Stuart Alger's Lesson in Crime

Stuart Alger was out door-knocking one evening late last month in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul. As the Ward 1 City Council candidate hobnobbed with potential voters, a neighbor called up to the porch. She wanted to know if Alger had left his bike leaning against a tree.

Apparently while he was giving his stump speech, some enterprising youngster had sized up the neophyte politician's 12-speed mountain bike and determined that it was superior to his own ride. Unfortunately it was not a mutually beneficial trade. "There was no way I was going to ride his bike around," Alger notes. "It was about two feet too short."

Alger called the cops. After riding around in a squad car for roughly 15 minutes searching in vein for the bike, however, the intrepid attorney decided to continue his door-knocking on foot.

The mystery of what had happened to his bike didn't last long. As Alger walked by a convenience store on Thomas Street, he spotted the 12-speed lying on the sidewalk. "It was pure happenstance that I saw it," Alger recalls. "I figured the person was in the store and sure enough he came out." The new occupant of the bike, however, didn't fit the description of the thief. Eventually the man confessed that he'd just purchased the bike a half hour earlier. "He eventually let it go," says Alger. "It was still in good shape. Nothing had been done to it really."

The incident has not dissuaded Alger from employing his bike on the Hustings. "I'm more determined than ever to use the bike," he maintains. And he discounts the possibility that the theft might have been the work of his political opponents. "I don't think it was a conspiracy," Alger laughs.