by Mike Walsh
Father Gates was, alas, a lousy judge of character.
Prison had neither softened nor reformed Van Hoogstraten. He came out vengeful and threatening. He was more of a vindictive outsider than ever. Gone was the sixties dandy. Dressed from now on entirely in black, he radiated malevolence. Tenants were his special hate. ‘Scum’ was just one of his words for them. But he would prove just as venomous about anyone who got in his way. He had been called a ‘self-imagined’ devil by a senior judge. Free again, he seemed to be determined to demonstrate that it wasn’t self-imagined, he was the real thing.
Some of it was, of course, play-acting for a gullible press. But by no means all. Now almost twenty-eight, Nicholas van Hoogstraten was a very dangerous man.
5
SETTLING ACCOUNTS
Van Hoogstraten’s first priority as a free man was to sort out his holdings in Switzerland. He flew to Geneva. He claimed later that he’d forgotten where he had put £2 million in cash. He spent two days walking the streets before he recognised the bank and worked out what the account number was. Then he turned his attention to revenge for what had happened to his money while he was inside.
Paranoia was a Van Hoogstraten trait. Everyone was suspect … after a piece of him … trying to defraud him … trying to ‘thieve’ his property … ‘taking the piss’. On his release he went through the books and decided that his accountant David Harris, who had once been found guilty of fraud, owed him £14,000. Harris was later to agree that he owed Van Hoogstraten some money but only a fraction of the sum that Van Hoogstraten claimed.
Van Hoogstraten decided to take over Harris’s businesses and then make the accountant work off his ‘debt’ by doing his company accounts free of charge for two years.
He kidnapped the accountant. It happened as Harris was leaving a bank in North Street, one of Brighton’s busiest roads. Van Hoogstraten, Markworth and another man grabbed him. They bundled him into his own Rolls-Royce and drove him off to the Newhaven – Dieppe ferry, then to Paris. Harris, a pinched little man with a damp handshake, was told that he was there to work off his debt and he’d have to stay until he’d done it.
In Paris, he was first lodged in a hotel, then a flat. On one occasion Van Hoogstraten arrived and said that he was dissatisfied with Harris’s progress. ‘He thrashed me within an inch of my life,’ said the little accountant, who claimed he couldn’t walk for the next two weeks.
It is probable that he wasn’t there just to work on Van Hoogstraten’s books. There was another good reason for him being out of the country. Harris was bankrupt, and no doubt Van Hoogstraten didn’t want his former accountant’s financial affairs – and therefore his own as well – to be opened up for scrutiny in a bankruptcy hearing. So Harris was spirited out of England – and kept out.
Why didn’t he try to escape or alert the authorities? He later told the authors: ‘I was told that I’d be killed if I returned. Or a member of my family would be.’
What happened to Harris’s family became known as the ‘Battle of Brighton’. It was an affair that would land Van Hoogstraten in the High Court once again.
The battleground was a house in Vere Road. The accountant’s sister, Sue Williams, her husband Jack and their two young children lived in the upper floors, and Harris’s sixty-five-year-old mother, Winifred Harris, was the tenant of the ground-floor flat. The property was one of the hundreds that Van Hoogstraten companies owned in the Brighton area.
In February 1973 the Williams family were suddenly told that the house had changed hands and the new owners, a building firm headed by a Mr Markworth and a Mr Moscrop, wanted all of them out. They heard nothing more for several months. One day Mrs Harris and her daughter returned home to find thugs throwing their furniture into the garden. Windows in the upper storeys were missing. Rodney Markworth and Leon Moscrop were inside the house changing the locks.
Susan Williams tried to intervene as Moscrop wrenched off an internal lock: ‘I rushed up and told him to stop… As soon as I got near he flung me off and threatened me. He told me: “You stand in my way and I’ll slash you to pieces.”’ The local council’s harassment officer appeared. ‘Fuck off,’ shouted Moscrop at the official, who had protested as a mattress thumped down on to the pavement.
The same short shrift was given to the tenant’s solicitor when he appeared after being phoned by a frantic Mrs Williams. A police constable who asked what Van Hoogstraten’s men were doing was told to ‘fuck off’ too.
Eventually more police arrived. They had to break down the door to arrest Markworth and Moscrop. By that time the house was uninhabitable. Water, phones, electricity had all been cut off, every lock was gone. So were window frames. The garden was a pile of furniture.
All this time a Rolls-Royce was cruising up and down Vere Road. In it was Van Hoogstraten.
Later that day he, Moscrop and Markworth were spotted in a nearby restaurant by a freelance journalist. He asked them if they were afraid of the consequences of what they were doing. According to the freelancer, Van Hoogstraten replied: ‘I could not care a toss about what anyone tries to do. I don’t live here any more officially anyway. I live in Switzerland and I’ll be going back on Monday.’
Van Hoogstraten also told him: ‘It was a real blitz operation… It’s the best bit of fun we have had for some time.’
Police dug into the background of the Williamses’ eviction and tracked the ownership of the house. There was the usual bewildering web of sales and transfers to mask where the real ownership lay, but the finger pointed at Van Hoogstraten. Inconveniently for him, the police also uncovered an alleged fraud over his acquisition of the building.
Back to jail went Van Hoogstraten. He was remanded in custody charged with causing criminal damage, unlawful eviction and conspiracy to defraud. He spent five more months behind bars before a court finally granted him bail – of £100,000.
The hearings in the ‘Battle of Brighton’ case were to last for most of 1974. Van Hoogstraten’s defence was that he wasn’t involved. Markworth and Moscrop’s defence was that the Williams family had no right to be in the house. At the end of it – after a stream of national headlines about the ‘tycoon’ and ‘his thugs’ – the exhausted parties reached a deal of some kind. Van Hoogstraten, Markworth and Moscrop changed their pleas to guilty on the three charges over the eviction, while the fraud charges were dropped. A benevolent-sounding judge wagged his finger at Van Hoogstraten and fined him just £2500 plus £1000 costs. Peanuts for Britain’s youngest self-made millionaire.
It was altogether a good result for Van Hoogstraten.
He didn’t let on that this was part of the vendetta against the accountant who he thought had betrayed him. It suited him that the outside world should think this was just another example of Brighton’s answer to Peter Rachman beating up some tenants.
‘This is nothing compared to what we did at 10 Albion Street, Portslade,’ he told a reporter. ‘We ripped out everything. Yet the family are still living there. The roof will have to come off next.’
Thus encouraged, the press duly descended on Portslade to find a family called the Johnsons at 10 Albion Street, or what was left of it. Their plight seemed outrageous. They had five young children. To get them out of their home, Van Hoogstraten’s men had bashed in the front door with sledgehammers, ripped out the windows and interior doors and smashed through walls. The roof was badly damaged too. When reporters found them, the Johnsons had evacuated the first floor and nailed polythene across the gaping window spaces.
Van Hoogstraten, however, hadn’t pointed this out to the press to show how bad he really was, but as a warning to other tenants. It emerged that he had been allowing the Johnsons to live in the house without paying rent. Quite a number of people had rooms or flats at low or no rent in Van Hoogstraten properties. The tycoon wanted someone in residence because empty buildings deteriorate. The quid pro quo he expected was that they’d get out immediately when he decided that it was time to sell the building. The
Johnsons had said no. So he’d sent in the heavies.
He told reporters that he’d warned the Johnsons that if they didn’t get out he would demolish the place: ‘If people get in my way I’m going to steamroller all over them… I say what I’ll do and I do it… People know what I’m like. No one has to do business with me. If they do, they know what they’re taking on…’
The Johnson and Williams cases were the first of many that would build Van Hoogstraten’s reputation in the press as an extremely tough landlord. If the newspapers had found out what he was up to privately, his reputation might have been still worse. It was a period when he was giving full vent to his juvenile paranoia and threatening everyone who had crossed him or, in his view, betrayed him.
Lawyer Michael Dring, who had represented Van Hoogstraten in the ‘Battle of Brighton’ case fell into that category. Van Hoogstraten accused him of having ‘stolen’ £1500 from him. The tycoon learned that Dring and his wife were on the boat train to Paris and decided to meet them. As the Drings left the train Van Hoogstraten walked up to the unsuspecting lawyer and, in his own words, ‘gobbed full into his face’.
Two days later Mr and Mrs Dring caught the 10.45 am boat train back to England. Van Hoogstraten was also on board. He went to the lavatory, excreted into some paper, entered Dring’s compartment and squashed the excrement in his face.
Twenty-five years later Michael Dring still won’t talk about it.
There is an immaturity about this escapade: skulking on trains, the delight in the use of excrement, savouring the revenge. But the childishness does not make it any less harrowing for the target. The resort to violent assault is a sign of being unable to draw a line. A more mature man might shrug and walk away. But never Van Hoogstraten. The persistence that has enabled him to amass a fortune, when allied to that love of violence carried over from his childhood, drives him to persecute his enemies. The dreadful thing is that his intimidation works. And that is why he is so dangerous.
Two weeks later various people were circulated with a two-page note on Van Hoogstraten-headed paper signed by his secretary. It described in minute detail the two incidents in Paris. They were, it said, meant to serve as a warning: ‘Whereas people like Dring are relatively safe among their corrupt “local clique” such safety does not extend to areas now controlled by my principal. Such incidents will be repeated in future against all such persons who have defiled their position in order to “attack” my principal.’
Half a dozen men and women were named in the note. The list included two solicitors – one female and described as ‘butch’, the other male and described as a ‘crook’ – and a judge who was labelled ‘kinky’. The note ended: ‘War has been declared. And in due course just retributions [sic] will be taken as further opportunities arise.’
Another former friend who was to experience Van Hoogstraten’s vengeance was the priest to whom he owed so much, Robert Gates.
Father Gates had remained close to Van Hoogstraten after his release from prison. He had learned about the kidnapping of David Harris. Several times he visited the accountant in Paris. There he heard about the threats that Harris would be ‘disposed of’. At first he didn’t take them seriously. He evidently still believed that his young protégé was basically harmless. But finally he became very alarmed at what he might be planning. He remonstrated with him and then appears to have advised Harris to seek police protection. Van Hoogstraten blamed the priest when he learned that Harris had wired Scotland Yard and returned home, from where he was taken into protective custody.
Van Hoogstraten never forgave Gates, and began a campaign to discredit him. A memorandum accusing Gates of misusing his position as a prison chaplain and having homosexual relations with prisoners was sent to Cardinal Heenan, the Catholic Primate of England.
Then, in 1976, Van Hoogstraten’s man Rodney Markworth launched a civil damages claim in which Gates was a witness. It gave Markworth the opportunity to launch into the kind of lurid sex allegations about the priest that newspapers adore.
He suggested in open court that Gates had had affairs with two prisoners and had written a ‘love letter’ to Van Hoogstraten. Father Gates denied the accusations but the damage was done. A press headline read: ‘Priest denies love letter to Van Hoogstraten’.
This was not the end of it. Van Hoogstraten hadn’t finished with Gates.
One Sunday morning the priest was saying Mass at the Holy Cross Church, Fulham, when three men advanced down the aisle, each clasping a banana. They were the emissaries of Van Hoogstraten come to humiliate the cleric in front of his flock. The bananas were presented to the helpless Gates, and the men filed back through the stunned congregation handing out sheets of paper describing in lascivious detail what their priest had allegedly got up to with male prisoners when he was a prison chaplain.
Gates denied everything and did nothing. He told a court later that he thought the allegations against him were childish. The Cardinal backed him.
Van Hoogstraten had the last laugh – a subtler, and ultimately more effective, way of wounding his erstwhile friend. He set up a new property management company in Hove. It would become the most notorious on the south coast for its treatment of tenants and its venomous attitude to council officials and solicitors or indeed to anyone who intervened on a tenant’s behalf. One of its ways of responding to a letter of complaint was to return the letter with the word ‘bollocks’ scrawled across it. Those complaining in person would have a bucket of urine poured on their heads from a first-floor window as they left. The name Van Hoogstraten gave the management company was ‘Robert Gates and Co’.
6
THE DREAM PALACE
A chance encounter in a dry cleaner’s in the East Sussex town of Uckfield started it. Van Hoogstraten was in a hurry. His car was parked on a double yellow line. As he made to leave the shop another customer said she just had to speak to him. For some reason Van Hoogstraten stopped and listened. It changed his life. The woman was an Irish clairvoyant who said she could tell him his fate. A session was arranged. He emerged from it claiming to be psychic and calling himself ‘a child of the Sun’. He was destined, he told friends, to live in a white marble palace on a hill.
So began a dream that would lead to ridicule and one of the most outrageous follies of his career. It would also cost him a good slice of his fortune.
He first set eyes on High Cross House in 1972, just after his release from prison.
The nineteenth-century neo-Gothic timbered mansion was set in over forty acres of East Sussex countryside. Hidden away down a country lane just twelve miles from the coast, it was picture-book old England. The terrace looked out on parkland and woods, complete with lake, horses and the South Downs rolling away into the distance.
If this sight sparked a dream in Van Hoogstraten at the time, he didn’t show it. He was there to find out what had happened to his money. He had discovered that David Harris, the accountant whom he would later kidnap, had used some of his money to help a south London publican buy High Cross.
The publican, Cyril Newton Green, was a tough, middle-aged man with underworld connections. He’d run a hotel in Streatham frequented by the most-feared gang in south London, the Richardsons. In the late 1960s he decided to quit London and try his hand at something different – opening an upmarket nursing home in the country. After weeks touring the Home Counties he finally lighted on the High Cross estate, near the village of Framfield. His wife Shirley, who was crazy about dogs, fell in love with the place. So did his stepdaughter, Leslie, who was equally besotted by horses.
Their idea was to operate a riding stables as well as a nursing home.
To buy the place Newton Green raised a mortgage with the National Westminster Bank. But he didn’t have enough to fit out the kind of exclusive money-spinning establishment he planned.
David Harris appears to have arranged to fill the finance gap. Harris had invested in High Cross either by making a loan or buying in as a partner. On his release fro
m jail in 1972 Van Hoogstraten started to dig through Harris’s transactions, and what he found about High Cross had him rushing to see Newton Green at the house.
Peter Couldridge, a Newton Green employee since the Streatham days, remembers Van Hoogstraten’s arrival. ‘He came storming in with three or four men and said: “This is my place.”’
An accommodation of some kind was reached. Newton Green accepted that he owed Van Hoogstraten nearly £100,000. He apparently signed a mortgage document for that amount with one of Van Hoogstraten’s companies, Getherwell Finance Ltd.
While Van Hoogstraten was putting the pressure on Newton Green he was displaying a very different side to the man’s wife, Shirley. The young tycoon, with his Rolls-Royce, dark, inquisitive eyes and talk of investments round the world, made a play for her.
He took Shirley to dinner, and arranged trips to the coast in the Rolls for her and her twenty-one-year-old daughter Leslie. He even took Shirley to his clairvoyant. Leslie remembers a day at High Cross when her stepfather was ill in hospital. ‘Nick came in with this huge emerald ring. He put it on my mother’s finger and she couldn’t get it off. He said: “Now you’re going to have to run away with me and marry me.”’
Shirley, twenty years older than her suitor, was smitten. ‘I really do think he fancies me,’ she told a disgusted Peter Couldridge.
‘You could tell, you know, that he was stringing her along,’ says Couldridge. ‘He put on the charm. All the women loved it. It was David Niven stuff. And Shirley, she just fell for it hook, line and sinker.’
Daughter Leslie, who, after all these years, still appears to have a soft spot for Van Hoogstraten, bridles at the idea that he and her mother became lovers. She was mortified at a television programme that claimed the two had an affair. However, she recalls that her mother was attached enough to Van Hoogstraten to offer to put up bail for him of £25,000 when he was next up in court, facing a bribery charge.