Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  He was soon being spoken of as part of a new breed of successful young tycoons who, typical of the sixties, didn’t abide by the old rules. Social historian David Gladstone got to know some of them, Van Hoogstraten included. ‘They tended to be anti-establishment and anti-professional,’ he says. ‘They were iconoclasts and consciously against the status quo. They had become very successful not through the help of professionals but by their own efforts. Their view on life was that they’d got where they were unaided, and that was how the world should operate.’ This new breed had no time for people who fell by the wayside. Victorian self-help was their credo. They were pre-Thatcher Thatcherites.

  In August 1967 Van Hoogstraten posed for a Daily Mirror photographer. The picture that the paper published showed him cuddling his stamp collection as he took it to lodge in a bank safety deposit. ‘A fortune in his arms’, the headline read. The story underneath reported that the stamp collection was now worth £380,000.

  Van Hoogstraten basked in all the publicity. He was rich, successful, and on the verge of becoming a national celebrity. Everything was wonderful. He began throwing outrageous parties. There was always a spectacular mini-skirted girl on his arm. He hired planes to take him to Paris so that he didn’t have to sit with ‘the peasants’. He called this period ‘my King’s Road days’.

  They were about to come to an abrupt end.

  Behind the glitz and the music the young businessman with the staggering confidence was secretly making connections with the underworld. After London, the Brighton of the sixties was the most corrupt town in the south of England. It was the main clearing house for stolen goods, had a thriving drug trade and was the favourite hang-out for half the gangsters south of the Thames. It also had a notoriously bent police force. It was the place to meet very bad people if that’s what you wanted. Nicholas van Hoogstraten met up with one of the most dangerous gang leaders in the country. That connection, plus his greed and his big mouth, were about to land him in deep trouble – and in jail.

  3

  BOMBER

  Success didn’t change Van Hoogstraten. The bile and the violence which, as a teenager, he had displayed in his treatment of his mother were still there. Shortly before his twenty-third birthday, they came bursting to the surface.

  The target this time was a friend called David Braunstein who had become his business partner. Van Hoogstraten, ever watchful for betrayal, became convinced that his pal was ripping him off.

  They had met in 1963 on the train from Brighton to Victoria. Braunstein, a young man with huge Buddy Holly spectacles, could not have looked more different to the fashionably coiffeured Hoogstraten. But he was the same age, eighteen, and they began commuting together regularly. Maybe, as the train rattled through the Sussex and Surrey countryside towards the dingy London suburbs, David talked about his tough East End uncle who knew the Kray twins. That would have fascinated Nick. Maybe Nick, in turn, fascinated David with his plans for making money and with his cockiness.

  They got on so well that Nick began calling in at the Braunstein house for supper. David’s father, Bernard, was the cantor at a local synagogue. He and his wife, Sylvia, took to the handsome young go-getter with his tales of the Bahamas. Sylvia would later tell a court that she regarded him as ‘one of the family’.

  Nick’s relationship with David was cemented in 1966 when the two friends set up a joint company, Demaria Textiles. The deal between them was that Nick would put in several thousand pounds to fund the operation and Braunstein would do all the work. Nick liked bankrolling his friends or making friends of those whom he bankrolled. He found that the more you discovered about people – especially their weaknesses – the more surely you could dominate them. He was learning to use friendship to acquire information, and thus to acquire power.

  ‘Yes, I’m a control freak,’ he says. ‘Isn’t every self-made man?’

  Demaria Textiles folded after less than two years’ trading. Van Hoogstraten reckoned that he had lost £3000 in the venture. He turned on David Braunstein, who accepted the blame. Braunstein hastily put his name to a document that Van Hoogstraten presented to him in which he agreed that he owed him £2000. However, he said he could only afford to repay £6 a week. Van Hoogstraten declared that he was ‘not much enchanted’ with that idea and the arguments began.

  The climax was a screaming row between the two former friends in the boutique in Brighton that Jimmy Saville had opened only a few months earlier. Van Hoogstraten accused Braunstein of stealing nearly four hundred dresses from the firm’s stockroom. He warned him that unless he made good the loss he would be in big trouble. A wholesale supplier who was in the shop heard him shout: ‘If I don’t get the money from you I’ll get it from your father; he’s got plenty. If I don’t get it I’ll do you and your father and the synagogue.’

  Braunstein’s sister Hannah remembers Van Hoogstraten arriving at their house in Chatsworth Road, Brighton, spitting fury. He demanded the money from her father and threatened the entire family. Then he warned that any one of the Braunsteins might be walking in the street and something could happen to them.

  Van Hoogstraten would claim in court that the only threat he made to the Braunsteins was to go to the police about David unless he paid up.

  Later that day Van Hoogstraten returned to the Braunsteins’ home. According to David’s father, he made more threats. He called himself a fascist and a Nazi and said he could have a stick of gelignite thrown into the house. He also allegedly said that he had enough money to pay to have every Jew in Brighton killed.

  He followed that up with threatening phone calls saying Jews were ‘the scum of the earth’ who ‘breed like rabbits … a cancer on the community’.

  What might have been dismissed as the empty threats of a hysterical bully became more ominous the next day. Two men the Braunsteins had never seen before arrived at the house and threatened them. A phone call from Van Hoogstraten followed shortly after this visit: ‘When am I going to get my effin’ money? The two blokes who called tonight – that’s just an example of what you are going to get.’

  Braunstein senior said he was given a deadline by Van Hoogstraten. Half his money – £1000 – by Saturday – ‘or else’.

  A night or two later a brick was thrown through the front window of the Braunsteins’ house. A threatening note, composed of letters clipped out of newspaper headlines, was found in the garden.

  The bizarre part of it was that Van Hoogstraten wasn’t responsible. David Braunstein was. He had composed the note and thrown the brick. He confessed later that a relative had suggested this idea as a way of getting the police involved.

  The ploy worked. The following afternoon Van Hoogstraten was interviewed by two police constables. He denied all knowledge of the brick and insisted he hadn’t called himself a Nazi. But when one of the police remarked to him that it would take a lot of money to kill every Jew in Brighton, Van Hoogstraten’s black humour got the better of him: ‘I could get the money and it is not such a bad idea after all.’

  The police posted a guard on the Braunsteins’ house; he was rostered to stand outside each night until the early hours of the morning.

  On 12 November 1966 the guard quit for the night at one o’clock. A few minutes later a hand grenade was thrown through a downstairs window. It exploded and wrecked the sitting room. Luckily, everyone was asleep upstairs and no one was injured.

  Van Hoogstraten, accompanied by his solicitor, was brought in for questioning. ‘We are appalled,’ said the solicitor.

  Immediately, Van Hoogstraten contradicted him: ‘I am not appalled. I think it’s marvellous. The bastard owes me money.’

  The outburst was an early example of what was to become a trademark of the man. Others might keep their lip buttoned. Not Nicholas van Hoogstraten. Even in a tight spot he would never be able to resist saying exactly what he thought. He developed a taste for saying the unpardonable. Eventually there was almost nothing he wouldn’t dare to say, no one he wouldn’t da
re to shock, nothing he wouldn’t criticise – except money.

  He was arrested and charged with causing the explosion. There was no concrete evidence, only his own threats, and his big mouth. However, it would later emerge that the Braunsteins weren’t the only witnesses against him.

  Police quickly discounted the idea of Van Hoogstraten himself throwing the grenade. It was assumed that he had paid someone else. But who?

  The track led towards one of the most dangerous armed criminals in the country, Anthony ‘Little Legs’ Lawrence.

  Lawrence was a fitness fanatic. He was notionally a scrap-metal dealer, but in fact he led a gang of criminals operating in south London. At the age of thirty-two he already had a dozen convictions. During one stretch in jail he had to be sent to Rampton, the special hospital where the country’s most psychotically violent prisoners are held. It was thought that Little Legs provided the grenade for the Chatsworth Road attack and maybe provided the grenade thrower too.

  Earlier that year he obtained a quantity of stolen explosives, grenades and firearms from a Coldstream Guardsman who had stolen them from the armoury at Chelsea Barracks. One of the grenades was thrown at a pub associated with a rival gang. Some of the stolen explosives were used to make a radio-detonated bomb for an attack on the same gang.

  Police discovered that Van Hoogstraten and Lawrence knew each other, and they suspected that the Brighton grenade was from the Chelsea Barracks consignment. But there was no proof. Police were still looking for something to link the two men when Van Hoogstraten was committed for trial for the Braunstein attack.

  The committal proceedings were due to start in Brighton magistrates court on 14 December 1967.

  With such a serous event hanging over him a wise man would have kept his head down. Van Hoogstraten did the opposite. He got caught up in an episode that thirty-five years later looks almost surreal: a phony jewel robbery that was obviously a set-up.

  It happened nine days before the committal proceedings opened.

  Van Hoogstraten had his heart set on one particularly spectacular emerald ring in London’s Hatton Garden. The nineteen-carat stone was priced at £15,000 – a huge amount in those days. He contracted with the jeweller, Raymond Taghioff, to buy it. They arranged to carry out the transaction at the Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria Station. Van Hoogstraten, accompanied by his secretary, Piers Dunkley, was supposed to bring the £15,000 in cash (‘I always pay cash’) and the dealer was to hand over the ring.

  The other men arrived at the station before Van Hoogstraten. Raymond Taghioff carried a case with the emerald in it. He was accompanied by a man called Harry Loeb, who acted as minder. Piers Dunkley carried a ‘safety case’ supposedly containing the cash. Van Hoogstraten didn’t appear at a prearranged meeting point on the station concourse. So the three other men trooped up to a room that had been booked in the hotel. They were inside for only a minute when there was a knock at the door. Loeb opened it expecting to see Van Hoogstraten. Three armed men burst in waving pistols that looked as if they were fitted with silencers. Dunkley and Loeb were both knocked to the ground. Taghioff, who for a moment thought it was all a joke, was told that he would be shot if he did ‘anything funny’. The three men, none of them masked, grabbed the money case and the emerald case and took off.

  Afterwards Van Hoogstraten refused to comment. ‘I can’t say anything,’ he told reporters.

  Two days later a twenty-one-year-old man from Camberwell called Michael George Blackmore was stopped in his car by police in south London because his car had no lights. Blackmore claimed to be an antique dealer. He was in fact a villain. Police found a bullet in his car. That led them to raid his home, where they discovered two guns and the two cases from the Grosvenor Hotel jewel robbery.

  Pointing to the ‘safety case’ which was supposed to have contained Van Hoogstraten’s money, Blackmore said that there was no money in the case: ‘You can take it from me … it only had a pile of papers.’ Asked if he meant someone connected with the sale was concerned with the robbery, he answered: ‘Of course I do, but I daren’t say anything about that now, I have my wife to think of.’

  Try as they might, the police couldn’t get him to talk. Or anyone else. They questioned everyone – including Van Hoogstraten – and got nowhere. In the end they had evidence enough only to charge Blackmore and another man called Terry Belding with armed robbery. Belding was acquitted. Blackmore was sentenced to five years in prison.

  But it was clearly an inside job, and just as clearly a phony robbery. The brazen cheek of it was stunning.

  It is probable that the man whom Michael Blackmore was so frightened of was Tony Lawrence, one of whose specialities was terrifying witnesses. Shortly before the Grosvenor Hotel job Little Legs had put out a contract to kill a man in an unrelated case for refusing to perjure himself in a trial. A small-time hood called Terry ‘Ba Ba’ Elgar took his money but bottled out of the killing. Instead of shooting Lawrence’s appointed victim, Elgar warned him to get out of London and to lie low. Little Legs found out what had happened, and Ba Ba, the would-be hit man, ended up dead himself.

  The committal proceedings against Van Hoogstraten for the grenade attack opened at Brighton magistrates’ court on 14 December 1967. They were supposed to take a week and be over by Christmas. Instead they stretched out over three months, and then the full trial was postponed. The case wouldn’t be finally completed until the following summer.

  The charges against Van Hoogstraten were grave. There were five of them. The first was of maliciously damaging part of the Braunsteins’ home. The second was of conspiring with person or persons unknown to blow up the house. There were also three charges of demanding money with menaces. Van Hoogstraten pleaded not guilty to all of them.

  Outwardly, he was his usual cock-sure self. He had his personal tailor working frantically. As the case proceeded the press gleefully detailed the different clothes that the dandy in the dock was wearing each day: ‘After the hearing Mr Van Hoogstraten, who wore a purple and blue striped suit…’ ‘Van Hoogstraten … wore an off-white silk brocade jacket, bright blue frilled shirt and a navy blue overcoat thrown around his shoulders like a cape…’ ‘Van Hoogstraten wore … green tinted gold spectacles and on his fingers were four heavy gold rings.’ ‘He stepped into the dock today wearing a Regency-style brown suit with a brown velvet collar and a purple tie.’ ‘Van Hoogstraten, wearing an olive-coloured Regency style jacket, and bottle-green trousers, was ordered to surrender his passport.’ ‘The accused … stood between two police officers with a patterned jacket of oyster brocade with velvet trimmings and white trousers.’

  But underneath the brashness the twenty-two-year-old was very worried. This is evident from an astonishing move. The committal stage had barely begun when a reconciliation with the Braunsteins was attempted. It took place far away from Brighton – in the Dorchester Hotel in London. Both the Braunsteins, father and son, were there. So were Van Hoogstraten and two other men. It appears to have been a relatively relaxed – and revelatory – encounter. No voices were raised. Anyone walking into the Dorchester lounge from a wintry Park Lane might have glimpsed the group talking earnestly over coffee and drinks, but, apart from Van Hoogstraten, they looked like just another bunch of politely haggling businessmen.

  In fact it was confession time. Van Hoogstraten insisted that he’d had nothing to do with the first attack on the Braunstein home, the brick thrown through the window. David Braunstein admitted that he had thrown it. He had also left the threatening note found in the garden. The idea, he said, was to galvanise the police into providing his family with protection.

  According to the Braunsteins, Van Hoogstraten also owned up. Yes, the responsibility for the grenade should be placed at his door. But, no, he hadn’t thrown it himself. In the plush quiet of one of London’s most exclusive hotels, he then came up with a proposition so audacious that it must have taken the Braunsteins’ breath away, if indeed he really did say what they claim.

 
; Van Hoogstraten suggested that the police be told that David faked the first attack on the Braunsteins’ home. This would confuse the whole issue and cause the entire case against him to be thrown out. Van Hoogstraten would then sue the police for damages. If he was awarded enough money, he promised to forget the £2000 which he still claimed David Braunstein owed him. ‘He said that if the damages came to more than £10,000 he would not claim the £2000,’ Bernard Braunstein said later.

  According to him, another threat accompanied the proposal. Van Hoogstraten warned him and his son that if he went to jail the whole Braunstein family would be ‘shot up’. He added that he would have six or seven men with machine guns surrounding their home.

  The meeting broke up and the participants wandered out into Park Lane. Van Hoogstraten offered his former friend a lift home. David Braunstein accepted. This abrupt switch from threat to friendliness was to characterise Van Hoogstraten. People would later remark on his chameleon-like behaviour: venomous rage one moment, a smile and a handshake the next. His mercurial character was constantly on display. Others might try to hide their feelings from moment to moment. Not him. As the years went on he learned to use these mood changes as a weapon to gain control over others. Again and again people would find it impossible to gauge the man or know what was coming next.

  Van Hoogstraten and David Braunstein were driven back to Brighton in Van Hoogstraten’s Rolls-Royce. On arriving there in the early hours of the morning Braunstein asked Van Hoogstraten not to drop him in sight of his home just in case the police were watching. He didn’t think it a good idea to be seen with the man he was accusing of bombing his family.

  The deal proposed by Van Hoogstraten got nowhere. Someone – presumably from the Braunstein camp – immediately told the police what had happened in the London hotel. The committal proceedings were suspended. But only briefly.