The Bicycle Tool Thief

POST NOTE, 10:35AM: Since going live with this post late last night, I have received about a dozen emails and phone calls from people that have been victims of Gregory White. People whose lives have been truly damaged. Suppliers who are owed thousands of dollars in a tight market. Even people who almost became his victim. Many of these people are in businesses where they can’t speak out. I am far from an exception here, I am the rule.

POST NOTE, 9:30PM: I have my fixture back. There’s so much more to the story.

I can’t believe that it has come to this…

Growing up, I learned that there were two types of thieves that have a very special place in hell; tool thieves and bicycle thieves.

Think now, how bad it is to be a bicycle tool thief!

Gregory White of Magic Cycle Werks in Bend, Oregon turned out to be on that low of a level. Like, holy cow what a lying snake in the grass dirtbag this guy turned out to be. (After this post went live, I’m hearing many stories about him. It turns out that he’s pulled a lot of shit like this.)

I met Greg at NAHBS back in 2016? He was a novice framebuilder trying to get a business going. I talked with him for a while at the show. He knew nothing about bike design and certainly less about mountain bikes and I was giving him a lesson. In the weeks following the show, I tried to help him with a design on BikeCAD for his girlfriend’s mountain bike. I like to help people when I can, this is a common thing for me to do. I think he ignored everything of what I did to help and built some junk pile instead.

The years go by. He pops up here and there on message boards and facebook. Not much of note but we flow in different circles.

Then, about a month ago, I put my Anvil Journeyman 3.1 jig up for sale. I’m building an entirely new frame fixture for myself and I needed to sell this to raise the funds. Selling what I have to make what I need.

This is a really nice fixture. Almost in new condition as I build very few bikes with it and by TIG. The demand for these tools is huge as they aren’t being made any more.

Greg reached out to me about the fixture, eager for me to ship the tool to him in Bend from the Bay Area where I live. I wasn’t interested in shipping it. It’s a real pain in the ass to ship things like this. It’s also expensive to do that. Pickup only.

He pressed me about how bad he wanted it and there had to be some way to make a sale happen as he couldn’t do the 20 hour round trip drive and keep his job. I decided to give into charity. If he met me in Redding, CA, about halfway between us, I would deliver it that far. The price would be $4000 with a nice rolling stand that I made. I needed half the money in advance to commit to the drive 10 hours of driving I was going to have to do.

It took some doing, according to him, to get $2099 to me by Venmo before the trip. This was sent from ‘Kathleen Branch‘. Apparently, Greg doesn’t know how to move money via the internet. He blamed this for most of the issues here.

How does someone in the modern era not know how to use PayPal, Venmo, or any of the other services that are common online. This should have been a major red flag. Instead, I just figured he was a fool.

So I drove up to Redding on June 15, 2020. Things were going smoothly until just out of town, I got a flat tire. Passenger side front. Slow leaking. Sucks. I pull into the meeting spot with some air left and grab a burger. I’m early so I get to thinking about fixing the flat. A plug should do it for now. I try to drive to a local tire shop but it’s too far gone at this point. I don’t want to cause more damage, so I pull to a side road, just about 1/8th a mile from where we were to meet. I get out the donut and jack that was stuck under all the fixture stuff and go to work.

Fuck. The wheel was stuck to the hub. I couldn’t get it off. I struggle for about 40 minutes. Finally, I’m under the car banging the inside rim with the iron to get it to move (yes, I tried rolling it loose) when Greg calls asking where I was. I sent him a pin to come to me. I kept banging. The rim actually started to move. Greg shows up and I continue to bang and bang, slowly working the wheel free. Once it was, I bolted the donut down and we made the deal.

Of course, he wasn’t able to get to a bank for cash in time so he ‘had’ to write me a check. I didn’t want that but I figured that he was in business, in this community, and it would be a silly thing to do to rip me off.

We exchange the fixture and the check. This was the exact moment that I was violated. He drove off. I drove off. I had just boarded Greg’s crazy train.

I take the check and drive home. We deposit it when I get home via internet banking.

A few days later we are notified by my bank that the check was returned. Account not found.

Of course, that’s his business phone number he wrote on the check and he’s no longer at the street address.

I figure that there was an issue with the scan of the check as we did it via a phone app so I went ‘in person’ go to the bank where it was drawn, US Bank, and attempt to cash it. At the window, it takes a while. The cashier started having problems. He calls over his manager. They spend about 10 minutes searching data bases. They can’t find the account. It no longer exists.

This was now larceny by check.

He clearly didn’t make a mistake. He past a bad check from an account that doesn’t exist.

The thing is, when we were meeting up in Redding and I wasn’t where we were supposed to meet, he called me via his personal cell phone (626-373-5475). This was important as it was my only way to really get in touch with him after the fact.

I contact him via text.