Igor wasn’t there.
Igor Kenk had called just seconds ago.
I stood outside the door of my room in a brightly colored hostel in Ljubljana, Slovenia, saying, “Hello? Igor? Hello?” into my phone. There was no reply.
Igor had recommended the hostel, which was sculpted out of the hollowed remains of a Communist-era prison. Maybe that was meant to be a winking endorsement—a lodging where you can lock yourself up for the night using the still-intact bars—from a man who did jail time. But I detected not a trace of irony.
“Hello?”
I called back. There was a ring, then a click, as if someone answered, then more silence.
I headed for the lobby, and while I was thinking over my next move, I turned a corner and nearly collided with Igor leaning against a wall. He nodded, as if this was precisely what he’d expected to happen. At 6-foot-1, he was a striking presence: the thin, shoulder-length brown hair, the swollen hands of a prizefighter, the cinematic blue eyes centered in his craggy face. At 54, Kenk was both hulking and springy, even catlike in his movements. He was wearing black spandex cycling tights and a green jacket bearing the brand of Italian sportswear company Briko.
I held up my phone with an inquisitive look, and he explained: Mobile calls cost 11 cents a minute. By calling but hanging up before we connected, he could announce his arrival but save the 11 cents.
Outside he showed me the bike he’d procured for me for the next few days. It was a lavender-painted Scott hybrid, probably 15 years old, flat handlebar, with a raven’s nest of antiquated cable locks smothering the rear rack. Bungeed to the top tube was a battered blue umbrella, ribs poking out the bottom. Mary Poppins channeling Tim Burton.
Later, he explained its provenance. He’d purchased it in anticipation of my visit—knowing I’d need a bike to fit my 6-foot-7 frame—from a guy at the Ljubljana flea market, or, as he calls it, “church.”
“He wanted 50 euros,” Kenk said, in his cheerful, melodious accent. “I said, ‘Okay, buddy, I want [it for] 30, and tomorrow, a piece of ID and your signature claiming that the bike is cleaner than whistle.’ Which, I didn’t add, we both know you probably stole it fucking half an hour ago.”
They settled on 40. I wanted to ask more about the deal, but that would have to wait. Kenk was already climbing on his own beater bike and tearing away.
Igor is a thief.
Of course, right? Back in 2008, The Guardian labeled him the “world’s most prolific” bike thief. On the sunny morning of July 16, officers were conducting surveillance in Toronto’s Queen Street West neighborhood, according to police Sgt. Robert Tajti. Cops say they saw a man use bolt cutters to extract a bike from its lock, then deliver it to Kenk in front of his shop, the Bicycle Clinic. They watched Kenk pay him in cash; then the man walked to another locked bike and repeated the process. Police swooped in and arrested both men. Two days later, acting on an informant’s tip, police obtained warrants to search multiple rental properties owned by Kenk around the city. Officers recovered well over 2,200 bikes and countless parts; in the rented apartment he shared with his girlfriend in the city’s Yorkville neighborhood, they allegedly found about three thousand Canadian dollars in cash.
Kenk was charged with theft, attempted theft, possession of stolen property, and possession of burglar tools. (He was never convicted.) Word of his otherworldly bicycle stash spread around the globe, and Toronto’s bike community howled in outrage. When the police put the seized bikes on display in hopes victims would reclaim them, some walked through teary-eyed. “I’ve never seen anything like it in 30 years,” Ruth White, superintendent of the police division that made the arrest, told the New York Times.
It may have been emotional, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Everyone knew Kenk took in stolen bikes. “I myself, amongst many other officers out on the street, had told people who had reported their bikes stolen, ‘Go down to Igor’s and see if it shows up there,’” Sgt. Tajti told me.
The trick was getting in. Kenk’s shop was so stuffed with bikes, customers had to navigate a low, narrow passageway. If you made it to the back, you’d enter a yard out of a hoarder’s acid trip: bicycles piled like teetering Seussian jumbles, even hanging in trees. Journalist Richard Poplak was the author of KENK, a book described as a graphic “portrait” by its publisher, Alex Jansen. For the project, Poplak relied in part on many hours of film footage captured by Jansen and two others. “The shop,” said Poplak, “was like a piece of performance art.”
It’s been a decade and a half since his arrest, but Kenk has remained a kind of cult figure—a source of lingering animus and dark fascination, and profound curiosity about his motives and mindset. Kenk himself suggested he was preparing for an economic apocalypse. Others opined that he was a hoarder dealing with mental health issues.
I was just as bewildered. I was an editor at Bicycling magazine when Kenk was arrested, and I instantly wanted to know more. I spent a couple of years sniffing around the story, and then I bought a ticket to Slovenia in 2011. The scenes and interviews you’re reading about here all took place then. I went hoping to make sense of Kenk’s rise and fall, to find out whether I could explain all that took place.
But when I returned home, I struggled with the story. Kenk was a cipher, someone who was far more layered and complex than I’d imagined. After writing several drafts but never quite nailing it, I landed another job. The story was pushed onto a back shelf, and although I intended to return to it as soon as possible, I never did.
More than a decade passed, and although I still hadn’t finished the story, I never stopped thinking about it, either. I would remember him sometimes—and this will make sense later—when I spent more money on something than I felt was wise or left a light on or kept my car running longer than necessary.
Then, last May, I came across a Reddit post titled “Igor Kenk back in town?” The author wrote that a coworker claimed to have spotted Kenk in a Toronto bike shop, using a pseudonym. Fifteen years have passed since he’d been pinched, but here he is. Commenters immediately launched into familiar opinions and theories about him.
No one, it seems, can quite figure out how to let him go.
Igor is a greasy monkey, a social worker, a stray cat, an anarchist, a utopian, a communist, a capitalist, a loser, a legend, a grasshopper, an explosive nonconformist, a sidewalk clown.
These are a few of the terms Kenk used to describe himself as we pedaled around Ljubljana back in 2011. If this sounds like a seething bundle of contradictions, well, sure—this was something he acknowledged but didn’t linger over. He didn’t feel the need to explain.
We rode past cafés and fountains and scenes of quaint old-Europe charm that—having survived the drab Soviet makeover—made the city a sleeper tourist destination.
We talked a little as we rode, but it was hard to settle into conversation. Kenk buzzed aggressively over the city’s sprawling network of bike paths, riding helmetless and fast, knees splaying out jauntily from the too-small frame of his faded green Peugeot. We wound up at Ljubljana Castle, a hulking edifice overlooking the city. As we locked the bikes together and walked toward its parapets, Igor described his middle-class upbringing. His father worked a mid-level government agriculture job in Tito’s socialist regime in what was then the republic of Yugoslavia. (Slovenia declared its independence in 1991.) “My father had very high intelligence, but emotional quotient wasn’t so good,” he said.
Emotional quotient (EQ) is a measurement of a person’s ability to monitor their feelings, cope with pressures and demands, and control their thoughts and actions. Kenk believes EQ is a far more useful indicator of success than the more commonly acknowledged IQ. He says his father surrendered to his fate, like a Tolstoy character, to a dull life far below his intellectual abilities: “Basically, age 30, he was finished. There was nothing left. Poor guy. So I ask mother, ‘What are you gonna do?’ ‘Well, I would leave him, but these thousand losers who are all chasing me down are even bigger losers than him.’ So they kept stumbling over this horrendous fate.”
Meanwhile, Kenk showed unusual proclivities. Math, for example. Starting when he was 5, his grandfather brought him around to pubs, where the old man challenged patrons to wagers: Could they solve complicated, SAT-type math problems faster than the little kid? Boris has 30 eggs, and he gives half of them to his two friends, who each give five of theirs to three others… “Of course,” Igor said, “those drunks were lost 20 times over. And I just go, ‘Oh yeah, the answer would be 28. Easy.’”
Under Tito’s brand of socialism, Kenk’s family believed the best chance for a good education was at the police academy; Igor was accepted at age 15. He graduated, excelling in judo, but only worked briefly as a cop before becoming disillusioned and getting fired, he said, for refusing to go along with brutal tactics and rejecting communist doctrine.
“I said, ‘I’m not fucking material to be member of communist party,’” Kenk recalled. “‘I’m ashamed being piece of this organization here because you’re all fucking hyenas.’”
He eventually found himself adrift in Yugoslavia’s wallowing socialist economy. Because of soaring inflation, goods were priced at three times what they cost in neighboring countries.
Kenk decided to drive into Germany and Austria to buy stuff and try to sneak it back over the border. “I took as much as I felt was gonna pass,” he recalled. The guards would stop him and demand a bribe, “so then we had little vegetable-market situation. He would say, ‘I want 100 [Deutsche] mark.’ I’d say, ‘Sir, I didn’t bring 100 mark.’ ‘Well then, fuck you.’ They turned me around three times.”
Kenk eventually snuck in $2,000 to $3,000 worth of stuff every week—stereo equipment, chocolate, bananas—which he sold at Ljubljana’s flea market, a place he still spoke of with ecclesiastical zeal. Earning a 30 percent profit, he raked in the same income he’d made as a cop. Capitalism and communism were colliding head-on, and he was happy to comb through the wreckage. “I was verifiably a legend here,” Igor said. “I loved it. It was great. I knew this was self-destructive, but hey, if you wanna destruct society, be my guest.”
Eventually he became interested in bikes. His first good one was a Miele with decent Shimano components for which he paid $800, and in what is either an ironic twist or a key moment in his origin story—or maybe both—someone later stole it. “Then I decided, I’m not gonna get myself nervous,” he said. “Whenever they steal my bike, I’m gonna just throw a Frankenstein together.” He soon acquired a German race bike—a Rixe, on which he installed Shimano’s high-end Dura-Ace components—and a new city. In the late 1980s, he moved to Toronto with his first wife, an Air Canada flight attendant. They split up in 1991, but he stayed.
After riding and walking and talking for most of the day, Kenk and I were ravenous. I suggested something prototypically Slovenian. He shook his head and led me into a shopping mall, to a buffet-type cafeteria where we loaded plates of pasta, cutlets of meat, and overflowing bowls of soup and salad onto trays. When I looked around for something to drink, Kenk beckoned me out of the restaurant and onto an escalator. We wound up in the men’s room. “We’re going to tomcat this,” he said, and ran tap water into his massive hands, from which he began slurping. I stared at him, and he straightened, water dripping off his chin. “It’s the same water,” he said, a little defensively.
For reasons that will be clear later, Kenk left Toronto a wealthy man, but he acted as if he were destitute, and he elaborated on this behavior by sharing expansive macroeconomic theories and advice about the importance of saving and the foolishness of wanton spending. He seemed determined to bail out the ocean of capitalism with a valve stem cap, but he lived stridently by this code. “Every dollar you’re dropping now, for the next 30, 40 years would be compounding interest—so each of these dollars is hundreds of dollars,” he said. “But because people are imbeciles, they cannot understand.”
Too many people spend more than they have, which is why, he insisted, we are on the verge of a global economic collapse. Those who travel by bikes will be better positioned when the world morphs into North Korea, he said, gulping his soup. For one thing, they don’t rely on a vanishing supply of fossil fuels. When he finished eating, he picked up his plate and licked it.
Rain was falling when we left. Kenk unfurled the umbrella he’d stashed on the Scott, then remembered there were two of us. Our choice was a dry hour-long walk or a wet 10-minute ride, and it was an easy decision. He racked the umbrella, and we pedaled off.
Igor is a maggot, a hoarder, a human colostomy bag. These are a few of the ways Toronto residents described him, in online bulletin boards and elsewhere, after his 2008 arrest. Someone tagged his old building with the words “Center for poor karma & pain research.” Wil Mills, who worked at Toronto’s Cycle Solutions, recalled the theft of his Wheeler aluminum mountain bike. “I remember seeing my bike lock in pieces and just thinking, Igor,” he told me. Visitors to Kenk’s shop weren’t allowed inside unless they were regulars or he invited them in. But by peeking over the single boarded-up window, Mills saw his bike near the doorway. “I started hitting my broken U-lock on the window, saying, ‘Give me my fucking bike back!’” he recalled.
A 15-minute shouting match ensued, during which Mills learned that Kenk believed he legitimately owned the Wheeler. “He thought if he had possession of the bike, it was now his,” Mills said.
After arriving in Toronto, Kenk delivered mail for Canada’s postal system and took on other odd jobs before he started fixing bikes in 1991. “I decided, well, this has got potential for survival, and potential for fun, so why not, right?” he said. “So I just rented one room and everybody found me there.” He ran his first shop, the Bicycle Clinic, on Queen Street West, from 1992 to ’96, then he moved a few blocks away on the same street to the building that became the seat of his notorious empire, in what was then a blighted neighborhood. The place was called Igor’s Bicycle Clinic Co-op. Word spread.
Kenk asserted that his stock was comprised of bikes he purchased at yard sales and assembled from parts scavenged from the garbage at established shops. He came to believe that bicycles are the greatest invention in human history and carry nothing less than the potential to change the world.
By law, as a dealer of secondhand goods, Kenk was required to do several things. First, when he bought a bike from someone, he was supposed to record the person’s name, address, and driver’s license information in a logbook. He was then required to hold on to the bike for three weeks and display it for the public, so a potential victim could reclaim the property.
Kenk kept the log, but Sgt. Tajti and others said he did not always comply with the second part. Without physical access to the store, the odds of spotting a stolen bike—much less being successfully reunited with it—depended on many things, including Kenk’s mood and the comportment of his visitors. “How enforced do you think that rule was?” said Eric Kamphof, then the CEO and general manager of a shop called Curbside Cycle, who says he, too, was turned away from Kenk’s door after a handful of bikes were stolen during test rides.
Several of Kamphof’s customers managed to get their bikes back from the clinic, he said. “You usually had to [say something] like, ‘Oh, I’m looking for a bike.’ And then you get in there and see yours and you’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s my bike.’ They’d make their case and sometimes he’d be amenable, and other times he’d be a jerk.”
One cyclist, Ryan O’Brien, said a friend found his stolen bike in Kenk’s shop, and they went in for it. O’Brien is a big man, and he was not intimidated. “We went in and we got into a conversation with him,” he said. “It was one of those, ‘That’s mine, I’m fucking taking it.’ A short while afterwards, you start to realize, How the fuck am I going to get that? How am I physically going to get to that thing? I’m going to basically have to solve this guy’s hoarding problem before I can get my bike back.”
Kenk acknowledged that he was fickle. “First five seconds when people open their mouth, you see what state of disrespect they’re operating with,” he said. “I’m thinking, Well, this is lost game. This guy is disrespectful to himself, so therefore even if he wanted to, he cannot respect some greasy monkey such as myself.”
As for the shop’s chaotic state? “It’s a little bit of a protest, my shop,” Kenk said. “When they ask me, ‘Why do you have all this shit?’ I say, ‘I don’t have nothing. It’s not mine, it’s your shit. The world is throwing stuff around, so I’m protesting. You can’t enter into shop because I disagree with producing things that people get and don’t need.’”
Richard Poplak, the journalist, had heard this before. “There’s nothing he does that he can’t intellectualize in a very sneaky and manipulative way,” he said. For example, Kenk’s claim that he held onto bikes for three weeks, when in fact almost no one would have any way of knowing they were in his shop. “It was a letter-of-the-law versus spirit-of-the-law thing,” Poplak said.
Then there was the way Kenk changed parts on bikes—putting a new saddle or different wheels on a new find. He said he did it so that if people came in claiming a stolen bike, he could test their knowledge: What do you notice that’s different here? If they couldn’t pass his test, he refused to return it. “Igor treated bikes like a Lego system,” Sgt. Tajti said. “It was easy to bolt these wheels onto that frame using that handlebar and that seat and create a de facto new bike.” This made it hard for bike owners to identify whether a bike was theirs.
What seemed to really rankle people was that Kenk did all this brazenly, even theatrically. His otherness mystified people, made him into a kind of flesh-and-blood urban legend. Several cyclists I met there had picked up apocryphal details of Kenk’s backstory: One described him as a bike racer from Czechoslovakia who was married to a musician. Few knew him, but everyone knew of him.
Here’s the hard part to square: Kenk’s shop was popular. He had loyal patrons, and the Bicycle Clinic never lacked for foot traffic. He believed the upkeep of a bike for most casual riders was needlessly expensive, so he offered free maintenance classes. He also created his own bikeshare program: For $20, customers could take one of his bicycles for a year, free upkeep included. If they wanted to bring it back, he would refund their money. Kenk has an excellent memory, so if he saw someone bring in a regular customer’s bike, he would grab it back and call them to retrieve it.
Bike owners blamed the cops for allowing Kenk to operate. Cops, in turn, blamed the bike owners, and the system. “The thing with secondhand pawn shops is they’re essentially licensed purveyors of stolen property,” Tajti said.
For big-city police departments dealing with homicides, sexual assaults, and other violent crime, bike theft will never be a high priority—“especially when we have an apathetic victim base,” Tajti said. “We offer them free bike registration so that if we recover [bikes] we can source them back.”
But most bike owners didn’t bother and simply considered theft a part of life. “It was the cost of doing business in Toronto,” Tajti said. “You buy a bike, you keep it for a year, somebody steals it, you get another bike. It was just the thing to do. Or, you get your bike stolen, you go to a place like Igor’s because you can’t afford to get a new bike, so you buy somebody else’s stolen bike. So now they’re being victimized, but they’re being complicit with the victimization of their neighbor.”
The question was whether there was any way to create a different result—and whether Kenk’s shop might have played a role in that. Reading KENK, Poplak’s graphic novel, Kamphof was struck that the circles on the Venn diagram of their worlds may have at least slightly overlapped. “What I loved about reading the book was that he loves the bicycle,” he said. “So I have a lot in common with that guy. I believe the bicycle is going to change North American cities, and he believed that, too.”
Igor is an environmentalist.
Not in the way many people I know are, including me—people who stridently declare they want to reduce their impact on the planet, but fall short of taking the big steps to back it up. We recycle diligently, but we keep flying, keep thoughtlessly going about our high-consumption routines. Not long after he served his sentence in Toronto, Kenk moved back to Slovenia, where he seemed to have resettled into a new life. During my visit, he carried around a plastic bag that he stuffed with trash he picked up everywhere we went. His new girlfriend, Sveta, a shy graphic designer in her 50s who spoke little English, confirmed with a roll of her eyes that he wasn’t just showing off for me; he did this habitually.
Once, we stopped at a pharmacy pick-up window; Kenk engaged in a vigorous dialogue with someone waiting in his car. When I asked about the altercation, Kenk said he had berated the man for leaving his car engine idling. No one likes the idea of carbon needlessly drifting up into the atmosphere, but who does that?
On the third day of our visit, Kenk grudgingly agreed to drive, because he and Sveta wanted to take me to Bled, a scenic mountain resort town that rings a lake where one of Sveta’s old friends is the mayor. On the drive, Kenk explained that he considered himself a kind of social worker, and asserted that if he could only get people into his system—taking care of their bodies and the planet, correcting their profligate ways—he could truly help them, and, by extension, make a difference in society. During our explorations of Ljubljana, he confided, he’d been taking note of my physical prowess, or lack thereof. He felt that I rode bicycles too much at the expense of other forms of fitness, like tai chi and hiking on steep mountains like the one we’d climbed the previous day.
We met Bled’s mayor, Janez Fajfar, at a pricey restaurant—his and Sveta’s choice. Igor derided the place for being snooty. “You would not be able to drag me here with thickest chains,” he said, teasing Sveta, who grinned. Perpetually the bombast, Igor sometimes spoke of women crudely. But he and Sveta held hands as we hiked the paths around Lake Bled. At the top of a gentle rise, we watched two people struggling to mount a nearby staircase while hefting bikes on their shoulders. One of them biffed as she reached the top step, her bike clattering across cobbles. Before I could react, Kenk was running toward them. By the time I caught up, he had helped the fallen rider back to her feet. He lifted her bike, gave it a quick look over, and handed it to her. She smiled and thanked him, then remounted and rode off.
Igor is a bike saint.
That’s how filmmaker Anthony Corindia phrased it. Kenk “coddled bikes,” he said.
Corindia was an aficionado who had built up bikes as a kid. As an adult yearning to reconnect with his childhood hobby, he walked into Kenk’s shop in the 1990s and announced he was looking for a 1972 or ’73 Peugeot. Kenk waved him down to the basement, a riotous mess illuminated by a single bare lightbulb. “I’m thinking, Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” Corindia said. “But he goes right to it—a ’72 with a royal-blue chrome frame. Totally original.” Kenk told him to come back for parts when he was ready to start building.
Corindia returned five years later with a camera, shooting a self-funded documentary about bike theft in Toronto. “I said, ‘You don’t remember me, but…’ And he says, ‘Yeah I do—Peugeot ’72.’ That blew my mind.”
Corindia and I sat in a hotel bar in Kenk’s old Toronto neighborhood. He wore black-framed glasses; his dark hair was combed straight back. He spoke enthusiastically about Kenk, who gave him full access to the shop, allowing him to shoot about 70 hours of footage. “At any given time,” he said, “there were five to 10 people around, from street urchins to drug dealers and addicts to legitimate people looking for bikes. It would be like this circus: He would be out on the sidewalk with a wad of money in his mouth, yelling into the phone, then he would pull the phone away and shout at someone, ‘No, no, that [bike] is piece of shit, man!’ I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody as magnetic.”
Heroin and crack use was a pervasive and overwhelming problem in the city, and bikes flowed in daily from addicts seeking quick money. People brought fake IDs, made up stories. Kenk was an enabler, but no one saw him actually commit theft, Corindia asserted. “It boils my ass to no end, all of these fucking idiots out there saying he’s a bike thief,” he said. “Why the fuck would he steal the bikes? They came to him.”
Corindia characterized Kenk’s shop in purely pragmatic terms. “It was a service,” he said.
Kenk and his defenders pointed out that he, in fact, collaborated with police at times while running the shop. At one point in the 1990s, the force assigned officers John Margetson and Vince Langdon to bike theft, and Kenk tipped them off when pricey new bikes came into his shop, after which the cops spoke to their connections in the bike community. A number of times, Kenk said, they successfully reunited people with their bikes. Corindia, who interviewed Langdon and Margetson on camera, backed up Kenk’s version of events.
Kenk said he never actually viewed the bikes as being for sale, per se. “Things are being held until I find some kind of situation that’s reasonable, that I allow somebody the usage of this bike,” he said. “Meanwhile, I am perceiving myself as a guardian.” He once told Poplak, for a piece in Toronto Life magazine: “I represent what the bicycle would want if the bicycle had a choice.”
The circumstances of Kenk’s 2008 arrest are worth pondering. On July 13, Brett Clarkson published a lengthy bike-theft story in the Toronto Sun that characterized the problem as an epidemic. The story included typically provocative quotes from Kenk—“I’m a thief, I’m the darkest nightmare in the western hemisphere”—which was sarcasm, but his comments nonetheless encouraged Torontonians to metabolize his actions as malicious. But the piece also noted that, according to Richard Mucha, the city’s manager of licensing, Kenk was “operating legally and doing everything by the book.”
Sgt. Tajti said police had a bike-theft sting underway at the time, involving bicycles left on the street as bait. He invited Clarkson along to observe on July 16—three days after the Sun article hit. That was the day Kenk was arrested.
“Sometimes,” Tajti said, “you catch lightning in a bottle.”
Igor is a scavenger.
As we rode around Ljubljana, he mentioned several times having 10 or so bikes in Slovenia, but he didn’t elaborate or let me see them. Surrounding himself with bikes seemed a habit Kenk was unable or unwilling to break. Most likely, they moved through his life along with various other gray-market items.
On the morning of my last day in Slovenia, we rode to a shabby hostel with a common area that reeked of stale beer and armpits. We climbed a dark set of stairs to find the person he’d come to see—a man with gray bedhead, a three-day beard, and jeans that sagged off his backside. Kenk wouldn’t tell me his name. He offered the man a 50-euro note with some flourish, and they talked for a while in Slovenian. The guy disappeared and returned with a couple of jackets and an enormous plastic bag with a large hole that Igor patched with some tape, then stuffed full.
When I asked, Kenk said he was just doing some business.
Back on the bikes, we rode toward “the ghetto,” an area he’d mentioned several times in previous days. He braked suddenly next to a set of four large plastic dumpster-like containers, looked around for a moment, then walked back 20 feet and knelt. “Ah, you have to look from this angle!” he laughed. He walked over by a tree trunk and picked up what he’d somehow spotted as the city whirled past: two beer bottles that turned out to be open but still full.
After we puzzled over the circumstances of this find, he carefully wrapped the open bottles in a spare plastic bag. He was already carrying the bag with the jackets, and when he subsequently stopped to pick up an empty bottle, he combined everything into one bag. It was five or so miles to the ghetto, which turned out to be a quiet, tidy suburban neighborhood where we stopped at a house. Kenk explained that his friends, a couple, paid $300,000 for it, and invited him and a mutual friend to split the basement into their own rooms so they could help pay the mortgage. We sat down with the couple, who appeared to be in their 60s, and someone pulled out a bottle of walnut schnapps and filled four glasses. It was 11 a.m. They plunged into a conversation, in both Slovenian and English, about the inevitable impending economic meltdown. A bottle of honey schnapps appeared not long after that, followed by bottles of beer. Things grew hazy, and the conversation eventually withered. Kenk roused himself and led me on a tour, after which he offered a box of walnuts he’d picked up on the street. We headed outside, where a whispery rain fell.
I swayed back and forth in the driveway. The world looked warm and soft, as through a movie-camera lens smeary from raindrops. Kenk wanted to do tai chi; he’d introduced his version of it to me two days earlier on a hike. He had us face each other in a crouch. The goal was to try to make the other person move his feet while holding your own position. He’d invited me to be the aggressor, to reach out and try to push him. As in judo, he’d used my energy to try to destabilize me, grabbing at me as I reached out.
This had been engaging the previous day, when it was sunny and we were sober; now, not so much. I wobbled away, trying to defog my head. Kenk didn’t accept this; he followed, talking louder and faster, growing agitated. The world is a cruel place that can punch you in the face with no warning, he was telling me. You’d better be prepared.
Standing behind me now, he bellowed that someone had a gun to my head, and I would survive only by fighting back. When I ignored him, he circled around and popped me square in the chest with his open hands—half punch, half shove. Instinctively I lunged, shoving at him a little wildly. He grabbed my arm. I was wearing a light puffy shell, and he ripped the sleeve’s lining. As he mumbled an apology I lunged again, catching him off guard, and he shifted his back foot to compensate. “Come on, come on,” he said.
We finally stopped, breathing heavily and blinking in the steady spring rain. My mind had tunneled to some other place, and it struck me that this wasn’t just for fun. Kenk was indoctrinating me into his self-improvement program—preparing me for the challenges of what he believed lay ahead, molding me into something sturdier, more self-reliant, less dependent on the bubble-wrapped safety of consumer society. I was both angry and sharply focused. It seemed possible in that moment that I understood Kenk better than I ever had before.
Igor is rich.
After his arrest but before his case was adjudicated, he was released on bond.
As prosecutors prepared their case, Kenk initially refused any plea bargain. “I insist you prove it to me,” he said, summarizing his strategy. “They cannot prove a thing.” He capitulated in December 2009 when they threatened to prosecute his girlfriend, potentially derailing her music career. He entered a guilty plea and ultimately served less than two years in jail. Under the Civil Forfeiture Act, the city seized his two trucks and his possessions. The bikes, after a few hundred were claimed, were all junkers—worth about $10 each, by one estimate. But his building had grown exponentially in value in a gentrifying neighborhood and sold for $640,000 (CAD). When the government was finally done with him, it handed him about half a million Canadian dollars.
For a while, Toronto’s bike community seemed to enter a period of reckoning; Tajti said police noticed that more people were registering their bikes. But some fundamental aspects of life stayed the same. Between 2014 and 2022, between 3,000 and 4,000 bikes were reported stolen each year, according to Toronto police data. Secondhand bike shops remain plentiful.
Kenk was bored with life in Ljubljana—forced out of the orbit of his own purpose. He was so frugal he could live off the interest from his windfall. He fantasized about working with bikes again. He had seen many bikes in the landfill in Switzerland, where he spent time with Sveta, a dual citizen. Those bikes would do some good in Slovenia, where the standard of living is lower. He pondered finding a sponsor to pay for the bikes’ restoration, then bringing them to Ljubljana to distribute among people who could use them. Maybe set up a bikeshare.
He asked me what I thought. I didn’t hold back: I told him it was an intriguing idea, but it was hard to imagine any venture capitalist signing on to any such thing with his name attached.
Who, then, is Igor Kenk?
Maybe the answer is all of the above: a greasy monkey, an anarchist, a capitalist, and so on. If he himself didn’t steal bikes, he was the mastermind behind a system that encouraged and enabled the theft of bicycles—hundreds if not thousands of them. He was also capable of abrupt, unpremeditated acts of kindness, and was the only person I’ve known who makes it a point to pick up trash routinely for no reward or public notice.
In Toronto, at least, Kenk was a kind of mirror. Anyone who was being real about the Bicycle Clinic—participating in his ecosystem—couldn’t avert their eyes from certain realities. Enter the shop raging at the world’s injustices, and that rage would be reflected back. Walk in open to the wonders of the bike and its transformative possibilities, and you found an image in your likeness there. Come there seeking a bargain, a too-good-to-be-true offer, and you found yourself face to face with the ultimate opportunist.
Plenty of people patronized Kenk’s shop; the sheer force of his personality scaffolded the Bicycle Clinic. But it took a customer base to sustain it. They entered with the drug users and the grime and the open embrace of chaos, and the bikes were a bargain, but the message was clear: You don’t get to pretend you don’t know what’s happening here.
Back in Slovenia, sitting by the window overlooking Bled Lake in the restaurant he openly disdained, Kenk maintained his bemused expression as multiple courses were whisked to our table on tiny plates, one even delivered in a delicate beaker. “They forgot to bring us magnifying glass,” he said, shooting Sveta a playful sidelong glance.
While they chortled, Mayor Fajfar picked up a copy of KENK, the graphic novel. He read out loud a quote attributed to the New York Times on the back cover: “What exactly was he planning to do with 2,865 bicycles?”
We looked at the mayor looking at the book. He gazed across at Kenk with freshly minted curiosity. “So,” he said, “why did you want [all those] bikes?”
Kenk’s eyebrows arched upward and his mouth twisted a little—not a frown, but more a look of weary resignation, like the frontier preacher who lashes himself to the cross for his flock, yet somehow still must address wayward heathens. He pushed his beaker away, leaned back, and said, “Why not?”
Igor is a memory.
For me, and for Toronto. More than 10 years after meeting Igor Kenk and reporting this story, it finally occurred to me, what I learned in Slovenia: It was never about the bikes. They were merely one element of one man’s peculiar and flawed but nonetheless fully lived vision for how we might save each other from ourselves.
In the time that has passed since then, I’ve lost track of Kenk. Recently I tried finding him through Alex Jansen, the publisher of KENK, who traveled to Switzerland in 2018 to put together a documentary for the 10th anniversary of Kenk’s arrest. He found Kenk living with Sveta and largely disengaged from his old activities, but he spoke of someday ramping up a legitimate used-bicycle operation that could help people gain independence and save bikes from being junked.
Jansen lost track of him after the pandemic started and had no luck tracking him back down upon my request. I tried messaging Kenk on Facebook, which looked like a dead end; the last public post was more than five years old. I tried reaching him through several other social media accounts that similarly looked long abandoned—all to no avail. He seems to have vanished from public view.
But I like to picture him now, roaming the streets of some Swiss town, scooping up litter, plucking bike parts out of the trash to build a frankencycle, insisting not only on fixing neighbors’ rides but on showing them how to turn a wrench themselves. And maybe he’s still with us when we breeze into one of the many secondhand bike shops that still thrive in some large cities—places where we can run our hands over the frame of a sweet-looking machine that is somehow available for a bargain price.
This Igor will take a long, piercing look at us, then lean over and whisper in our ear: What’ll you have?
David Howard has written for many national publications and is the author of two nonfiction books, most recently Chasing Phil: The Adventures of Two Undercover Agents with the World's Most Charming Con Man.
