Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  ‘Then he mentioned the price,’ Browne recalls. ‘He planned to charge £10,000 a week.’ Van Hoogstraten turned him down. It was the same with the other PR men. They were only prepared to take on Van Hoogstraten if he paid top dollar, and as a point of principle he would never do that.

  So Van Hoogstraten and Browne conceived a strategy of their own. Van Hoogstraten would present himself as a reformed wrongdoer who was tarred by mistakes that he’d made decades before. The picture he’d present would be of a tough man, yes, but a strictly legal, totally straight one these days. A man to be feared? Yes, but only by those who themselves broke the law in their dealings with him. A bad landlord? No.

  The heavyweights of the media and television were now nosing round, and the new PR strategy was tried on them. It did not pan out remotely as planned. Van Hoogstraten and Browne would chat the strategy through first, before the journalist or TV crew turned up, and then Browne, watching from the sidelines, would see it all unravel.

  Browne was ‘the fixer’ for press interviews. Journalists called him on the phone and an evening meeting would be arranged in London. If it was the reporter’s first meeting with Van Hoogstraten the venue would probably be an expensive Park Lane hotel. A favourite place of Van Hoogstraten’s was the Inn on the Park.

  It became a standard routine. The journalist met Browne in the lounge and then, five minutes later, Van Hoogstraten made his grand entrance. At the time he favoured smoked-glass sunglasses, black pinstripe trousers, a starched white shirt, black jacket, black waistcoat, black tie, black pocket handkerchief, black built-up shoes and over all this a full-length white or black mink coat. He had three minks to choose from.

  This apparition advanced down the hotel’s staircase and up to Browne and the journalist. ‘Mr Van Hoogstraten,’ Browne announced deferentially. If he hadn’t been warned what to expect, the journalist would be transfixed. He’d be treated to the hard Van Hoogstraten stare, and then a diatribe.

  Browne told us what usually happened: ‘Nick just couldn’t contain himself. He had to play the gangster. He couldn’t help himself. He’d meet a journalist and every time it was the same. Out he’d come with the half threats and the hints about dark deeds.’

  The first of the media heavyweights to come calling when the Kensington and Chelsea case broke was Duncan Campbell, then of the Observer. An incisive and intuitive reporter, Campbell is widely liked among other journalists. He is also hugely envied because his long-time partner is the actress Julie Christie, with whom he now lives in California.

  Of all the articles written about Van Hoogstraten, the piece that Campbell wrote for the Observer colour magazine in the winter of 1987 was Van Hoogstraten’s favourite.

  The six-page article, some five thousand words long, was headed: ‘How Nicholas van Hoogstraten played the devil and became a millionaire.’ Next to the headline was a full-page photograph of the tycoon posed proudly next to his favourite Louis XV chair.

  Campbell began with the quote from Lord Justice Winn when he passed sentence on Van Hoogstraten for the Braunstein grenade attack back in 1968: ‘This young man is a sort of self-imagined devil. He thinks he is an emissary of Beelzebub.’

  A vivid description followed of ‘the landlord with the highest profile since Rachman … who once sipped tea in the Wormwood Scrubs canteen [and] now has Lapsang Souchong brought to him on a silver tray at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane’.

  The report tracked through much familiar territory – the stamps, the Bahamas, the clubs in the sixties, the Braunstein affair, Wormwood Scrubs, the rupture with his parents, the collections, the palace, Robert Gates, the property empire, the overseas homes and the Kensington and Chelsea case.

  It quoted Van Hoogstraten’s own view of himself as an innocent man these days who was facing ‘what he believes has been a shoddy attempt to deprive him of his properties which, he says, he manages in an exemplary manner’. Campbell left readers to judge as he dug up tenants who were just too frightened to talk and only one with a good word to say about Van Hoogstraten.

  Campbell had dug more thoroughly into Van Hoogstraten’s background than most other reporters. His knowledge of Van Hoogstraten’s life in prison jolted the tycoon. The reporter told him how he’d heard about the relationship with Baron von Benno and how Van Hoogstraten was remembered in the Scrubs for his neatly pressed prison uniform and for never being short of essentials.

  ‘Who told you about that?’ asked Van Hoogstraten, who couldn’t resist a dive into gangster-speak. ‘It wasn’t someone who had his legs blown off in the green fields of Surrey?’

  The reporter’s homework had taken him to Fulham to see Father Gates. The priest told Campbell that he was prohibited by the Official Secrets Act from discussing people with whom he had dealt in a pastoral role. But Campbell had it confirmed that Cardinal Heenan had indeed received a dossier on Father Gates from Van Hoogstraten, but had taken it far less seriously than Van Hoogstraten assumed.

  During that evening in the Inn on the Park, Van Hoogstraten opened up more to Campbell than he had to any journalist in the past. He talked for the first time about his love life. ‘I am a confirmed bachelor with three or four legitimate mistresses… Although I have more than one “wife”, I have a very close relationship with them all. I don’t consider anything else other than from an academic point of view. I’m interested in what’s out there but I’m not going to pursue it. I’ve got enough on my plate… My private life is as pure as the driven snow.’

  He talked too about his image. One of the PR experts whom he had consulted about that had worked for Aristotle Onassis. ‘He was saying the only way from this terrible Mafia-type image is to ingratiate myself by joining “society”. Why should these people be interested in me? They’re going to be after my money, after my brains and being seen with yesterday’s villain. I said: “What’s in this for me?”’

  The boastful side of the man came bubbling out continually. ‘You can take me anywhere, show me anything and within a matter of days or hours I’m an expert. I learnt accountancy in six months. I learnt as much as I needed to know about the diamond business over a couple of years.’

  He was keen to impress with his lineage, and talked of his great-uncle Adolph in Sidcup, who, before himself, was the last in the family to be of ‘any wealth and consequence’. ‘When he died it was in the News of the World because they were looking for heirs to his £8 million estate. If I’d known about him and he’d known about me I’d have got the parcel, wouldn’t I? He’d have loved me rebuilding the family fortunes after all these years.’

  Campbell ended his report by describing Van Hoogstraten heading off after dinner into one of his properties in Hill Street, Mayfair, one of the most expensive streets in Europe. ‘Great Uncle Adolph from Sidcup would have been proud,’ he wrote.

  Next to come calling was Granada TV’s World in Action, the country’s top investigative TV programme. Mike Walsh, a reporter on the programme, had been assigned to investigate the growing scandal of winkling in London and homed in on Van Hoogstraten. There were at least half a dozen Rachmanite property developers and speculators operating in the capital at the time. Some were as ruthless as Van Hoogstraten. But none had such a high profile.

  Walsh began digging around in Kensington and Chelsea and the neighbouring boroughs where Van Hoogstraten was operating. In Kensington and Chelsea most of the tenants involved in the case brought by the council against Van Hoogstraten were too scared or traumatised to go on camera. It was the same in Notting Hill’s All Saints Road, where Walsh discovered another Van Hoogstraten method of getting rid of a woman tenant. She lived in a run-down corner property owned by the tycoon. Her home was the first-floor flat. One day she returned to find the staircase leading up to it was gone. Van Hoogstraten’s men had removed it. The tenant lost her home. She was too frightened to go on camera.

  Solicitors who had represented tenants were equally scared. One of the most prominent in Kensington and Chelsea said that
he’d been thrown down the stairs by one of Hoogstraten’s thugs and didn’t want a repeat of the experience. He wouldn’t even appear with his back to the camera and his voice disguised.

  In the neighbouring borough, the City of Westminster, there was a woman with a lot more courage. Jackie Hope was introduced to Walsh by a tenants’ rights worker. He knew numbers of other Van Hoogstraten tenants who had been abused but only Jackie Hope was ready to go public.

  She wasn’t a rent-paying tenant but a leaseholder, an owner-occupier. Her home was in Edgware Road near the Regent’s Canal, a raised ground-floor flat with a garden at the back. She bought the lease in the late seventies and understood the garden to be hers.

  A delicate woman in her forties with grey eyes and a soft voice, she had been an actress until ill-health prompted her to give up the stage. She spent most of her time during the day in the garden. Then one afternoon she saw two men there. She later learned that one of them was Van Hoogstraten

  ‘I walked out into the garden and walked towards them and said: “Excuse me, are you from the managing agents?” And Nicholas van Hoogstraten spat in my face and pushed me… He said: “I’m the new owner. Get your things out of here.” I said: “I’m sorry, this is my garden, you will have to deal with my solicitor.” And the man who was with him, who I now know to be Robert Bradshaw, said: “You won’t need a solicitor, you’ll need a doctor because you’re going to end up in a wheelchair, and if you’re in a wheelchair you won’t be able to get into your garden, will you?” So, again I said: “I’m sorry, you’ll have to deal with my solicitor” and I was pushed by Nicholas van Hoogstraten down my garden towards the door, towards my flat and he said: “Get back in there, your property ends there,” and he spat in my face again.’

  In fact Van Hoogstraten wasn’t the landlord. Robert Knapp had bought the freehold using the surname Bradshaw. In a bizarre reversal of roles Van Hoogstraten had chosen to play Knapp’s heavy in the confrontation with a tenant. ‘Uncle Bob’, however, needed no help. Over subsequent months he made Jackie Hope’s life hell without anyone’s assistance. Nails were hammered into her front door. There were thefts. The garden was damaged.

  Mike Walsh approached Van Hoogstraten, and an off-the-record meeting was set up between them. Again it was at the Inn on the Park. The reporter arrived briefed to expect an over-the-top performance full of veiled and not so veiled threats. What he didn’t expect was the length of the meeting. It began at 7.30 pm. Van Hoogstraten talked and talked about himself – what he’d done and was alleged to have done, his hatred for tenants, socialists and the Irish, his huge wealth, his collections, his palace, his admiration for Hitler and for Mrs Thatcher. It went on for hours. Walsh finally extricated himself at about 1.30 am.

  At Granada it was agreed that if Van Hoogstraten could be induced to say a fraction of what he had said in the hotel, World in Action would have a memorable programme.

  At this point Don Jordan was asked to collaborate on the project as producer. He and Walsh had supper with Van Hoogstraten in the Window on the World restaurant at the top of the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane. Van Hoogstraten drank water and ate little.

  The two journalists outlined their intention to make a film about the property tycoon and asked if he would participate. The idea was batted about for several hours, during which Van Hoogstraten at one point did his astonishing facial morphing act. One moment he was relaxed and chatty, the next raving mad and threatening. In less than a minute it had blown over, like a summer shower. By the end of the meeting he had agreed that, subject to a letter of intent from Granada Television, he would take part in a film profile of himself and his methods.

  Walsh wrote a letter outlining the film they wanted to make and setting out some ground rules. Van Hoogstraten, as he desired, would be informed of who else was appearing and any accusations they made against him – but only immediately before any interview with him. Two weeks later Walsh and Jordan were invited to meet Van Hoogstraten at his offices in The Drive, Hove.

  When they arrived, they were admitted by a very languid, good-looking young man and shown into a room furnished with Van Hoogstraten’s ubiquitous French pieces. The man himself sat in a dazzlingly bright gilded chair behind a truly beautiful ebonised desk oramented with charming gilded caryatids at each corner.

  Van Hoogstraten opened a drawer in the desk and extracted Walsh’s letter. He proceeded to criticise it for not being precise and clear. The journalists thought they were about to be thrown out. Then Van Hoogstraten put the letter down and pronounced: ‘I couldn’t have done better myself.’

  This, it transpired, was high praise. Van Hoogstraten was fond of writing letters of ambiguous content to tenants. The qualities he perceived in this letter were to result in his offering Walsh the choice of three things – a job, a ‘grace and favour’ flat or death. Months later, when the film had been made and transmitted, the three men met over lunch in London, together with another Granada Television colleague. True to form, Van Hoogstraten threatened the other colleague, saying he would give him a ‘good spanking’. Walsh brought up the subject of the three possibilities that had been placed before him. Which, if any of these – a job, a flat or death – were still in play? he enquired. Van Hoogstraten pondered for a theatrical moment and then said: ‘Well, I think all three are still on the cards, don’t you?’

  Filming was a stop-and-start affair. Van Hoogstraten was often away in France, so days with him were arranged around his schedule. In between times, the World in Action team researched aspects of his life and business. They interviewed tenants who had experienced a rough time at the hands of their mercurial landlord.

  No case history touched the journalists’ hearts more than that of a young woman suffering from multiple sclerosis. She was terrified of Van Hoogstraten and only agreed to be interviewed in silhouette and without her name being given. We’ll call her Miss A.

  Miss A was a sitting tenant in a house owned by Van Hoogstraten in Shepherd’s Bush, west London. When she went into hospital because of her illness, Van Hoogstraten telephoned with a fabricated story that her flat had been flooded. She sent him a key. All her belongings were removed, so erasing any trace of a tenant in residence. The house was sold with vacant possession.

  When Miss A complained, one of Van Hoogstraten’s employees wrote to her suggesting she would be better keeping quiet about the matter if she wanted to see her personal belongings again. The letter said she would be ‘well advised to let sleeping dogs lie as we are well used to dealing with the nonsense caused by tenants who one minute are grateful for a place to live and the next minute seek compensation from the owner’.

  Miss A tearfully told World in Action that she felt the letter was intended to threaten and frighten her. In an interview at High Cross, Walsh confronted Van Hoogstraten with his behaviour towards Miss A. It was an interesting moment. Van Hoogstraten had not had his behaviour or methods publicly questioned before, except in a court of law. Walsh said he thought his treatment of Miss A was pretty bad.

  ‘You would,’ replied Van Hoogstraten. ‘It wasn’t your property. You don’t think the landlord is entitled to take back his property when he wants to?’

  He went on to say that, in his opinion, the small sum Miss A was paying – £12 a week – could hardly be called rent. ‘She was taking the piss,’ he said. ‘And I’m not standing for it.’

  ‘And property is king?’ asked Walsh.

  Van Hoogstraten thought for a moment and then smiled. ‘Isn’t that what life’s all about?’

  The film was full of such moments. On another day Van Hoogstraten sat on the gilded throne behind the gorgeous desk and freely revealed how he saw himself.

  ‘I am probably ruthless and I am probably violent,’ he said.

  He admitted he knew violent people – ‘A few violent associates, yes’ – but then ‘everybody could be brought to the point of violence, depending on the circumstances’.

  He smiled as he said, ‘There is always plent
y of young blood coming up. Down the line there are people we can call on for things that need doing from time to time.’ He was clearly enjoying himself playing the villain. ‘One keeps one’s insurance policies up to date,’ he added. It made for riveting viewing.

  There was one moment when he became very agitated. Walsh asked about his connection to specific convicted criminals, mentioning one of them by name. Van Hoogstraten went into a ballistic fury. He fumed that he would not talk about others but was happy to answer questions about himself.

  He went on to explain his view of society: ‘The most serious lesson I ever learned very early in life, when I first began to have substantial wealth, was that one could not trust those people that ordinary members of the public or business people are told they could trust – their professional advisers, solicitors, accountants, police even – all these people are hypocrites.’

  The people one could trust, he proclaimed, were the so-called criminal classes.

  At first hearing this sounds deliberately perverse. But when put into the context of the Van Hoogstraten world view, it makes a twisted sort of sense. It starts with the belief that all that matters is oneself. The so-called criminal classes know this. Any notions of society or collective endeavour are only hypocritical bullshit. So the imposition of rules or laws is merely a conspiracy to stop the individual getting what he wants – and the conspirators must therefore be crooked or bent.

  So bent means straight and straight means bent.

  Other moments were less fraught. Van Hoogstraten and the authors travelled around London in a taxi as he talked about the property world. He described ‘winkling’ and said how buildings could be worth so much with vacant possession that it could hypothetically be worth bumping someone off – ‘if you’re that way inclined’.