Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  Van Hoogstraten wasn’t the Newton Greens’ only creditor. Cyril had also gone to moneylenders in his old Streatham stamping ground. No sooner did Van Hoogstraten appear at High Cross than the moneylenders from south London dispatched some heavies to the mansion apparently wanting a piece of the action. Cyril asked Van Hoogstraten for help. The tycoon is believed to have called on associates of his old gangster friend Little Legs Lawrence, who was in jail. ‘We went down there with banjo cases and saw them off,’ is how he later described what happened. His four years in jail had left him better connected than ever.

  Newton Green was now a very sick man. When he died, Shirley inherited Purlville, the company that owned High Cross. She decided to hang on to the estate she loved by running a more modest operation – a rest home rather than a nursing home. To prepare for the changeover she closed the place down for a while.

  At this time Van Hoogstraten was living almost permanently abroad. He seemed to have homes in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and France. Nevertheless he kept in touch with Shirley. He even sent air tickets to Paris so she could fly in for a romantic weekend with him there. The tryst doesn’t seem to have been a success. Afterwards the relationship began to cool and Shirley found a new man.

  She also – fatally – began to fall behind with repayments of the loan to Van Hoogstraten’s Getherwell Finance Ltd. Van Hoogstraten, far away in Switzerland, pounced. Shirley was informed that Getherwell was seeking a possession order for High Cross. However, the company told Shirley, she could stay, they didn’t want her out.

  The deal was that Getherwell would pay off her mortgage to NatWest. In return Shirley would pay rent of £1600 a quarter and not oppose the possession order. Shirley consulted her lawyers. The legal advice was that she’d have only a fifty-fifty chance of overturning the possession order and that, knowing Van Hoogstraten, it would be a long, costly battle.

  So she agreed to the Getherwell deal. Now renamed Parklands Rest Home, High Cross was reprieved. Shirley could return to her animals and the new man in her life, Paul Hales.

  In 1976 she discovered the NatWest mortgage hadn’t been discharged. Getherwell had reneged on their side of the deal. Her lawyers advised her to stop paying rent. Shirley stopped and wrote to Van Hoogstraten telling him why. She was, she made clear, challenging the possession order.

  After a month or two’s silence, warning letters began to arrive from Van Hoogstraten and Getherwell. Knowing the man’s reputation, Shirley and Paul Hales tried to outflank him. They asked the NatWest, as the main mortgagor, to repossess the High Cross estate. They calculated that the bank would then sell it on the open market, realising enough through the sale to take what it was owed, give Van Hoogstraten what he was owed and still leave Shirley with a tidy sum.

  But once Van Hoogstraten has his claws in a property he doesn’t easily let go. On 26 April 1978 his secretary wrote to Shirley: ‘I write to give you formal warning that pending the obtaining of a Possession Order against your company you are not entitled to “quiet enjoyment” of the Estate.’

  One of the spots which the High Cross estate overlooks is called Tarble Down, named after a bloody battle fought there 750 years ago between Simon de Montfort and King Henry III. A new battle was about to be fought at High Cross.

  Some of Van Hoogstraten’s men, led by the formidable young Rodney Markworth, now occupied the gatehouse flanking the estate’s entrance. Among them was Leon Moscrop, who, with Markworth, had gone to jail after the notorious ‘Battle of Brighton’ three years earlier.

  One morning soon after Markworth and Moscrop moved in, staff at the rest home arrived at work to find that they couldn’t get in – and the residents couldn’t get out. The gates were chained and padlocked. Paul Hales cut the chain. The next morning the chain was back. That night Hales cut it again.

  In the big house, which had twelve residents, all over eighty, the phones began to ring incessantly. When staff answered, there was either a stream of threats or, even more worryingly, silence.

  One morning Shirley took a call and a gruff male voice said: ‘We’ve been taken for cunts long enough. We’re going to start putting poison down for the horses and the dogs.’

  Shirley called in Securicor. They were to patrol the grounds at night.

  The gate-locking saga continued. It was an astute tactic. Visitors coming to see their relatives couldn’t do so and wanted to know why. More worryingly, in an emergency it would be impossible to get ambulances or fire engines up to the house. If the siege went on, Parklands Rest Home would have to close down.

  On 4 May the first violence occurred. Paul Hales decided to remove the front gates altogether. In the early hours, as he set to work, Rodney Markworth suddenly appeared. Hales claims that Van Hoogstraten’s hard man went for him. But Hales, who had brought along a wrench for protection, got the first blows in. He laid out Markworth, who was taken to hospital with a gash in the head that needed fifty-eight stitches. Later Hales pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm. The judge proved very lenient, letting him off with a caution and a £50 fine.

  Over the next month Shirley and her elderly residents learned what the ‘quiet enjoyment’ letter meant.

  The anonymous calls multiplied. Hales says they averaged some two hundred a day.

  Outside, Van Hoogstraten’s men circled the house in an old car ‘from dawn to dusk’, revving the engine and smashing into fences and through the garden.

  The climax came on 16 June. That day Shirley and Hales were due in London to seek a High Court injunction to stop the harassment. It was also the eighty-fourth birthday of one of the residents. A party with a cake was being laid on for her in the main dining room.

  The house awoke to find the electricity had been cut off and the phone lines severed by a hacksaw. Both exits were impassable. The main drive was blocked by a twelve-foot-high barricade of felled trees, piles of gravel and tarmac topped with barbed wire. A five-foot-deep trench had been dug overnight across the only other way in, the tradesman’s entrance.

  Social workers turned up from the county council. They were unable to get past the main gate. Markworth told them that he was taking possession of the estate on behalf of Getherwell. Residents’ relatives were advised by the police not to try to get in.

  The daughter of one resident told a reporter: ‘My mother is in there and she can’t get out. I’m hoping the social services and the police are going to do something.’ She was too scared to be identified. ‘I don’t want to give my name because it might be traced back to my mother.’

  Eventually a Social Services mini-van was driven through a gap in the fence at the far end of the estate and across fields to the house. Press cameras clicked as the bewildered residents were helped into it.

  On the advice of the police, the remaining staff at the home trooped off after the old people. It wasn’t safe for them to remain. Markworth and company wouldn’t let them take their belongings. So they left them, and the birthday cake.

  An hour later Shirley returned from the High Court with an injunction ordering Getherwell to withdraw. But it was too late. Everyone was gone except Van Hoogstraten’s men.

  All that was left were Shirley’s four dogs. She found them in her Daimler parked down the drive. Acid had been thrown over the car. The dogs were all bleeding. One had to be put down immediately. One lost an eye, another an ear. Police manning the perimeter suggested the dogs had been fighting. A vet later stated that the wounds had all been caused by a sharp instrument, maybe a knife.

  Van Hoogstraten, far away in Paris, was only too happy to take responsibility for what the press called the ‘Sussex siege’. The day after the evacuation he phoned the Evening Argus to put his side of it. As always, he was convinced that right was on his side. ‘We have £150,000 tied up in this property. The tenants are £8000 in arrears although they’re drawing £800 a week from the residents.’

  ‘Don’t think these people have been unjustly treated,’ he added. He had been seeking possession for
months. ‘I stalled off doing anything drastic or morally wrong, if you like, until the old folks had been removed. But we have had considerable trouble with East Sussex Social Services in moving them out.’

  Asked about Shirley Newton Green’s injunction, he said: ‘They know where they can stick their court order… If they arrest any of my employees I will just employ more.’

  The News of the World headline read: ‘Stick your court orders says the siege thug tycoon’.

  For once Van Hoogstraten didn’t want to be presented as wholly heartless. In another phone call to the Evening Argus he announced that he was offering Leslie Newton Green a flat. ‘We have no argument with this twenty-one-year-old girl.’

  But everyone else beware. A few days later copies of the following notice were nailed to some two hundred trees fringing the estate:

  ‘TAKE NOTICE that this company as (a) Landlords (b) Mortgagees are now in possession of the High Cross estate and all goods thereon.

  ‘AND TAKE FURTHER NOTICE that any adult person other than police officers or other persons duly authorised by this Company in writing who enters any part of the Estate is liable to be shot at and/or attacked by our guard dogs.

  ‘BY ORDER – DIRECTOR OF GETHERWELL FINANCE LTD.’

  No one from Parklands Rest Home – members of staff or old folk – set foot on the High Cross estate again.

  A year later Van Hoogstraten took a journalist on a tour of the battlefield. He talked of ‘the great fun’ that he’d had over the siege. He pointed to the battered Daimler, still where it had been left by Shirley a year before, indicating the bloodstains on the back seat. ‘That’s where I ordered the dogs to be slaughtered.’ At the nearby stables he said: ‘That’s where we poisoned the horses.’

  He had no special plans for High Cross at the time. It was just another piece of real estate whose value would accumulate and could one day be sold at a huge profit. ‘We are not proposing to do anything with the property. What does one do with these places?’ It would, he said, simply be secured and made safe from fire hazards.

  He had it boarded up, and for a time the mansion was forgotten. It would hit the headlines again – involved in a colossal tax claim against the tycoon. Then it would mysteriously burn down. Many years later the white marble palace Van Hoogstraten was destined for would arise from its ashes.

  7

  VAN HOOGSTRATEN’S

  WOMEN

  Late evening in a hotel suite in Brighton. Tanaka Sali, a pretty seventeen-year-old not long arrived in Britain from Zimbabwe, is watching The Jerry Springer Show on television. Van Hoogstraten comes in. He says he is going to bed and asks the girl to join him. She says she wants to stay up to watch the show.

  Van Hoogstraten goes through to the bedroom and prepares for bed. After a while he reappears in the sitting room. He grabs the remote control and turns the volume down. He then stalks back to bed. Tanaka turns the volume up. The millionaire reappears and turns the television off. Tanaka turns it back on.

  Van Hoogstraten unplugs the television and carries it towards the bedroom. The teenager tries to grab it from him. Van Hoogstraten lets go of the television and slaps her hard across the face. She pushes him against the wall. Her lover’s face contorts into an evil mask. The transition is so violent it’s almost unreal.

  Tanaka has seen this before. ‘His face changes and it’s a different person. It’s weird. I can’t explain it to you if you haven’t seen it. He’s got two personalities.’

  The couple begin hitting each other. He calls her a fucking bitch. A fucking cunt. She screams back, obscenities, mutual abuse – they’ve done this before. Finally Tanaka grabs her handbag and leaves.

  Van Hoogstraten heads downstairs, the terrifying mask sliding back into its usual shape. On his way past the dining room, he finds a blob of jam on a doorknob. Spotting a member of his staff nearby, he tut-tuts: ‘One can’t be having this, can one?’

  These scenes of the bedroom and the public arena provide a condensed portrait of the two sides of Nicholas van Hoogstraten. He conducts a stormy relationship with his young mistress while keeping a steady eye on business. Two opposing forces are at work here, in an uneasy balance.

  Tanaka Sali could give as good as she got and was well used to her lover’s tantrums. She was, after all, a teenager who wanted to go out with people her own age and have fun. Her middle-aged lover would indulge her up to a point, giving her pocket money to go to clubs with a female friend. But he was careful not to indulge her too much.

  ‘If I wanted to go out, he’d give me twenty quid, that’s all,’ she recalled. ‘That’s five pounds for a taxi going to the club, five pounds for a cab coming back, five pounds to get into the club and five pounds for a couple of lemonades, because I wasn’t allowed to drink any alcohol.’ She used to save her money up until she had enough ‘to get wrecked’.

  When she first met Van Hoogstraten, in Harare towards the end of 1999, Tanaka thought of him as ‘an elder’ who was respectable and nice. But after she had lived as his mistress for some time, his violent mood changes began to scare the young woman.

  ‘Since I started going out with Nick, I noticed I started being suicidal. When I had a fight with him one time, I cut my wrist because I wanted to kill myself and then I passed out on the bathroom floor. That’s how mad he used to drive me.’

  For his part, Van Hoogstraten always said he was only trying to control the headstrong teenager. His paternal attempts to get her to obey him and take direction were for her own good. Their rows were therefore about her drinking, smoking, staying out overnight clubbing, not getting up in the morning and, ultimately, seeing a younger man. Like those young women in 1960s Brighton, she was – horror of horrors – frivolous. If only that Van Hoogstraten ideal could be attained: sexiness without frivolity. Sex on tap, on demand, but switched on and off by him. A fantasy shared by more than one or two males.

  Despite it all, despite the lectures, the reproofs, the tirades, the hammerings, Tanaka Sali still likes him. Women do like him.

  When Van Hoogstraten appears on television it has an odd effect on hundreds of women. They watch transfixed as this self-assured, well-groomed man lays down the law according to Nick. There is a touch of the celebrity bad boy about him. With his immaculate hair, his growling, screen-gangster voice and his certainty that he is right, he appeals to a band of women who immediately fall for him. Or maybe it’s just the money that’s in his trousers. And in the bank. And in his international investments and his houses.

  Whatever it is, after every appearance he gets fan mail. The letters are mostly declarations of love, or lust, and more often than not they propose marriage. The aphrodisiac of a hundred million or so acts like musk to these doe-eyed, spellbound women. Van Hoogstraten is, of course, hugely amused by the letters, but also flattered. Who would not be?

  If it were just the money, it would be too simple. There is something else about Nicholas van Hoogstraten.

  He is, when you see him, right there, in a deliberate, self-made sense. You feel he wants you to experience him. The problem is, how exactly? He says everyone, the media especially, gets him wrong. It’s no wonder. He is difficult to read.

  These days he is quieter than he was, less in-yer-face than he used to be. He is still far from self-effacing, but quietly assured and not quite so full of himself. He can play the bashful schoolboy, dipping his head, giving a short laugh, half turning his upper body away, lowering his gaze, before glancing up to see what effect he has had. He is more reflective. He can appear – odd though it is to say it – almost vulnerable. It is a clever act that appeals to female sensibilities.

  The Courtlands Hotel clientele includes a large smattering of the wives of Brighton’s business elite. They gather here for Inner Wheel meetings and other social functions. These middle-aged and elderly genteel ladies seem comfortable in the hotel owned by the unobtrusive man dressed in black. At one of these gatherings an elderly widow whose husband once owned the hotel remarked wh
en introduced to Van Hoogstraten: ‘Do you know, you are almost charming!’ It was probably only that old English disease, snobbery, that prevented her from admitting that he really was charming.

  His good looks no doubt help with the women. A strong forehead, straight nose, angular jaw, not jutting but turning around and then up to a longish, masculine face with cheek bones a model would starve for. He has hair any movie star would be proud of. It sweeps back off the temples in a Mach 3 swerve and at the forehead it describes a great aerodynamic thrust before blowing effortlessly over the crown to a finely etched line of closure just above the collar. The collar is on the high side, stiff, as white as any detergent commercial. And the hands. Perfect manicured nails and a gold signet ring set with a huge purple amethyst.

  Then there’s the eyes, of course. But first, the mouth. It has a fluid nature. Hard, but soft. His top lip declines in the middle like the centre, the apex, of a jet wing, moving down in the middle and upwards to either side. When he smiles, he pulls this central V down further while the cheek muscles pull the edges of his lips naturally up. The effect is a vulpine look at once comical and sinister.

  And this is the problem with Van Hoogstraten. The very heart of the matter of describing him and getting close to his nature. He is at this fleeting moment, with the grin, almost a pantomime villain. But a closer look tells you that he is owed much more respect. He is, perhaps, an evil bastard. Or somewhere between the two. Or perhaps both – a protean, fluid personality, seesawing from one to the other. Just what is he?

  And that takes us back to the women wooed by him through the cathode-ray tube. Do they realise that marriage to Van Hoogstraten might not be a bed of roses? Maybe they do and they don’t mind. Maybe they want the thorns. These fans could be made from the same pattern as those women who go on daytime television shows to explain why they married the man who killed his first wife for her money, who shot his best friend when a drug deal went sour, who is doing twenty-five years in Category A or Broadmoor. Maybe they are the same women.