GHOST JAILED FOR 10 YEARS
not a “Filofax man”, adding: “I don’t pay tax, I don’t claim benefits.”
Seed made connections with London’s criminal gangs in Wormwood Scrubs and Blundeston prisons. An underworld source said he was given his Basil nickname while in jail.
The source said: “When he was in shovel he became friends with a couple of London criminals from well-known families. Baz talked about being one of the boys and having a ‘Joe’, a prisoner who cleaned his cell.”
On release, Seed moved from Cambridge to Islington, north London, then the epicentre of London’s crime world.
He led a double life, spending weekends gardening for his elderly mother at his old home and weekdays plotting heists with Brian Reader.
Reader was part of the Hatton Garden gang, and was jailed three years ago with Terry Perkins, 67, Daniel Jones, 61, and John Collins, 75.
One Last Job, a biography of Reader, 80, reveals how he met Seed in the 90s and realised the “alarm man” and computer expert was who he needed in the modern age. With his middleclass upbringing, university education and frugal lifestyle, Seed made an unlikely gang member.
But the source said: “He is a problem solver. Brian recognised his ability and brought him on board.”
Money wasn’t Seed’s main motivation. The source said: “Of course he wanted the money from the jobs, but he enjoyed the thrill of going into places at night.”
To get their man, police watched Seed for two-and-a-half years. They regularly tailed him walking to his brother’s house in east London, through Stratford to Canary Wharf, where he was filmed in April 2016.
Single and childless, Seed went to Cornwall with his mother and brother twice a year for family holidays.
In March 2018, he was finally arrested after the Flying Squad raided his one-bedroom flat and found £140,000 worth of Hatton Garden jewellery and gold ingots.
Passing sentence at Woolwich crown court, Judge Christopher Kinch QC told him: “Your role was a central one. You were at the heart of the core activities that had to be carried out.
“You were not just there to fetch and carry. This must rank among the worst offences of its type.”