“It was a weird, unbelievable story,” Tesch recalled. The product of careful research and planning, this new identity would be backed up by newspaper clippings and trophies that bore the name Alexi Santana-a self-educated Nevada cowboy who could run a mile in just over four minutes and, according to the correspondence found in the shed, had applied for admission to some of America’s finest universities, including Stanford, Princeton, and Brown. He had been dreaming of a better life, to be led by a person who was no longer James Hogue. The correspondence there showed that James Hogue had been occupied with a larger, more imaginative goal than disposing of the stolen bikes. Sleeplessness, fear, and nervous exhaustion have settled in the hollows beneath his eyes.Īs it turned out, Hogue’s theft from the Tesch Bicycle Company was only the beginning of a far more intricate deception, the clues to which were neatly laid out in the locker in St.
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The only hints of Hogue’s state of mind survive in the form of two photographs taken at the time of his arrest. George, Utah, where an acquaintance named Jim Hogue had whipped out a Mitutoyo metric dial caliper engraved with Tesch’s name. One of his friends had recently been at a party in St. The theft remained unsolved until the following March, when a bicycle enthusiast from Utah named Bruce Stucky stopped by to visit Dave Tesch at his shop. In the summer of ’87, Hogue started showing up in San Marcos, sleeping in his truck, helping Tesch out around the shop, and otherwise leading a life that might have seemed atypical for a Stanford professor. He drank a mixture of mustard and Perrier during races he lit a cigarette after crossing the finish line, as the other runners looked on in horror. With his diffident manner and his youthful face, though, he looked less like a professor than like an undergraduate. in bioengineering from Stanford University, where he was a professor. The instructors also included a young man named James Hogue, a miler who, according to the camp’s promotional literature, had earned a Ph.D. For the previous few summers, Tesch had worked as an instructor at Jim Davis’s Vail Cross-Training Camp, which offered people the chance to enjoy a week in Vail, Colorado, training with athletes like the distance runner Frank Shorter, and the champion triathlete Scott (the Terminator) Molina. In fact, the thief was someone he knew quite well. A similar break-in had been reported at another bicycle firm in the area, Masi, and Tesch leaped with characteristic but misplaced certainty to the conclusion that a rival had burglarized his shop. When Tesch opened the door of his shop one morning in October, 1987, to find that someone had kicked over a rooftop turbine vent, jumped down the hole, and made off with more than twenty thousand dollars’ worth of frames, parts, and tools, his anger at the theft was compounded by the knowledge that he could ill afford the loss. Yet, even in the best of times, manufacturing high-end bicycles was a difficult business. In La Verne, California, a company called Santana made tandem bikes, and had captured more than half of that specialized market. In towns such as San Marcos, the manufacture of high-end racing cycles had grown into a thriving cottage industry, boosted by the surprise gold-medal victory of the American cyclist Alexi Grewal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The competitors that worried Tesch most were local. The Tesch Bicycle Company, in San Marcos, California, produced approximately five hundred bicycles a year for a growing community of avid cyclists who preferred American-made bikes to those produced by better-known European racing houses like Bottechia and Colnago. A short, stocky olive-skinned man, he was expert at his craft. Standing next to Jacobson in the locker, the bicycle-maker, Dave Tesch, stepped forward to identify his stolen goods. The detective guessed that the thief had been living in the shed, perhaps for months. Inside, he saw bicycle frames, a row of athletic trophies, papers, letters, a sleeping bag, and other personal effects.
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100, the detective flicked a switch to illuminate a sixty-square-foot space with aluminum walls, no windows, and a bare concrete floor. Raising the corrugated steel door of Locker No. George, Utah, with a warrant to search for high-end racing bicycles and tools that had been stolen from a bicycle-maker in California several months before. On the morning of March 30, 1988, a police detective named Matt Jacobson arrived at the Secure Storage facility in St. How did a twenty-nine-year-old drifter, petty thief, and ex-con turn himself into a nineteen-year-old freshman at Princeton? Illustration by Mark Ulriksen I-THE LOCKER