Bryan Hance knew all about stolen bicycles. Eleven years ago, he cofounded Bike Index, a site where people can register their missing bikes. He saw how, over the years, bicycle theft had morphed from a crime of opportunity—a snatch-and-grab, or someone applying a screwdriver to a flimsy lock—to a brazen, calculated business of break-ins, angle grinders, and Strava-stalking.
But when he discovered a Mexican Facebook page listing $8,000 bikes for a fraction of their value, he knew something was different. As it turns out, the crime he'd begun to uncover was massive—perhaps one of the largest of its kind anybody had ever seen. What followed was four years of detective work so all-consuming that, by the end, the only thing he wanted as much as justice was to be free of it.
