Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  The hearings resumed. The whole story of the failed company, the missing dresses, the storming rows and the two attacks on the Braunsteins’ home – the brick and then the bomb – was laid before the magistrates. They had no doubt there was a case to answer. Van Hoogstraten was duly committed for trial at Sussex Assizes, in Lewes, in May.

  The prospect of the trial might have daunted anyone. But this was only one of the trials Van Hoogstraten was to face that summer. While the Brighton magistrates had been feeling their way through the committal evidence in the Braunstein case, he was, amazingly, getting himself into even deeper water with the law.

  He already had the swanky cars. He wore amazing clothes. He was buying antique French furniture. But he wanted more of the trappings of great wealth. He wanted to be a collector of rare objects, including jewels and silver, and he didn’t much care how he got them.

  In January 1968, just as the Braunstein case was beginning, country houses in Surrey and Sussex were hit by a series of break-ins. The burglar or burglars were after jewellery and antique silver – tea sets, dinner services, trays, goblets.

  The first burglary was at a chartered accountant’s house in Lewes. The accountant was awakened in the middle of the night. Having seen the outline of a man’s figure creeping across his bedroom, he quietly dialled 999 and eventually switched on the light. The intruder was still there. He took off down the stairs and escaped. When police arrived they discovered that silverware worth £1000 had gone. The accountant described the figure he had seen fleeing from his bedroom as lithe, between twenty and thirty years of age and athletic-looking.

  A few days later a house in Wentworth, Surrey, twenty-five miles away, was burgled. Among missing items was silverware worth more than £2000. Some of the stolen pieces were rare, including a jewelled elephant goblet. Over the next two months eight or nine houses were hit.

  What brought Van Hoogstraten into the frame was the jewelled elephant goblet. Along with other stolen items its description was circulated to police stations in February 1968. It also featured on the ITV crime programme Police 5.

  As luck would have it, a Metropolitan Police detective had seen a jewelled elephant goblet among antiques displayed at Van Hoogstraten’s flat in Kingsway Court, Hove. The detective had gone there to look for evidence of a link between Van Hoogstraten and the grenades stolen from Chelsea Barracks. The detective connected the goblet in Van Hoogstraten’s flat with the one reported missing. On 15 March the flat was raided.

  No jewelled elephant goblet was found there. A friend of Van Hoogstraten had seen Police 5 and warned him to get rid of it. Van Hoogstraten said later that the goblet had been dumped and was ‘probably at the bottom of the Thames’. But in the kitchen of his flat detectives found a large suitcase stuffed with silver. Attempts had obviously just been made to erase identifying marks on the different items.

  Van Hoogstraten admitted nothing to the police. When questioned about the cache of silver found in his kitchen, he tried bluster. He hadn’t yet learned how to keep his head under pressure and to lie with conviction.

  He claimed that the silver in the suitcase was all his. ‘Yes, I collect silver. I have one of the finest collections in the country.’ Asked where he had got the items in the suitcase, he said that his friends and associates bought them on his behalf at auctions. He admitted that he had indeed been trying to erase identifying marks on some items. It was a common practice, he explained. He was only trying to remove unsightly marks because he wanted to display the silver.

  He insisted that he did have receipts for all the items, but not at the moment. ‘I will have them later.’

  As for the jewelled elephant goblet, he said: ‘I have never had one.’

  The police took away more than a hundred items of silver from Van Hoogstraten’s flat after the raid. More than half would be identified as coming from the recent spate of burglaries.

  A few days later Van Hoogstraten produced the promised receipts. They were on the headed paper of a local ‘antique dealer’ called Jack Swaysland. In fact, Swaysland was one of Brighton’s notorious ‘knockers’, the men who comb the country knocking on the doors of the unsuspecting in an attempt to con them out of any valuables and antiques they have. Van Hoogstraten said that, as far as he knew, Swaysland was reputable. He was helping him build up his antique silver collection by spotting items at auctions and buying for him. He’d been doing this for a year.

  The police weren’t convinced. Swaysland’s signature was on the receipts. Yet when he was taken to Hove police station and shown a hundred or more items of silver laid out in rows, he didn’t seem to recognise any of the items. He looked ‘amazed’ when he saw all that silver, said Ted Mantell, the detective inspector in charge. What also weighed with Mantell was that Swaysland had a police record. He was not the reputable dealer that Van Hoogstraten claimed he was.

  Swaysland was questioned closely. He stuck to his story. He insisted that he had sold the stuff to Van Hoogstraten. It seemed that Van Hoogstraten was in the clear. Or was he?

  The police wouldn’t let the jewelled elephant goblet case go. In later years the Hove force in particular would be subject to all kinds of rumours about pay-offs and corruption because of Van Hoogstraten’s seeming immunity from the law. But at the start of his career, in 1968, both the Hove police and the Met pulled out all the stops to nail him.

  Pressure was put on Van Hoogstraten. On 28 March he was hauled in to Fulham police station, in west London, for questioning. The police account suggests he was in turn boastful, petulant and jocular. He appears to have dropped all pretence at innocence and tried to browbeat his interrogator.

  Detective Superintendent Alfred Moody conducted the Fulham interview. Unknown to Van Hoogstraten, the superintendent was tape-recording everything. His transcript – which was later challenged – has Van Hoogstraten admitting to having possessed the jewelled elephant goblet and then crowing about being untouchable: ‘You’ll never pin anything on me… I can get off anything you can charge me with… You will not touch me. My business associates will see to that. I’m too valuable to them… Anyone can be bought so long as you have the right money and I have got it. Twenty, thirty, fifty thousand, you name it and I will pay it.’

  The bluster didn’t work. That same day Van Hoogstraten was charged with six cases of receiving. Later he would also be charged with burglary.

  His hope, of course, lay with Swaysland. If the knocker stuck to his story that he’d sold the silver and Van Hoogstraten had bought the pieces in all innocence, then the case against Van Hoogstraten would be wafer thin. For the moment Swaysland did stick to the story.

  The police pressed on with the case against Van Hoogstraten, but without much confidence.

  What they didn’t know was that Swaysland was a very frightened man. A friend of Van Hoogstraten was forcing him to shoulder the blame for the silver. The friend was no other than the terrifying Tony Lawrence. This finally emerged when the Hove detective Ted Mantell asked Swaysland why he was agreeing to be Van Hoogstraten’s fall guy. According to Mantell’s notebook, Swaysland said: ‘I will tell you what, Ted. When Tony Lawrence is convicted and put away come and see me again.’

  Little Legs was about to be tried himself on explosives charges. His trial was to be at the Old Bailey in May. If he went down Swaysland would talk.

  It was Easter 1968. Van Hoogstraten’s future depended on three juries – two that would try him and the one that would try Tony Lawrence.

  The first trial was of Van Hoogstraten himself on the grenade charges. It opened in Lewes on 23 May 1968. The headlines were riveting: ‘House blast: the youngest millionaire in court today’… ‘£3000 bail for “youngest millionaire” on bomb charge’… ‘Millionaire accused of causing bomb blast’… ‘Grenade damaged the rabbi’s home’… ‘I had enough money to have every Jew in Brighton killed’.

  The jury listened for five days as Van Hoogstraten and the Braunsteins gave their conflicting versions of the escalat
ing rows and the threats that preceded the attacks. Van Hoogstraten claimed that his only threats were that he’d go to the police about David. He’d never threatened any physical harm to the Braunsteins or anyone else. ‘I’m not the violent type.’

  The words ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ had first been used by the Braunsteins, not by him, he insisted. And he certainly hadn’t organised the attacks on their house.

  The accused did himself no favours in court. His attitude visibly upset his own expensive defence counsel, Victor Durand QC. At one point Durand even threatened to walk out on him. It happened when the barrister was cross-examining Leon, David’s seventeen-year-old brother. Leon Braunstein was recalling an evening when he listened to a telephone conversation between his father and Van Hoogstraten. As Durand questioned him, Leon began to smile.

  The QC rebuked him: ‘I don’t think this is funny, do you?’

  The judge intervened, saying to Durand: ‘I don’t think you could have seen what happened because the dock is behind you.’

  When Durand turned round he saw Van Hoogstraten grinning at the witness.

  The barrister was not amused. After apologising to Leon Braunstein he turned to Van Hoogstraten and said in open court, so that everyone could hear: ‘Either you behave yourself or I shall have to leave this case. You must control yourself, please. I mean that.’

  The case hung on Van Hoogstraten’s threats and whether they were serious. Had the Braunsteins been the only witnesses to them there might have been doubts in the jury’s minds. If David Braunstein had thrown the brick, couldn’t he have thrown the grenade too? But there were two other witnesses against Van Hoogstraten unconnected to the Braunsteins.

  One was the wholesale buyer who had witnessed the first eruption in Van Hoogstraten’s Deb boutique. The other was a Jewish businessman called Jack Mazzier. He was a passenger travelling on the Brighton – Victoria train shortly before the grenade attack. He told the court that he had overheard a ‘frightening’ conversation between two other passengers in his first-class compartment. One was Van Hoogstraten, who was complaining about someone who owed him money. Mazzier recalled him saying that he would have the man ‘done up for £50 and then said something about having a bomb thrown’. He also testified that Van Hoogstraten said: ‘They are Jews and they can afford to pay.’

  Mazzier was scared of getting entangled with Van Hoogstraten and so had not come forward immediately after the grenade attack. He’d been persuaded to do so by a Jewish friend.

  The jury of ten men and two women believed him and the Braunsteins. It took them just eighty minutes to find Van Hoogstraten guilty of maliciously damaging the Braunsteins’ house and of demanding £2000 with menaces.

  In later years Van Hoogstraten would admit a measure of responsibility for the grenade attack. The affair was ‘the most seriously silly thing’ of his life, he told us. ‘All my later troubles go back to that.’

  The judge told him at the time: ‘You seem to have a most exaggerated sense of your own importance and take the view that other people ought to do what you wish … you are an arrogant and evil young man and a bully.’

  He gave him four years.

  Trial number two, of Anthony Lawrence, opened the same week as the grenade trial. At the end of it Lawrence was found guilty, and put away for fourteen years. The next day Jack Swaysland gave a new statement to the police. He had indeed been lying about the silver found at Van Hoogstraten’s flat. He’d never seen any of the items before. Van Hoogstraten hadn’t got them from him. His testimony would make all the difference at the third trial.

  It opened two months later when a prison van brought Van Hoogstraten from Wormwood Scrubs prison, in west London, down to the same court in Lewes to face charges of burglary and receiving. In the Braunstein case his own big mouth had brought him down. This time the cause of his downfall would be his ceaseless desire to get everything on the cheap or, better still, get it for nothing – in this case silver.

  He even tried to get himself defended for nothing. In a move that took many people’s breath away Britain’s youngest self-made millionaire applied for legal aid. He told the East Sussex quarter sessions that he couldn’t access his considerable assets. For tax purposes they were arranged in such a way that he could only get at them if he could ‘attend to the business of his companies in person’, which he couldn’t, of course, because he was in jail.

  The court asked the police about his finances. For a moment it appeared that the world might get a tantalising glimpse into what Van Hoogstraten’s wealth amounted to. But no. All that the police could offer was the accused’s own talk of a cache of gold bars, ‘a large quantity of Scottish banknotes’, his stamps and ‘property in the UK and the Bahamas’. The Crown called his plea for legal aid ‘ludicrous’, and the court thought likewise. The legal aid application was rejected.

  Van Hoogstraten decided that he would defend himself. It wasn’t because his wealth was a myth and that he couldn’t afford another barrister. As subsequent events were to show, he did indeed have huge assets. The reason he gave at the time was the truth: he had ‘somewhat lost faith in British justice’ after the Braunstein verdict. What he meant was that he thought that he could do a better job defending himself than a QC would.

  But the jewelled elephant goblet trial turned out no better for him than the Braunstein trial. The only plus for him was that the charges of burglary were dropped for lack of evidence.

  Otherwise it was downhill all the way. Fifty items of silverware found in his flat were displayed before the jury and identified by their rightful owners. Swaysland was brought in to the witness box to swear that he had lied the first time about selling Van Hoogstraten the silver. Then the police related Van Hoogstraten’s alleged attempts to bribe them.

  His defence was that it was all a fit-up and that the police had been looking for a ‘deal’ in which both the silver and the grenade charges would be dropped in return for a £25,000 bribe.

  For the second time in as many months a jury didn’t believe him. They found him guilty on eight charges of receiving. Before passing sentence on Van Hoogstraten the chairman of the quarter sessions told him: ‘It is quite clear that … Brighton is a centre for stolen goods and we are quite satisfied that you have been playing a substantial part in that centre.’

  The sentence was five years, to run consecutively with the four years that he had already been given for the grenade attack. It could hardly have been worse.

  4

  BANGED UP

  Nicholas van Hoogstraten, aged twenty-three, began his nine-year sentence at Wormwood Scrubs in the summer of 1968. With typical braggadocio he’d say that the prison experience made him ‘five times richer, a hundred times more intelligent and a thousand times more powerful and dangerous’ than before.

  There was some truth in that verbal V-sign to the world. Van Hoogstraten proved a much more slippery customer when he emerged from his first long stretch in jail. He seemed to have learned from a master con man how to manipulate British company law and the tax laws of a dozen countries.

  He showed that he had learned how to exact ‘retribution’ from those he considered his enemies without being caught himself. He’d be especially unforgiving of anyone suspected of ripping off his property.

  In his early days in the Scrubs he was full of chutzpah; he even petitioned the Home Secretary to be allowed to run his businesses from his prison cell. When the request was refused he tried to do it anyway, bribing a hard-up warder to help and storing up a lot of trouble ahead for both of them.

  Life behind bars was harder for him than most, though his mother, Edna, told her neighbour Mrs Yaxley how her Nicky was buckling down to it. He had landed a quiet job in the prison library, she said. In reality Van Hoogstraten was proving such a handful that he had to be disciplined several times. He spent three weeks in solitary confinement.

  Eventually he learned to keep his head down in jail. He stayed out of trouble with other prisoners by lending them
tobacco, the main currency in jail. ‘Anyone could borrow from me without paying interest. It wasn’t an ounce at the beginning of the week and an ounce and a half back. It was an ounce at the beginning and an ounce at the end. I wasn’t making any money out of it. I just believed in keeping the whole place ticking over nicely. Keep all your fellow associates happy and you don’t get any aggravation.’ The authorities knew what was going on, he claimed. They turned a blind eye. His deal with them was that there would be no drugs.

  He made friends inside with another wealthy prisoner, a restaurateur who called himself Baron von Benno, an extrovert, over-the-top character. Reminiscing about those days, Van Hoogstraten described Benno, a vodka drinker, smuggling bottles of the stuff into the Scrubs and drunkenly throwing the empties down at warders from an upper walkway.

  Von Benno was Jewish, and Van Hoogstraten claimed that their friendship showed that he wasn’t anti-semitic. The Braunstein grenade affair had been about money. ‘A lot of people think that I’m anti-semitic. I’m not… I’m more anti-Irish than anything.’

  In the Scrubs he nursed his grudges. All his life he blamed others for his problems, and rationalised every mean thing that he had done, reasoning that they were all down to someone else. David Braunstein was never forgiven. Thirty years later Van Hoogstraten would still be blaming him for the whole affair and musing over the punishment his former partner supposedly deserved. Reflecting on the grenade attack, he told a TV reporter in 1999: ‘When somebody robs you, sticks their hand in your pocket, they deserve everything that’s coming to them.’ Braunstein, he said, should have had had ‘his bollocks chopped off’.

  The differences with his parents festered too. They appear to have come to a head during his time in jail. They sprang from disputes over who owned what during his teens. He claimed that his assets were put in his mother’s name because he was underage and that he had to go to the High Court to get them transferred to his own name. His father claimed that he ripped him and Edna off – and not just over properties. He later told the Daily Star that his son ‘obtained’ antiques, gold, jewellery and a Jaguar car from him and his wife, worth around £40,000 at 1960s prices, a fortune in those days.