Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  They took him on as he’d never been taken on before in London. And for once a local council backed them.

  Of the two hundred or more properties he bought in London in the eighties, the one that put him in the glare of publicity again was a splendid double-fronted white villa built in Holland Park in the 1860s. Today Sir Richard Branson lives in the same street in exactly the same kind of house. Others there are embassies. They fetch between £6 and £12 million each.

  Number 74 Holland Park had been owned by an eccentric old lady. Her tenants were a mixed bunch. They included two actresses, a psychotherapist, a lawyer and a computer analyst, a typical in-crowd mix for this part of west London in the 1980s. The old lady died in 1982, and the house was sold by public auction. A front company owned by Van Hoogstraten bought it. He paid £375,000. Two years later the house would have fetched three or four times that amount with its tenants still in residence, such was the rate of price inflation. Had it been emptied of its tenants it would have fetched ten times as much.

  Van Hoogstraten put the house in the name of his mistress, Caroline Williams, the brightest of all his collection of black girlfriends. She informed the tenants in a handwritten note that from now on rent should be paid to Robert Gates and Co in Hove. Nothing at all worrying happened in the house until the following winter. Then the tenants realised that the central heating wasn’t functioning. Until then, all that had passed between those living in the house was the odd greeting as they passed on the stairs. Now they got together. The lawyer among them phoned the office of Robert Gates and Co on their behalf and was treated to a tirade from the other end of the line. He was so shaken by it that inside a week he was gone from the building.

  It was the start of a six-year battle.

  Among the tenants were a psychotherapist Orlee Udwin and her sister Leslee, then an actress and later an award-winning film producer. Leslee had fallen in love with the house when she went to a party there in 1980. A few months later the two sisters managed to get a flat of their own there for a rent of £50 a week. They were the leading lights – and Van Hoogstraten’s bêtes noires – in the battle that now began.

  When the lawyer neighbour took flight, Leslee phoned around for advice. ‘Local agencies … told us that we were tenants of one of Britain’s most notorious landlords… Van Hoogstraten, they said, was dangerous and we should not underestimate his threats. We were advised to fit double locks and chains on our doors.’

  In an article for the Sunday Times Leslee described what happened when she took the plunge and phoned Van Hoogstraten direct to tell him that central heating was provided as part of the tenancy agreement. She demanded the heating be put on again. The tenants wouldn’t be cowed, she said.

  ‘Van Hoogstraten went ballistic and started screaming at me. He said: “You tenants are fucking scum. You cunt, you’re not going to get your car out of second gear.’ After that Leslee made a habit of looking under her car before she got in, terrified the brakes would be tampered with or a bomb placed under it.

  Next to be threatened was the Irish caretaker, Frank. He was warned of dire consequences to him personally if he put the heating on. Frank quit the job soon after that. All the male tenants in the house quickly took fright as well. Within a few weeks only the women remained.

  New men did move into the vacated flats – Van Hoogstraten’s men. One was Tony Browne. The others were the architect’s friends. Leslee and the other women tenants had no idea the newcomers were friends of Browne and warned them about Van Hoogstraten. Every word went back to the landlord.

  Eviction notices were the next move. Two girls sharing a flat were told they were illegal tenants. Others received similar letters.

  The two girls made the mistake of going on holiday. At around two o’clock one morning their fellow tenants were awakened by an almighty banging. The girls’ furniture was being thrown down the stairs by Van Hoogstraten in person and two other men. After that Leslee began carrying a kitchen knife in her handbag. The spectre of the black-clad Van Hoogstraten able to get in and out of her house at any time of night haunted her.

  The landlord’s attitude? The girls were ‘troublemakers taking the piss’. They had terrific flats in one of the most upmarket addresses in London and were paying peanuts for them. They were indeed living in a desirable place, with large, fourteen-foot-high rooms, huge, balconied windows and a spacious garden. But what really upset Van Hoogstraten was that any tenants should take him on, especially women. He would be just as indignant about an Irishwoman whom he had harassed out of a slum a mile away off Portobello Road as he was about his Holland Park tenants. He told the authors that the woman was ‘a prostitute’ and the Holland Park women ‘a bunch of lezzies’.

  No one seemed able to help Leslee and her fellow tenants. The police told them there was nothing they could do unless Van Hoogstraten or his men physically harmed them.

  In desperation they hired their own solicitor and spent £2000 pursuing Van Hoogstraten. Two years of injunctions and court orders and summonses followed, all futile. Van Hoogstraten’s funds seemed to be unlimited. The tenants’ weren’t.

  The breakthrough came when Leslee and the others linked up with people whom Van Hoogstraten was said to be harassing in other houses in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. All were experiencing similar problems – threats, changed locks, disrepair, attempted eviction.

  Together they formed a tenants’ association and discovered that their own council had quietly taken action against Van Hoogstraten years earlier. In 1979 Kensington and Chelsea Council imposed a control order allowing it to take over a house in Norland Square owned by the tycoon. The building was in such a state that it was deemed to jeopardise the ‘health, safety and welfare of the tenants’. Its defects included rising damp, dry rot, a dangerously rotten floor and no fire exit. The order enabled the council to move the tenants out as a temporary measure while it undertook repairs itself and then charged the landlord for them.

  Immediately the council had completed repairs, in 1982, Van Hoogstraten’s men moved in, changed the locks and prevented the tenants returning. A second control order was issued.

  Would Kensington and Chelsea consider taking over four or five of Van Hoogstraten’s properties? It didn’t look likely. Despite its action over the Norland Square property, the council was a bastion of conservatism. Like all local authorities it had always been timid with control orders. So for months it batted back the tenants’ arguments. During this period the harassment went on. Letters came from Robert Gates and Co declaring that they weren’t legally tenants at all and were ‘squatters’. Possession proceedings were initiated. One tenant, Rod Howard, claimed that Van Hoogstraten personally smashed down the door of his flat and removed furniture while he was in bed.

  It was finally too much for Kensington and Chelsea’s environmental health officials. An investigation into Van Hoogstraten was ordered. Needless to say, it didn’t get much help from the landlord himself. In reply to an enquiry about a tenant in Redcliffe Gardens, his office wrote: ‘We are in receipt of your stupid letter of 4 March which should have been returned to you marked “BOLLOCKS WITH TWO LL’S” across it in very heavy black ink.’

  Others did co-operate, including other councils where Van Hoogstraten was giving problems. As a result the first-ever dossier on the many sides of Van Hoogstraten was compiled. It listed aliases, convictions, front companies, associates and shareholdings. But the most persuasive fact to emerge was the similarity of what so many tenants in his houses in the borough were experiencing. Kensington and Chelsea, no doubt crossing its fingers, took the plunge.

  In October 1985 it issued control orders on five of Van Hoogstraten’s properties in the borough: 74 Holland Park, 102 Redcliffe Gardens, 19 Elsham Road, 178 Holland Road and 36 Norland Square. These gave the council day-to-day management rights over the properties. The council followed up with compulsory purchase orders for all five. Worst of all from Van Hoogstraten’s point of view, the council
then laid charges of harassment against him, against Caroline Williams and against Ronald Dedman, a Van Hoogstraten stalwart in the High Cross siege. Dedman was accused of breaking down a door in the Elsham Road property and threatening a tenant there with ‘a nasty accident’.

  The harassment trial was set for the following year. If found guilty, Van Hoogstraten could face four years in jail, or even longer.

  He was beside himself. A letter signed by Robert Gates and Co attacked the council officers who were acting against him as ‘dishonest, incompetent and corrupt’. Inevitably, Van Hoogstraten appealed against the compulsory purchase orders. That meant a public inquiry would have to be held and the harassment trial would have to be postponed.

  The inquiry took place in July 1986. As so often, Van Hoogstraten couldn’t – or calculated that he shouldn’t – keep quiet, and gave vent to a surge of paranoia. ‘There is a conspiracy … to thieve these properties from me,’ he shouted.

  Kensington and Chelsea’s QC used the same word. Van Hoogstraten, he said, had organised ‘an evil conspiracy’ against his tenants. He ensured that they suffered maximum discomfort. ‘You do not provide them with hot water. You cut off the central heating… You don’t pay the electricity or gas or oil bill… You badger for non-existent rent arrears.’ It was all familiar stuff. But persuasive. The appeal against the compulsory purchases was turned down.

  The public inquiry went against Van Hoogstraten. Salt was then rubbed in his wounds when the council decided to get back the money it had spent repairing the Norland Square property by selling it. The repairs had cost £126,000. The house was sold to a local housing association for not much more – £148,000. The difference, a mere £22,000, went to the original owner, Van Hoogstraten. The house had been well and truly ‘thieved’ from him.

  Naturally, he didn’t take it lying down. Before the harassment trial could be heard, he attempted to jail the mayor of Kensington and Chelsea and all the councillors. He alleged that in selling the house the council had breached a High Court undertaking, and so sought to have all the elected members jailed for contempt. Inevitably, he failed. The way was now open for the harassment trial.

  The case opened in January 1988. Van Hoogstraten faced nine charges of harassing tenants between July 1984 and September 1985. Outwardly, he was his usual confident self. There was no evidence of harassment. The charges would be ‘laughed out of court’, he forecast.

  In Southwark Crown Court tenants reeled off the complaints against Van Hoogstraten, the months of ‘hell’, the water and power supplies cut off, a door smashed down, the furniture removed in the middle of the night and the landlord’s own menacing appearances. Kensington and Chelsea officials backed them and pointed to the same pattern in house after house.

  The first week didn’t go well for Van Hoogstraten. At the end of it one of his solicitors came up with a suggestion. If he would change his plea to guilty the solicitor could guarantee a non-custodial sentence. Tony Browne, who was there throughout the trial, remembers the nervousness of the man as he made the proposal. ‘He was sweating and rubbing his hands.’

  Van Hoogstraten, no longer on public display, responded coldly. ‘Your opinion is very prejudicial to my position,’ he said. That afternoon he sacked his entire legal team, including three barristers and three solicitors.

  From then on he defended himself, with Browne acting as his solicitor. They knew they had one advantage. British judges traditionally allow defendants who represent themselves to get away with far more than any barrister could. Van Hoogstraten took full advantage.

  ‘He knew when he was crossing the line and kept doing it,’ says Browne. Van Hoogstraten ‘deliberately lost his temper during cross-examination’, exploding in apparent outrage at what had been said. ‘You really must calm down, Mr Van Hoogstraten,’ the judge interjected, fooled by his play-acting.

  Van Hoogstraten called the case a ‘stitch-up’. He claimed that the tenants had manoeuvred for compulsory purchase of the properties so that they could then buy their flats from the council for much less than the marked price. He told the prosecuting council: ‘We all know there are villainous landlords around but I’m not one … None of my tenants, and I’ve got thousands of them, have lived a life of misery. You don’t want to know about the tenants who I send bottles of sherry and hampers from Fortnum and Mason every Christmas.’

  A hotel at the nearby Elephant and Castle was Van Hoogstraten’s headquarters for the duration of the trial. As everywhere, his office was a table in the restaurant. He had an employee called James Pyeman take notes of everything that happened in court and bring it to the hotel, where he and Browne held a nightly inquest. What had been said? What had been missed? Most crucial of all, how had the jury reacted?

  The jury was Van Hoogstraten’s top concern. How could he win them over. ‘Nick thought the men on the jury would see where he was coming from,’ Browne recalls. ‘His problem was the women… He needed to sway them.’

  Van Hoogstraten’s solution was to use the politician’s oldest trick – a baby. He arranged for his youngest child to be brought to court almost every day. Outside the court, jurors who had just heard women tenants describe the ‘hell’ Van Hoogstraten had put them through were greeted with the daily sight of Nicholas van Hoogstraten the gentle father, holding an infant.

  If any of the jurors had chanced to venture into the men’s lavatory one afternoon they might have seen two other sides of Van Hoogstraten: his paranoia and his violence. Paul Cheston, a rookie reporter on the London Evening Standard, had just entered the WC when he was attacked.

  He recalls: ‘I had been alone in the press box day after day and Van Hoogstraten kept glaring at me. The day he attacked me I had just gone to the men’s room. The door flew open behind me, and I was pushed in the back. I turned around and I saw that it was Van Hoogstraten. He was all dressed in black, his trademark black. He threw me against the wall, both hands round my throat. He’s smaller than me but he was very fit, he had the complete advantage. I was terrified. He was semi-throttling me. He was shouting something about me passing press cuttings to the jury about things that he had done in his past. It was a ludicrous idea, but he took it very seriously. He was completely paranoid. It was very, very frightening, and then he stormed out.’

  Afterwards Cheston decided that Van Hoogstraten probably feared that the reporter might tip off the jury about his past and that the incident in the men’s lavatory was a warning. ‘It was a threat, the frighteners,’ the reporter says.

  He did nothing about it. Neither judge nor jury ever heard about it and the case continued.

  Van Hoogstraten’s camp believed that a key moment came when he cross-examined Leslee Udwin on the details of the harassment and the fear that she said it engendered.

  ‘What is your profession?’ Van Hoogstraten asked her.

  She paused, then said: ‘Actress.’

  Van Hoogstraten left it there.

  ‘“Actress!” That reply said it all,’ says Tony Browne. ‘The jury knew at that moment that they had been watching a performance.’

  The jury returned with its verdict one afternoon in January 1988 during a thunderstorm. The rain was so heavy that it seeped through the roof of Southwark Crown Court and streamed down the walls. The court had to reconvene in a dark old neo-Gothic monstrosity next door. It was an appropriately melodramatic setting for the villain in black. He faced nine charges. With the thunder crashing its accompaniment outside, the foreman of the jury pronounced the verdicts: ‘not guilty… not guilty… not guilty…’

  Van Hoogstraten had feared the worst. As the first charge was read and the verdict, then the second and the verdict, then the third, tears began to stream down his face. The next time he would cry in public would be at the Old Bailey when he was on trial for murder.

  That evening Van Hoogstraten, Browne, James Pyeman and Caroline Williams celebrated over tea and sandwiches. Exultantly, Van Hoogstraten promised the others that he would give them anything
they asked for. James asked for an electric guitar. His employer did not approve of such frivolity. He paid for him to have driving lessons instead. Maybe James could be his driver some day.

  The next day Van Hoogstraten took Tony Browne off to the Caribbean to continue the celebration at the five-star La Toc hotel on the island of St Lucia. Tony had never seen his tight-fisted boss so generous. ‘We stayed for nine days. Everything was lavish. I had a terrific time. On the other hand he never paid me a farthing for all the work I had put in night and day for him on the case for weeks and weeks, so in the end, as usual, he got off very cheaply.’

  Although Van Hoogstraten had beaten Kensington and Chelsea in court, the council went ahead with the compulsory purchases. So it ended in a dead heat. The Royal Borough had failed to jail the rogue landlord and the rogue landlord had failed to hang on to his properties.

  He wasn’t happy. On his return from St Lucia he was the same as ever: ‘I will be taking due retribution against the people who brought this case,’ he told the Evening Argus in February 1988. As far as is known, he never did.

  10

  NOTORIOUS

  As the Kensington and Chelsea case unfolded, Van Hoogstraten was now under the spotlight not just in the courts but in the Houses of Parliament, too. Yet another new government Housing Bill was going through the House of Commons aimed specifically at boosting the private landlord. Rent controls were to be eased still further. It was a highly contentious measure, and the latest accusations against the tycoon were manna from heaven for its opponents in the Commons. Van Hoogstraten’s name dominated debate after debate. So he decided that it was time he changed his image. He sent Tony Browne to consult the public relations people.

  Several turned Browne down flat. They didn’t explain why. Others, however, were ready to accept the commission. The most impressive was fronted by a former SAS officer. He won Van Hoogstraten over with descriptions of how the dinner parties he’d arrange and charity functions they’d attend would be Van Hoogstraten’s entree to new and influential people, the first step in changing the image.