PORT TALBOT: Burglar with 166 offences on his record jailed after late-night hunt for an unlocked door

A Port Talbot burglar with 166 offences on his record has been jailed for four years after wandering his own streets in the dead of night, trying front doors until he found one unlocked.

Marcus Lee Thomas, 37, of Promenade View, Sandfields, let himself into a home on Arthur Street in the early hours of 1 June and took the keys to the owner’s Mercedes, Swansea Crown Court heard.

Minutes earlier he had tried the front door of another house on the same terraced street, but found it locked.

The Mercedes had been parked on nearby Bailey Street overnight, and shortly after 2am Thomas was caught on CCTV driving it away. Its owner only realised his home had been entered when he went to fetch his keys from their usual spot by the front door and found them gone.

The court heard the car was later seen on Dalton Road with two women inside alongside Thomas, and the three spent several hours that morning at a flat on Cwrt Morfa Afan.

It was there the spree ended in a wreck. One of the women drove the Mercedes into a fence on the cul-de-sac then reversed it into a parked van, while Thomas stood by the car “laughing”, the court heard.

The three ran off leaving the keys in the ignition and the engine running. Police found and arrested Thomas on Dalton Road.

The damage to the Mercedes was put at £7,000 and the owner’s insurance company wrote the car off. The van suffered significant damage to its bonnet, wing, door and headlights.

In his impact statement, the owner said he had saved up for months to buy the car, and the burglary had left him anxious, struggling to sleep and “always on edge”, fearing someone would enter his home again.

Golf club raid, a vicar’s ransacked home and a knife-point car theft

Thomas pleaded guilty to burglary, attempted burglary, aggravated vehicle-taking, vehicle damage and driving while disqualified and without insurance.

His record runs to 62 convictions for 166 offences, the court heard, including four burglaries, 22 vehicle-taking offences and 20 counts of driving while disqualified.

Among them: a 2017 raid on Grove Golf Club in Porthcawl in which a cleaner was threatened with a crowbar, and the 2019 burglary of a vicar’s home in Port Talbot in which the couple’s dog was badly beaten and more than £50,000 of jewellery taken, most never recovered.

In 2023 he was jailed for 54 months over a group knife-point car theft on Swansea’s St Helen’s Road that ended with a police car being rammed. He was on licence for that offending when he struck in June, and has been recalled to prison until June 2028.

His barrister James McKenna, who told the court he had represented Thomas for 20 years since his offending began as a teenager, accepted his client had a “poor record”. He said Thomas had stayed out of trouble for nearly a year after his release in July 2025, before a new relationship, a reintroduction to drugs and, within a week, “reverting to type”.

Judge Christopher Vosper KC said Thomas had “set out to burgle a property” to take a car, then “made the car available” to the woman who damaged it.

With credit for his guilty pleas, Thomas was jailed for four years and banned from driving for five, with an extended test before he can hold a licence again.

Detective Constable Joseph Wilcox of South Wales Police said Thomas’s behaviour was “the sort which makes people feel unsafe in their own homes”. “He knew what he was doing was wrong, yet decided to do it anyway,” he said. “There is no place for behaviour like that on the streets of Neath Port Talbot.”

The court heard legal proceedings are under way against a woman in relation to the same incident.