by Mike Walsh
The ruling didn’t allay the rumours and suspicions, let alone satisfy the bereaved families. Years later an even wilder story circulated. It was claimed that the house had been fired by members of a notorious paedophile ring who were being blackmailed by people attending the party.
The Argus kept an eye on Van Hoogstraten over the next few years but with less and less reward. There was a running scandal about a decrepit eyesore on the seafront that he was rumoured to own and there was the odd landlord-tenant dispute to report. But the only headline story about him in the mid-nineties was an account of how he bought a hotel and promptly cancelled a club booking because the terms offered by the previous owners were too cheap. The Argus gave front-page prominence to the predicament of forty bewildered trippers who had been turned away by Van Hoogstraten.
He was much quieter all round. Maybe he had decided to enjoy his wealth and his mistresses and concentrate on the palace and his kids. Maybe middle age was catching up. Whatever was going on in his mind, something seemed to be changing in Nicholas van Hoogstraten. Readers of the Argus even began seeing good things about him. The paper reported that he made the News of the World pay £2000 to a Sussex charity as the price of giving an interview. It revealed that when sponsorship for the giant Christmas tree in Palmeira Square was suddenly withdrawn, Van Hoogstraten had stepped in and paid for the tree. There was a report that he was regularly giving thousands to charities. The Argus columnist Adam Trimmingham wrote that Van Hoogstraten was a complex man with his own set of moral standards.
But Van Hoogstraten was not to settle into a tranquil middle age. His past was going to catch up with him and bring him to his knees. And two of those fellow outsiders who had been so drawn to him would be the agents of destruction – the eager front man Michaal Hamdan and the obsequious Mohammed Raja.
14
A THORN IN THE SIDE
As he reached his fifties, Nicholas van Hoogstraten had begun to wonder about his own mortality. ‘For the first time in my life in the last few years I’ve been involved personally with people who have died, dealing with funerals and that sort of thing. And I don’t like the feeling,’ he told one of the authors in 1997.
The first death to affect him was that of Bill Bagot, the burly old millionaire from west London whom he’d met thirty years before and who had been so important to him ever since. Bagot died in Charing Cross Hospital on 3 September 1993.
Doctors had expected the old man to survive. He had a heart condition and had lost the use of his legs. But the view was that he could safely be discharged as long as there was constant medical care on hand. Van Hoogstraten set about providing it. Bagot’s home in Acton was converted to provide a flat for a nurse next to his bedroom. Van Hoogstraten paid for the work and was planning to pay for the nurse.
Others had flinched at the eccentric old man, who got shabbier and filthier as the years went by. But Van Hoogstraten, so meticulously clean himself, didn’t seem to notice. He was genuinely fond of Bagot. ‘My father figure and my mentor,’ he called him.
News of Bagot’s unexpected death affected Van Hoogstraten deeply. Tony Browne was amazed to see tears coming down his employer’s face. ‘Nick is an actor but this was no act,’ he says. ‘He really was upset… He began some soul-searching, why-are-we-here? soul-searching, that sort of thing.’ But then sensibilities gave way to practicalities.
‘We were straight round to Bagot’s house in Acton to search it,’ recalls Browne. ‘The old man was a miser. He hid things, like Nick hid things. Nick wanted the place taken apart… What was he looking for? Valuables, bank notes, bearer bonds, gold, anything with high value. He was sure Bagot had lots of things hidden away.’
The house and the house next door, also owned by Bagot, were both ransacked. Over a period of weeks the garden was completely dug over, the cellar was searched, the walls examined for hollow sounding bricks, floorboards taken up, and lavatory cisterns searched, always with Van Hoogstraten looking on.
The search was suspended for a few hours for Bagot’s funeral. Then the digging and stripping at the two houses in Cumberland Road resumed. Van Hoogstraten insisted on being on hand throughout. He didn’t trust any of his lieutenants to let on if they found something. He watched as every bed knob was unscrewed and every picture on the wall taken down so the paper backing could be ripped off in case something was underneath.
Something was found. Gold coins! Browne didn’t see them and never knew how many had been unearthed or what the value was. But he saw Van Hoogstraten’s delight after the discovery.
A will was produced. Drawn up almost exactly twenty years earlier, it was a sparse document for a man known to be immensely wealthy. Of the four hundred properties Bagot had owned in and around Paddington only one was mentioned, along with just one other property – a house in Surrey. They were left for the lifetime use of two friends.
The residue of the estate was willed to Van Hoogstraten. He was named as Bagot’s sole executor and trustee. What the residue consisted of wasn’t specified. Apart from a rough sketch of a cemetery monument and the words ‘Red Granite Obelisk as here’, that was the only information which the old eccentric had put in his last will and testament.
‘Putting the estate in order’ can mean a lot of things. We can only guess what it entailed for Van Hoogstraten as he went through Bagot’s effects. The two adjoining houses in Acton were full to the ceiling with junk. But they also yielded up antiques, a collection of forty or fifty carriage clocks worth thousands of pounds and, of course, the gold. That, however, couldn’t be a fraction of what Bagot had really owned. His fingers had been in many pies. He had been variously described as ‘an accountant’, a ‘merchant banker’, a ‘businessman’ and ‘the owner of a property empire’. There had to be a fortune somewhere.
Van Hoogstraten spent a long time looking for it. He put Bagot’s estate in for probate in June 1994, nine months after his old friend died. The probate document made no mention of the hundreds of properties the old man had owned. Maybe he’d passed them on to Van Hoogstraten in his lifetime. But the documents made no mention either of gold coins, shares, antiques or carriage clocks. Indeed Van Hoogstraten claimed that the net value of Bagot’s estate in Britain was less than £10,000 – about the value of a lock-up garage next to one of the old man’s houses in Paddington. Probate appears to have gone through without problems. There were no death duties.
Two more deaths occurred in the 1990s – those of Van Hoogstraten’s parents, Charles and Edna. For three decades he had hated both of them and they, it seemed, had hated him in return. But towards the end of their lives there was a reconciliation between them. Again Van Hoogstraten shed genuine tears.
The passing of those people who had been so important to him left a more introspective figure who sometimes surprised visitors who had come expecting the same old posturings. In the spring of 1997 one of the authors, who had not seen him for years, was treated to what was almost a display of humility when Van Hoogstraten showed him around the shell of the projected palace in the spring of 1997.
Predictably, Van Hoogstraten began by enthusing over the half-built edifice. He still appeared to be the megalomaniac intent on leaving a monument of mind-blowing extravagance behind him. ‘There’ll be frescos on the ceilings, the columns will have to be painted in gold, there will be tapestries on the walls,’ he boasted.
But in the next breath this vainest of men was mocking himself for being so mean about everything else: ‘We do things and we don’t exactly know why. Most of the things that I do, from when I get up to when I go to sleep, I don’t know why I am doing them. I wonder to myself sometimes why I am wasting my time using second-class stamps to save sixpence. Even if I do it a million times it adds up to a hill of beans.’
In this confessional mood Van Hoogstraten then admitted why the monument he was building, and the kids he had fathered, wouldn’t bear his family name. ‘The name is Hamilton Palace… Hamilton after Hamilton, capital of Bermuda. It was one
of the few places in my youth that I fell in love with… My children are called Hamilton. It’s a fine colonial name … and I couldn’t foist my own terrible name on them, innocent children.’
Those close to Van Hoogstraten have no doubt that whatever mellowing there was in him was down to the effect of fatherhood. In the eighties it was impossible to see him even developing into a fond parent. By then Caroline Williams had borne him two children, but he was never pictured publicly with them, and he made clear to those who asked that the kids would have to make their own way in the world, unaided by him or his wealth. He wasn’t leaving his children anything. If they expected to benefit from his death he would never be able to trust them. The only time he was seen to be the loving father was when he cuddled his youngest child in an attempt to influence women jury members during the Kensington and Chelsea trial.
Ten years on, paternity had transformed him. He now had five children, four sons and one daughter. Company searches suggest that far from letting them fend for themselves, he had settled a fortune in shares on each of them. He demonstrated a tactile affection for them which was obviously genuine. It was reciprocated. He also began to talk about them, coupling their interests with his. In interviews with newspapers and on television he now talked enthusiastically about the ‘importance’ of his children in his life.
But despite the children and the moments of introspection, fundamentally Van Hoogstraten hadn’t changed. At the slightest challenge the temper could still go way over the top. He’d been out of the headlines for four or five years when, in December 1998, the Ramblers’ Association announced that he had closed a public footpath at High Cross and must open it again. His reaction turned a trivial dispute into a major event and made him a national hate figure once again.
Van Hoogstraten was just what militant ramblers were looking for – an arrogant large landowner who had barred a public right of way. Parliament was debating the decades-old issue of public access to the countryside and Van Hoogstraten was God’s gift to those urging the government to take on unreasonable landowners. The footpath that now became a cause célèbre was on his High Cross estate. Known as Framfield Nine, it ran to a disused church and had once been a lovely walk with glorious views of the South Downs. When Van Hoogstraten had closed it years before, no one had noticed, but suddenly ramblers discovered its existence and found that it had been a public right of way for 140 years.
The landowner responded to the Ramblers’ Association’s call to open the footpath with all his old villainous extravagance. He had his men dump old fridges, car batteries and all kinds of other rubbish on the path and string razor wire everywhere. A ten-foot fence was erected. Men with shotguns were reported to be patrolling. No one was going to walk on his land.
Once more the media made for East Sussex. Van Hoogstraten was ready for them all with a different epithet for every interview. The ramblers were ‘just a bunch of the dirty mac brigade’, ‘the great unwashed’, ‘disgusting creatures’, ‘a lot of herberts’, ‘anarchists’, ‘perverts’.
The ‘Enemy of the People’ column in the Sunday Times described Van Hoogstraten as ‘one of the least likeable people this column has ever attacked’. The Daily Mirror called him ‘Britain’s vilest millionaire’.
He enjoyed himself hugely. In one live TV interview he libelled an MP by saying he was surprised the man hadn’t yet been arrested because of his activities on Clapham Common, ‘if you get my meaning’. When the cameras turned off he said to the studio manager: ‘Did you like that bit about Clapham Common? I thought it was rather good’ and laughed unproariously.
Van Hoogstraten would need all the light relief he could get. At the beginning of 1999, when so much seemed to be going so well – with his kids, his palace and his plans in Zimbabwe – he was in reality heading for a fall. It wouldn’t come through his property dealing but that still murkier side of his business – the moneylending. The catalyst would be the slum landlord, his one-time friend and admirer Mohammed Raja.
Until the early nineties everything had gone smoothly between the two of them. More than a dozen properties acquired by Raja had been bought with loans from Van Hoogstraten. Each month Van Hoogstraten phoned to tell Raja what he owed in interest and capital repayment. Each month Raja or his son Amjad turned up at Van Hoogstraten’s Hove office with a cheque or a bundle of £50 notes. The cheques were never made out to Van Hoogstraten but to one of his finance companies, Unifox.
Outwardly, relations were amicable. Raja was polite and always full of compliments for Van Hoogstraten. In turn Van Hoogstraten drew both Mohammed and Amjad Raja more and more into the fold. Amjad began managing some of Van Hoogstraten’s properties in west London.
But it was a mutually suspicious partnership. Van Hoogstraten always insisted that he was fond of Mohammed Raja, yet he told a friend that Raja had ‘dirty fingers’ and sneered about ‘this slum landlord’ to journalists. As for the Rajas, privately they appear to have resented the arrogance of the man they were in hock to. Amjad said later that Van Hoogstraten ‘acted like a king’, treating other people as if they were nothing.
Relations went downhill after the house-price bubble burst in 1989, sending the property business into recession. Between 1991 and 1992 the number of house sales fell by half. A lot of property men got caught as prices slumped too. Van Hoogstraten, seeing what was coming, sold much of his residential property, but Mohammed Raja wasn’t as far-sighted and went on buying.
He was soon in trouble financially. In desperation, he raised a building society mortgage on a property for which he already owed money to Van Hoogstraten. Technically that was fraud. Van Hoogstraten found out about it and demanded extra security for his loans. Raja agreed to give him deeds to other properties he owned. In his desperation he also signed blank property transfer forms. This extraordinary step left Van Hoogstraten in a position where – if Raja did default – he could fill in the name of a Raja property and transfer ownership to himself.
Michaal Hamdan recalls Van Hoogstraten telling him that he was giving Raja ‘enough rope to hang himself’. Sure enough, Raja couldn’t keep up repayments and Van Hoogstraten promptly repossessed several of his properties. He also sued Amjad Raja over unpaid rents.
Open war broke out in 1993 over how much Raja still owed Van Hoogstraten. In May that year he asked for a breakdown of borrowings and repayments and meanwhile stopped all further payments to Van Hoogstraten. The tycoon refused to detail everything on paper. All he’d do was tell Raja the total figure owing – £300,000. Raja refuted it. In October he went to the High Court alleging breach of trust and demanding the return of the deeds he had lodged with Van Hoogstraten. He claimed that Van Hoogstraten had used the blank transfer forms to fraudulently take properties from him.
There followed a series of heated phone calls from Van Hoogstraten. ‘He was very abusive,’ says Amjad Raja. ‘He phoned me… He called my father a maggot… He said my father “doesn’t know who I am”.’ Hamdan witnessed one confrontation between the two men at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. ‘Nick suddenly raised his voice and began saying he would not trust Raja to go to the toilet in his house without expecting to lose his girlfriend’s jewellery…’
Van Hoogstraten, meanwhile, moved in on Raja’s properties. Locks were changed and letters sent to tenants telling them their old landlord was bankrupt, and the new one was Robert Gates and Co. Raja in turn sought an injunction preventing Van Hoogstraten from ‘interfering’ with his property or making threatening phone calls and of conspiring to cause him injury. The injunction wasn’t granted.
Later, in court, Van Hoogstraten would insist that despite all this he and Raja remained on good terms personally. It is difficult to believe. In 1996 the tycoon fingered Raja as a ‘fraudster’ in a letter to the Bradford and Bingley Building Society which had given Raja that mortgage. Van Hoogstraten suggested to the building society that it launch bankruptcy proceedings against Raja and he offered to pay the costs himself.
The fight with Van Hoogstraten became Raja’s obsession. He talked about it continually. He went to the Sussex police with information which, he said, proved Van Hoogstraten a fraud. The police sent him away. He went to ‘every solicitor in Sussex’, as one of them put it, asking them to take on the case.
Some turned him down because of the fear the name Van Hoogstraten induced. A standard reply to anyone asking in Brighton and Hove to be represented against Mr H or one of his companies was – and still is – ‘but we could get a brick through the window’.
Raja’s case seemed moribund. He was largely to blame himself because he appears to have been almost as slippery as Van Hoogstraten. He was loath to give the full facts. It eventually emerged, for example, that he knew Van Hoogstraten had used the blank transfer forms to assume title to some properties, and had accepted it. But he said that he didn’t know the extent of the transfers or expect that he wouldn’t get the deeds back.
Van Hoogstraten didn’t seem to have much to worry about. It was minor stuff to him, just an irritant. But Raja wouldn’t leave it. In the summer of 1998 he found a new lawyer in London and took the decision to up the ante. In July he gave notice that he planned to ask the High Court to let him amend his charges against Van Hoogstraten to fraud. The minor irritant was now serious.
Raja was not the only litigant brave enough to take on Van Hoogstraten. As Van Hoogstraten himself saw it, a more serious threat came from a barrister who had once represented him. Michael Kennedy was a specialist in company law. He had represented Van Hoogstraten against the Palmeira Avenue leaseholders in 1992. He lost the case but – unlike other lawyers who unsuccessfully represented Van Hoogstraten – had remained on good terms with him. So good that when Kennedy needed £350,000 to invest in a high-tech company he went to the tycoon. A complex deal was struck. It involved Kennedy borrowing the £350,000 from a Van Hoogstraten company and providing security for the same amount.