The biggest problem is that these thieves have a person who will look the other way and not ask questions when buying stolen property. Igor was complicit in the crime.

Think about it – people stealing catalytic converter, copper cables or whatever. They will get a fraction of the actual worth of those items but replacing these things or repairing the damage to the car/building is so much more for the innocent victim.

Quotes from local (Toronto) TV ads:
Jewelry isn’t forever.
I’m the Loan Arranger. Take my cash and go to the track!

No lets have classes in Culture Tyranny instead, and why gophers made it into Disney’s Winnie the Pooh, when they don’t exist in Pooh’s native habitat of East Sussex. I’ll leave it to you to Google where that is.

I think I saw him on the street today. He is much better dressed but you cannot hide the evil.

He should be shunned until he shows some remorse.

Seriously

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1V57L8LjN4

You were “skint”? And your bike was “nicked”? I know you’re living in England, but cor blimey and stone the crows. Are we going to have to stage a de-Brittainifying intervention?

And with all due respect: No. Not “every second-hand merchant” deals in stolen goods. If you’re going to praise the authors of this graphic novel for not rationalizing Mr. Kenk, perhaps such rationalizations aren’t needed.

People have no respect for others belongings anymore, and no matter how much of a “guru” this Igor was to the author, chances are he was thieving his whole life, through necessity or simple choice, and was taking away someone’s mode of transportation. This guy doesn’t need to be immortalized, he should be vilified. Just because he’s a “character” doesn’t mean he’s above the law and if he loved bikes and biking that much, he wouldn’t have been stealing bikes from other people. My guess is he profited even more by taking in bikes he suspected or knew were stolen for less money, then selling them at a big profit.

The guy should be prosecuted. He’s breaking laws, and should be prosecuted.

Oh yeah, Just look at this awesome Kenk t-shirt:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9144422@N04/4889290863/

I don’t know if the filmmakers are still selling them or not.

The brother of a friend of mine lets can him Peter is a professional with a good income; he’s lived all his adult life on Queen West. One day his bike is stolen. He had insurance on it so he went down to Duke’s Cycle with insurance check in hand and because Duke’s dealt in high end bicycles Peter was the perfect customer. Somehow Peter ends up with an even more expensive bike than the first and low and behold a week later it gets stolen too.

Now with insurance check in hand again, this time an even bigger settlement because the list price was higher, off he goes to Dukes again. Duke sells him an even better bike.

Now he’s got a bike that he hangs up on the wall in his front hallway because it’s so fabulously expensive that it wouldn’t last 5 minutes in the back yard – a bike so insanely expensive that he can’t take it anywhere because no lock is good enough to hold it.

Vanity, Greed, Avarice. Take your pick.

I discovered through that story (but Peter didn’t) that if you buy a road bike from the 1970′s and lock it with a link chain and a keyed padlock, no one even looks at it. But perhaps that’s the problem.

Much more likely than the police railroading that looser.

Stealing bicycles affects the urban poor more than anyone else- people who rely on cheap transportation to get around, and may not have a couple of bucks to spare for a bus pass.

It was great walking along and seeing store, store, store, bike chaos, store, store…

I can think of plenty situations where if my books were stolen I would fail a class.

How far can you go out of your way, and how sure can you be sure that you’re not buying a stolen bike. If you think about all of the 20+ year old bikes on the streets of Toronto, it’s hard to imagine one that hasn’t been nicked at one point in its existence. I’m pretty suspicious that the bike I bought off craigslist was stolen after I found a serial no. under some reflective tape when I peeled it off, but what am I to do when I just paid $100 for a bike. Maybe people are just more comfortable going to their local bike shop and having a relationship with the vendors when purchasing a second-hand bike. Even if they know there is a good chance they will end up with a once stolen bike either way.

I’m glad that this graphic portrat of Kenk dosen’t act as an apology for his actions (which are inexcusable IMHO), but I don’t think I could ever read it. It would simply make me too angry to try and feel any sympathy for the man who took my only means of transportation away from me.

He may not have directly stolen it, but he certainly facilitated it’s disapearance.

As for Cory’s ambivalence about Kenk, I get that. A lot of crooks are really good at manipulating people’s feelings about them; it let cold-eyed sociopaths like Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde pass themselves off as folk heroes. Hell, in my own state, it looks like Rod Blagojevich will walk, despite clear evidence that he tried to get his hands on every dirty dollar he could lay his sticky fingers on, and despite his own defense basically saying that he wasn’t really a crook due to sheer incompetence; there’s a theory that part of the reason that the jury is hung is because of Rod’s decree that seniors get to ride on the Chicago Transit Authority for free, even though he didn’t bother to figure out how to pay for it, and it probably won’t last for much longer.