Toronto Bike Thief
This is incredible. He stole almost 3000 bikes before he was arrested last week. I wonder what it feels like to be one of the most hated people in your own city…
Toronto’s mysterious bicycle thief By Ian Austen
Thursday, August 21, 2008TORONTO: What exactly was he planning to do with 2,865 bicycles?
That is just one of many questions the police and others are puzzling over after the arrest last month of Igor Kenk, the proprietor of a used-bike shop here.
Kenk’s legacy now fills the top floor of a former police garage. Organized by brand name and mostly resting on their handlebars, wheels pointed upward, are thousands of bicycles that the police allege Kenk either stole or arranged to have stolen.
The rat pack collection of bicycles arguably makes Kenk the unofficial world champion of bicycle thieves. But as he awaits trial next month on 58 charges related to theft and drugs, the biggest mysteries of all are Kenk’s possible motives and his ultimate plan for the armada of steel, rubber and aluminum he amassed.
“He’s easily the most hated man in Toronto,” said Alex Jansen, a filmmaker who has been working on a documentary about Kenk for a little more than a year. “But I just found that it’s not as black and white as I originally thought.”
Kenk was something of an informal social worker, Jansen explained, giving work to street people and outpatients from a nearby mental health institution. Of course, some of that work allegedly involved stealing bicycles.
The arrest has provoked an outpouring of emotion and publicity in a city renowned as one of the most bicycle-friendly places in the world. About 15,000 cyclists have scoured the Kenk collection in search of their missing bicycles. But only 469 bicycles had been returned as of Thursday morning, when another 17 days of public viewings began.
“It was staggering,” Ruth White, the superintendent of 14 Division, the unit that made the arrest, said of the public reaction. “I’ve never seen anything like it in 30 years.”
Oddly enough, the police and many bicyclists were aware that Kenk’s little shop, the Bike Clinic, appeared to be a black hole that seemingly consumed every bicycle stolen in the city. Bike-theft victims regularly discovered their missing bicycles there and were often able to recover them either through vigorous argument or by paying $30 or $40. more…
