If it seems too good to be true, you're probably involved in money laundering

The frame has been sold. It felt all too easy. I posted on Craig's list, got a reply and sold the ol' girl. After all we had been through, we were just starting to get to know each other. Oh well. She wasn't the one for me. But hey, I made 35 bucks in the process. But as for the second Peugeot I bought...now THAT is a story...

I posted on Craig's list last week, and here is the email chain with one "William Laura" that seemed all too good to be true.

William:

Hello,
Is the item still available and in good condition?
Regards,
Laura Williams.

Me:

Yes and yes! It needs a new chain and a front tired tube but everything else is awesome! I wish it was my size. When would you like to come see it?

William:

I appreciate your response to my inquiry. Am interested in buying it
from you. I would have loved to come and check it myself but I'm on
business to canada. Pls do withdraw the advert from craigslist as i don't
mind adding $50 for you to do that, so i can be rest assured that the item
is held for me. I should believe it is in good condition as stated. I will be
making the payment via a Certified Check, which my secretary will mail
to you. I'll be picking the item from you with the aid of my mover. My
Mover will be coming to pick it from you once the Certified Check has
been cashed. Pls I will need your full name and residential address
along with your phone number to issue out the payment.
Regards.

Commentary: This is the second item I have ever sold on Craig's list, so for me, this seemed totally legit so far. I mean, this seems like a busy guy who likes the old school peugeot but doesn't have time to see it so he wants me to hold it for him. What's an extra 50 bucks to a guy who goes on business to Canada during the week? What I should have been thinking at the time was, who the fuck goes on business to Canada? But hey, I wanted to believe that I was going to sell this bike and get extra money. At the time, I really thought there was nothing out of the ordinary here...

Me:

Wow that sounds great. I will take the item off craig's list and hold it for you, on good faith that you will send me a check for $300. My full name is Jordan Cohen and I would like you to send the check to my workplace. The address is:

Jordan Cohen

Painted Bride Art Center

230 Vine Street

Philadelphia, PA 19106

You said your mover will be coming to pick up the bike? I imagine that will be sometime next week? My number is 301-807-7134. You can have him call me to set up a day and time, once I receive the check. Please confirm all the details of this email so that I can take the bike off Craigs list. Thanks for your interest! I'm glad the bike will be going to a good home!

Commentary: I know what you are all thinking, OBVIOUSLY this is a scam. But put yourself in my position. You want to sell a bike. It sounds like the guy wants to buy it. You are getting an extra 50 bucks. Where is the scam?

William:

Thank you for your reply.Your payment will be send and should be ready for the mail asap,do get back to me as soon as you have the payment delivered to you.You tell me the best time for the mover to come over for the pick up after you might have cashed the check.Moreover, do remove the ad completely from craigslist to be sure it is held for me.

Commentary: This seems pretty legit to me. He is send the check and his mover will come pick up the bike. My fears have been calmed, for now...

Me:

OK, I will take the bike off Craig's list. Thank you for your purchase. I will let you know when I get the check for $300. Could I possibly have a phone number to contact you if there is any problem? Thanks!

Me (follow up):

I just deleted the posting. Please let me know when the payment has been sent. Thanks.

William:

Hi ,
How are you doing? I want you to understand that the deal is on as my
secretary has posted the payment already, but there was a slight error
i guess we can handle with care, instead of the actual amount for the
item, she made out the check for $2250, she claimed that was what i
requested but she didn't get that straight. So once you have the check
please cash it and deduct the money for the items plus $50 that for your
running around expenses. The excess fund should please be sent to my
mover via western union,this fund will be use for pick up and delivery of the
item and in offsetting the cost of the shipment he has undertaken for me
recently.
**Please email at once to let me know that i can trust you to have the
excess funds sent to my mover**
Regards.

Commentary: Welcome to sketchville, where people have names like William Laura and money gets thrown around like candy. I would LOVE to say that I knew this was a scam at this point, but truthfully, I still thought it might be legit. I mean, I knew something weird was up, but I didn't really want to believe it. I did want to talk to this guy in person though, so I wasn't just blindly going through with it. And how was I supposed to know that Western Union is a money launderer's best friend?

Me:

This all seems a bit crazy. Please call me at 301-807-7134 so we can discuss this over the phone so that we both feel better about it. Thank you and I look forward to talking with you.

Me (next day):

I know you are busy but if you had a free moment I would love to talk to you about the money mix up. If you cannot, I could talk to your secretary instead and try to work something out. You can trust me to only take the money you owe me for the bike, but I would feel better about the situation (as you would I believe) if we talked it out. My number is 301-807-7134. Thanks!

Commentary: Ok, so I knew something was up, but man did I not want it to be true. But really, I wouldn't have gone through with it if the guy didn't call.

William:

Sorry i've been too busy to check my mails. I would give you a call tomorrow.

Commentary: No call. I'm really starting to believe this is bullshit. I know what your thinking..."it too you THIS long?!?"

Me:

If I don't here from you by 5, I am relisting the item. My number is 301-807-7134.

Me (later that day):

Thank you for completely wasting my time. A simple email response would have been nice.

William:

Hello and how are you doing?

Did you still have the item held for me. I'm not ignoring your emails i've been too busy last week to check mails.

Commentary: OK, so I know now this is all a money laundering scam. But the guy is pretty persistent, isn't he? There is a tiny part of me that wonders if this could possibly be legit. So I give it one last try. I guess I'm just an idiot like that.

Me:

This whole thing seems a bit fishy to me. If your secretary made out the check for the wrong amount, have her cancel the original check for $2250 and send me another check for the $300 we originally agreed on. I really don't want to have to deal with western union or handling extra money of yours. If you send me the check for $300, the bike is yours. For now I relisted the item. Send the check quickly, and when I get a PHONE CALL confirmation that the check has been sent, by you or your secretary, I will take the ad off craigs list. My number is 301-807-7134. If I get another offer for the bike before I hear from you I am selling it. Sorry to sound harsh, I just feel like you have wasted a week of my time already and I could have had this bike sold.

Commentary: Shit. So I have given this guy my name, email address, work address and phone number. If he really is a drug dealing king pin who is praying on gullible bike sellers to launder money, maybe I should be worried. So far, no word from the infamous Mr. Laura. But something tells me I may not have seen the last of him. Furthermore, by me posting this on my gchat, he may very well be reading this right now. Maybe I should look into Craig's List Witness Protection?

You can't teach an old bike new tricks

What a mess. I bought an old peugeot project frame and I was ready to bring it back to life. I wrestled with the bottom bracket and eventually got it loose. I even bought used shimano ultegra integrated shifters (gear shifting integrated into the braking system) that are used on all high end road bikes today. I thought that I would add some new technology to this old girl. I bought a 9 speed cog for the back wheel and front and rear deraileurs.


But alas, you cannot teach an old bike new tricks. It turns out NONE of the stuff I bought was compatible. In order to make this frame usable, I would have to bend out the back triangles to accommodate a 9 speed cog on the backwheel. This would cost me an extra 40 dollars, when I only paid 60 dollars for the frame. What's more, I found out that the frame I am in possession of is actually the wal-mart level bike put out by Peugeot back in the day. All of this work for a crappy bike? I think not. So do I feel like a giant ass? Of course. But you don't even know the half of it. When I was deluding myself into believing that I could go against all odds and build this bike, I even found and bought another, fully built Peugeot from the 70's which I decided I would strip of its necessary parts and sell the rest. Thats right, I now have not one, but TWO old French bikes, which I need to get rid of. Why not keep the second Peugeot I bought? Well, it is too large for me. Fuck.
Now what? Well, the bikes are listed on craigslist. I am starting over, but now I have the wisdom of experience (and mistakes). I also have a seat, shifters and deraileurs. I am thinking from here forward I am going to stick to an English threaded frame so everything just fits. I am either going old school English or old school Italian. French may be out of the question. But only time will tell.

Apparently, the French are assholes.

Peugeots are pretty. And they are hard to pronounce. But other than that, I know little about them. After a bit of Wikipedia research, I learned that Peugeot is the most successful factory team of the Tour de France, winning the race a record 10 times. While Peugeot bikes were really popular in the late 70's and 80's (I believe the baby I got is a late 70's bike but that is just what most people have guessed) but it seems that nowadays, people are more interested with finding old Peugeots and fixing them up rather than buying new ones. There is something appealing about bringing back a vintage bike that was the top of the line at the time, and though oddly outdated now, still seems timeless. I want to take this rusty, old 70's Peugeot and bring it back to the glory days. I have this vision of melding old and new, vintage and cutting edge, to create one mean, lean riding machine. Easier said than done...

When I first took my dilapidated frame to Firehouse bikes, the same place I first fell in love a Peugeot, I was expecting to get some good advice on how to bring new life to this bike. I mean, that is what they DO there. When I showed the woman working there my frame and told her that i was interested in fixing it up, she began her nay saying. "Well, you see thats an OLD French bike, only compatible with OLD French parts. If you are looking to build a road bike from that, you are looking at a nearly impossible task. You're talking months of frustration, loads of money and in the end it probably won't be worth it." Helpful, very helpful. My only response was "Good to hear" as I cracked a sarcastic smile and walked out the door with my baby. I'll show her...I'll go to bike church, where anything is possible.

I went to bike church the following week. I got downstairs, excited and ready to work. My first task was to take off the rusty old bottom bracket (basically the part where the pedals attach to the bike). I put my bike on the stand when a blonde mustached, young, hipstery bike volunteer came over to me. I thought, now here is a man who can give me some inspiration. I told him I was looking to build this old frame into a new road bike. He looked at it, rubbed at some of the rusty spots and then his nay saying began. "Yeah, I tried to build up a Peugeot one time. It was a horrible experience, really frustrating. You see, these bikes are French threaded so you can only use French parts that are threaded the same, which are hard to find. It took me forever to complete the bike and I had to use a threadless bottom bracket which now is rickety and doesn't ride right. This project, if not impossible, is nearly impossible. But you can give it a try if you want." Awesome. If you can't get inspiration from a hipster who says fuck it to all rationality and does his own thing, who can you get inspiration from? "Well, I guess I'm in for a fun project then", I said as i began examining the rusted bottom bracket, trying to think of how best to remove it. I'll show him, I thought. I'll show everyone....

A few minutes later, this crazy old dude with a home made Archie hat came over to help me with my bike. He saw how hopeless I looked and he decided to help me out. Little did I know his dedication to my cause. Now let me tell you a bit about the crankset (petals and front gears) and the bottom bracket (part where the crankset attaches on the bike) of this bike. I'll try to clarify any hip bike lingo that I learned along the way. This particular old bike has a codder pin holding the crankset on, (in other words, its a pain in the ass to get off, and even worse when it is rusted to the point of being unrecognizable). While I thought the codder pin seemed too rusted to remove, Archie, begged to differ. He rummaged through the tool drawer until he found a special codder pin remover. We removed one side, no problem. But...the other side, was another story.

What I did not realize when I bought the bike, which is probably why I was sold this bike by a guy who fixes up bikes for a living, was that "someone" had already tried to remove the codder pin and bent it so that it was unable to be removed by the normal tool. Archie, seemed unphased. He had a plan. He attempted to use what he referred to as a "sacrificial nut" placed within the clamping, codder pin remover to unbend the pin as we twisted the tool. This brought us closer to the goal, but in the end it too failed. At this point, Blonde mustache nay sayer man, who I later found out to BE FRENCH!!! (named Pierre of course) was intrigued at the difficulty of my project and came back over to help. Another volunteer also floated over, realizing that my project was escalating into a war between man and machine. The two younger volunteers attempted to use a hammer and screwdriver to unbend the pin, while Archie, the seasoned veteran, went to find other tools. He came over to my bike, unclamped it while one of the younger guys was still trying to hammer the pin, and took it over to a table where he had set up a metal sander. The days of trying to coax that pin out were over. He was gonna nuke the little fucker. I wish I had a camera down in that musty basement where bike dreams come true. I can barely describe the scene as Archie blasted away the rusty, 30 year old metal crank that stood between us and the pin. It was a bloodbath. Sparks flew everywhere. The entire bike church stopped and watched as Archie butchered the rusty old crank. He believed in my project. As I watched the sparks fly, I started to believe too. He finally sanded through the crank, through the codder pin, but that little thing still held fast. It took a great deal more hammering before the pin finally let go. And here it is today...









Yeah that was a cylinder once. So finally we got the codder pin out and took off the whole rusty crankset. But we weren't out of the woods yet, there was one piece left in our way. The way that the bottom bracket is constructed, there are two cylindrical pieces that screw into either side of the hole in the bottom part of the bike where the pedals fit. Inside, as I found out after getting one of these pieces off, there are tons of little ball bearings just walking around in there all willy-nilly. One side is easier to take off (pictured center) because it has a lock ring (pictured left) and there is a special tool for that. But after the whole crankset was removed, the only piece left was the one on the right, and it was rusted in there tight. It probably had not moved since the bike was built, if anything it had only been tightened. So begins part 2 of this ridiculous bike church adventure. I started with a big wrench and a hammer, trying to lock it around the flat edges of the ring and unscrew it. But alas, which way to unscrew? Lefty loosy, right tighty....right? Well, no. Remember that the French are assholes and thus, they must make everything difficult. Of the 4 guys helping me thus far, 2 believed that this bike was old enough that they screwed in the bottom bracket in the same direction as one would pedal the bike (this was before they realized that in doing this, you could essentially unscew the bottom bracket while you road the bike). However, the other 2 believed that it was made after the point in time when the started to screw it in against the pedal motion. I listened to Pierre and Archie since they seemed to know the most and attempted to unscrew to the left. This, proved useless; the thing was stuck.

After 45 minutes of attempting over and over with the wrench and hammer, Archie came back. He once again had a plan. He went into the super specialized tool drawer, and picket out a big crank looking tool that he said was made especially for unscrewing this piece. Basically, the crank part of the tool went on the outside and another piece went through the other side of the bottom bracket and screwed into the crank. Essentially, the big crank tool sandwiched the stuck piece to give more leverage for unscrewing. But the stuck piece was not giving, even with 3 big strong men giving it a go. So we added even more leverage by extending the crank with steel tubes cut from old bike frames. At this point, there were 5 guys trying to unscrew this thing at once while others just stared in awe. There were two people pushing up with all their weight and 3 pushing down. Finally, the thing started to budge a little, as the steel tubing began to bend. When it stopped unscrewing. Pierre and Archie realized, that they were screwing the wrong way. We had actually tightened the thing more. So when we attempted to unscrew it the right way, we bent the tool itself, without moving the piece. Of course, seeing how impossible the task was and that we had just made it worse, people stopped helping and moved on to other, simpler tasks. Archie stayed with me.

We had only one more option, to clamp the crank tool into a table vice and try to spin the bike to unscrew it. This was a last ditch attempt to maximize the torque. We tried to clamp this cylindrical tool as best we could into a vice and 3 of use began pushing with all our weight. After a while, we felt it budge. No one said anything because we didn't actually believe it. We kept pushing and soon began turning the bike. It was working. It became effortless. The three of us smiled and we gingerly turned the bike. loosening the rusted old piece's death grip on the bike. One guy said "it just feels so good" and I replied "yeah, I feel like we are putting so much good energy into the world right now" We could have easily unclamped the contraption and unscrewed the rest by hand, but it felt too good. We all continued to unscrew. Finally, the bike was free. Archie turned to me with a smile and said "now the real project begins". People around me were cleaning up. It had taken 3 hours to get that stupid rusty bracket off. Pierre even came up to me and apologized for being so negative. He wished me luck on the project. I began to believe that in a few months, I might actually be riding a functional bike. I guess I shouldn't jinx it. The real work hasn't even begun.

Finally, a peace treaty between the English and French

I have been eyeing saddles for my new project bike, but specifically I have heard wonderful things about the leather English made Brooks saddles. Unfortunately, these expensive leather butt holders cost anywhere form 100-200 dollars. So, I went to my trusty friend Craig and checked out his list of possibles. After a few weeks of searching, I got lucky. Yesterday I found a guy selling bikes and one had a Brooks saddle on it.

I immediately shot him and email asking for just the saddle and he had no idea how much it was worth, so I got it for 20 bucks. Now I have to recondition the old leather (looks like its seen a few years and a few raindrops), but after looking for advice online, it seems the Brooks brand prohide cream will do the trick. My only concern now is putting together a French frame and an English saddle. Will the age old feud between the English and French cause my bike to break out into bloody warfare while I am riding down Walnut street? Let us hope not.

Why can't I breathe, whenever I think about you?

This is not a blog, it is a story of a boy and a bike. Well, more like a boy and his journey to create his dream bike. The story begins one fine May morning, nearly 4 months ago...

I knew I needed a bike for my job in Philadelphia and my fellowship gave me 300 dollars to go buy one, so of course I was excited. I went to a used bike shop called Firehouse bikes in West Philadelphia and perused the selection. I made sure to take my friend Annie who actually knew something about bikes and would keep me from getting the flashiest one for the sheer beauty and brightness of it. She proved her worth when we walked in the door and I instantly walked over to a bright, lime green road bike that was 650 dollars. Annie grabbed me by the neck and took me to the bikes that ranged around 300-400 dollars and helped me to pick out a functional bike. I settled on a maroon Ross signature for 385 US American dollar bills. While I loved my new bike, in the back of my mind I yearned for something more flashy and colorful to match my rainbow personality.

3 months later, I was helping my friend try out bikes at Firehouse and I came across a beautiful, brand new 1985 Peugeot. It had been lying in parts in a box for over 30 years before being put together and finding its way onto the floor of Firehouse bikes. I was immediately drawn to the rainbow coloring, smooth finish and surreal ride of this French beautfy. But I had my trusty Ross, now nicknamed Pacha Mama, and I couldn't just abandon her. Or could I? I tried to bargain with the owner of the shop to trade in my old bike for this new one, but the odds were simply not in my favor. I would have had to shell out another 250 dollars! Plus, I loved my old bike, and we had already been through so much together. So I left, somewhat downtrodden. I think Pacha Mama felt neglected and unloved, she just didn't ride the same after that.


For the next few weeks, I rode my trusty bike all around Philly--though every night in my dreams, I betrayed her love by riding another. One night I couldn't sleep so I began searching on craigslist for any little french cuties. Then I saw her, an old 1970s peugeot, bruised and broken but still with a spark.
She was an old girl, in need of a whole lot of love, but I was ready and willing to commit. I would clean her up, replace her beat up, outdated parts, and make her the bike of my dreams. And so, my journey began...