Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  Van Hoogstraten absolutely denied it, and it has to be said that there is nothing known about his parents’ lifestyle at the time to suggest that they had managed to accumulate any kind of wealth. They lived modestly and Charles’s job was as a wine waiter. The only remotely ostentatious thing the neighbours remember of the Hoogstratens was the amount of booze in the house at Christmas time, no doubt from the Andes. True they had a car, but it was a modest one.

  This resentment towards his parents led to one of Van Hoogstraten’s nastier moves. While inside he decided to ‘repossess’ furniture from his old home which he said belonged to him. He set up a raid on the Rustington house. It was stripped of curtains, carpets and furniture.

  There was other business to attend to in prison, and Van Hoogstraten put his personal attractiveness to good use. He struck up a friendship in Wormwood Scrubs with a fifty-two-year-old Catholic priest called Robert Gates. Father Gates had just become a chaplain at the prison when Nick arrived there. With his Catholic upbringing the handsome young tycoon was automatically on the list for a chat with the new chaplain.

  The priest was charmed by Van Hoogstraten. He would later write that the young prisoner was a victim of ‘unscrupulous parasites who exploit his ordinary human needs to get what they can out of him without caring where they leave him emotionally as well as physically’.

  Father Gates became Van Hoogstraten’s confidant and began to help him with his business and his personal affairs, ultimately acting as a conduit with the world outside. He was persuaded that the problems with Charles and Edna were down to their son being in jail, no more. Gates bought the line that relations between parents and son had been fine up until Van Hoogstraten’s imprisonment. According to Van Hoogstraten’s account, Gates became his bridge with his parents and went down to Rustington on his behalf to see them. There Gates handed over a suitcase full of Van Hoogstraten’s cash in exchange for properties that were in his parents’ name.

  However, the young prisoner’s greatest use of the chaplain was as an enthusiastic advocate in his attempts to get his long sentence reduced.

  An appeal for a cut in the sentence was heard in 1970, two years into the nine-year term. Gates spoke up for Van Hoogstraten. He told the authorities that he was basically harmless, more a fantasist than a thug. He had ‘created a myth of wickedness about himself’.

  The appeal court judges concurred. Echoing the chaplain’s assessment, Lord Justice Winn suggested Van Hoogstraten had created a world of make-believe. ‘He built up a picture of himself as a sinister international figure, of treasure buried here and there, of houses, indeed palaces, all over the world… He wanted to acquire beautiful things, to possess them and gloat over them so that they could pander to his vanity in the same way as it is said that eccentric millionaires might acquire great masters and keep them at lock-up store rooms in their ranches.’

  He was, the judge went on, ‘a sort of self-imagined devil. He thinks he is an emissary of Beelzebub.’ It was a characterisation that would be recycled in almost every subsequent pen portrait of Van Hoogstraten.

  Their lordships accepted another argument also put on Van Hoogstraten’s behalf: that if he had been tried at the same time for both his crimes – the grenade and the silver – he would have been sentenced to far less than nine years.

  The court cut his overall sentence to five years.

  Lord Justice Winn was optimistic about Van Hoogstraten’s future. He believed that he just needed to mature, and was like ‘a child, a Walter Mitty character who will grow out of all this nonsense’.

  A High Court judge has seldom been proved more wrong.

  Meanwhile Van Hoogstraten had to get through his sentence. He was a good-looking youngster in a jail containing more than a thousand sexually frustrated men. He would have needed a tough friend to protect him.

  Tony Lawrence would have been ideal. He had been banged up just a few weeks before Van Hoogstraten, for causing explosions. But he wasn’t in the Scrubs. Van Hoogstraten’s psychotic friend, who had protected him in the past, was reckoned to be too dangerous to be held there. He was thirty miles away in the high-security wing of Chelmsford prison. A couple of years later someone smuggled out photographs of Lawrence doing press-ups and weightlifting in his cell.

  But Van Hoogstraten did find in jail two men who were tough and dangerous enough to defend him against anyone. He never talked much about the friends he made while he was there but he forged relationships with these two that were closer than anything else in his life.

  Rodney Markworth was one of these two new friends.

  These days Rodney Markworth is a nondescript, stocky man of medium height. He sports a mutton-chop moustache and looks like a grumpy French farmer. But his appearance couldn’t be more deceptive. His is a record of explosive, uncontrollable violence.

  When he and Van Hoogstraten met he was a good-looking twenty-year-old serving four years for beating a motorist unconscious. That was the beginning of a record of repeated violence that would range from running down a traffic warden in a Rolls-Royce to attempting to assault a judge in his own court. He leaped out of the defendant’s box in an attempt to reach the judge before he was stopped by court officials.

  Van Hoogstraten took to Markworth at first sight and Markworth to him. There is no doubt that there was a special affinity between Van Hoogstraten and Markworth.

  Markworth came out of jail as Van Hoogstraten’s close confidant and protector, and played this role for over a quarter of a century. He was a Van Hoogstraten ‘Kapo’, sometimes his front man, sometimes his business partner, and always one of his top heavies. Using a variety of different pseudonyms, he would pop up regularly as a director of companies that Van Hoogstraten was believed to control. But it was for his capacity as an intimidator that Van Hoogstraten seemed most to value him. Sometimes calling himself Markworth, sometimes Lombard, sometimes Hamilton, he surfaced again and again in the violent episodes that have made Van Hoogstraten’s name so feared over the past three decades.

  The so-called ‘Battle of Brighton’ in the spring of 1973 was a Rodney Markworth operation. It involved the eviction of a family that was carried out so brutally that Markworth, Van Hoogstraten and another of his violent henchmen, Leon Moscrop, ended up in the dock together at the Old Bailey.

  A still more notorious event involving Markworth was the ‘siege’ of an old people’s home in Framfield, East Sussex. In the late seventies Van Hoogstraten laid claim to the place and sent Markworth and others in to terrorise the occupants. It made national headlines when a social services rescue van sent by the local council had to ferry a dozen old people across fields after a gang led by Markworth had blocked all entrances to the place and invaded the home itself.

  With occasional breaks, Markworth continued as a close associate of Van Hoogstraten for many years. At one point Markworth vanished for a while. His disappearance coincided with a police probe into his affairs and Van Hoogstraten fanned a rumour that Markworth was dead. He implied that his henchman had been murdered, and that his body was under a motorway somewhere or under the Brighton Marina. ‘He wasn’t the cleverest of blokes. I think he stepped out of line and was dealt with,’ he told a reporter. A newspaper headline at the time read: ‘The henchman who vanished.’

  In reality Markworth was very much alive, as Van Hoogstraten well knew. In the 1980s the tycoon employed him as a ganger organising the students and dole cheats who maintained his properties on the south coast. Markworth continued to work for his friend well into the nineties. He and his family were lodged on Van Hoogstraten’s country estate in what the owner called a ‘grace and favour’ cottage.

  Markworth sank from sight in the late nineties. But in the spring and summer of 2002 he was back again, silently rooting for Van Hoogstraten when his mentor stood trial for murder. He was spotted in the public gallery at the Old Bailey in London, watching as Van Hoogstraten fought for his freedom. Journalists attending the trial were advised for their own safety not e
ven to try talking to Markworth, and none of them did.

  The other man whom Van Hoogstraten met in jail in the early seventies was an even heavier character than Markworth, and would one day appear in the Old Bailey alongside Van Hoogstraten in that murder trial. His name is Robert Knapp.

  Six foot three tall and with piercing blue eyes, Knapp was a striking figure. He is remembered by a childhood friend, the journalist Janet Street-Porter, as ‘a stunner … highly intelligent and very attractive’. Acquaintances of his later in life, when he was making big money out of bank robberies, talk of his ‘big hats’, ‘fat cigars’ and ‘his white Cadillac convertible’. But above all they talk of his unpredictable ferocity.

  Fulham-born Knapp was beginning his first stretch after a botched armed robbery when he and Van Hoogstraten first met, around 1969. He went to work for Van Hoogstraten almost immediately after his release from prison in 1978. To outsiders Van Hoogstraten introduced him as ‘my lieutenant’, while among friends he usually called him ‘Uncle Bob’. Years later, in a boastful slip that would help pave the way to his, and Knapp’s, eventual downfall, Van Hoogstraten called him something else. ‘He’s one of my hit men,’ he whispered to a girlfriend.

  ‘Bob Knapp was like a typhoon,’ says Van Hoogstraten’s former architect, Tony Browne. ‘He carried an air of menace that was tangible but you didn’t know what would happen … whether he’d throw up all over you, or crack a joke or shoot you, you never knew.’

  Browne, who began working for Van Hoogstraten in 1982, recalls an early encounter with the latter’s lieutenant. Knowing no better at that point, he demanded an interview with Van Hoogstraten over some money that hadn’t been paid to him. He made an appointment by telephone and went into his employer’s office breathing fire. Van Hoogstraten was seated behind his vast baroque desk. Browne recalls: ‘Standing on Nick’s right at his shoulder was “Uncle Bob”. Big and dressed in black. He was just looking at me and getting more and more agitated at what I was saying. And then he suddenly just moved out from behind Nick’s chair – put himself between me and Nick – and physically he turned me round and suggested that I leave the room with him. I didn’t argue with him, I’m glad to say now.’

  Knapp was ‘the persuader’, says Browne. When bothersome tenants had to be dealt with, Knapp dealt with them. Just the sight of him usually proved sufficient. One typical instance in the eighties was recalled by a former rent collector for Van Hoogstraten. It involved Knapp putting in an appearance at a mansion in Third Avenue, Hove, which Van Hoogstraten had just bought. The property was split into twelve or so furnished rooms and flats, mostly occupied by elderly tenants. ‘Nick decided the furniture they had was too good for them. He was going to replace most of it with old rubbish – wardrobes, tables chairs… When some of us came in to shift the old stuff out and move the rubbishy stuff in, Bob appeared and just innocently stood there in case there were any complaints. There weren’t any. They were mostly old people. No one said anything. He was so big and intense…’

  Like Van Hoogstraten himself and like so many of his associates, Robert Knapp used more than one name. Robert Pierson and Robert Bradshaw were two of his pseudonyms. When Colin Adamson, a journalist on the Brighton Evening Argus, went to interview Van Hoogstraten for a colour piece in March 1979, he was introduced to his ‘new henchman Bob Pierson’. Adamson quoted Pierson/Knapp as saying: ‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect Mr Van Hoogstraten. I’d stop a bullet for him and do anything he asked of me. So be careful.’

  Janet Street-Porter met Van Hoogstraten and Knapp in 1978 when she went to interview him in Hove for a television programme. Twenty-four years later she recalled it in an article for the paper she was now editing, the Independent: ‘Robert Knapp, clad entirely in black, with black dyed hair and a leather coat, answered the door. He was Van Hoogstraten’s right-hand man… Like Robert, Van Hoogstraten was clad entirely in black, wearing a tight Edwardian-style suit and rectangular dark glasses; a menacing, rather camp mod.

  Is there a gay side to Van Hoogstraten? If we are to believe the man himself, the answer is a resounding no. Publicly he is scathing about homosexuality. ‘Disgusting poofters’ is one of his favourite terms. Yet there undoubtedly is a big feminine ingredient in this vain, complex man, with his built-up shoes and penchant for dramatic clothes. Tony Browne certainly thought so when he first met Van Hoogstraten in 1980. At the time Browne was a student who was looking for lodgings in the Brighton area. Together with some fellow students he arranged a meeting with a man who was said to specialise in cheap rooms.

  ‘We rang the doorbell … to be greeted by a very strange-looking individual who opened the door. He was wearing – in the middle of the day – a cream dressing gown that was slightly open. He had on a pair of purple underpants and a pair of purple slippers. And his face seemed to be caked in what looked like foundation … a bit strange.’

  Van Hoogstraten came up for parole in 1971, and the support of Father Gates again proved more than helpful. In a probation report the chaplain enthused over the prisoner’s motives for turning down a pre-release employment scheme that meant living in a bail hostel for a short time. ‘He told me that much as he would like the chance to get out of prison he could not see, in his circumstances, that the hostel would be of much practical use to him. He did not want to take a place which might be better used by someone else, and he felt he ought to make his views known before people were put to the trouble of interviewing him and writing lengthy reports.’

  Father Gates quoted this as ‘a tangible indication of Van Hoogstraten’s growing awareness of his responsibilities to others.’ A number of people, said the priest, had commented on a ‘change for the better in his attitude and behaviour’ and had noted ‘the very marked and encouraging progress he has made’.

  He concluded: ‘In my opinion and I think in that of everyone who knows him well, Van Hoogstraten presents no public risk.’

  Van Hoogstraten was released in January 1972. But it didn’t mean freedom. A witness said that as the freed man walked out through the prison gates he looked astonished as two police officers jumped out of a car and grabbed him. They told him he was under arrest on suspicion of bribing a prison officer.

  It was alleged that Van Hoogstraten had been making pay-offs to one of his jailers since 1969. At that time he had petitioned the Home Office to be allowed facilities to run his businesses from jail. He had been turned down but he had still attempted to do so.

  A hard-up warder gave him the opportunity. He told Van Hoogstraten that his car had broken down on the M1 and he didn’t have the money to repair it. Van Hoogstraten promised the man cash if he would take business documents out for him to a woman at an address in Chelsea. The warder agreed to act as his ‘postman’. When the warder met the woman she handed him £100 in cash. It happened several times. And when he returned to the jail he had supplies of soap, deodorants and scent for the young dandy.

  This time Van Hoogstraten got bail. The trial date was set for October. He did not appear to have worried that much about the outcome. He hadn’t made any secret of the fact that he was trying to run his business empire from his cell or that letters were being taken out for him. He claimed that the prison governor knew about his arrangement with the warder and had not objected. So at his trial in October 1972 he pleaded guilty, assuming a nominal penalty. He was stunned at what happened then. The judge, noting Van Hoogstraten’s ‘bad record’, said that he had used his riches to ‘seduce’ a prison officer and ‘you must pay for it’. He sentenced him to fifteen months in jail and the warder to nine months.

  Van Hoogstraten was sent to Wandsworth Prison. He was outraged at the disparity in the two sentences and immediately appealed. Once again he turned to his friend Father Gates. The appeal court heard from the priest about a transformed and beguiling Van Hoogstraten.

  The two had spent time together regularly – several hours a week – over the last nine months while Van Hoogstraten was on bail awaiting trial
. And Father Gates would be only too happy to continue seeing him when he was ultimately released. ‘It would not just be a matter of social duty. Van Hoogstraten can be a pleasant companion and while I think it essential to broaden his horizons and widen his acquaintance with the right kind of people, including those of his own age, it is no burden to spend time in his company.’

  Gates reported that all was now well between Van Hoogstraten and his parents. Problems had arisen but that often happened when a lad went to jail, and anyway bridges had been mended and his parents were ready to let bygones be bygones. Van Hoogstraten was on good terms with his married sister. While out on bail he had visited her regularly. She had a little baby and he was proud to be an uncle. On top of that, since his release he’d worked hard at his businesses, ‘which no one has ever doubted … have been built up honestly and by his own hard work’.

  The appeal succeeded, and Van Hoogstraten was finally released in January 1973. Lord Justice Roskill suggested that he would benefit hugely if he agreed to seek voluntary prison aftercare ‘although that might be a blow to his pride’.

  Van Hoogstraten agreed – no aftercare.

  Father Gates had hoped to provide that aftercare. The priest had persuaded himself that his young protégé was now a different animal who would allow himself to be guided. He set it all out in a memorandum which weighed heavily in securing Van Hoogstraten’s final release. He drew a picture of the young man regularly visiting the vicarage, being introduced to Gates’s friends, and being entertained at Gates’s mother’s house in Walmer, East Sussex. Van Hoogstraten would even ‘take part in parish life’ in Fulham. After all, Brighton was only an hour from London by train.