Doubtful. Thieves steal catalytic converters for the Rhodium in them. Rhodium is more expensive than gold per troy ounce.

Where is bike theft legal?

Bike theft is legal in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, Providence, Pittsburgh, ...

Is there a national bicycle theft ring? I have a vague impression that it's mostly small groups. Steal a few bikes, maybe swap some parts around, sell them as used bikes, repeat.

This takedown seems to have been possible because there was a central group that was moving hundreds of millions of dollars of stolen goods - maybe even billions if you take "cost to manufacture" instead of "resell value". Why would a bike theft ring that centralized exist?

I doubt there is one, it seems to me that even with bikes being as expensive as they are the value isn't there. But, maybe? There was an interesting story a year ago about bikes being stolen from CO and popping up for sale in Mexico. The article is long but has a summary at the top of the page. https://bikeindex.org/news/closing-the-loop-a-deep-dive-on-a...

In Seattle homeless camps had/have bike chop shops.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/bike-rack-chop-shop-growing-trend...

It’s mostly not organized. (Though there do seem to be some rings exporting high end bikes to Mexico for sale.)

There's no need for a nation-wide ring with bikes. With cats, it is because you need connections to a refinery that will accept your stolen cats... but bikes can be fenced locally in a bike store.