The world champion bike thief
Bookworm on Aug 21 2008 at 6:14 pm | Filed under: Crime and punishment, Silly Stuff
While the Olympics has been churning on in Beijing, another champion has been at work in Toronto. Igor Kenk, who was arrested last year, stole almost three thousand bikes, making him one of the most hated men in the City:
What exactly was he planning to do with 2,865 bicycles?
The police are baffled by what Igor Kenk planned to do with such a surplus of bikes.
That is just one of many questions the police and others have been puzzling over since the arrest last month of Igor Kenk, the owner of a used-bike shop here.
Mr. Kenk’s legacy now fills a former police garage with a leaky roof. Organized by brand name and mostly resting on their handlebars, wheels pointed upward, are 2,396 of the bicycles that police say Mr. Kenk either stole or arranged to have stolen.
The jumbled collection of bicycles suggests that Mr. Kenk is the unofficial world champion of bicycle thieves. But as he awaits trial next month on 58 charges related to theft and drug possession, the biggest mysteries of all are Mr. Kenk’s 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 Mr. Kenk for more than a year as part of a study of his rundown neighborhood’s transition to hipsterdom. “But I just found that it’s not as black and white as I originally thought.”
Read the rest here. It’s quite amusing, not to mention baffling.
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There was a Chinese film from 2001 called Beijing Bicycle about a messenger who had to work off his bicycle and just as he was about to pay it off, it was stolen. The guy who took it wanted to impress a girl. Perhaps Mr. Kenk had many he wanted to impress.