In this episode, host Jonathan Maus welcomes members of Timberwolves Cycle Recovery into he Shed. Also known as the Sith Lord Vader Squadron Timberwolves, they're a grassroots group of Portlanders who are taking the law into their own hands to recover stolen bicycles. They are led by Royal Johnson, who is the main voice you'll hear in the episode. Royal and Jonathan were joined by Laura Dallago, the group's treasurer, and Rich Baker, who coordinates their events and rides.

Royal started the group in Austin, Texas in 2011 and he maintains a chapter of the group there, as well as one in Los Angeles, Colorado, and Houston. Their MO is to enlist people to help them spot stolen bikes, research online to find out of it the bike is indeed stolen, and then if it is, they hit the streets and try to recover it.

On March 18th, Royal went on a recovery mission in the South Waterfront district that was first reported as a robbery by gunpoint. Alarmed by the initial reports, we did a story immediately based on details from an OHSU campus alert and a police report that said someone flashed a gun and robbed someone of a blue electric bike near the intersection of SW Sheridan and Moody. It was only after we published that we figured out Royal was involved and that perhaps the person who reported the gun wasn't telling the truth. It all turned into a mess, so Royal and I agreed he should come over to the shed so we could hash everything out.

Links:

• What really happened with that bike theft confrontation in South Waterfront? - (BikePortland, 3/22/23)
• Updated: Stolen bike recovery leads to confrontation in South Waterfront (BikePortland, 3/18/23)
• ‘Timberwolves’ look to hunt down and recover stolen bikes (BikePortland, 10/24/22)
• SLVS Timberwolves on Instagram

Welcome to the BikePortland Podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Maus. My guests this week are members of Timberwolves Cycle Recovery, also known as the Sith Lord Vader Squadron Timberwolves. It's a grassroots group of Portlanders who are taking the law into their own hands to recover stolen bicycles. They are led by Royal Johnson and he joined me in the shed along with Laura Dallago, the group's Treasurer, and Rich Baker who coordinates their events and rides. Royal started the group in Austin, Texas in 2011, and he maintains a chapter of the group there as well as one in Los Angeles, Colorado, and Houston. Their MO is to enlist people to help them spot stolen bikes, research online to find out if the bike is stolen or not, and then if it is, they'll hit the streets and try to recover it. I've watched this group online for a few years now, and we profiled them on BikePortland back in October.

I'll include a link to that story and the group's Instagram in the show notes. I wanted to have Royal on the show because on March 18th he went on one of those recovery missions in the South Waterfront district that was first reported as a robbery by gunpoint. Alarmed by the initial reports that I saw, we decided to do a story immediately based on details from both an OHSU campus alert and a police report that I confirmed with the police who said that a witness told them that someone had flashed a gun and robbed someone of a blue electric bike near the intersection of Southwest Sheridan and Moody. But soon after we published our story, we figured out that Royal and the Timberwolves were involved, and that perhaps the person who reported the gun wasn't telling the truth. It kind of turned into a mess after that.

I did try to follow up and clarify everything that happened, but for Royal and the Timberwolves, the damage was done. Someone in the community made it even worse by apparently spreading rumors that Royal actually did flash a gun. And Royal who is Black has gone online in recent days saying it's just another example of racism in the cycling community. Adding to the complexity of this situation are long simmering concerns that his group and actually other people in the bike community unfairly target homeless people with their many social media posts that show bikes parked next to tents, and then imply that they're stolen before having any proof that the bikes are actually indeed stolen.

There's a very fine line between being frustrated with bike theft and accusing innocent people, especially already vulnerable people who live in tents on the street of being thieves. So Royal and I agreed he should come over to the shed so he could hash everything out. One quick note, I only expected Royal to be with me on this episode, so when he showed up with Laura and Rich, I had to scramble a bit to make the interviews work out. Luckily, I have four mics here, so it was fine, but I'm not used to managing a four-way interview, so just keep that in mind as you listen. Here's our conversation.

Let's see. Let's just go around there and give folks a sense of who we're talking to in the room today. Royal, how'd you end up in Portland?

I'm from Austin, Texas, and I believe about in 2014 is when I decided to expand or at least find another place to move to, because my hometown was becoming a little overran by people there taking the culture out of it. But yeah, so I decided one day that I was just going to come and see what Portland was about because in Austin they say it's a sister city at the time, still kind of is, but yeah, that's what motivated me to get here.

Cool. What about you, Rich? You've been here a long time, short time, what?

Been here since 2015. Moved here for fragrance gigs, selling cologne downtown in Portland, and then started biking a lot and have loved biking ever since. And just immersed myself in the bike culture here and just loving the bike scene so far.

Tell me again your role in the Timberwolves?

I'm a Coordinator, so planning events and things like that, and mainly leading the Foster night ride and having a presence on all the bike rides. That's kind of what I do.

Cool. Cool.

He does a pretty good job of that.

All right, Laura, what about you?

Yeah, so I moved to Portland to go to college back in 2014. Was kind of seeking out Portland specifically to go to school because I never learned how to drive, but it seemed like somewhere where I could get by. So I got a bike right away. Didn't really get more involved into the bike scene until I met Royal honestly. Before that I would just pop in on group ride with my friends, but never really got to know other people. But yeah, in the Timberwolves, I'm the Treasurer, so I'm basically there to, if we throw any events, make sure all the money's in order and keeping track of the club funds.

Let's say we have an event where we have to have a fundraiser for somebody's bicycle to be replaced, Laura would definitely pick the event with Rich and then they would manage the financial perspective of that.

Cool. I know all of you ride in the social rides, Thursday night ride kind of just in the [inaudible 00:05:40]. Is that kind of how you came into knowing about each other and stuff like that?

I mean, Petappalooza is what kind of did it for me and Laura. Me and Rich commute yearly, so we're pretty much on TNR and FNR and Foster Night Ride, of course. And yeah, we've had a couple summers together. They were pretty fun, so it made us closer.

Cool. So give me the background on what the Timberwolves are and then how it came together, how it started and when?

Well, in June 5th, 2011 in Austin, Texas, a week before then I actually got my bike stolen, and I tracked it, located it, found it, and after that I just realized to myself I could definitely use this kind of insight to help other people around that time. Austin's cycle theft problems were on the rise, and we've effectively started Chapter One. SLVS stands for Sith Lord Vader Squadron. I mean, there's no reference to Star Wars pretty much, but it just sounds good coming off the tongue. And Austin, Texas is the first chapter. And after this happened when someone stole my bike, we have effectively started tracking and locating other people's bicycles and we were making results happen. The results were so immense that the local law enforcement were upset that we were doing more recoveries on stolen property than they were.

And after it became successful, I passed a torch to a good friend of mine by the name of Michael Green. He is now SLVS Chapter One President, and a couple of my friends took it to Los Angeles. I went to Portland and I moved here about the summer of 2014. And as soon as we touched ground, we started recovering bicycles. I mean, we were kind of put together. We weren't organized as well as we are now, but we were definitely organized enough to cause some type of change in that particular situation when it comes to bike theft.

Gotcha. And I had you over today, we kind of agreed that you wanted to talk a little bit more about a specific bike theft recovery, right? One that happened on March 17th.

Yes, sir.

Or March 18th or Friday, Saturday.

I think it was the 18th.

18th? So I'm hoping we can just kind of get that out in the open. We reported it one way on BikePortland and folks that have read both stories can see what happened. We initially published it based on very, very little information that we had from a police dispatch log and then also OHSU on the campus. There's a federal law I guess that they have to report out stuff if there's a weapon involved, which is what they thought based on that police log. So we basically just mimicked that, parroted that, put it out on a story out of an abundance of caution for the community. It wasn't until a couple hours later we realized that maybe that wasn't really what happened. And then I got in touch with you, Royal and started thinking, "Oh, okay, connected the dots that the Timberwolves weren't involved." So we cleaned up that first story and then did another story just trying to saying what happened. Turns out, well, I'll let you kind of explain your perspective since you were actually there as part of Timberwolves. How did it go down from what you saw?

I got a message on the Timberwolves Cycle Theft Recovery Instagram that said that they had spotted a stolen bicycle that matched the identification of one that was stolen in September. And I like, "Oh, okay, that's a former Timberwolves bicycle." The bicycle that was stolen and recovered was a former one of our members that is not too happy with me. But I go out, I get in my car, I contact the person that spotted it, I told them to just stay on it, just make sure there's eyes on it until I get there to match the information that we have. And when I get there, the bike's there out plain as day, and I check the serial number and it matches the information I have. I check the pictures and it matches. It's the same bicycle.

So after that I just go and I don't take the bike, I don't touch the bicycle until I let these individuals know, "Hey, this is happening." And I was like, okay, wake up. He wakes his friend up, dude comes out, I'm like, "You're in possession of a stolen bicycle. We've matched the information that we have to the bicycle." I even let him see it. And I don't even think he was really with it. And I mean, he's agreeing, like, "Yeah, this is not mine. I don't even know how this got here." And I was like, "It's okay, we're not here to hurt you or harm you or get you in any trouble and whatnot. We just wanted to make sure this bike gets back." And then he agrees. So we start taking off his property that's on it, other people's stolen [inaudible 00:11:04], et cetera, et cetera.

And then as soon as the bike starts to leave, that's when he flips the script. He's like, "Oh my God, somebody gave me that." I was like, "Look, we've already shown you that this information, it matches to the bike. It's not yours, man." And I put the bike on my bike rack. He jumps in the street, starts screaming at me still. I'm just like, "Yo, that's not going to change anything." And I get in my car and I drive away. That's it basically. Eventually the other witness came to meet up with me and we verified again whose bike this was. And after that I went to go drop it off to him. Unfortunately about this situation, is that the guy that I recovered the bike for is more out of trying to make me look like a bad person than him stepping up and owning his own bicycle.

Okay, I hear what you're saying. So the person who was in possession of the bike at the time you showed up, this was a person living under the underpass?

Yeah, it was a house.

Okay.

He obviously was not able or even in any ability to own a $3,000 electric bicycle underneath a bridge.

I'll talk about that in a sec. But to stick to the incident in particular, how did the police call get to be what it was? Do you think the person who had the possession of the bike did it or?

Yeah, I believe strongly that the guy that made the report, the dude that was calling the cops was trying to get the cops to have a faster reaction based on the threat level. I mean, I guess in his mind he was like, "No cop's going to come down here to help me recover a bike that I stole unless it was an imminent situation." And I did not have a gun. Nor do I understand why he would do that, being who he is and his situation. Because normally these people are not trying to have the police involved in anything they're doing. I mean, it was sad to see, but I mean that could've definitely caused consequences for me and the witness and him probably too.

Right, thinking if we had a more responsive functioning police force...

Yes.

And they would've rolled up quickly or maybe there was one in the neighborhood.

Yeah, with guns drawn.

They're hearing that a dude just stole a bike with a gun.

Yes.

Right? And even though on the call it said it was a white guy.

And obviously I'm not white.

Which is another weird thing about it.

And it was a gray BMW SUV.

Yeah, but I mean if the cops show up, they're thinking a gun's drawn, they see you there being a black person, that could've been not great.

And that's what I'm saying. So it boggles my mind that even if there was another white male in the vicinity with a gray SUV, he could've endangered someone else by making a false police report.

So what if the guy that you approached had no idea it was stolen?

He knew because that bike has been sold, bartered, sold, bartered, all the way from Albina down to the Southwest waterfront. And with my history with how this goes is that, I mean if you're not fronting like you're going to do something to harm someone, this is what opportunists do in these situations. Or if you cannot get me to reason with you because you know you're at fault, and all of these things happened before the repossession took place. You got a reason with me. I'm showing you facts, actual concrete, evidential facts. You can't argue with that. But you can make this into a situation where it's a me versus you.

So why is the owner of the bike not super happy? And what you're saying, he's kind of spreading stuff around, maybe making you look worse and adding fuel to the fire here.

In this situation, the way I see it at least, is that when the Twitter post went out about us, I remember at one point I was like, "We were not involved because of the situation was saying there was a gun, a white person, SUV, all those things I was baffled by." Even [inaudible 00:15:43] had to do with it. So I was like, "No, we're not." And then I turned to find out that on Twitter, this person is basically saying that we are the ones involved in the incident with a bike that he owns.

Mm. Mm-hmm. I hear what you're saying.

I don't even know if you had saw the BikePortland article, but I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Royal, what was brought to our attention was that someone had responded to a tweet of BikePortland's about the incident, and this account that's anonymous, what we suspect is from the bike owner just given different details. Potentially, that was the first tag of this is the Timberwolves. I'm not sure if that tweet happened before any of the article comments, but that was at least the first one that we saw where someone was like, "This is the Timberwolves."

Yeah. Yeah.

I was contacted at 6:00 in the morning by John and then later on this tweet was made. I told him, "We'll talk later, we'll figure this out." And as soon as we started to figure it out, the bike owner is trying to point at us saying, "That guy has a gun," basically.

So he is not refuting that anything necessarily happened, but he's trying to add details that make you look worse.

Yes.

He is sort of adding the gun thing.

Yes.

So maybe it's plausible that the guy you took it from physically there, right, the homeless guy who thought it was his bike, but you took it from him or you repossessed it.

Yeah.

It's plausible that he called it into the cops, embellished it, and said a gun was involved. And once that kind of got out into the public, this guy who owned the bike thought, "Oh, that that's a good way to [inaudible 00:17:27].

Throw a jab at Royal. Yeah.

And so I'm going to go ahead and kind of say that it could happen or I'm going to obtain that.

There's a possibility.

It's a possibility. I see.

That Royal recovered my bicycle with a gun.

Yeah, and I think part of this is that the kind of stuff that you're doing already makes some people uncomfortable because of the interaction aspect. Especially because there's a lot of interaction with people living outside with homeless people, right? And there's that very fine line to walk around, are they guilty or not of being in possession of a stolen bike? Do they know what's going on, right? Could it just be theirs? So that's already I think a part of this. So do you think that's why people were wanting to make this connection or maybe?

We have pretty good community outreach. Okay. There's not a war against homeless people. Most of the individuals that we approach help us recover stolen bicycles. This isn't like a gung ho craze like us versus them. There is none of that. There's only one community here and that's the entire City of Portland. And I mean, situational awareness could tell you some things. I knew this person didn't own this bicycle. There are people that do own bicycles that are homeless. That is true. There's no biasness. We'll treat you as a human being. We'll talk to you about what's going on. We'll definitely make sure that your are understanding of what's taking place here. Yes, it's a possibility that houses, individuals can own bikes they did not steal. That's why we do not go after individuals with nothing less than professionalism. So I hope that answers your question.

Yeah, I mean, can you expand on that a little bit? What kind of practices do you have in place to make sure that those things don't happen, right? So do you have some stuff that you do with the wolves or best practices so that you don't approach a camp or something? I think it's already uncomfortable for some folks.

Okay. I can see your... So we don't approach any camps unless there are numbers. If we're in numbers, we also still come to this situation like, "We're not here to harm you. This isn't something like we're trying to get you in trouble. We just want you guys to help us locate and identify this bicycle." And most of them agree. They're like, "All right, yeah, we have seen that we will help you." And then at the end of the day, reward or not, our relationship doesn't change. And some of them we do help out a lot. So it could be.

So stating your intentions at the beginning is one of the ways to kind of suss out, make sure it's not going to be a bad interaction.

Yes.

I think there's more likely to be a conversation when we're recovering a bike than a altercation. Because 99% of the time we research and find the bike, get the facts straight, and then we go recover the bike. And if there's any problem recovering the bike, we have a conversation with the people who are currently possessing the bike.

And if not then, that there's still going to be a situation, we get the owner involved. And when the owner can identify their own bicycle and this such said perp won't give it back, then the police have to do their job. There was steps to this. And none of them have to do with brute force or violence towards anyone.

Yeah. Laura, did you have something to add?

Well, I guess just going back to your initial question about avoiding just targeting homeless folks' house, or individuals, I think it's important to note that when Royal and the rest of the club are doing recovery work, it's always going out with a bike or a few bikes in mind. It's not going out and saying, "Let's go confront a bunch of people and make them feel bad about their situation." It's like, "Hey, we have these five bikes that are still missing." 'Cause we have a page where people will post if they need help. So it's more of going out, we have five bikes in mind, let's ride around either in a car or in a bike and see if we spot it. It's with a specific bike in mind, not a specific target.

Okay.

Not targeting specific people.

I'll direct it to Royal just 'cause I think you're the one doing the posts and stuff for the most time. Are you worried at all though that just by posting so many pictures of homeless camps and bikes and being like, "Does anybody owned this?" Which I think is a lot of your posts. Are you worried though that could inflame someone who is not as careful about this, who maybe is already sort of biased and angry with people living outside? I mean, that exists.

Like I said, again, We don't come at this situation like these are the enemy." The real enemy here I see is local government not taking care of its residents.

Is that one of the things that really drives you to do for the recovery?

Yes, there's not a lot of funding towards actual services in Portland that would provide a more reasonable way of handling this situation than just being active in the community and curbing what I can. And...

So...

Go ahead.

Is that how you see the work of Timberwolves? Is it kind of the guardian angels thing? Is it the community stepping up and saying, "We are going to do what is not happening."

We're going to make sure that there is a strong playing field between being houseless, losing your bicycle, and the efforts that it would take to professionally recover these by still having everybody's peace of mind.

Do you mind sharing a little bit about how you go about that? I mean obviously you see something looks out of place. You can look on Bike Index or whatever. Any other tricks or ways that you guys do your research or anything like that?

Well, Bike Index is the major hub of where you can find your stolen bicycle or you can register it. So there's a lot of other individuals or even groups like PDX stolen bicycles, or PDX find my ride, Bike Index like I said. We all work together in order to have a process where once the bike comes missing, you can look on Bike Index. Once you find out where it is, you can call the Timberwolves. We'll come and we'll take a screen at this and then see which is the best effective way of getting it back without anybody getting hurt.

Any idea how many recoveries you've been involved in or how many bikes you've gotten back?

Since I've lived here since 2014? Quite a lot.

Up to you. Yeah.

Quite a lot.

You don't have a number, you don't mark it down.

I think it's been at least over 1,000 since 2014. But in the last year, I'm going to say at least about 14.

Dang. And it's usually eyes on the street? You just see something?

Yeah. Most of it's like finding a needle in the haystack. And if the needle moves and the haystack that you're trying to look for it in, it's just a matter of time before it comes up. It's just that I don't recommend to anybody without any type of experience, no matter if it's talking to people or repossession. I don't think that anybody should just be strongly doing that. They should proudly come and use what we have here. And that's strong-minded individuals with their hearts in the right place.

And speaking of which, you've done some public events where people can come and what? What do they do at those?

We overwatch.

You learn the ins and outs or you kind of get people up to speed or what?

We like the community to come and see the effectiveness of it, and they can also learn some things. Basically, we want you to see exactly what's going on here. So you know exactly if you want to start learning how to do this on your own, then you can have the steps there in order to see that this is effective. And yes, we do train our own members, especially the new ones how to do this. There's only six or seven of us that are actually in the Department of Cycle Theft Recovery. There is an administration department, there's an ambassador wing, there's a coordinator. There are all different pieces of our makeup. And me and about four others are what makes up the Overwatch Recovery. And we do those classes so people can see. Yes.

And this is a fully all volunteer unsanctioned thing, there's nonprofit status or anything like that?

Non-profit, it comes out of pocket for me to fund most of the things that we're doing. And yes, this is free. Even our recoveries are free. We don't charge anyone anything. The only thing that we would like them to do is register their bicycles and support the cause in any way they can, by either educating themselves or be on the watch like the rest of us. Basically, we want the whole city to be like that. It's not like we want to be the only ones to recover bicycles. We just want to do it properly. And if other people rise to do this with us, then we can all form an even stronger organization that eventually would prevent this from taking place at all.

I'm sitting here thinking in my head of how your approach to it and the approach that I took to it years ago when I was like, "Bike theft's getting too crazy in this town, it's out of control." And I'm saying this knowing completely that I'm a white guy in the position I'm in and you're a black guy. And I was like, "I'm done with bike thefts." So guess what I did?

Made a buck. What did you do, John?

Oh my God. Man, that's good. No, I put together a little one-page piece of paper with some ideas and walked down to the central precinct, had a meeting with the chief of police who I knew just from doing bike and traffic stuff. And in the older days they used to actually do a lot of traffic stuff and we had this whole thing with the bike community. So I knew the chief of police at the time, and I just got a meeting with him and I was like, "Hey, bike thefts out of control. We got to do something. You have some officers that are trying to recover bikes, but they want more time." And I remember I slid the piece of paper across the thing and he's like, "All right, this looks good. We'll do this." But I don't know if you know, but that whole thing, it was good for a while. We had a cop that kind of did what you're doing.

He was doing this with us a long time ago.

Okay, there you go. There you go.

Yes. I think his name was Detective Daniels.

Dave Sanders was his name. Yeah.

Dave Sanders. What is it called? Five something Garage?

Yeah. Yeah. The 529.

529 Garage.

Yeah.

And Bike Index back in the day working in the same kind of lane. But I'm not sure if they're working together. Detective Sanders reached out to me and told me that he would be able to at least be on site as we are matching the serial numbers to the bikes that we have in mind. And we were not even as organized then as we are now. So I would wish that the Portland Police Bureau would get back a bike theft task force so the community could at least dispatch what they know to them. This could be something. This could be a game changer.

Yeah. I mean, that's why I brought that up. 'Cause I was curious what your feeling was about coordinating with the police, because some people in your position would be like, "You know what? We're doing this because we don't want the police to do this or they can't do it well." But you're saying you'd like the help.

I wish that everybody would do this.

You would like the help and the coordination would work, you think?

Yes. I think the coordination between all cyclists and the cops when it comes to this kind of stuff, the more aware you are of it, the more that you see that this is a situation that you should probably have an effort in. It would help us all. Because little girls bikes get jacked too.

Yeah. Everybody's bikes are getting stolen.

Everybody's bikes are getting stolen. So if you see some fool on the damn trike with the tassels, that would make me want to do something quickly.

No, I hear you. Okay. I'm wondering if you're willing to talk about the stuff you posted on Facebook yesterday? Just you wrote something you said, that's my TED talk. Thanks for listening.

"Oh, yes."

And you said some things about racism in the cycling community that you've experienced. I think if the profile of the Timberwolves grows, the fact that you're leading it, the fact that you're saying that stuff, and you're feeling that, what do you want to say about that now?

I mean, I've literally been called the N word on a TNR, just hanging out with my friends. I mean, I'm not perfect, but I'm loud, I have fun. I'm myself. There's no reason why a person could be persecuted in any way for them being who they are, no matter if they're a girl or a boy, whatever it may be. You have the right to exist, and as long as you're not hurting anyone and causing any types of problems, which I've never, I am persecuted by individuals in the cycling community and I am probably the only person that looks like me. I'm just going to put it like that.

So what made you want to share that? I imagine that's kind of the first time you said that yesterday.

Because it's in everything. People need to realize that in order for change to happen or for good things to flourish, then you got to let go of the old, and most people are just scared of change. And I am a big part of change since I moved here in 2014. If this is what's going on and people are trying to put a stop to any of the agendas that I'm doing, I'm sure if I was a white person, it'd be a different story.

Yeah. 'Cause you think some of that is maybe related to you leading the Timberwolves and stepping out and doing this big thing in the community and...

Yes, I do. Judge me by my character. But my character has never been anything but original of myself. So if that is a big problem for people, then tough cookies. I'm not going anywhere.

No, I hear you. Fair enough. Yeah. Anything else you want to say about the Timberwolves or?

We have a lot of rides coming up on our roster this summer, and I would like people to get to know us honestly before they can make any types of judgments and to have an open mind. What I do is very serious, so I take it serious and we do this non-profit for everybody. Don't care what kind of bias you might have. Obviously in this situation, this is what I'm worried about when it comes to people having bias towards me, no matter if I recovered their bicycle or not. And the only race is the human race. So if individuals can educate themselves on how serious this is for all of us in this community, I definitely appreciate that.

Sounds good to me. Thanks for coming over and talking about it.

Thank you.

That was Royal Johnson, Laura Dallago and Rich Baker of Timberwolves Cycle Recovery. The BikePortland Podcast is a production of Pedal Town Media Incorporated. If you like this episode, please subscribe and browse our archives for past shows. Leave us a review and tell your friends about it. BikePortland is a community media source that relies on the community and individual subscribers to stay in business. Please sign up today if you aren't a subscriber already. And I'm your host, Jonathan Maus. Until next time, I'll see you in the streets.