Towards the end of the 2nd scene of Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold, the prologue in the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, this dialogue occurs among Wotan, the king of the gods, and Loge, the god of fire, regarding the all-powerful ring that Alberich, the Nibelung dwarf, has fashioned from the magic gold that he took from the Rhinemaidens after cursing love (long story - don't ask), regarding how Wotan might try to get the ring for himself, with a brief interjection from Froh, the god of spring:
"Wotan: Den Ring muss ich haben!
(I must have the ring!)
Froh: Leicht erringt ohne Liebesfluch er sich jetzt.
(It is easily won now without cursing love.)
Loge: Spottleicht, ohne Kunst, wie im Kinderspiel!
(So easy, without skill, like child's play!)
Wotan: So rate, wie?
(Then tell us, how?)
Loge: Durch Raub! Was ein Dieb stahl, das stiehlst du dem Dieb; ward leichter ein Eigen erlangt?"
(By theft! What a thief stole, you steal from the thief: could possessions be more easily acquired?)
This type of situation came up for a bartender in Vancouver recently, albeit not with a ring, but a bicycle. More below the flip.....
The bartender in question is Kayla Smith, who works at the Portside Pub in Vancouver's Gastown neighbo(u)rhood (on-line review of the place here). Two articles are my sources here, from which I liberally quote:
(1) Jenny Lee and Kevin Griffin, Vancouver Sun
(2) Sunny Dhillon, The Globe and Mail
The start of the sorry saga was thus:
VS: "Smith’s new, $1,000 bike was stolen from a rack outside a friend’s apartment in Vancouver’s Olympic Village sometime before midnight last Wednesday. She filed a police report."
G&M: "Ms. Smith said she was visiting a friend at the Olympic Village last Wednesday, after attending the Pacific National Exhibition. She was worried about locking her bike – worth more than $1,000 – outside, but her friend assured her it would be fine. After all, that was why Ms. Smith had invested in a heavy-duty lock.
But when she came back out, the bike was gone. Ms. Smith, with a mix of despondence and anger, filed a police report and later mentioned the theft in a Facebook post."
However, as luck would have it, the next day:
VS: "When a friend saw Smith’s distinctive bike in a Craigslist ad at 11:30 a.m. the next morning, Smith didn’t stop to think. Within 45 minutes, she was posing as a buyer, meeting the seller in a McDonald’s parking lot just blocks from where the bike was stolen."
G&M: "Thursday morning, still in bed and teary, she received a call from one of her friends. A bike that appeared similar to hers was on Craigslist for $300. Ms. Smith took a look, noted the make and model similarities, and quickly called to arrange a meeting, worried the bike wouldn’t last long at that price."
Smith didn't ask the police to come along, though, potentially to arrest the thief:
VS: "Smith......didn’t even stop to call the police. She isn’t usually a vigilante, she said, but 'I didn’t want to wait and I didn’t want to spook him.'"
G&M: When Smith called the thief to arrange a meeting, she said: "I called the guy up, totally played super sweet, was like, ‘Hi, how are you? You know, I have the day off today, why don’t I come meet you?’”
It's hard not to imagine that besides being royally angry at the thief, when Smith saw the guy, the word "loser" must have flashed through her brain, because according to her:
"The seller had scabs on his legs, scabs on his arms, was unclean looking and wore dark glasses".
You can infer as you wish from the scabs and slovenly appearance. At the meeting, after Smith got on her bike:
VS: "Once she was sure the bike was hers, she just hopped on and kept on pedalling. 'I thought this is it, you’re not going to get it back,' she said."
G&M: "As she stood in the McDonald’s parking lot where she and the seller had agreed to meet, the only one of the two who knew the bike was actually hers, Ms. Smith still hadn’t settled on a game plan.
But she had the element of surprise on her side, and once the Vancouver woman was back in the driver’s seat, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. Her hands shook, but her feet pedalled. And pedalled, until she was gone.
“I can’t believe I just stole my bike back,” she thought, living the dream of anyone who’s ever had one stolen, while leaving the dumbfounded seller in her dust."
Later in the G&M article, to fill out the picture: "....when she finally saw the bike, with its stickers and custom brakes, she knew it was hers. She rode to a nearby parking lot, to a spot where she could still see the seller but he couldn’t see her.
'He was standing there dumbstruck,' she said. Then, realizing something was amiss, she said he sprinted away.
Ms. Smith said she’s passed the seller’s information on to police. A woman who answered the phone Monday denied involvement."
As far as the Vancouver police went, the same constable and spokesman, Brian Montague, was quoted in both articles:
VS: "Montague said Vancouver Police would have preferred working with Smith to recover her stolen bicycle.
'We’re glad that she got her bike back and we’re very glad that she was not hurt in the process,' he said."
G&M: "Constable Brian Montague, a Vancouver police spokesman, said the department will follow up on the information Ms. Smith provided, but locating the seller and requesting charges will be more difficult than if she had called them in to handle the sting, as other victims of theft have done in the past.
He emphasized the department is glad Ms. Smith got her bike back, but wouldn’t encourage anyone to follow her lead."
Ideally, of course, in terms of legally nailing the thief, it would have been better for Smith to work with the police to catch the guy, as Montague noted. In addition, in this particular instance, Smith is now publicly known and her name is now out there, but the thief's name isn't. In the strict, 'purist' sense, Smith is also a "thief", albeit in a case of "stealing" her own property back from a true thief. You can see where this gets legally murky, if this incident ever were to proceed to the courts. Since the police and Smith have a phone number linked to the thief, tracing the guy is probably fairly easy, in a strict informational and technical sense. Legally, however, without formal charges filed, the thief's identity couldn't be made public. Although I'm not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), even just looking on the surface, in terms of the law, I can see how trying to prosecute would be not quite so clear-cut now.
In purely hard-headed and materialist terms, though not to defend vigilantism as such, it was more "practical" and less financially draining for Smith to do what she did, to right the wrong that the thief did to her. It would have been a huge drain on her time, not to mention potentially a hit on her bank account, if the thief had been apprehended, to pursue justice through the courts. Everyone would be morally on Smith's side, of course. However, legality and morality don't always merge.
One subliminal reason, perhaps, why Smith "took the law into her own hands", without necessarily putting it that way, is expressed by Yvonne Bambrick, "an urban cycling consultant in Toronto", cited in the Globe and Mail article as follows:
"....cyclists can feel police don’t take bike thefts seriously. That’s one of the reasons people take matters into their own hands. [Bambrick] said she could recall two prior incidents where people found their stolen bikes on Craigslist and took them back."
That may be more than a tad unfair, if this quote from Vancouver Constable Montague is anything to go by, per the
Vancouver Sun article:
"Montague said about 1,700 bicycles were reported stolen in the city of Vancouver in 2012. So far this year, 794 bicycles have been reported stolen.
'We recover a lot of bicycles every year,' he said, but police often can’t return bikes to their owners because many people neither record the bike’s serial number nor engrave the frame with an identifying mark such as a driver’s license number. 'With a serial number, it can be recovered anywhere in Canada,' he said."
Whether or not Smith has a note of the serial number or has engraved a mark on her (happily recovered) bike, she says that the main lesson for her of this is as follows:
“I don’t think I’m ever going to be locking that bike again. If it’s not coming inside, I’m not going out."
In addition, besides his evidently off-putting physical appearance, and his moral sleaziness, one further illustration of what a loser this Vancouver bike this is comes at the very start of the
Globe and Mail article (
emphasis mine):
"The man who stole Kayla Smith’s bike, then tried to sell it on Craigslist, had one request when she asked to take it for a test drive. “Don’t ride away,” he said."
No doubt the thief said that with a totally straight face. Sound like anyone you recognize?
So in the end, a happy, if slightly morally ambiguous ending for Kayla Smith, where she got back at the thief and got her bike back. Clearly not the same as stealing from a thief in the Ring, since in the opera, Wotan wanted to steal the magic ring for its power rather than return it to the Rhinemaidens, while in Vancouver, Smith was taking back what was rightfully hers.
With that, Happy Labor Day weekend, and time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week, which hopefully don't involve bike theft.....