A BURGLAR who boasted of his thieving skills when selling stolen bikes to police officers has been jailed.

Guy Michael Mason was caught on CCTV when he broke a court curfew to go on a £5,000 raid of York St John University on December 7. Police were waiting for him and his accomplice as he left the campus, Stephanie Hancock told York Crown Court.

He was already on bail for stealing and handling stolen bicycles following his chats with undercover detectives and subject to a suspended prison sentence for other crimes.

Today, Mason, 30, of Plumer Street, Tang Hall, is starting three years and eight months behind bars after pleading guilty to one charge of burglary, two each of stealing bicycles and selling stolen bicycles and one of selling a stolen laptop computer.

Judge Shaun Spencer said of the university raid: “The offence was quite clearly a planned and deliberate offence and not something that can be passed off as an offence committed on the spur of the moment.”

He also said Mason had engaged in “systematic trading of stolen bicycles”.

Mrs Hancock said Mason was trapped by a police sting called Operation Maelstrom in which detectives went undercover to catch handlers of stolen goods.

On February 15 last year, Mason sold one of the detectives a bike for £60 and told them he had stolen it himself.

On May 4, he sold another undercover policeman a stolen laptop for £80 and on May 10, he sold an undercover police officer three more bikes for £30 each, and again said he had stolen one of them. He was arrested on August 5 and bailed.

On October 15, he was given a prison sentence for house burglary, suspended on condition he observed a nightly curfew.

But on December 7, at 1am, a security guard at the university alerted police after spotting Mason and another man raiding the catering department’s safe. The accomplice escaped with their £5,000 haul.