No burglary at Rich City Rides, police say, pointing to possible dispute between bike shop’s partners.

This story was reported and published in a collaboration between Richmond Confidential and Richmondside. 

Najari Smith, co-founder and co-owner of Rich City Rides Cooperative Inc., reported to police on Jan. 13 that he walked into the bike co-op on Macdonald Avenue in Richmond and found thousands of dollars of merchandise missing. In the following days, he gave media interviews about the reported theft and started collecting donations through a GoFundMe campaign with a goal of raising $200,000 for the beloved neighborhood shop.

After investigating the report for several months, Richmond police now say there was no burglary. But Lt. Donald Patchin said they are investigating whether any other crimes occurred “related to the handling of business funds and property.”

“It appears this is a business dispute amongst the owner/operators of the business,” Patchin said in an email and a phone interview.

“From the very beginning, all signs pointed to it not being a burglary,” he said, adding that security cameras had been turned off, and there was no sign of forced entry into a safe or the building. 

The investigation is time-consuming, Patchin said, because it could involve subpoenas for business records and bank accounts and “going through those with a fine-tooth comb to try and determine if there was any malfeasance.”

In a phone interview the week of July 15, Smith maintained that the store was burglarized, but said he understands that if items are missing because of an internal dispute between himself and his business partner, it wouldn’t fit the legal definition of a burglary. 

Smith’s estranged business partner, Felonte “Taye” Roshni McGee, said he hasn’t been contacted by police with an update on the investigation.

“That’s a version of what I’ve been saying the whole time,” McGee said, when told by a reporter that police said no burglary occurred. “Nothing was ever stolen from the shop.”

Patchin said the investigation is focused on the Rich City Rides bike shop, not the nonprofit of a similar name. He said it came about through various allegations made during the burglary investigation.

Three people with ties to the shop, including McGee, have insisted there was no burglary. They say Smith spent so little time at the shop in the year leading up to its closure, that he was not familiar with its inventory. Smith acknowledged that he had been more focused on the nonprofit and was dealing with a death in the family, but he says he could see something was amiss when he went to the shop in January.

McGee said in a March interview that the bike cooperative was “closed indefinitely.” It remains locked up with paper covering the windows. 

Many cyclists were saddened by news of the bike shop’s closure and its uncertain future. They expressed concern on social media and in the chat sections of the group’s online fundraisers. Rich City Rides has been a staple in Richmond for more than a decade, hosting regular group rides and advocating for bike access and biking infrastructure — and by extension, green space.

“I don’t want to cast a negative light on my community,” Smith said recently. “I love Richmond.”

Soliciting donations

Smith launched the Rich City Rides nonprofit in 2012 and said Tuesday that the organization had other fiscal sponsorship before coming under the Urban Tilth umbrella in 2014. Urban Tilth is a food justice nonprofit founded and led by Richmond City Councilmember Doria Robinson, who is also Smith’s romantic partner. Urban Tilth currently has an active online fundraiser for the nonprofit on the platform JustGiving. 

Rich City Rides’ bicycle store and repair shop was founded as a co-op in 2014, and it operated financially as its own entity.

The nonprofit, which is still open, continues to host community rides, youth activities and repair workshops. It also provides bikes to residents in need. 

“Over the past 10 years, we have provided over 3,500 free new and refurbished bikes to Richmond residents,” the nonprofit project wrote in its February newsletter. 

When Smith posted the fundraising page after reporting the burglary in January, he wrote that he had planned to dissolve the co-op bike shop amid “insurmountable debt.” 

“We were trying to raise money to settle those debts and to end the business, so me and my partner (McGee) could walk away,” Smith said.  

“Help us turn a setback into a bounce back,” he asked potential donors, more than 60 of whom contributed. 

The GoFundMe campaign is no longer active, and a social media post about the burglary has since been deleted. The fundraiser had collected at least $4,000 in contributions before the page was taken down. 

Smith says these donations will be used to “pay off the credit card debt the bike shop incurred.”

Rich City Rides nonprofit’s website has a homepage message stating it is transitioning to an independent nonprofit known simply as Rich City — “a beacon of community development.”

The nonprofit has been able to accept tax-deductible donations because it has received fiscal sponsorship from Urban Tilth, which is a 501(c)(3) organization. The fiscal sponsorship model allows an organization to receive the benefits of nonprofit status without the hassle or cost associated with establishing and maintaining a 501(c)(3). 

The co-op and the nonprofit were based in separate units of the 1500 Macdonald Ave. location. Smith said the co-op started as an initiative of the nonprofit project.

“The offices for the nonprofit for years were located upstairs in the back of the bike shop. So people would not necessarily know that there were two different organizations,” said former employee Jason Woody.

“One of my big regrets is not changing the name,” Smith said in reference to confusion between the co-op and the nonprofit. “Hindsight is 20/20.”

The agreement between Rich City Rides and fiscal sponsor Urban Tilth was “confusing to a lot of people, including me for the first seven years,” McGee, the shop’s former co-owner, said. 

Community members would come to the bike shop asking to donate, McGee said. “I’d have to go to them and say, ‘No, you cannot donate anything to this for-profit establishment. You can surrender these things, but we cannot give you any tax write-off papers,’” he said. 

Woody and McGee were let go from the nonprofit last year. McGee worked at the co-op until it was shuttered in January.

Robinson, executive director of Urban Tilth, said any claims of confusion about the relationship between the nonprofit and the bike co-op are disingenuous. 

“They know the difference, especially the co-owners who were party to the creation of the CA co-op corporation, including the signing of incorporation papers and the ongoing business management,” she said in a May email. “They know and knew.” 

Before Robinson was elected to City Council, the California Strategic Growth Council announced on Oct. 28, 2022, that it had awarded $35 million to Richmond and a group of nonprofits, including Urban Tilth and its nonprofit project Rich City Rides, to build green infrastructure. 

Rich City Rides said in its application that it would use its portion, $3.7 million, for an E-bike lending library and a Rising Youth Fellows Program, to “build a base of Black and Brown Richmond youth leaders to advocate for climate justice in Richmond.” 

The plan has been to base the E-bikes in Unity Park at Ohio Avenue and 16th Street. On Instagram this month, Rich City posted an architectural drawing of a structure that would house the fleet, saying it would be built by next year. 

Rich City Rides also executed a plan to buy several properties, including the Macdonald Avenue building, launching a fundraiser for the purchases in 2023. Urban Tilth stepped in to help, paying $4.34 million for six properties, including the Macdonald building housing the Rich City Rides nonprofit and the bike shop. The Rich City’s Rides nonprofit contributed $1.13 million to the purchase amount, raised through a capital campaign, Smith said Tuesday. It then used a $2 million bridge loan to purchase the buildings from Urban Tilth, using the properties as collateral, according to Smith and a recent audit of Urban Tilth’s financial records.

Urban Tilth then sold the six parcels to Rich City under a “bridge loan” for the same amount, using the properties secured as collateral, according to a recent audit of Urban Tilth’s financial records. 

Robinson said in her email that the nonprofit project has repaid some of the loan — though she did not say how much. She said she expects the loan to be fully repaid by year’s end. 

“We’re working on it,” Smith said recently. “We want to complete that by the end of the year.” 

What is a fiscal sponsor?

In tax filings, Urban Tilth has noted its role as a fiscal sponsor over the years, including through a sponsorship agreement. Rich City Rides, in a 2024 newsletter, said it “has been a fiscally sponsored project for the past 12 years.”

Comprehensive fiscal sponsors collect donations, manage funding, disperse paychecks, and assume fiscal and legal liability on behalf of a project. 

“Maintaining control over the donated funds is a requirement of a legitimate fiscal sponsor arrangement,” according to the National Council of Nonprofits. The sponsor and project often have aligned missions, and typically the sponsor charges a fee for the service.

“If the fiscally sponsored entity is under the umbrella of the fiscal sponsor, then the fiscal sponsor has all of the authority to purchase real property on behalf of its program or project,” said nonprofit lawyer Daryl Reese, who is based in Santa Rosa.

Urban Tilth charges nonprofits a fee, and, in turn, offers insurance, business operations support and networking opportunities, according to Robinson. 

“We believe in the work of our [fiscally sponsored] projects and want them to succeed,” she said in her email. 

In response to questions about the relationship between Urban Tilth and Rich City Rides’ nonprofit, Robinson wrote, “Throughout our work we have been working with lawyers and acted according to their sound guidance which has stood up to close scrutiny from state and local authorities to this day.” She then accused the media of being “quick to assume and believe that projects led by Black leaders are somehow doing something wrong.”

Partners have a falling out

Smith launched the bike cooperative a decade ago with other founders who have since left the organization. He said Tuesday that McGee joined him in 2015. McGee says the partnership brought together his deep Richmond roots with Smith’s business acumen. 

“In the years following, we grew in name and legend as a special magic light in a city with a tough, rugged past,” Smith wrote about the early years on the recent GoFundMe page.

“We had a great relationship when it first started. I thought we were taking care of each other,” McGee said. “I admired him.”

“We were very close friends,” Smith said. “I watched his kids grow up.”

But as the nonprofit project was expanding, the bike shop was experiencing financial troubles, according to Smith. And by 2023, both Smith and McGee said they had plans to dissolve the cooperative. 

Richmond police spokesperson Patchin said this detail complicated the burglary investigation. 

“The problem is that there were already issues among the business owners,” he said. “They were already in the process of potentially shuttering the business before this occurred.”

The former friends’ relationship today is a far cry from how they described it in the early years, when McGee says they would always find each other at the shop after outings and activities. 

They have accused one another of sending people to threaten them. Smith said he filed a report with Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety at the end of 2022. McGee said he filed a report with Richmond police, and that the people who threatened him last August also stole a couple items from the co-op. 

Richmond police declined Richmond Confidential’s public records request for McGee’s 2022 threat report. The city said there was no record of a call to the Office of Neighborhood Safety from 1500 Macdonald Ave. in the time frame Smith referenced.

Richmond police also declined a public records request for the burglary report Smith filed in January. 

After reporting the burglary, Smith turned to fundraising, as he did when Rich City Rides tried to buy its building last year, and when he said the organization needed money to repair a vandalized van in 2020. “We know we can come back stronger than ever,” he wrote on the January GoFundMe page. 

Smith also wrote that there was no sign of forced entry. “The only way this could have been done is with access to a key and the ability to disarm the alarm system,” he wrote on the page, which has since been unpublished.

McGee took that as an accusation. 

“He’s telling people that I robbed my own store. And so I’m ashamed to really be outside,” McGee said. “It’s really depressing. Like I gotta keep on answering questions from everybody.”

In a recent phone interview, McGee reiterated, “That would mean that I would be stealing from myself. And I do not steal. l am not a thief. And I definitely don’t steal from myself,” he said. “My whole existence of being a bike rider and a person of this community, and being a pillar of my community — it all has been wiped away.”

Smith said on the fundraiser page that two days before he discovered the burglary, he had drafted a plan to dissolve the cooperative, which he said had accumulated $185,000 in debts. 

An Instagram post advertising the fundraiser said, “The proceeds will go to resolving the 200K debt the bike shop owes.” The post has since been taken down. 

One of the 60 people who donated to the fundraiser wrote in the comments section: “A business like this serves the community in many different ways. Hoping they are able to get back on their feet and get back to serving the community.”

Woody reported the page as fraudulent to GoFundMe, saying in an interview that he did not believe a burglary had occurred. Brian Barnes, former general manager of the bike shop, also said in an interview, “There was no burglary at all.” 

Woody said the fundraiser was deactivated after he made that report. It was later reactivated, but has since been taken down again. 

Since last year, Urban Tilth has been hosting a fundraiser for the Rich City nonprofit project on JustGiving, raising more than $14,000 so far. 

Rich City announced in its February newsletter that it intends to establish official nonprofit status, which would separate it from Urban Tilth’s sponsorship. Records show it has been registered with the California Secretary of State and Franchise Tax Board, as required. But it does not yet turn up on the IRS or California Attorney General’s lists of charitable organizations.

On Feb. 28, the California Attorney General’s office — which registers and manages state nonprofits — sent notice to Rich City to submit its registration fee, bylaws and IRS paperwork.

“It’s a process,” Smith said. “We’re working through our financials so that we can do the final submission for our 501(c)(3). We’re working on it.”

The Attorney General’s Office said by email on July 17 that its Registry of Charities and Fundraisers had not received a response from Rich City. 

“Ignoring a Notice to Register may lead to penalties, administrative or legal action, and the loss of tax exemption status with the Franchise Tax Board,” the office said. 

Two days later, the attorney general’s office sent Rich City a “final notice to register.” As of July 29, Rich City was still listed as “not registered” on the attorney general’s website. 

 This story was updated to add information provided after publication by Najari Smith and to correct information about who founded Rich City Rides Cooperative, when it came under Urban Tilth’s sponsorship and how many properties it purchased in 2023.    

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