bendele, a sales associate at Bike Source in Highlands Ranch.

In one burglary, the suspects stole $90,000 worth of bicycles in under five minutes. In all, the indictment cited 29 burglaries and multiple attempted thefts. One store was hit twice in 10 days. Littleton’s Giant Cyclery, which has since closed, was struck four times.

Mojo Wheels was reeling from the shock from its first smash and grab when the suspects returned three weeks later for more merchandise. “We got hit a second time with a box truck. This time, they tried to crash through the back door, hit the structural I-Beam and shifted it 8 inches. The whole roof was gonna fall down on us,” manager Hamilton said.

Bad luck followed Mojo Wheels. Hamilton says the robberies continued when they moved to a temporary space while the old one was being repaired; and didn’t stop when employees moved bikes back into the Sheridan and Dartmouth in Denver store to start over.

The good news? Mojo hasn’t had a theft in over a year.

“We have installed concrete pylons to the building and there’s metal strapping on the inside of the windows and the bikes are locked down,” Hamilton said. “Honestly, at this point, we’re crossing our fingers.”

A potential remedy?

Bryan Hance, runs a free nonprofit bicycle registry out of his Seattle home. He refers to his Bike Index website as “a bike thief’s worst nightmare.” If a bike is stolen, the owner can report it on Bike

Index and receive messages and tips through a secure messaging platform.

In early 2021, he started getting messages from eagle-eyed bike lovers who noticed that a number of stolen bicycles from Colorado were showing up on a Facebook page called “Alexander’s Bikes” which was run out Juárez.

“People said ‘Man, you’ve got to look at this guy. He’s got a lot of bikes which have Colorado indicators on them,’ ” Hance told The Denver Gazette. “It was weird to see an entire inventory tying back to a single location.”

Hance saw red flags: Some of the Alexander bikes were decorated with decals and stickers from Colorado bike stores, they had scrapes and scratches in weird places as if they’d been stacked on top of one another, and many of them had no pedals. “No pedals means they shipped them. And when you see a brand new bike with scuffing and scratching it means it was pulled out of a window.”

As Hance investigated further, he saw that the owner of the Facebook site had region-locked his seller’s page to Mexico-only, a move which he found suspicious.

“The cynic in me says this guy doesn’t want Americans to find their bikes,” he said.

Hance gathered 150 photos from the site, and sent emails to people throughout the country he calls his “ambassadors.” Within the hour, he had identified ten stolen bicycles.

“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” Hance said.

Hance, who gives all of the credit for the sting to law enforcement, eventually handed his information over to a Colorado detective and waited. When Operation Vicious Cycle was announced last November, he was free to open up about what he’d found.

And about what he continues to uncover.

At the time of publication Bike Index has compiled more than 1,000 individual postings and over 15,000 images from Alexander’s Bikes which represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory. Hance found that bikes which sell for $2,000 to $8,000 in America are going for about that much in pesos.

“No one has ever quantified the gray market for bikes. What this data proves is that these bikes are selling for 90% of their U.S. value,” Hance said. “This isn’t some addict who stole a bike and used the money to get high. This is straightup organized criminal activity.”

Even though the eight men arrested in the Vicious Cycle bike sting are off the street awaiting trial, the Colorado bicycle thefts roll on.

Still disappearing

A huge fitted piece of plywood welcomes customers to EBikes USA in Cherry Creek. Grainy black and white surveillance video from last April shows what happened.

It shows a van back into the front window in a spray of glass and metal.

“They hit it so hard there was glass everywhere,” said co-owner Julie Moarefi. “There were 3,000 square feet of glass all the way to the back of the store.”

For Moarefi and her husband Houshmand, who started selling EBikes from the back of their garage, this was personal.

Moarefi says that Cherry Creek security guards happened to be nearby and took after the panicked store-crashers, who twice drove the wrong-way down a one-way street. She feels no store is safe and once you buy your bike, no lock is theft-proof.

“We tell our customers a lock is a deterrent,” she said. “All you are doing putting a lock on your bike is trying to keep them from stealing it right away.”

Since the hoopla of national attention from Colorado’s bike sting, Hance’s tipster army has grown. He’s even heard from Mexican residents who alert him to other criminal bike operations dotted across Mexico using the same style of online Facebook shop which Alexander’s Bikes uses.

Hance said he alerted Facebook about the possible criminal operations happening under their noses.

Alexander’s Bikes disappeared over the holidays, but Monday, Jan. 11, it was back online posting ads for bicycles.

“I’m throwing up my hands,” Hance said. “I’ve done all I can do. What the hell? We really wish Facebook would have woken up and done something.”

If your bike is stolen:

If you have had a bike stolen in Colorado, check The Bike Index here: https://bikeindex.org. In Denver, bicycle owners can take note of their bike’s serial number and register the bike with the city at no cost. If you’re a commuter riding into Denver from another city, you can still register with Denver in case the bike is stolen there. If your bike is stolen, a Facebook page called Denver Stolen Bikes is a good place to post photos of your bicycle in hopes of finding it.

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2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.denvergazette.com/article/281509344565432

The Gazette, Colorado Springs