Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  He said that many of the neighbours did not like it when he bought a house in their street. When asked why this was, he directed the camera crew into the exclusive Holland Park enclave of Norland Square. This pretty garden square is lined with expensive terraces of early-Victorian houses painted a pleasing and uniform pale magnolia. When we asked which house he owned, he replied that we would see for ourselves. We did. At the north-west corner was his house – painted bright purple. It turned out he had other houses around the area in assorted colours – another purple one, a green one and other colours too. A rainbow coalition against the smug conformity of the establishment that hated him and whom he loathed in return.

  He hated anyone who stood in the way of making money. Jackie Hope, with a lease of twelve years still to run, finally gave up and left Maida Vale. World in Action helped her to find another flat. After Van Hoogstraten’s conviction in September 2002 for manslaughter, she said she finally felt safe. She had spent fourteen years moving from flat to flat, always in fear he would find her.

  Another side of this complex man’s character came out during filming. He displayed his shrewd knowledge of the property market, and advised the World in Action team that the domestic property market was about to crash. His forecast was proved correct the following year.

  He also exhibited the side of his character that is the connoisseur. At the royal jewellers, Cartier of Bond Street, he displayed his astonishing knowledge of big-ticket gemstones. He offered an informed critique of individual stones – ‘unusually for an emerald it has fire’ – and gave accurate assessments of their value – ‘worth about a quarter of a million’.

  Back at The Drive, he took pleasure in showing the programme makers some of his fabulous collection of antique French furniture, lovingly describing each piece’s provenance – ‘from a royal palace’ – or the nature of its construction and materials – ‘Sèvres plaques, satinwood from the French colonies, mahogany, and the frame is oak.’ Unused to such opulent furniture, his guests ventured to suggest it was all a bit over the top.

  ‘Well, I’m a bit over the top, aren’t I?’ the collector instantly batted back, following this up with a put-down: ‘I don’t see any onyx tables here.’

  He also evidently took great pleasure from cars, although he was not really much of a driver. He drove Walsh down to his High Cross estate in a black Corvette Stingray, a rare collector’s machine from the sixties shaped like a shark, with the massive power of a V8 engine. Van Hoogstraten barely drove above 35mph the whole way from London.

  Throughout the filming he was touchy but mainly good-humoured. His irascibility would flash through from time to time, but so too would his ready wit. When, in answer to a question, he estimated his worth at about one hundred million, Walsh, seeking clarity, asked if that was in pounds sterling. ‘Well, it wouldn’t be lire, would it?’ came the immediate riposte.

  The millionaire was interesting company, with his chippiness, his wit, his hidden empire run from a series of anonymous terraced houses in Hove, his fabulous possessions and his iconoclastic world view. He had a collection of hand-made Italian shoes with what Americans call ‘elevator heels’ stored in an anteroom off his office, where a hunting rifle with telescopic sights also lingered. He was undoubtedly out of the ordinary.

  Of all the days they spent with Van Hoogstraten, the film crew particularly remembered the one when he said he would produce a friend to speak up for him, as World in Action had requested. The man who arrived at The Drive was a small, delicate-looking, middle-aged figure with little hair and a jaunty step. He was David Harris, Van Hoogstraten’s former accountant.

  What happened next was almost surreal. While Van Hoogstraten looked on, Harris told not of his friendship and regard for him, but about how violent he was. He said Van Hoogstraten was ‘dangerous and ruthless’, and described the kidnapping incident from the seventies when he was ‘lucky to escape’ with his life. During this, Van Hoogstraten was having a whale of a time and grinned while Harris told how the millionaire had kidnapped him, held him captive in Paris and fed him on tinned sardines for over a year.

  During breaks for the camera to be reloaded, Van Hoogstraten would fill in facts that Harris had omitted. He obviously loved to hear the story and wanted every last detail to be told. The bizarre tableau of the frail-looking accountant relating how he had been in danger of his life, while Van Hoogstraten, attired in his customary black, prowled behind the camera, was to stay with the programme makers for some time.

  When the World in Action programme was transmitted, four and a half million people watched the tycoon expound his views and explain his methods of doing business. Thanks to the film, questions were asked in Parliament during a debate on housing. It also received a great deal of attention in the press.

  Van Hoogstraten gained instant notoriety and in some circles even a sort of celebrity. He became hooked on television and in the ensuing years was to give countless interviews. But few if any were to reveal quite the degree of menace and comfort with violence that he exhibited in that first appearance.

  Soon after, the Daily Star came calling. A tabloid with no time for nuance, the paper found in Van Hoogstraten exactly the sort of black-hearted hate figure that the red-top press loves. It published a two-page investigation by Chris Anderson under the headline ‘He sent thugs to strip his family home… Now the family shun tycoon.’ Anderson had gone to Rustington to interview Charles and Edna Hoogstraten. He found the tycoon’s father to be even more bitter than he had been in the past. Charles repeated his earlier claim that his son had got started in property by ripping off his parents, and then went much further. He claimed that a dozen properties were involved and that in the sixties Van Hoogstraten had also obtained from him and Edna ‘antiques, gold, jewellery and a Jaguar’ worth around £40,000, a huge sum at the time.

  ‘Britain’s most feared landlord,’ said Anderson, had gone to his parents’ home and stripped it of furniture, carpets and curtains. He then had ‘even threatened to have his own parents terrorised by henchmen’. According to the report, Van Hoogstraten admitted that his relationship with his parents got so bad that ‘it was getting to the stage of me sending someone round to do something about it. I mean on a personal, physical level.’ It was alleged that his plan had been to send in thugs to terrorise his parents in their home and then leave them tied up. Van Hoogstraten admitted to the Star that he was only dissuaded from going further by his younger sister, Betty.

  Van Hoogstraten was seldom to be out of the headlines from now on as reporters dug up everything they could. It would be a long time before they realised that he had a parallel – and still more lucrative – business career overseas.

  11

  BUILDING AN EMPIRE

  Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, 1999. It’s October – the hottest time of the year. Temperatures average nearly thirty and can easily reach into the sweaty forties. It’s the evening now and the daytime heat is finally drifting up into the black sky as Nicholas van Hoogstraten and Tony Browne enter the nightclub.

  Browne remembers it well. ‘We had a bit of time to kill before we headed up country to the estates. We went into this club which was normally quite a quiet place. It had changed. There were girls and hookers dancing with business types all over the place.’

  They sit at a table with a panorama of the dance-floor action. Girls dance with middle-aged whites. One girl is particularly good. She has beautiful features and large breasts. She moves erotically, flicking her backside from side to side while pulsing up and down on her hips in sinuous rhythm. She ripples like an eel, young and sexy.

  Van Hoogstraten says: ‘What would be good would be to have her naked and shaking her arse over you like that as you lie back in bed.’ They laugh. Browne catches the girl’s eye. She comes over and Browne does the socials. Her name is Tanaka. She’s sixteen at the most. Van Hoogstraten buys her a Coke. Browne diplomatically moves away and one of the girl’s friends quickly slides on to the seat next t
o him.

  The following morning the two men drive nearly two hundred kilometres south towards the town of Mvuma to the biggest of Van Hoogstraten’s African landholdings, Central Estates. But the millionaire does not forget the girl in the nightclub. Within a year she would be in England, set up as yet another new mistress and living in one of his hotels in Brighton.

  Around the corner from that hotel is another of Van Hoogstraten’s properties, Africa House. The name conjures up a host of images. There is a grandness about it – Africa House – a sweeping, all-embracing intention. One might think of a government building, a hangover from Britain’s colonial age like those grey bulwarks at the corners of Trafalgar Square, Canada House and South Africa House. Whatever it might be, it would hardly be 20 The Drive, Hove.

  The Drive is one of the series of grand boulevards sweeping down to the seafront, peppered with houses owned by Van Hoogstraten. Their façades of yellow London brick are stained black with age and their bays jut out grimly over half-basements. Number 20, Africa House, is no exception.

  How he came to call it Africa House dates back to the sixties, when Van Hoogstraten was a young man still making his way in the world of international investment. He was in his early twenties and looking for new experiences and new areas of financial speculation. He chose to look in Africa – specifically, in South Africa and Rhodesia – as Zimbabwe then was - – both countries where Europeans could lead a luxurious life at very little expense. And there was, by all accounts, still money to be made. All of this appealed to the penny-pinching, pound-hungry young man from Sussex.

  At that time, for a man with an entrepreneurial eye, southern Africa must have seemed a collection of wonderfully free countries, full of opportunity and without the taxation and red tape of England. Van Hoogstraten certainly thought so. Thirty years later he still thought so. In 1997 he told financial journalist James Hipwell: ‘South Africa is one of the few places on this planet worth both investing in and living in. The level of honesty and integrity you find down there is much higher than anywhere else in the world.’ With prescience worthy of his Irish clairvoyant, he added: ‘You don’t have all these multiple fraudsters and Stock Exchange scams that you have over here.’

  Unfortunately, the young businessman was not so blessed with foresight of the catastrophic political upheavals that were to overtake Zimbabwe, beginning even before the twentieth century ran out. A political tremor was to sweep across the land, putting in question the value of the multi-million-pound investments he had built up in ranching and agricultural holdings.

  The Rhodesia Van Hoogstraten found as a young man was a huge, fertile country with a well-run infrastructure built under the British colonial system. Political undercurrents were already rumbling under its placid surface that might have deterred others from long-term investments, but he was made of sterner stuff.

  Anyone who travels to Zimbabwe cannot help but be taken by the country. It is part of the great South African plateau, with undulating plains rising up to five thousand feet above sea level. This altitude makes the climate agreeable for Europeans. The first adventurers tended to notice the land but not the people. The things that attracted the young entrepreneur to Rhodesia were the very things that had attracted Europeans since the time of Cecil Rhodes himself – the land, the mineral wealth and the possibility to impose their will on the indigenous population.

  The Victorian colonialist Rhodes and the twentieth-century businessman Van Hoogstraten shared a desire for wealth and an ability to take decisive action to gain it. Van Hoogstraten was later to say of his commitment to the country: ‘What I do is a bit like what Cecil Rhodes did and nobody could fail to be impressed by what he did.’

  Cecil Rhodes founded the De Beer’s diamond empire and made political treaties from which nations grew. He had a vision of nothing less than an Africa developed and run for the glory of the British Empire. Van Hoogstraten hated society and craved a world in his own image that would show the rest of them.

  But there are real similarities. At the age of seventeen Rhodes was sent for the good of his health to join his brother farming in Natal. That same year diamonds were discovered at Kimberly. Cecil and his brother were among the first successful diggers. By the time he was nineteen Rhodes was rich. Van Hoogstraten was sent abroad in his teens – to cure not physical ill-health but antisocial behaviour – and also seized the opportunity to create the basis of a fortune before he was twenty.

  There were other parallels. Here is what one biographer said of Rhodes: ‘He so far abused his power as to become intolerant of any sort of control or opposition … he was lacking in regard for individuals and a great part of his daily life was spent in the company of satellites and instruments, whom he used with cynical unconcern for the furtherance of his ends.’

  When Van Hoogstraten first visited in the mid-sixties, the country was in turmoil. The majority of the population supported independence. The minority – the white settlers – did not. In 1964 the Prime Minister, Ian Smith, rejected Britain’s plans for votes for all. There would be no votes for blacks. He told one of the authors in the late 1970s how the black population was politically naive, unready for self-government. The twin monsters of racism and self-interest were dressed up in the rags of paternalistic compassion and concern.

  In 1965 the opposition parties began a guerrilla war. Despite the thousands of British citizens living in Rhodesia, Britain severed diplomatic links. The United Nations imposed economic sanctions. By the seventies Zanu, largely representing the majority Shona peoples, and Zapu, supported by the Ntebele, amalgamated into the Patriotic Front to form a combined force. They fought a war lasting fourteen years, characterised by guerrilla attacks on Rhodesian security forces and sporadic murderous raids on farms owned by whites. The Smith regime fought back with the help of South African military know-how.

  In Rhodesia, Hoogstraten, the perennial outsider and iconoclast, smelled something else he liked: a whiff of the Wild West. Uncertainty and fear are good news for a certain kind of businessman. There was a peculiar swashbuckling atmosphere. From the establishment heart of the Salisbury Club to the hotel lounges and restaurants, and in the easy-going bars and nightclubs, the conversation was the same. The tobacco farmers, the owners of franchises for imported trucks, the cattle ranchers, the mine owners, the drifters and chancers all talked about it. Money. It was why they were here. As Hoogstraten himself would have said, it was what it was all about.

  In the roughest bar serving beer from Nairobi, Guinness from Lagos and Scotch smuggled from God knows where, the talk was of money. In the restaurant of the Monopatapa Hotel, where white-gloved waiters served plates of impala steak while the trophy heads of topi, sable and, yes, impala gazed mutely down from the walls, the talk crackled with money or the thought of it. There was gossip of mining concessions that could be had if one knew the right person, and of old mines thought to have been worked out long ago but which some geologist or other had recently seen and declared worthy of further exploitation. Hoogstraten loved it. For a man with a deal in his veins, this was a land running with the drug of money.

  Most of this chatter was piffle. But some opportunities were real enough. While others dreamed over their Shumba beers, Hoogstraten was a man up for action who pursued his opportunities. The result is that today he has interests reputed to range from diamond mines in Congo to coal mines in South Africa.

  Back then he was, he says, ‘appalled that someone else should own so much of someone’s country. It was disgraceful. It was not right.’ When he speaks now of the injustice he found, his words carry the tone of conviction. He last spoke of it to the authors in early 2002, when he was facing a charge for murder and, as a condition of his bail, could not leave Britain. He had been in the habit of going to Zimbabwe every few weeks and the restrictions clearly hurt.

  Young Hoogstraten quickly reached an opinion of white settlers, or ‘Rhodies’. He didn’t like them. It was not simply a case of differing views on the black maj
ority, but of style and class. The established ranching class, to which Ian Smith belonged, had old-style manners and courtesies that put them into a time-warped realm of ease which excluded Hoogstraten, the urban self-made man. The white farmers tended to be a rough-and-ready lot who immediately rubbed the essentially urbanite incomer up the wrong way.

  For the Rhodies, the young Englishman’s cocky, self-assured manner must have rasped against their slower-moving rural skins, snagging like a snake’s scales against a cow’s hide. The door of social inclusion was shut once more. By now Hoogstraten was turning into the professional outsider, professing contempt for the old order at home and those he found on his travels. He would remain an outsider throughout his life.

  Then he discovered Africa. The outsider often pitches up in a new place and sees its opportunities with new eyes. Hoogstraten saw this right away. ‘In Third World countries there are no effective laws. Any law there is comes out of a pound note,’ he later said.

  He also found a kind of freedom. Africa would allow him a status and a space to be himself that he could not find at home in England. He was a European with money. This instantly made him a figure with power and prestige. There was room for a powerful ego to grow here, unencumbered by the class and social barriers at home. The ruthless ‘thiever’ could create a world of his own and, as a byproduct, he could do good and earn respect in return. In the 1990s all this was to culminate in his becoming a sort of benevolent dictator over nearly a million acres of land.

  His commercial interests appear to have begun with straightforward investments made in companies with major African holdings. This move accelerated around the end of the eighties, when the entrepreneur foresaw the crash in the value of domestic housing in Britain. He sold hundreds of houses and began to search for new investments in Africa. As he looked around for suitable investment opportunities, the name of Cecil Rhodes was replaced by a new day-to-day role model. This person was altogether a more modern entrepreneurial spirit – Tiny Rowland.