Igor Kenk's rented house sticks out like a bad tooth in a brilliant smile on Berryman Street in Yorkville, where a renovated townhouse goes for $1.2-million.
A sticky-note advertisement for 1-800-GOT-JUNK fades beside the front door, and if it's meant to be a question, the answer is yes, even after the police came by on Sunday to remove 100 bicycles from the garage out back. An array of castoff items, from milk crates and tennis balls to a copy of Modern Competitive Analysis, Third Edition, still littered Mr. Kenk's driveway yesterday, where his Toyota pickup, bearing the vanity plate EXTATIC, sat silent, its cargo box full of similar detritus.
As for the bikes, they sat in a police warehouse among another 1,500 and counting that officers have seized from five Toronto addresses linked to Mr. Kenk, owner of a ramshackle repair shop on Queen Street West where stolen bicycles were allegedly sold, sometimes back to their original owners, police say.
Mr. Kenk, 49, who faces charges of theft and possession of stolen property, along with possession of drugs including marijuana, crack cocaine and powdered cocaine, is in jail pending a bail hearing this Friday. Jean Laveau, 47, whom Mr. Kenk allegedly instructed to steal a bicycle while police looked on last Wednesday, was arrested with him and faces similar counts.
These images show the back of the property on Queen Street West in Toronto from which many bicycles have already been removed, but many wheels, tires, etc. still remains. Officers executed further search warrants on the property looking for stolen bikes. (Peter Power / The Globe and Mail)
Related Articles
Initially, police removed hundreds of bikes from Mr. Kenk's shop, but hundreds more were found in weekend searches of his Yorkville home, where police said the drugs were found, and at garages he had rented on College Street, east of Dufferin Street, and on Dovercourt Road, north of Dupont Street. As news of the alleged theft operation circulated, police received a tip and cleared out a fifth storage facility yesterday.
As aggrieved theft victims filed into the Hanna Avenue police garage to peer hopefully into the massive jumble of frames and handlebars just after 2 p.m. yesterday, a cube van full of bikes arrived, fresh from the latest search.
"You haven't seen around the corner yet," Superintendent Ruth White of 14 division said as she waded deeper into the warehouse, "and there's more coming."
Supt. White said she hasn't seen anything like it in 30 years of policing. "We had a woman identify her bike that was stolen eight years ago," she said, adding that about 70 owners had so far been reunited with their wheels - or at least their frames.
Grant Downey, a 39-year-old real estate agent, was among the lucky. After a fruitless visit to the warehouse on Saturday, he returned yesterday after more bikes had arrived, and there, in plain view, was his baby: a sparkling, lime-green Scapin, an Italian beauty worth $3,000, though it was missing its wheels.
"It's the green one there," Mr. Downey said as he pointed and jumped with excitement. "I'd know it anywhere. It's very rare."
After a battery of questions from police, Mr. Downey was handed his bike back. "It was three years ago," he said of its theft from a secure lockup at his east-end condo, "but I never gave up hope."
Mr. Downey said he went to Mr. Kenk's shop to look for his bike shortly after it went missing, a common practice among theft victims, since it operated as a pawn shop. (Detective Izzy Bernardo, a lead investigator in the case, said that before his arrest, the shop owner had, as required, kept weekly logs of bicycles that he took in to sell, and that he had occasionally turned in bikes that had been found to be stolen.)
But, because Mr. Downey had not registered his bicycle with the police or recorded its serial number, he could not have definitively claimed it when he visited Mr. Kenk. As it was, the shop owner, citing the extreme clutter inside his shop, "wouldn't let me in," Mr. Downey said.
Curtis Monti, 35, reported a similar experience yesterday, recalling the Oct. 26, 2005, theft of his $3,000 Kona Explosif, in broad daylight and captured on a surveillance camera, at Bloor and St. George streets.
"People said, 'If it's anywhere, it's at Igor's,' " Mr. Monti said, so he paid Mr. Kenk a visit. "I sort of baited him to lead him to believe I was looking [to buy] a bike," rather than the victim of a recent theft, he said.
Mr. Kenk allowed him into the cramped chaos of his shop, and "it looked like Silence of the Lambs for bicycles," but he did not see his Kona among them.
Mr. Monti had the same result at the police warehouse yesterday.
"I've already got it replaced," he said. "I just want to see an end to the story."
That's not likely any time soon, as police begin the laborious task of going through the massive cache of seized bicycles. Happy as they were to hand 70 of them back to their owners, it barely made a dent in the pile, most of which remained unsorted. Yesterday was the last day the warehouse, which is needed for repairs to cruisers and other police work, was to be open to the public, but Supt. White said police are scrounging for 1,400 square metres [15,000 square feet] of space, on a donated site if necessary, to catalogue and display them for another two weeks.
"I just can't believe the constant flow of the public," she said, adding that people's reactions have been stronger than those typically seen after a house break-in. "Obviously, it's important to people."
