They’re a little older and a fair bit wiser, but Toronto cyclists aren’t likely to forget the name Igor Kenk any time soon, even if the courts are essentially finished with him.
Mr. Kenk, 50, pleaded guilty to 16 charges Tuesday, bringing an end to a high-profile case that began in 2008 with a single bicycle-theft arrest and ballooned into the seizure of nearly 3,000 bikes, illegal drugs and other items he’d stashed around the city.
His guilty pleas, on counts of possessing cocaine, marijuana and 10 stolen bikes, averted a months-long trial on dozens more charges and thus relieved the Crown from having to mount a case it had struggled to assemble for its sheer volume of evidence.
In the end, Judge Kathleen Caldwell settled on a 30-month sentence that will see Mr. Kenk serve just four more months in jail.
She gave him the standard double credit for the 13 months he’d already spent in custody awaiting justice.
The sentence came less than two weeks after Mr. Kenk lost most of what he owns in a proceeds-of-crime civil suit brought by the Ontario government.
He forfeited 2,200 bikes, two pickup trucks and agreed to the supervised sale of his bike shop, from which he’ll have to pay $50,000 to the province and his legal fees.
“It was the appropriate resolution under the circumstances,” Crown prosecutor Ruth Kleinhenz said of the criminal case yesterdayTuesday outside the Old City Hall courts.
“Obviously, proving the theft of 3,000 bicycles would be quite a feat, but this is a representative sample of the bicycles that were stolen” in the days before Mr. Kenk’s arrest, she said of the 10 he admitted to having.
News of Mr. Kenk’s July 16, 2008 arrest, after police watched him pay a man to steal a bike, turned from a trickle to a torrent in short order.
Police received a tip that he was running a drugs-for-bikes scheme and their initial searches of his Queen Street West bike shop and Yorkville home led to a dozen more raids, trumpeted to the media, at rented garages around the west end.
The resulting haul of 2,865 bikes, several kilograms of marijuana, packets of cocaine and a motley array of castoffs made headlines around the world, but in Toronto, the case caused a shift in the city’s cycling consciousness, said Yvonne Bambrick, executive director of the Toronto Cyclists Union.
“That was a big step, that he did go down, that his shop was no longer in business, that we had so much awareness raised in and around the issue of bike theft in Toronto,” Ms. Bambrick said.
“And I think it was a big eye-opener for police to see just how passionate people are about this stuff, about how personal it is when you have a bicycle stolen.”
For weeks after the raids on Mr. Kenk’s garages, police held open houses where theft victims could reunite with their lost wheels, and returned 582 bikes to those who could prove ownership.
The nearly 2,200 unclaimed bikes stood as a reminder to cyclists to register their bikes with police, and registrations soared as a result.
Meanwhile, bike thefts plunged substantially, from an average of 2,821 per year between 2004 and 2008, to 2,087 in the year ending Aug. 31, 2009, Toronto police statistics show.
“People now know that it’s worth investing in an expensive lock so that you can avoid suffering a loss on the street,” Ms. Bambrick said.
“I think in the past people felt as though they were just not being heard by police and that they didn’t care,” which may have discouraged them from registering bikes or reporting thefts.
As for Mr. Kenk’s sentence, “my sense … is that he got off a bit too easy,” Ms. Bambrick said, though she acknowledged “the needs of the courts and the police to balance out costs and time.”
What lies beyond his release from jail in four months, meanwhile, is anyone’s guess.
“It’ll be interesting to see what he does, because on one hand, this is a man who has caused a lot of pain to many people through his involvement with bike theft, but on the other hand is a great lover of bicycles,” she said. “So he’s quite a dynamic character in that sense.”
