“Cutting crew: Benjamin Ortiz tracks down a ring of professional bike heisters.”
An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art style emperor.”
–St. Augustine, “The City of God”


A repetitive techno beat pulses synthetic energy as three little hoodlums cruise a desolate North Side residential stretch at 4am. After a few hours of party-hopping and hitting forty-ouncers, it’s time to settle some accounts. Chavo passes a joint to Kief in the backseat when he spots the target he has been looking for all night, and with a quick hand signal he motions to the driver. “What’s up?” Smoke asks, pulling the ride into slow motion. And then at once they detect what Chavo’s eagle eye picked out from beneath the shadows: a state-of-the-art Gary Fisher 24-speed with suspension shocks and top-line gearshift, locked to a yard fence. As they creep by, Chavo eyeballs the prize and reaches his hand out for the boys to lay five on him. “Hell yeah!” Kief nods his head with smoked-out enthusiasm. “You got infra-red eyes, bro! That shit is just asking for us to take it to the bank!”

I ride my bicycle through a labyrinthine wasteland of Chicago’s industrial husk to an address I secured only after calling three voice-mail boxes, finally getting the mumbled directions from Pee-Wee, an “associate” of the boys. At the end of a deserted cul-de-sac, I find the action: a crumbling, stuccoed two-story house pumps with bass, booming through my bike frame from a block away. I roll up, and older teens check me out from a lopsided porch. Some form a smoking ring on the ledge, and a few couples go back to making out. Walking my bike through the rusty, crooked gate and up the sidewalk, I greet a few mad-do stares with “What’s up?” Smoke snaps out of his tobacco meditations and stands up from a slouched low-rider lawn chair. “What’s up?” he echoes as he plods past the people on the steps. “Where should I put my ride?” I ask. He sizes my bike up with roaming eyes. “Just set it by the fence, dog, ain’t nobody here gonna take it.” I don’t know if I should feel assured or insulted at his bottom-line evaluation, but I secure the bike and he escorts me into he house party.

Smoke and two friends he grew up with, Kief and Chavo, form the core of a veteran bike-thief posse. Many of their pals at the party have gone on runs with them or manage their own theft crews. Smoke and his buddies see nothing wrong with a little friendly competition; through their network of “associates,” they are able to farm out merchandise and keep sales flowing. Soon after I approached Smoke with the idea of writing a story on his crew, he called me back and said, “The boys figure you can help us out with PR.” And so they invited me to check out their warehouse during peak party time for a conversation about the biz.

Smoke and I walk up to the front door and a solid mountain of a man named Smiley waves us through with an impassive, slight nod. “At $3 a head, we’re gonna clear $600 tonight after expenses,” Smoke explains with a hint of pride. We walk into a front room decorated with chipped paint, random graffiti tags and strobes, through layers of groove throbbing from the turntables and mixer, as a sweaty crowd shakes their asses to booty-call house music. Smoke hails and slaps five on nearly everyone along the way to the kitchen, where Kief and Chavo are maxing and relaxing. With a lazy grin, Chavo nods toward the back door, where the four of us retreat for some shop talk.

The boys circle back around the block, Smoke all the while scratching his chin and calculating balance sheets in his head: “I’d say approximately $1,200 retail, and I can push it for $600, which comes to $200 each, plus whatever commission I can pull in off the customer.” Chavo smells a paycheck. “Let’s do this,” Kief confirms, pulling a pair of Kmart bolt cutters from under the seat. The techno vibe crescendoes into hard acid chaos as Chavo’s sticky fingers flex. He bobs his head with the electric rush he feels for the job at hand.

On the back porch, Kief pins my arms behind my back while Chavo frantically pats me down. “You got a wire? YOU GOT A WIRE?” Kief says, and they bust up laughing. “Just kidding,” Chavo adds. “We know you ain’t no McGruff Crime Dog, G.” At twenty years of age, Chavo is the informal leader of his crew and the first to have gotten into bike theft. He started a year ago when some friends with mutual interests decided they were tired of having raggedy-assed bikes and wanted “the dope rides.” Kief, now 18, got into the life when he saw what Chavo was doing and wanted a piece of the action. Together, they’ve heisted seventy-five bikes in a year without getting caught, spotted or snitched on. “The first job I pulled was at night in the Lincoln Park area,” Chavo remembers, “and I didn’t even know if bolt cutters would work, but they did the trick sho’ ’nuff. The procedure was standard, and I rode away with some piece of shit I thought was fresh. But it was worth only $200 retail, tops.”

Chavo laughs at his amateur days of snatching chump change. “It all started out as fun, but it became less a game and more a way to solve financial problems. Snatching bikes helped bail out my family for doctor bills, rent and such when regular work didn’t pay jack.” Discovering the profit potential, Chavo and Kief educated themselves to increase the return on their labor and risk. “We asked questions at bike stores and read magazines to find out the most expensive frames and components — it was like research, except not for some bullshit book report,” Chavo says. “It’s a job I do every now and then for money, but I still do it for fun, for the rush I get out of it.” Kief confirms “the rush,” a natural adrenaline kick from the dexterity and danger involved.

Smoke, 19, never got into the thrill of snatching, but found his niche as the group’s business and sales manager. He still goes on runs with them every now and then to help sniff out high-profit targets. Smoke gives his job title as “middleman, expert in the distribution of new properties.” Smoke sometimes posts flyers to sell a bike, telling the customer he has to trade in his favorite one for school money. His usual practice, though, is to find a buyer through word of mouth. He explains how the boys cut the retail price of their wares in half for sale, so if Smoke goes on the run he gets his equal cut plus whatever extra the customer is willing to pay. “You’ve been skimming off the top!” Chavo breaks in with exaggerated anger, reaching into his coat pocket like he’s pulling out a piece. Smoke laughs. “Nah, the mark-up is my commission for the extra sales work I do,” he says. “No matter what, though, the customer always gets a good deal.”

The car pulls up with its lights off half a block from the merchandise, and Smoke keeps the engine idling. Kief and Chavo close the doors quietly and exit with a firm pace, all the while looking up and down the street for John Does and Five-O’s. Nothing’s going on here, officer, just two youths in hoodies and baggy gear power-walking with a large set of bolt cutters between them. Chavo plants himself next to a tree just off the sidewalk in front of the yard, blending into the darkness, and Kief moves in on the goal.”

Chavo breaks it down: “We usually scope out bikes just before sundown, so we don’t waste any time at a rack trying to find the right model. Then we snatch between eleven at night and 1am, or from four to six in the morning. Spotting the bike can take the most time, but the actual job takes two, three minutes tops.” With a one-time expense for bolt cutters, the crew prefers the lock-crunching method to freon. “Hydraulic jacks are also good for breaking U-locks, but we never try to pull locked bikes off traffic signs, ’cause then you still have to transport the bike and break the lock anyway,” Chavo says. The crew can take on most anti-theft devices except certain U-locks — like the Kryptonite New York — and some fiber O-locks. If a lock cannot be broken, the mission is aborted. “Which is cool,” Chavo says, smiling, “because sometimes we can take valuable components anyways, mix and match them with good frames we have in stock.”

The three say they never would beat down some unsuspecting cyclist and snatch a bike by force. “That’s fucked-up man,” Chavo says. “And unprofessional,” Smoke adds. “My parents wouldn’t approve of what I do, even though I do it for them lotsa times,” Kief clarifies. “But if they hadn’t brought me up with the right morals, I probably would be socking fools in the face and jacking bikes by crude strength — but that shit’s deep and only gets deeper.” Chavo shakes his head. “Ruthlessness, what you’re talking about.”

Kief sets the bolt cutters aside as he glances at the two-story duplex some twenty-five feet away. No lights, no sounds. Then his eyes feast on the chalice. The front wheel is quick-release, of course, and a Kryptonite Sport secures both wheel and frame to the chain-link fence. Kief pulls out a pocket knife and takes thirty seconds to strip rubber away from the bolt-and-key part of the U-lock. Once a bare, vulnerable strip of metal is visible near the lock mechanism, Kief stashes the knife and steadies the jaws of the bolt cutters on the lock. With one of the cutter grips firmly resting against the ground, Kief starts to push with all his weight against the opposite grip, and the lock groans slightly under the pressure. But then a sharp, quick whistle pierces his ears, and he pulls the cutters away. Chavo has just noticed a car turning a corner two blocks south and moving in on the spot, so he and Kief disappear under the tree. Smoke, too, ducks down in the driver’s seat. Headlights close in on the getaway ride.

When I ask Chavo if he’d ever buy a stolen bike, he looks at me sideways, unimpressed. “Depends on the price, dog.” Kief and Smoke bust up laughing. But how would Chavo feel if someone stole his bike? “Actually, some parts did get taken off my bike once,” he says. “Fuck it, there’s enough to go around.” Kief and Smoke nod in agreement. And then I drop the bomb: What would you say to people who think you’re wrong for stealing, for taking what’s not yours and what you didn’t work for? Chavo and Kief hedge for a while, like they’re looking around for an answer to pop up. “I guess I’d say they’re right,” Chavo finally says in a flat tone. “Basically, it’s bad what we’re doing,” Kief agrees, “but I don’t do it for drugs or high-profiling, just for the money, for shit I need.” Smoke, silent all the while, shakes his head. “Nah, bro, what we’re doing is redistributing wealth, ’cause the way I see it, some fool who has a $1,000 bike isn’t hurting for rent and bills like us. Straight up.” After Smoke speaks the virtues of converting private property into communal resource, he works another angle. “Put it to you this way, since you’re a straight John Doe who pays his taxes and obeys the Constitution and all that bullshit, not like us illegal motherfuckers — there’s people taking you for your livelihood every day and lying to you about it to your face, dog! Highway robbers in suits and government gangsters using your money to kill Gs like me worldwide! And then somebody gonna act like I’m a little maggot for taking what I need to help my moms ’cause she doesn’t have a fuckin’ gold card? Shiiit…”

The car zooms by without incident, and Smoke sits up to see brake lights in the distance. Chavo crawls back to his post, and Kief wastes no time working at the lock. The cutter jaws crunch it open in no time, and Kief pulls the broken corpse away from his new toy as Chavo strides over, collecting both the shattered lock and the bolt cutters. At once, Kief mounts the Gary Fisher and kicks away from the scene, Chavo walks back to the car and Smoke shifts the engine into “drive.” Kief disappears down a side street into an alley. Chavo and Smoke five each other as the car lights come back on, congratulating themselves on a nice, clean job well done. The easy part now is to rendezvous with Kief at the checkpoint, stash the goods and maybe hit a rave. It’s OE 800 time.

“Bicyclists’ Golden Rule:
Never buy a stolen bike.”
–“Bike Cult,” David Perry

Bike Thieves’ Golden Rule:
Greed will fuck you up.

The party still bumps with diabolical mixing, and it looks like the boys are anxious to get stupid on the dance floor, so I ask to see their warehouse of goods before we break off the interview. “Right this way,” Smoke announces, more than happy to showcase the fruits of their labor. He leads me into the kitchen and through a bolted, padlocked door down into a musty, post-apocalyptic basement. Carefully stepping down a splintered wooden stairway, I ask Chavo if he sees a future for himself in bike burglary. “I’ll definitely never look at a bike the same way,” he answers, as we walk through a boiler room up to another bolted door. Do you think you’ll ever graduate to grand theft, like jacking expensive cars?” I ask. “There he goes with that corrupt shit again,” Kief breaks in, laughing. Chavo smiles, but then responds seriously. “We’re strictly bikes — nothing more, nothing less. We leave other markets to the experts.”

We finally reach a cramped, low-ceilinged crevice which serves as the graveyard of broken locks: Gorillas, Pyramids, ATBs, the Club for Bikes. (Kief evaluates the Club: “What a fuckin’ joke!”) In the opposite corner rest fifteen bicycles. Specialized Rock Hoppers, Gary Fishers, a Mongoose, GTs, Treks. My guides give me a rundown of the prices and stories attached to each model. “Here’s one I got with some serious rookies,” Kief snaps. “I pretty much go out with Chavo and others I can trust to do the job right, but I’ve been out with some wannabes who fuck up a lot.” Kief blazes a few tales about “busters who punk out on a job right when it’s happening.” Some super-rookies specialize in taking bikes from people caught “slipping,” like when someone leaves only the quick-release wheel locked but not the frame.
“This one time,” Kief recounts, “some shorties I went with spent fifteen minutes playing around on one rack until they got this bike right here, and then they wanted another one from the same rack!” Chavo adds his contempt, “Yeh, that was bullshit right there. Rookies are rookies, meaning they fuck up, but greediness is one thing I do not tolerate when I go out on a run. Aside from leaving evidence behind, getting greedy is the worst mistake you can make.” I’m confused.

What’s the difference between “bringing in bank” and being greedy? “Somebody who gets greedy can pick up two nice bikes in one night want to go for more just ’cause they can make mad money for a new CD player or whatever,” Chavo answers. “I mean, there’s a lot of bikes out there and a lot of people snatching them, but greed is not called for.” Kief agrees: “We do it so we don’t have to struggle so much, not for fresh gear and jewelry. The guy who gets greedy keeps thinking, ‘Yeah, just one more bike, and I can get cable!’ But that one more bike can make you sloppy and get you in trouble.” Chavo sums it up: “After you score some valuable merchandise, you just have to relax or it will go to your head. Greed will fuck you up.”

Smoke brings the conversation back to biz. “So what you think?” Sounds like a proposition. “I saw the Acapulco Giant you rolled up on, and it looks like you could afford to upgrade, my brother.” More laughs, but then Smoke turns to me and flashes a grin. “Nothing wrong with a test ride, eh?”
— by Benjamin Ortiz
NewCity 23 November 1995

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