Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  This sad and ravished continent has given the entrepreneur a wider canvas for his investments and for his personal dreams. While Rhodes left his vast fortune in trust to provide scholarships so that students from Africa and other colonies could study in England, Tiny Rowland’s empire turned to sand. What will happen to Van Hoogstraten’s African wealth is anyone’s guess, but the future in Zimbabwe currently looks bleak.

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  AT THE COURT OF KING NICK

  Van Hoogstraten promised that when his great palace was finished, he would hold a party. It would be ‘the first and only party’ that would ever be held there. All the great and the good would be invited to see his treasures and his park. Then Hamilton Palace would be closed up for good. There’d be no more parties, no more guests. No outsider would ever clap eyes on his priceless collections again. No one would even get into the grounds. Other self-made men can’t wait to get into the county set, entertain lavishly and see themselves accepted. Much of the history of the English countryside is of the corrupt and the ruthless, parvenus and villains, buying their way into society by building a mansion which everyone who matters comes to time and again. Needless to say, Nicholas van Hoogstraten, the perennial outsider, had no such plans.

  High Cross House had originally been the home of the Thornton family, who had built it in the 1840s. Half a century later, in a typical expression of Victorian benevolence, Major Robert Thornton spent a fortune restoring the local church in nearby Framfield. When the estate passed out of the Thorntons’ hands that kind of paternalism went too. But even Cyril Newton Green, the publican who acquired High Cross before Van Hoogstraten, happily let locals wander and pick holly and bluebells and the local angling club fish for trout in the lake.

  Not the new owner. After he took over High Cross, the message went out that no one was welcome on the estate. The notices that were pinned up at the time of the siege warning that trespassers would be shot were left there. The angling club was kicked out. Van Hoogstraten’s men could be seen in the grounds with shotguns. As he outlined his plans for the palace to the press he emphasised the malevolent treatment any interloper could expect: ‘Trespassers will be dealt with really viciously,’ he told the Daily Star. To the Observer he said: ‘People think they can come on and start cutting holly at Christmas time, come sightseeing… We deal really viciously with people when we catch them especially when they know they are not supposed to be there.’

  His nearest neighbours were the two hundred or so souls living in and around Palehouse Common, mostly in groups of cottages along the road from nearby Uckfield to Lewes, some isolated in smallholdings. They were understandably terrified by what they heard about the new lord of the manor. One local did try a courtesy call on the estate. He was told by a man he took to be a caretaker that he wasn’t welcome. Others living in the group of cottages just outside the estate were approached by the press about their new neighbour. The only one who chose to speak would only do so off the record, explaining that he was frightened of ‘a brick through the window.’

  The fear spread to the little town of Uckfield, just a over a mile away. Mike Skinner, a Liberal Democrat councillor all through the nineties, says that Van Hoogstraten didn’t have to do anything to intimidate people in the town. ‘His reputation was enough. Almost everyone seemed afraid. I remember sitting with a police inspector over something Van Hoogstraten was up to, and being told: “Don’t do anything, he’s dangerous.” He wouldn’t go into any details. He said he couldn’t tell me why and just repeated: “He’s dangerous.”’

  It needed only the subtlest moves from Van Hoogstraten to reinforce that intimidating picture. When he applied for planning permission to resite his palace a little to the south of the skeleton of the gutted old mansion, local councillors visited the site to see for themselves. As they got out of their vehicles and filed down the lane leading to the estate, they saw people with video cameras. Van Hoogstraten’s men filmed each councillor entering the grounds, and made what they were doing very obvious. The planning application went through quickly, almost on the nod.

  Quietly Van Hoogstraten began buying up parts of Uckfield. It was rumoured that he owned whole parades of shops there.

  Like the police, council officials were loath to take him on. There was one case that infuriated councillor Skinner. An eighteenth-century Methodist chapel in Palehouse Common was being rebuilt as an expensive residence. It was sited in the middle of a terrace of modest houses along a country road called The Street. Complaints came in from the houses either side – both the homes of women living on their own – that they were being harassed by Van Hoogstraten’s men. The two women said that hedges had been ripped up and their boundaries pushed back by the builders. When a council official eventually called round it was claimed that he joked about their complaints with the developer.

  Skinner wrote to the chief executive of Wealden District Council, and was told that there was no evidence of Van Hoogstraten’s involvement. The tycoon had been seen driving by the chapel one day in a black American car and stopped to have a laugh with the builders. That was the only link. Skinner wasn’t satisfied and began to dig.

  He found that the man named as developer of the chapel, a Ukranian called Roman Antoniuk, had an address on the High Cross estate and a registered office at another building owned by Van Hoogstraten. Skinner demanded action from the council. ‘The chief executive told me: “Leave it, leave it … we’re all frightened of him,”’ he recalls. He wouldn’t leave it, insisting that the council should act to force the developer to give his two neighbours their land back. A council committee was convened to discuss issuing an enforcement order. It met, but to Skinner’s frustration was adjourned sine die. Nothing was ever done. The two women had to put up with it. A disgusted Skinner was helpless.

  The dark persona which Van Hoogstraten had cultivated so thoroughly didn’t put off everyone. The reverse in some cases. A coterie of admirers gathered around him. The common denominator among them seems to have been that, like Van Hoogstraten himself, they were all outsiders. They ranged from career criminals like Robert Knapp to smaller fish in the property field – usually foreign-born – who tried to ape Van Hoogstraten or to live off his leavings, or who tried both.

  Knapp was only at the ‘funny farm’ intermittently because he was in jail most of the time. When he first met Van Hoogstraten in prison he was a comparatively minor criminal who had served a few years for burglary and forgery. Later he became his alter ego and happily played the role of his enforcer, but he had other strings to his bow as well. Sometimes they involved Van Hoogstraten, but not always. Like many of Van Hoogstraten’s associates he dabbled in property on his own account. He was also the registered owner of a wine bar in Hove. Police suspected that he was merely the front man and that Van Hoogstraten was the real owner, but they may have been wrong.

  ‘Uncle Bob’ had a taste for the glitzy life and always seemed to be driving a new – usually American – car. To fund his lifestyle he developed into a major-league hold-up man. One acquaintance who witnessed Knapp talk about his ‘jobs’ thinks that he loved the adrenalin rush of being a robber. Like some character out of a Humphrey Bogart movie, he seemed to get a buzz out of being behind a gun. But though he impressed everyone who knew him as being an intelligent man, he nevertheless kept getting arrested. In 1986 he led a raid on a Post Office van and stole £100,000. Police caught up with him just as he transferring the money from the getaway car into another vehicle.

  While Knapp was away in jail for the hijack his parents Sylvia and Arthur were given one of the ‘grace and favour’ cottages at High Cross by Van Hoogstraten. Later, in court, Van Hoogstraten would break down and describe his fondness for old Mrs Knapp. ‘She was like my mother,’ he said.

  Knapp was released from jail on licence in 1993, but he wasn’t out for long. Just six months later he got twelve years after a botched raid on a jeweller’s in which his fellow robber killed himself rather than be caught.

&nb
sp; Another violent friend – also another outsider – was the tough Greek-Cypriot restaurateur Andrew Emmanuel. Van Hoogstraten and he had always enjoyed a fiery relationship ever since they met in the sixties. Emmanuel was the one man who consistently stood up to him and was treated by him like an equal. They were a disparate pair, the carefully brushed, neat Van Hoogstraten and the muscular Emmanuel with his yellow teeth and excited gestures. They did business together and rowed continually, cursing each other, hurling every kind of threat. ‘At one time or another each one was going to murder the other or break his legs … we were always on the brink of calling the police when they were at it,’ says a regular witness of their fights.

  However serious their rows appeared to others, Emmanuel stuck by Van Hoogstraten through thick and thin, and vice versa. Asked once by the authors if he had any friends who would be willing to talk honestly about him, Van Hoogstraten could think only of Emmanuel. We duly approached Emmanuel. ‘Yes, I will give you an interview,’ he said. ‘I want the world to know about the man I love and the man I hate.’ In the event, on Van Hoogstraten’s instructions, he had second thoughts and told the world nothing.

  The most dramatic role of all in the Van Hoogstraten story would be played by a third outsider who couldn’t be more different from Emmanuel. This was a polite, obsequious, even fawning Pakistani, Mohammed Sabir Raja.

  A burly, genial-looking figure, with big black eyebrows and a carefully clipped moustache, his appearance belied his behaviour. In his white shirt, silk tie and striped blue business suit and with his purposeful, military stance, Raja could have been mistaken for an ambassador or an international banker. In fact he was a slum landlord.

  Born in 1937, Raja grew up in the tiny village of Tatral near Rawalpindi in Pakistan. He married in 1951 and had three sons. At the age of thirty-five he set out for England, leaving his family behind until he had made enough money to send for them. So began a classic climb from rags to riches. The young immigrant took a room in Brighton and began a course in business administration at the local college. While studying in the evenings he worked in the day for the Post Office, then as a guard on the railways.

  It took him five years to save and borrow enough money to buy his first property. That was in 1967, the year that his friend-to-be Nicholas van Hoogstraten was first starting to appear in the headlines. Raja bought a house in Lorna Road, Hove. A controversial career as a landlord had begun. Three years later he was doing well enough to bring his wife Starbie and their three sons over from Pakistan, but it was to be another six years before he had enough capital to become a full-time property dealer.

  Later Mohammed Raja would credit Van Hoogstraten with teaching him the tricks of the trade. But from the early days he was no angel. He specialised in crowded bedsits, squashing in as many tenants into the smallest space he could. A fellow property dealer says of his bedsits: ‘You smelled stale human sweat from the moment you walked in until the moment you walked out. They were the pits.’ In 1976 Raja was criticised for housing up to sixteen tenants in a property in Goldstone Road, Brighton, which had just two WCs and one bath. A few years after that he was fined £750 with £600 costs for trying to bribe a council official. Raja said that it was ‘a clear misunderstanding’. He was not used to dealing in ‘the English way’. Eventually he would notch up more than a hundred convictions all over the country, mostly for health and safety violations. In 1989 the Evening Argus investigated his activities and dubbed him ‘Brighton’s worst landlord’.

  Raja was unrepentant. He told the paper: ‘Tenants, including the young people and those who are on the dole, they have nothing to do except fight each other and damage the property… If people want to live in a doss house or a palace it is their choice.’

  He ultimately did so well in the bedsit business that at the time of his death he had amassed a portfolio of more than a hundred properties. Most of them were in the Brighton area, but he also had houses in London and as far afield as Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle.

  Oddly for a man judged to have broken the law so many times, Raja clearly brought up his family to respect it. He and Sarbie had three more children, all girls, and each one became a lawyer.

  Van Hoogstraten says that he first clapped eyes on Raja in the early eighties. Raja needed a top-up loan to complete the purchase of a ‘modest’ property which he had bid for at a London auction. He put down a deposit of ten per cent, but he didn’t have the funds to complete the deal. So he came cap in hand to borrow the money from Van Hoogstraten. However, Raja couldn’t have offered enough security for the loan because the tycoon turned him down. As a result, Raja lost his deposit. Van Hoogstraten’s story – told with typical relish – is that he himself then ‘thieved’ the property, which was now going dirt cheap.

  Raja, a proud man, never mentioned the episode. He claimed not to have met Van Hoogstraten until some years later. He said that it happened in 1987. He was at a property auction when he was ‘persuaded’ to borrow from Van Hoogstraten in order to buy a property from him. Raja outlined the deal in a statement to a lawyer some years later. The arrangement was slick and it dodged taxes. Van Hoogstraten lent him the money at twelve per cent, a cheaper rate than the banks charged. Raja paid off the loan, bit by bit every month, usually in cash. When they were square he got the deeds from Van Hoogstraten. There was nothing on paper. As extra security, Van Hoogstraten had Raja sign blank property transfer documents. These could be used to transfer other Raja properties into Van Hoogstraten’s name if Raja reneged on repayments. Raja held his breath and agreed to everything. It was all cemented with a handshake. It was a gentleman’s agreement.

  The deal worked perfectly. Within a few months Raja had paid back the loan and Van Hoogstraten handed over the deeds. It was the first of a number of similar loans that would eventually total well over £500,000.

  As in so many of his business dealings, Van Hoogstraten got to know this new associate. They were soon on first-name terms: Mohammed and Nick. Raja’s son Amjad says: ‘It was nice to know the man. He seemed genuine enough at the time. He was OK to do business with because he had clout. He had money as well, so that seemed OK.’ They became friends. Such good friends that a few years later Van Hoogstraten was invited to be the guest of honour at Amjad’s wedding.

  Van Hoogstraten began letting Mohammed Raja in on some of his money-making secrets. Raja later described one of them – a breathtakingly simple way of reneging on debts. Van Hoogstraten would deliberately run debts up on company A and meanwhile transfer all assets out of that company to companies B and C. Then he would dissolve the company with all the debts, company A, and its creditors could go hang. Raja called it ‘wiping the slate clean’ and appears to have approved. ‘I learned quite a few tricks of the trade from him for which I am still grateful,’ he said.

  According to Raja, one of the tricks involved buying freehold properties and then getting hold of the leasehold tenancies dirt cheap. From Raja’s description it appears to have worked like this. Van Hoogstraten bought a freehold. He then squeezed the leaseholders unmercifully by imposing high management charges. Some couldn’t keep up payments and defaulted on their mortgages. Their flats were then repossessed by their building societies with a view to putting them on the market to get their money back. At this point Van Hoogstraten’s men vandalised the repossessed flats, usually making it impossible to sell them on the open market. As freeholder, Van Hoogstraten then made an offer for the flats and usually got them ‘at a knock-down price’. He went on to give Raja’s son and business partner Amjad lessons in how to do this.

  The tycoon boasted to the Rajas of his tough approach to associates who owed him money. He described the kidnapping of his accountant David Harris and invited the Rajas to witness a violent repossession he was planning. ‘He told us that he was “sequestrating” a shop and all the contents in it,’ Amjad recalls. ‘He said he was going to surround the place with thirty men to make sure the job was done properly.’

  In the la
te eighties and early nineties Raja borrowed more and more from Van Hoogstraten as he tried to build up his empire. Each time Raja borrowed to buy another property, Van Hoogstraten kept the deeds of the property plus a blank transfer document with Raja’s signature. It was a procedure that years later would prove a recipe for disaster.

  Shortly before Van Hoogstraten started doing business with Raja, another foreign-born property dealer struck up an acquaintance with him. Michaal Hamdan set out to become a friend of the tycoon. He was to become closer to him than almost anyone, and then, like Raja, become a bitter opponent.

  Today Hamdan is living the life of a millionaire playboy in Beirut. An overweight forty-something with a liking for silk shirts, low-slung sports cars and gold jewellery, he whiles away his time between villas, yachts, the beach and the casino. He seems a dedicated hedonist with a penchant for young girls. Hamdan lived in Britain for twenty years, then fled back home to the Lebanon in April 2002. He is afraid for his safety because he thinks that his old friend Van Hoogstraten may have put out a contract on him.

  Hamdan is from a rich Christian family in Beirut. He came to Britain in 1978 to study business and settled in Brighton. In the mid-eighties he started dabbling in property and attending auctions. You couldn’t do that in Brighton – or London for that matter – without becoming aware of Van Hoogstraten. When the tycoon wasn’t at the last auction in person, his doings or suspected doings were usually part of the gossip afterwards in the bar.

  Watching Van Hoogstraten’s struggle with Kensington and Chelsea Council in the late eighties, Hamdan became a fan. He studied Van Hoogstraten at auctions but didn’t make himself known. He liked the chutzpah of the man, and the two fingers he waved at authority. From everything Hamdan said subsequently it is clear that he decided to model himself on the tycoon. ‘I think I idolised him,’ he says.