by Mike Walsh
‘He was stalking me,’ Van Hoogstraten said later. ‘He kept trying to bump into me.’ Hamdan finally succeeded. He buttonholed the tycoon as he emerged from a branch of Lloyds Bank in Bayswater in 1987. Hamdan remembers introducing himself as a property dealer who would like to do business with Van Hoogstraten, hastening to add that he was only a small fish. He remembers Van Hoogstraten’s reply: ‘Big fish eat little fish.’ Van Hoogstraten’s recollection of the meeting was: ‘He came up to me and I effectively told him to go away.’
In fact Van Hoogstraten was quite taken with this eager little fish. He said he’d check him out with contacts in the Lebanon. A few months later he called in at Hamdan’s flat and soon the two became friends. The young Lebanese wanted to be big in property and Van Hoogstraten told him how. Hamdan became an avid pupil at the feet of the master. Mean in so many things, Van Hoogstraten has always been generous with advice – where to live, who to trust (or more usually who not to trust), when to buy, when to sell. He looked at Hamdan’s modest portfolio and at his debts and told him that he was insolvent. To dodge his creditors Hamdan should ‘warehouse’ some of his properties – transfer them out of his name – and sell some of the others, then declare himself bankrupt.
Hamdan took Van Hoogstraten’s advice and survived the crash. He later bought properties from the tycoon for himself and also acted as his front man. Like Van Hoogstraten, he painted himself as a man it would be very unwise to cross because he had dangerous connections he could always call on.
The two men were so often together that some people assumed the Lebanese was a new bodyguard. Van Hoogstraten was in London sometimes twice or three times a week. Hamdan invariably found that he had business in the capital at the same time. He’d give Van Hoogstraten a lift from Hove in his Porsche in the morning and meet him for a Park Lane dinner at dusk. The highly sexed Hamdan might have preferred to go clubbing in Soho, but instead he usually listened as Van Hoogstraten talked and talked and then he dutifully drove the tycoon all the way back to the coast.
In 1990 the relationship was further cemented – or so it seemed – when Van Hoogstraten offered this pupil the management of some of his holdings on the Riviera. At the time he was expanding fast in France. He later told the Daily Telegraph’s David Millward that because of the authorities’ attitude he found it easier to deal with tenants on the other side of the Channel. The French police just stood by and watched ‘while you do the villainy’, he explained.
The deal with Hamdan involved the Lebanese managing Van Hoogstraten properties and renovating them at his own expense in return for half the rents and half the profits once the properties were sold. But they weren’t sold. Hamdan later complained that he spent £80,000 of his own money renovating them and then got fifty per cent of nothing.
Hamdan played a key role in another new venture for Van Hoogstraten – hotels. In the 1990s the tycoon was set on building up a hotel chain. By the end of the decade he owned, directly and indirectly, at least seven hotels in the Brighton and Hove area alone. As usual he tended to use front men in acquiring them. Hamdan was one of them. When the seventy-bedroom Imperial Hotel in Hove came up for sale, Van Hoogstraten put in different offers using different front men, including Hamdan. He orchestrated it so that at least one of his highest bids was withdrawn at a key moment, so that a lower bid, notionally from Hamdan, got the hotel.
The purchase money was put up by Van Hoogstraten, and ownership of the Imperial was quickly transferred from Hamdan to one of the tycoon’s companies. Meanwhile Hamdan managed it. He says that Van Hoogstraten promised to make him part-owner of the hotel but reneged on the deal. When he pointed out that he’d been managing it unpaid for seven months, Van Hoogstraten told him it was good experience.
All this didn’t stop Hamdan continuing to front for Van Hoogstraten in some property deals and partner him in others. He became so close to the tycoon that he was made a director of some of Hoogstraten’s key enterprises, including the Zimbabwean holding company Willoughby’s Consolidated. But the Lebanese was increasingly unhappy. Secretly he decided that Van Hoogstraten wasn’t giving him his due. He said later: ‘I expected Nick to take the lion’s share but I did expect crumbs, and I didn’t even get them.’ The admirer was turning into an enemy.
13
FIRE!
At the beginning of the nineties the Van Hoogstraten empire had taken on a radically different look, which should have kept controversy at bay. Foreseeing the property crash, the tycoon sold the bulk of his residential properties in the UK. He concentrated instead on the commercial stuff – hotels, shops, office blocks, warehouses. Fewer residential properties meant fewer ‘difficult’ tenants to deal with and that should have meant fewer ‘devil’s landlord’ headlines. But it did not turn out that way. In 1990 the gravest landlord-tenant crisis yet was about to break over him. And this would involve deaths.
This time the crisis involved not rent-paying tenants like the Mahoods or the Udwin sisters but a trio of leaseholders. They were owner-occupiers of three flats in a house in Hove and were trying to use the new Leasehold Reform Act to buy the freehold.
The Act had been introduced by Van Hoogstraten’s heroine, Mrs Thatcher, as part of her crusade to boost home ownership. It gave leaseholders the right to club together and buy their freehold as long as a majority among them agreed. Van Hoogstraten regarded the measure as a personal affront.
Like other ruthless freeholders, he had always made big money through exorbitant service charges and management fees. He reacted to the new law with a typical burst of paranoia. He complained that it was unjust and told Michaal Hamdan that he knew that it was directed specifically at him. ‘They’re trying to stop me,’ he told Tony Browne.
The house the three leaseholders lived in was 11 Palmeira Avenue, a gracious, magnolia-painted Victorian terrace. As well as the leasehold flats, it contained two rented flats. In 1989 the leaseholders, led by a man called Andrew Crumpton, decided that they wanted to buy the freehold on the house. A bizarre game of pass the parcel now began.
In 1990 Crumpton and his neighbours approached the company they assumed to be the freeholder with an offer. Sorry, they were told, the freehold has just been sold. They tracked down the new owner. Same story. Sorry, it’s just been sold. The same with the next buyer and the next and the next. The title was passing around like a red-hot brick. In two years it changed hands six times.
While the leaseholders chased after the title, hurried conversion work was under way in the two tenanted flats. It seemed innocuous enough – refurbishing for new tenants, no doubt. However, when the work was finished the three leaseholders found that these two flats had become three flats. They were being ‘sold’ on short leases to three different companies. At a stroke, Crumpton and the others had lost their majority and their legal right to acquire the leasehold.
It was a brilliant, if unscrupulous, dodge.
But the three owner-occupiers included a trainee solicitor, and they challenged it. A protracted legal dispute developed. It ended two years later in victory for the leaseholders. They must get their freehold, the courts ordered. The night that the decision came through, Crumpton received a threatening phone call. He immediately told the police. He was so frightened that he and his wife moved out.
A few weeks later, on Easter Saturday, there was a party on the third floor of number 11. It was to celebrate the twenty-eighth birthday of the flat’s tenant, Tim Sharp. The day before the party Tim felt a bout of flu coming on and tried to postpone the celebration, but it was too late. He was homosexual and word about the party had gone round the large gay community in Brighton and Hove. As the pubs closed people began to congregate in Palmeira Avenue and mount the stairs to Tim’s flat. One was an unemployed airline steward called Trevor Carrington, who arrived with his partner. He wasn’t a friend and hadn’t been invited. Apparently he’d just heard about the party and had scribbled the address on a piece of paper. In the free-and-easy camaraderie of such gatherings no
body objected. But Carrington was drunk when he arrived and got drunker. Nobody complained when he decided to go, and followed his partner down three flights of stairs, past an old sofa outside the ground floor flat. They left behind maybe sixteen or seventeen people.
Shortly after 2 am, fire broke out. The blaze took hold so quickly that Tim Sharp and his remaining guests were trapped on the third floor. There was no fire escape. One partygoer got out by shinning down a drainpipe. Others stumbled across to the parapet next door. Tim tried to climb down the drainpipe too. He lost his footing and fell fifty feet.
Firemen arrived just after 2.30. In the basement area they found Tim Sharp’s body. He was dead. A forty-eight-year-old nurse from Wales, Mabel Roberts, and twenty-nine-year-old Andrew Manners both lay nearby. Both had jumped from the third floor. Both died. Another badly injured man was trying to crawl up the basement steps.
As one crew tried to battle its way through the flames on the ground floor stairwell, another was told to get a platform up to roof level to tackle the blaze from there. Just before the fire engines arrived a passer-by had seen two faces at the front window immediately below the roof. Flames and smoke now obscured the window. Speed was essential. But there was no room on the roadway to put down the stabilising jacks needed for the hydraulic platform. There was an unbroken line of parked cars next to the pavement and a double line of cars down the centre of Palmeira Avenue. Firemen and policemen desperately bumped parked cars out of the way. They estimated that this lost them between five and ten minutes. It took three hours to douse the flames completely. Two hours later the remains of thirty-three-year-old Paul Jones and thirty-one-year-old Adrian Johns were found under the roof on the third floor.
Five were dead. All might well have escaped but for one thing. The freeholder who had struggled so determinedly to hang on to the freehold had struggled just as determinedly to avoid paying for fire doors – let alone a fire escape. Four years earlier Hove Council officials had judged the place a firetrap and demanded action by the owners. They’d got nowhere.
The day after the fire, Easter Sunday, Trevor Carrington took a stiff drink, swallowed some tablets and slashed his throat and wrists. He was rushed to a hospital in Haywards Heath. The following morning his brother visited him there, and a terrible story stumbled out. On the way out of the party Trevor, in his drunkenness, had used his cigarette lighter to set alight the settee on the ground floor. He’d wanted to ‘cause a panic’ and ‘liven up’ the party. It was ‘a prank that had gone terribly wrong’. Carrington pleaded with his brother to help him flee abroad. Go to the police, or I will go to them, his brother told him. Three days later Carrington walked out in front of a lorry. Death was instantaneous.
To Hove police it was an open-and-shut case. A malicious prank by the drunk Carrington had caused the fire. But was it so simple? A fire brigade report on the fire suggested that fires might have been set in other parts of the house as well as the ground floor. It pinpointed two areas of severe charring on upper landings which it said were ‘not consistent with a fire that had originated at ground level’. Had more than one person been involved in the arson?
Then the Daily Telegraph had a tip-off from a fire-brigade source that Van Hoogstraten might be involved and sent reporter David Millward to dig into the freehold dispute. The reporter talked to the leaseholders and heard that while they were trying to buy the title it had whizzed between five companies and a woman called Lucia Tavarini. He discovered that each of the companies was run by a close associate of Van Hoogstraten or had an address associated with the tycoon. Millward couldn’t at that time find any link to Ms Tavarini. But there was one. In preparing this book, we discovered that she had been a girlfriend of Van Hoogstraten’s front man and sometime partner Michaal Hamdan.
Before the inquest into the deaths was held, David Millward unearthed the dismal history of Hove Council’s attempts to have fire precautions installed. Rumours circulated about who was really responsible for the five deaths. Hoogstraten’s name was to the fore. Trevor Carrington was rumoured to have had £30,000 in an Isle of Man bank. Journalists speculated wildly that he might have been paid by Van Hoogstraten to fire the house and that he might then have been murdered to keep him quiet. To some people, nothing was beyond Nicholas Van Hoogstraten. The Evening Argus decided to put Van Hoogstraten on the spot over his links to the house. It demanded that he appear at the inquest into the deaths. ‘He should come forward and clear the air,’ an editorial declared.
Van Hoogstraten didn’t oblige. But although he wasn’t there in person, his was the dominating presence at the inquest when it opened in Brighton in August 1992. Colm Davis-Lyons, counsel representing two of the bereaved families at the inquest, wrote to the coroner, Dr Donald Gooding, asking that Van Hoogstraten be called as a witness. Dr Gooding turned him down, saying that the millionaire wouldn’t be able to shed any light on the deaths, so he wouldn’t call him. In protest Davis-Lyons and two of the families walked out of the inquest and demanded a judicial review of the decision.
The inquest proceeded. Over two days jurors heard senior officials try to explain Hove Council’s futile attempts to force the landlords of 11 Palmeira Avenue to take fire-safety measures. They listened as witnesses took them through the awful events of the previous Easter – the party, the fire, the five deaths, Carrington’s confession to his brother, his death.
They also heard something indicating that maybe there was more to this act of arson than a drunkard’s moment of madness. Andrew Crumpton was in the witness box, describing the disputes over the freehold. When he had finished, the coroner asked if there were any further questions. In the press box David Millward stood up. ‘Can the press ask questions?’
‘Yes,’ said Dr Gooding.
‘Well, Mr Crumpton,’ said Millward. ‘Can you tell us what happened the night that you won the case?’
‘Yes,’ said Crumpton. ‘Someone phoned me and threatened to burn the place down.’
The jury brought in a verdict of unlawful killing and, in Carrington’s case, suicide. The jurors added an afterthought. They called for changes in the law to bring absentee landlords to heel.
For five bereaved families it was nothing like enough. They wanted to see Van Hoogstraten in the witness box. They also wanted to know much more about the four years in which the council had tried and so abysmally failed to make the landlord install a fire escape. ‘You can’t sweep five deaths under the carpet,’ said Dennis Johns, whose son died in the fire, overcome by fumes.
There was an outside chance that Mr Johns and the other grieving relatives would get their wish. The day the inquest ended a judge accepted Davis-Lyons’s plea for a judicial review. This meant that two appeal court judges would put the coroner’s actions under the microscope and maybe order a new inquest. The world might yet see the tycoon called to account.
At the time Van Hoogstraten was far away, living on the French Riviera with his latest black mistress, a twenty-seven-year-old Sudanese called Fatou. Reporters and press photographers flew down to Cannes to interview him. They found the multi-millionaire enjoying his riches. Snappers photographed him in outsize Hollywood shades with Fatou’s arm around his neck. He radiated confidence, and as ever he provided terrific copy.
He told the Daily Telegraph’s David Millward that it was ‘outrageous’ to link him to the deaths: ‘If I had been involved, number one, there would not have been anyone in the building. Number two, it would have been done in the basement. If you are going to do it you do it properly.’
Millward asked him about Davis-Lyons. Van Hoogstraten replied, in his typically threatening style. The lawyer ‘was liable to get a whack … entitled to get a spanking… He knows what the position is. If anybody causes me any kind of personal hardship they don’t get away with it. They may get away with it for six months or a year or two years or whatever until sufficient time has passed and it is nothing to do with me. I deal with people in cold blood not hot blood.’
The Ev
ening Argus sent its Van Hoogstraten expert, Adam Trimmingham, to Cannes. He fixed on the tycoon’s sybaritic lifestyle. ‘On his right hand he wore a ring worth anything up to £250,000. On his left he sported a watch given him years ago by an Arab sheikh.’ His latest girlfriend was ‘stunning’, the reporter added. He described how the millionaire ‘conducted a public, teasing, affectionate hands-on relationship’ with her throughout ten hours the Tringingham spent with them.
‘I asked him,’ Trimmingham said, ‘if he was more mellow now. He replied: “Not more mellow but less hot tempered. I may have done something immediately ten years ago but now I stop and think about it.”’
The quest for the truth went on for nearly two years. It culminated in December 1993 when the judicial review opened at the High Court in London. The families vented their feelings to the court. The coroner had appeared ‘to be more interested in getting the inquest over as quickly as possible than addressing any of the issues relating to the means of escape,’ declared Lee Homberg, who lost his brother in the fire. The inquest jury were ‘repeatedly misled’ about what Hove Council could have done, claimed Edward Fitzgerald QC, acting for the families.
It didn’t impress the High Court. Lord Justice Simon Brown savaged the coroner’s handling of the inquest but was even more critical of the families’ lawyer and of the press. Barrister Colm Davis-Lyons had been ‘high-handed’ and ‘tactless’, which had riled the coroner. Dr Gooding had erred but he was right not to call Van Hoogstraten. ‘There was no useful evidence which Mr Van Hoogstraten could have given, even assuming, contrary to all likelihood, that he would have been a willing and co-operative witness.’ As for the media: ‘Much of the pressure to call Van Hoogstraten came from the media who were undoubtedly intent on exploiting the tragedy to the full, not least by capitalising on Van Hoogstraten’s suggested link with the property.’ There would not be a new inquest, the judge concluded.