Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  The Andes carried four hundred passengers, and the new bellboy did very well out of them. His former shipmate remembers Nick well. ‘Like his father, he was very, very smart. Always well turned out. The uniform was a white tunic with blue edgings… He used to make a lot from tips, a lot. What he’d do is grizzle in front of passengers when he was operating the lifts and they’d ask him what was the matter. He’d tell them how terribly homesick he was. Of course the passengers would feel sorry for the lad, especially the women passengers, and they’d give him a big tip.’

  According to the shipmate, the snivelling bellboy also played on the good nature of his fellow crew members. ‘He went round the crew’s quarters asking people for a sixpence or a threepenny bit so he could buy stamps to write a letter home.’

  He also made money by covering for his shipmates’ boozing and philandering. He’d happily fill in for them if they made it worth his while.

  What the teenager saw on the Andes changed his life. ‘The wealth was incredible. That’s when I started to see what was going on in the world. I put it all to good advantage.’ He also saw what happened below decks and in the galley, which might explain some of the peculiarities he exhibited later on in life. One was his preference for baked potatoes. He explained that he could peel a baked potato and throw the peel away knowing that ‘no one has pissed on or spat on’ what he was consuming.

  Nick spent twelve months on the Andes. There was a three-week cruise in the Mediterranean, followed by a quick trip north to the Baltic and then, for the rest of the year, there were lazy, month-long cruises round the Caribbean and Florida.

  One of the regular ports of call was Nassau, capital of New Providence Island in the Bahamas. It was here that Nick spotted an opportunity and made his fortune. Or he says he did.

  Nassau was still an old colonial port in 1960. On the hill overlooking the bay loomed the battlements of Fort Charlotte, built by slaves in the eighteenth century. Down below, black policemen in white helmets and khaki shorts patrolled the bustling harbour. Horse-drawn surreys trotted through narrow passageways with names like Goat Alley and Burial Ground Corner. Here and there along the shore an elegant pastel-coloured mansion peeped out from behind a wall of bougainvillea or hibiscus. Expatriate white men chatted in their clubs. Black children hailed incoming yachts, offering to dive for pennies. Bahamian women tramped the marketplace and the shantytown of wooden huts ‘over the hill’, balancing impossible parcels on their heads.

  But Nassau was changing. There were more and more Cadillacs and offices on Bay Street, the commercial hub of the town. There were more and more men with briefcases. The port was about to develop fast, and property prices were about to explode.

  When Nick first arrived land prices had already been shooting up for several years. The rise was fuelled by the increasing numbers of the super-rich opting for a hideaway on the powder-soft sand of a Bahamian cove. It wasn’t a new phenomenon. The first rich Britons and Americans to spot the Bahamas as a perfect bolthole had arrived as long ago as the 1880s. There had been no big influx of the rich, however, until after the Second World War. Then, in the fifties, British aristocrats like Colin Tennant and Sir Victor Sassoon fetched up there, and more followed. At the end of the decade some land prices had trebled. That was nothing to what was coming.

  Two men had visions for the island of New Providence that would help to send the Bahamian land values through the roof. One of them was an American tycoon called Huntingdon Hartford. In 1959 he had paid £3 million to buy a plot of six thousand acres on an islet across the bay from Nassau called Hog Island. It was an enormous sum in those days. Hartford announced that he planned to build a ‘resort of taste and refinement’ there, though he was looking for a ‘more appealing’ name for the island. He found one. In 1962 the colonial authorities gave permission for Hog to become Paradise Island. The news of the American millionaire’s plan prompted a scramble among entrepreneurs to snaffle up every acre of the Bahamian shoreline that they could.

  The second man’s vision would have an even more dramatic impact on the islands. Meyer Lansky was the American Mafia’s financial wizard, but in 1959 he and his even more notorious partner, Lucky Luciano, lost their lucrative gambling outlet in Havana. Fidel Castro’s left-wing revolutionaries overthrew the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista, then promptly closed the Havana casinos and kicked the Mafia out. To Lansky and Luciano, dreamy little Nassau was an ideal replacement for Havana. Their predecessors had once used the islands. During prohibition in the 1920s American bootleggers had made the Bahamas one of their main staging posts for running hooch into the USA. But its real attraction to Lansky and Luciano was that the authorities there were likely to be a pushover. There was no income tax in the islands. Currency controls were minimal. The colonial administration didn’t much care who set up shop there as long as they weren’t communists. And the place was almost as near to the USA – and so almost as close to US gamblers – as the Mob’s old base in Cuba was.

  Lansky and Luciano quietly moved in on the Bahamas. Later they would open their own Mafia-controlled bank there and own two of the smaller islands. Gambling and drug running would take off. The impact on land prices would be massive. In a couple of years prices would quadruple, then quadruple and quadruple again.

  The Andes docked just as all this was beginning to happen. Van Hoogstraten, speaking to one of the authors in 2001, described what followed. ‘The executors of Sir Harry Oakes were selling his estate. They had this idea of splitting it up and selling ten-year options on each little parcel. I had some money and bought as many options as I could… I took out hundreds, no, thousands.’

  Sir Harry Oakes was a fabulous character from another age. In 1917 he had made the second-biggest gold strike ever in the Western Hemisphere. It brought him so much money that he was reckoned to be the richest man on earth. In the 1930s he purchased the huge Westbourne estate outside Nassau and settled there. But in 1943 he was murdered in his Westbourne mansion, apparently the victim of a Voodoo ritual. His only house guest found his body lying face-up on the bed. It was tarred and feathered and was smouldering as if the corpse had been set on fire. Oakes’s playboy son-in-law, whom he had openly disliked, was arrested and charged with the murder. But after a sensational trial he was acquitted. Nearly sixty years later the killing remains a mystery.

  Van Hoogstraten never explained how he heard that the Oakes estate was being sold and how he then got in ahead of all the others who were scrabbling for prime sites in Nassau. Whatever the explanation, he managed to buy up ‘hundreds of acres’ without putting up anything other than minimum ‘option money… Peanuts.’

  Then he quit the ‘navy’, as he called it, and waited. He didn’t have to wait for long.

  Within two years he was rich. ‘I saw land that I had bought for nothing, £300 an acre, go for six, eight, ten thousand an acre. It was colossal money in those days.’ He didn’t gamble on prices going any higher but sold everything. ‘I pulled the whole lot out and put the money in Switzerland.’

  ‘Where I was clever or lucky was when I got out,’ he later told the Observer. ‘All markets go in cycles. You can’t always get in at the bottom and out at the top. As long as you get in and get out you make money. I always had an instinct for knowing when enough’s enough.’

  How much did he make? He claims that he went ‘from being worth £30,000 [his stamp collection] to a few hundred thousand’.

  Later he would invest the Swiss money in mining, land and gold in the USA and Africa. It was these investments which eventually made him super-rich, he claimed in an interview with Business Age.

  Inevitably, journalists and others have wondered about the story of the launching pad for his wealth – that inspired piece of land speculation in the Bahamas. But investigative reporters who have dug for details have come up with nothing. Enquiries to the land registry there have produced no records of anyone called Nicholas Hoogstraten. Real-estate operators who were active in the islands in the 19
60s profess not to know the name, but then this is a rich man’s paradise and so it is a place of secrets.

  Is the Oakes land story a fiction? Does it seek to cover up a much more sinister explanation for Hoogstraten’s sudden wealth? There is no evidence of any wrongdoing, but the enormous amount of money he claims to have made – together with his later criminal activities – has fuelled continual speculation.

  One friendship which he says he forged there was with Sir Lynden Pindling, the first black prime minister of the Bahamas. When Nick was striking gold with the land deal, Pindling, a lawyer, was leading the fight for independence from British colonial rule. He was known by his followers as the ‘black Moses’. Van Hoogstraten says that he was introduced by a girlfriend to the charismatic Pindling and that they became friends. He is a compulsive namedropper. One or two meetings with a famous person and, in his mind, he or she becomes a friend. Mick Jagger, the Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith and Janet Street-Porter are just a few examples. If Pindling was indeed a friend, he was a friend with dangerous connections. As Prime Minister of the Bahamas, he was to become totally dependent on the Mafia. His regime was supported by drug money. He was finally forced from power in the 1970s because of corruption, and because those Mafia connections had become an international scandal. At that time ninety per cent of all the cocaine consumed in the USA was being routed through the Bahamas.

  However Nicholas Hoogstraten made his first fortune, he never forgot the Caribbean as giving him the opportunity to change his life. He’d return there time after time. He’d try to live there. He’d name his companies – and his family – after towns there. He’d go there to celebrate his greatest triumphs and his greatest escapes. And he’d find a beautiful woman there who fell in love with him and might have kept him on the straight and narrow if only he had stuck with her.

  2

  KING MOD

  A triumphant Nicholas Hoogstraten packed in his job as a bellboy on the Andes and went back to the Caribbean. He was in the Bahamas on that day in November 1963 when US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He remembered that he felt glad at the news as it came through from Dallas. ‘Kennedy was on an ego trip,’ he later explained. The young Englishman had no time for other people’s egos. He was about to embark on an extensive ego trip of his own. Before he was twenty-three it would land him in jail, sentenced to nine years.

  But up to that moment life would seem very, very good.

  He was, in his own eyes, very rich and he was about to get very much richer very quickly.

  At eighteen he’d take the first step to becoming a property tycoon.

  At twenty he’d open his own boutique and have his own pop clubs.

  At twenty-two he would be able to call himself Britain’s ‘youngest self-made millionaire’.

  Later – after he was released from jail – he’d get richer still. First he would call himself a ‘multi-millionaire’, then a ‘multi-multi-millionaire’. He would visibly relish hearing himself stress the words ‘multi-multi’.

  He’d also relish reeling off the goodies his ever-growing pile of money was buying: first the Rolls-Royce and the Cadillac, then the jewels and the Persian carpets, then the two Turners, the Holbein and the Boucher, then the ‘finest collection of antique French furniture in private hands’ and finally the palace, a real one – ‘the biggest private dwelling built in this country in more than a hundred years’.

  But he found out very early on that there was one thing that money couldn’t buy: social acceptability. He was made to learn that as he dreamed his teenage dreams in the Caribbean. Nick had decided that, having struck it rich there, he would try to make a go of living there, just like so many rich or aristocratic Brits. Colin Tennant, Princess Margaret’s friend, had made a home on Mustique, Noël Coward in Jamaica, Nicholas Hoogstraten would make his home in Bermuda. Or that was the plan.

  He set his heart on living in Hamilton, the capital. ‘Hamilton was one of the few places that I visited when I was younger that I fell in love with… I purchased a hotel there, on Langton Hill. It had thirty bedrooms. I bought it to live in, as my home. But in those days I was only a kid – I was only eighteen – and I didn’t know much. When I moved in I was uncomfortable. I felt like a fish out of water. I only stayed there one night and it was my own hotel.’

  It seems that his face didn’t fit in the exclusive clubs and chic hotel bars of the British expatriate elites. Blacks weren’t made very welcome in such places. Nor, evidently, was a smart-arse kid from Sussex with a lot of money and the wrong accent. He was an outsider, a parvenu, and he was made to know it.

  His bile at the memory of how he was treated suggests the humiliation ran deep. It must have hit that ego very hard indeed. He made no white friends on the islands. Of the whites whom he did come across there he says: ‘they were riff raff … sickos, the lot of them’. He didn’t like them and they didn’t like him. The way that the whites in Nassau and Hamilton reacted to him seeded in Hoogstraten an intense dislike for British expatriates that he would show again and again in later years.

  At the same time the arrogance of the whites stirred in him a fellow feeling for blacks that would temper his whole life, especially his sex life. He must have felt more at home in the black shebeens ‘over the hill’ in Nassau than he did among the blazers and old school ties in the Porcupine Club, where the Duke of Windsor had held court during the war when he was governor of the Bahamas.

  Nick sold the Bermuda hotel – ‘I had an offer from a Yank that I couldn’t refuse’ – and decided to go home to England.

  Did Charles and Edna Hoogstraten welcome the prodigal son with open arms? Initially, perhaps they did. He had lots of money, he lent them some of it and he was ready to buckle down to a normal career.

  Aged eighteen, he landed a job in the business he loved – cataloguing stamps with the Stanley Gibbons organisation. Over the next two years he travelled up and down from Shoreham to the company’s headquarters in London. If he was full of himself and lippy, to the outside observer he must have seemed to be just another young commuter on the Victoria run.

  The job at Gibbons didn’t stop him trading in stamps on his own account. He had kept that lucrative sideline going on the Andes and during his sojourns in the Caribbean, and he would continue with it always. Then the firm discovered that some of its employees had been pilfering, creaming off stamps for themselves. A young colleague of Nick’s was accused. He claimed that Nick was behind it. There was no proof. Nick denied it, but he was out on his ear. He was twenty.

  By this time he had already dipped his toes into the world in which he would eventually become a national hate figure in England – property. Many years later he described how his first move into the field came about. It was in 1963. He was driving down St Magdalene Street, in Brighton, with a girlfriend. She pointed out a terrace of five houses all with ‘For Sale’ boards outside. On enquiring about them Nick found that they were to be auctioned, and the guide prices amazed him: ‘They were going for nothing.’ The reason – they had sitting tenants. He went to the auction and bought all five properties. ‘They were a bargain. I thieved them.’ By ‘thieving’ he meant buying something for less than half what it’s worth. That was to become Nick’s guiding star.

  In 1988 Charles Hoogstraten gave one of the authors his alternative version of his son’s first venture into property. He said that he and his wife had their savings sunk into a little property business of their own. He claimed that because young Nicky was so good at figures they asked him to do the paperwork. Nicky obliged them, but later they claimed they found that the deeds were transferred into his own name.

  Van Hoogstraten claims that he actually lent his parents money to buy a better house and then put some of his assets in his mother’s name because he was still a minor.

  Whatever the truth is, Nick had found his niche for life. Playing the property market astutely, he bought and sold and bought again quickly. Two years after the Brighton purchases, he
bought his first properties in London – a house in Chelsea, then several in Notting Hill. They were followed by more properties in Brighton and Hove. Showing the same eye for a bargain that he had displayed in the Bahamas, he was on his way to his first million.

  At home relations appear to have plummeted. Charles Hoogstraten had sour memories about his son. Nick was equally bitter about his father, who, he said, resented him. ‘He objected to me ruling the roost.’ The bad blood would fester until almost the end of Charles and Edna Hoogstraten’s lives.

  Nick decided to leave Rustington for Brighton. The raffish seaside town and its genteel neighbour, Hove, would be his centre of operations from now on.

  He carried with him lessons of a resentful, lonely boyhood, fractious teens, a violent father and, if there is a dishonesty gene, he took that too. He was cocky, handsome, hard-working, and he was charming when he wanted to be, especially to women. He trusted no one and he seemed to care for no one either, except perhaps his sisters.

  To the rest of the country Brighton was the place where teenagers rioted. It was the era of Mods and Rockers, and Brighton’s Marine Parade was their battleground. Every weekend and Bank Holiday they converged from all over the south-east of England. The Mods, with their neat haircuts, short Italian jackets, cutaway collars and slip-on shoes, came on scooters laden with lights and other decoration. The Rockers, with their long hair and regulation studded leather jackets and jeans, came on powerful motorbikes. Fights between the two groups were endemic. Sometimes hundreds of Mods and Rockers were involved. Deckchairs were smashed and used as weapons. Holidaymakers scattered. Police launched baton charges to break the groups apart. The battles on Brighton’s beaches made the headlines week after week.