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past in the city as a drug user and a street cruiser who did nothing but look for fights. Mike told me one night while we sat and talked in a parking lot that one day a senior patrolman suddenly remembered the loser version of Mike and remembered that he had been arrested for growing pot in his apartment. This should have shown up on his background investigation when he was hired, but it had not.
    The hunt was on. The senior patrolman was out to rid the department of Mike and shatter his dream of being a cop. Mike told me that he was seriously worried that his past had come back to haunt him. He was called in to the administration and had to meet with a crusty old lieutenant, who also was in charge of the computer and records section for the department.
    The lieutenant had already discovered that Mike had expunged his arrest record. He had access to the state file at an admin level, which granted him unlimited access to the records. He asked Mike to explain the arrest.
    Mike admitted that he was really scared. His dream was slipping away, but he came clean and told the lieutenant everything—all of it, more than was even in the files. The lieutenant was impressed by his honesty, and thought it over. This was before software had the ability to track a user’s action in a program, and when he’d finished thinking about it, the lieutenant simply deleted Mike’s arrest and conviction record, and then told him to act like this had never happened. Mike never saw his records deleted; they just never existed. Understood ?
    Mike understood. His dream had been saved, and he never forgot the gift he had been given. Mike told me of the incident and how he could not believe his luck. This couldn’t happen today, but in 1985 it was possible, and did happen. The witch-hunt stopped and Mike continued on with his career.
    Mike had a passion. Like every other cop in this book, he was exceptional at something. In Mike’s case, he was exceptional at finding stolen bicycles.
    To understand Mike’s passion you had to know his history. For most of us at the department, Mike’s passion was a mystery, so I asked Scott, his brother, why Mike was so determined to locate every stolen bike in the city. Scott rolled his eyes.
    “You have to understand, Mike had a bike when he was thirteen years old. He saved all his money and bought the bike of his dreams—a Schwinn Continental. He had it for about one month, showing it off to the whole neighborhood, and then one day it was stolen from behind our garage.”
    Mike blamed Scott, of course. He said Scott had left the bike lock undone, and that the Hispanic family across the street must have taken it. Mike was pissed beyond belief, and heartbroken.
    Their dad also thought one of the Hispanic kids must have taken it. At the time, Scott was hanging out with one of that family’s kids, and he invited him over for dinner and to play basketball, much to his dad’s disapproval. When the bike was stolen, Mike’s dad confronted the eight-year-old Hispanic boy, and told him that he could no longer come over to play with Scott.
    “I know that you had something to do with stealing Mike’s bike and you are no longer welcome here,” Mike’s dad said. The boy tried to explain that he had done nothing, but there was no reasoning with the older man.
    I asked Scott, “Are you serious? This is why he has made it his mission in life to recover stolen bikes?” I mean it was an obsession—Mike was ridiculed by all the other cops, and even the dispatchers had assigned him the unofficial call sign of “BIKE-ONE,” mocking his unrelenting mission to find stolen bicycles.
    Scott replied, “Yep that’s it. That’s the reason why. The funny thing is, thirty years later I actually found out who did steal the bike.”
    Scott said, “I was working an event for overtime pay, and I was talking to one of the DJs at the event. The DJ and I had grown up in the same neighborhood and we remembered each other. We started