Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  In October 1996 Kennedy paid off the £350,000 and asked for the security to be released. He told a friend that when he went down to see him in Hove, Van Hoogstraten just looked at him and said: ‘Michael, I’m not giving you a penny back.’ The barrister was stunned and left.

  Ripping off Kennedy so blatantly was a grave miscalculation by Van Hoogstraten. This was a top barrister who knew the workings of the law and was a member of one of the leading chambers in the Inns of Court. He was neither a confused tenant nor a terrified provincial solicitor. Kennedy sued for return of the security. An acrimonious legal battle began. By 1998 it looked as if Kennedy was winning it.

  Both the Raja and Kennedy cases continued to go badly for Van Hoogstraten. In October 1998 the High Court rejected his move to strike out the Raja action. In January he was ordered to pay Raja’s costs. Meanwhile Kennedy was granted an injunction which froze £350,000 of Van Hoogstraten’s assets. Then in April Raja finally got the go-ahead from the High Court to sue Van Hoogstraten and his companies for conspiracy and fraud.

  Of the two antagonists, Van Hoogstraten seemed to take Kennedy much more seriously. He would refer to the Raja case as the ‘Raja nonsense’ while cursing Kennedy and telling his associates he would ‘do’ him.

  The Kennedy case came to court on 15 April. It was bitterly contested. Accusations about front companies, disreputable business practices and fraud flew around for five days.

  Then, out of the blue, Van Hoogstraten waved an olive branch. With the court case still due to run a week, he phoned Kennedy personally and suggested the two have supper that night. They met in London, in the discreet elegance of a French restaurant off Sloane Square. Neither party will tell the details of what transpired. But an out-of-court settlement was reached. Kennedy got his security back and – it was rumoured – Van Hoogstraten also promised him one of his farms in Zimbabwe. If that was the icing on the cake, Kennedy never got to taste it. Before the summer was out war veterans from Zanu PF had taken over the farm. A friend of both men suggested that Van Hoogstraten himself might have tipped his Zimbabwean friends the wink.

  Kennedy was off Van Hoogstraten’s back, and it might briefly have seemed to the tycoon that Raja would soon be off his back too. As the Kennedy case was coming to its climax, Raja appeared to be making his own peace overtures. On 9 March and again on 23 March he wrote fawning letters to the tycoon suggesting they ‘clear this mess up’. Addressing him as ‘Dear Nick’, he was full of compliments – about Van Hoogstraten’s integrity, his wisdom, and even about how well he came over on TV. Van Hoogstraten replied that he agreed ‘entirely’ that they should settle.

  Raja’s letters, however, contained no concessions. He still wanted a breakdown of what was owed and what had been paid, and Van Hoogstraten still wouldn’t provide it. On 22 April the High Court gave Raja permission to amend his claim against Van Hoogstraten to that of conspiracy to defraud.

  Van Hoogstraten would later treat the Raja claim as trivial, small beer to a man of his wealth. If he had lost the case, he said, he would have just written it off against tax.

  But, according to the Rajas, the money now involved certainly wasn’t small beer. Amjad Raja says his father was talking in terms of Van Hoogstraten owing him millions – maybe three million or more.

  The ‘maggot’, whom he so derided, was standing up to Van Hoogstraten in a way he wasn’t used to. What’s more, the media were starting to take notice. His desk diary records his irritation. The entry for 5 May says ‘BBC Raja nonsense’.

  At a property auction attended by Amjad Raja and Michaal Hamdan the tycoon couldn’t stop himself giving vent to his feelings. Amjad and Hamdan were talking about the basement flat which Hamdan and Raja senior were fighting over. Amjad asked if his father was a thorn in his side. ‘Van Hoogstraten was standing maybe a yard away from me. He stepped forward and said: “You know what we do with those thorns. We pick them and one by one we break them.” That hit me. It was a threat. I knew he was talking about my father.’

  15

  VOICE FROM THE GRAVE

  A summer morning on 2 July 1999. A Ford Transit turns into Mulgrave Road in Sutton, south London. What could be more normal, more English? A white van in a suburban street. Tradesmen tending the needs of the middle classes. Plumbers. Builders. Kitchen fitters. Loft converters. No one pays them much attention.

  The van stops across the road from number 63. Two men get out. They are wearing blue overalls and matching floppy hats. From the van they take a canvas tool bag and a long-handled fork. Gardeners.

  But these white-van men have a secret. The man with the fork has a knife hidden in his overalls. And inside the bag carried by his mate is a sawn-off, single-barrelled shotgun. They ring the doorbell of number 63. Mohammed Raja rises from his desk and goes to answer it. The surprising thing is that he, too, is carrying a knife.

  What happens next is seen by people across the street. A scuffle breaks out in the doorway between Raja and the two men. Then a shot is heard. It wakens Raja’s two grandsons, Rizvan and Waheed, both students and still in bed though it has gone half-past nine.

  ‘I was sleeping and I was wakened by a really loud noise,’ recalls Waheed.

  The scene that met them could not have been more horrifying. Their grandfather was bleeding and in obvious pain. A man was standing over him with a knife. Another man was kneeling and reloading a single-barrelled, sawn-off shotgun.

  ‘I saw my granddad and he was in lots of pain. He was bleeding and he was looking at me in my eyes,’ says Waheed. ‘And I saw these two other men standing there and then I saw one of them was holding a gun. And that’s when I realised that it was actually a gunshot.’

  The shot they heard had hit the ceiling by the stairs. Mohammed Raja was bleeding because of knife wounds. He had been stabbed five times, and the injuries were sufficient to kill him. But Raja was not going to go quietly. He shouted to his grandsons to call the police – and he screamed something else that stuck in their memory.

  ‘And my grandfather shouts out to us in our native language, Punjabi, that these are Van Hoogstraten’s men that have come and hit me,’ says Rizvan.

  Waheed ran upstairs to dial 999. His brother tried to pull his grandfather away from his assailants, before shielding himself behind the kitchen door. Though grievously injured, Mohammed Raja stumbled out of the hall and into a lounge at the rear of the house.

  While this was going on, Waheed was having trouble getting through to the police – he was put on hold by an automatic queuing device. When he finally did get through, he heard another loud bang.

  Although he had lost a great deal of blood, Mohammed Raja was still defiantly holding his knife when the gunman followed him into the lounge. This time the intruder made no mistake, and fired at point-blank range into the dying man’s left eye.

  As the attackers ran out of the house, they were watched by a couple taking their pet to the vet’s surgery across the road. The woman said she thought they were in their twenties or thirties. But they were odd-looking. They had moustaches and wore heavy-framed glasses. Both had long hair that could have been wigs.

  The murderers drove off. They turned into Manor Road and after only half a mile pulled into a driveway behind a block of flats. They doused the van with petrol and set it alight. An elderly resident, Margaret Perry, heard the noise. She looked out of her window and saw the white van and the two men, one of whom she later described as being about eighteen years old. When the men spotted her, they ran off.

  The driveway was right beside the A217, a major route running south through Sutton towards the M25. If the murderers had accomplices waiting with another vehicle, they could quickly have driven anywhere in the country.

  When Waheed Raja’s call was received in the 999 call centre, it put in motion a series of rapid events. An operator routed the call to a Metropolitan Police operations room which dispatched local police officers to Mulgrave Road. The ambulance service was also alerted.

  Shortly
afterwards a call was made to a run-down Victorian pile in Eltham, south-east London. The building sits on Shooters Hill, at the junction with Well Hall Road – the road on which Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager, was killed by a racist gang in 1993, a notorious attack for which no one was brought to justice. Just around the corner, two of the suspects in the Lawrence case hurled racist abuse at an off-duty black police officer in 2001. For this, they were imprisoned for eighteen months the following year. It is not a place for the fainthearted.

  At first glance, the building on the corner appears derelict. Leaves and rubbish collected around the main entrance indicate it is never used. Only the cars parked in the sloping yard at the back give any sign that people work here.

  This is the unlikely headquarters of AMIT – the Area Major Investigation Team – the branch of the Metropolitan Police that investigates all serious crime in south London.

  To enter their shabby HQ, the detectives climb an iron fire escape from the yard and go through a steel door on the first floor. This takes them directly into a long, shabby kitchen that doubles as a canteen. At the far end, a dismal corridor leads away to the offices.

  When the news of the Raja murder came through to AMIT, a call was made to Detective Chief Inspector Chris Horne, the unit’s senior investigating officer. He was at the Old Bailey, attending a murder trial.

  Chris Horne was a career detective who had made it into the CID after three years in uniform. He was a no-nonsense type whose twenty-five years’ experience as a detective gave him a low-key but decisive manner.

  After taking the call DCI Horne immediately ordered a forensics unit to Mulgrave Road. Their first task would be to cordon off the scene and make sure that no clues could be disturbed. In any murder case the best thing any investigating officer has going for him is the scene of the crime itself. The murder scene is the physical link to the perpetrator.

  Horne got in his car and drove to Sutton. When he arrived he found to his dismay that local police and ambulance men had trampled through the scene of the crime. They had gone through the front door – just as the murderers had done. They had followed their route to the lounge at the back of the house, where the body of Mohammed Raja was found. Furniture had been moved to give paramedics more room to examine the victim.

  As an old hand, Horne knew what to do. He stood at the doorway and looked down the hall, noting the many bloodstains. Then, instead of going through the house, he went around to the garden and peered in through the French windows. On the other side of the glass he could see the body of Mohammed Raja lying on the floor. His first impression was that Raja had been trying to escape through the French windows when he was shot. Near the body, by a doorway from the lounge into the kitchen, lay a bloodstained knife.

  Horne called a meeting of his forensics team. They discussed what evidence should be collected. There was an enormous amount of blood around the house, smears, blobs and pools of it, on floors, walls, furniture and on the dead man himself – forty or fifty separate bloodstains in all.

  One of the forensics team asked: ‘How many swabs do we take, boss?’

  Horne did not hesitate. ‘Every single one,’ he replied. It was important to know if all the blood at the scene of the crime was solely that of the victim. If it wasn’t, then some could have come from one of his attackers, injured during a struggle. It was a painstaking approach that was to pay off handsomely later in the inquiry.

  The team went to work. Among the bloodstains they noticed some small blobs on the front door. What made them interesting was that they were on the leading edge, where the door fits against the frame when closed. The blood could only have been deposited there while the door was open. The door was carefully unscrewed from its hinges, wrapped in polythene and taken to the Home Office forensic laboratory in Lambeth for testing.

  The investigation was helped by Mohammed Raja’s grandsons having seen a great deal. So the fact that their grandfather had been attacked by two men was immediately established. Then there were the dying man’s last words – that he had been attacked by Van Hoogstraten’s men. It seemed that Mohammed Raja was reaching out from the grave and giving the police a steer as to where to go.

  Chris Horne was too seasoned a campaigner to fall for the first theory that presented itself. ‘One of the worst things for an investigating officer is to have tunnel vision,’ he says. ‘You have to look at everything.’ However, he knew that if there was a link between Raja and Van Hoogstraten, his job was to find it, analyse it and either discount it or act on it.

  The burned-out van was examined minutely for clues. In the back were the burned remains of blue overalls, a charred knife and several burned fertiliser bags. The van was towed away to be minutely examined at the forensic laboratory for fingerprints and DNA traces.

  That evening at Sutton police station Horne had an unexpected visitor – Commissioner Hugh Orde. It was unheard of for such a senior officer to attend the scene of what was, after all, just one more murder. But the killing at Mulgrave Road had rung alarm bells for top brass at New Scotland Yard.

  The McPherson Report on the way police had handled the Stephen Lawrence murder had just been published. It made several damning criticisms of the Metropolitan Police, including incompetence and endemic racism within the force.

  Now two white men had murdered an Asian man in south London. The Met could not afford this one to go wrong. Hugh Orde left Chris Horne in no doubt that a quick and efficient investigation was required.

  Horne reflected that this was no more than what he intended. He knew that time was both an ally and an enemy of detective work. It was important to gather intelligence about all suspects as quickly as possible. Speed would provide suspects with less opportunity to cover their tracks.

  The first people Horne questioned were the murdered man’s family. Had they any idea of who could have done it? Mohammed’s son Amjad was asked for the names of people who might have had a reason to want his father out of the way.

  Amjad said his father had a number of continuing disputes, mostly over property or money. Among them was one with a businessman from the north-west of England, and another with two brothers in Essex.

  Two disputes stood out from the rest – the squabble with Michaal Hamdan over the flat in Brunswick Square, and the litigation against Nicholas van Hoogstraten over the loans.

  Hamdan was a close associate of Van Hoogstraten and might conceivably have shared a taste for violence. But given the dead man’s last words and Van Hoogstraten’s reputation, Van Hoogstraten looked much the stronger suspect.

  Rizvan said that a few months before the attack, Mohammed Raja had told him he was about to win his case against Van Hoogstraten. Then his grandfather had advised him that if anyone rang the doorbell, he should always look through the window to check who it was. Whether or not he took his own advice, we shall never know. But if he did, it was not enough to save him.

  If Van Hoogstraten was behind the murder, could one of the attackers have been the tycoon himself? The team ruled out this possibility because of his age. Van Hoogstraten was fifty-four, while eye-witnesses put the attackers in their twenties or thirties. But Raja’s words were enough to put Van Hoogstraten at the top of their list of suspects.

  The police had to keep an open mind. Even members of the immediate family had to be eliminated as suspects. A list was drawn up of just about everyone who knew the dead man. Having thrown their net as widely as possible, the detectives set about their next task: going through their catch to gradually eliminate people from their inquiry.

  Detective Constable Hugh Ellis was given the task of gathering intelligence on Van Hoogstraten. A few hours after the murder he was in Uckfield to talk to the local police about their best-known resident. He remembers that the Uckfield police had little information beyond the millionaire’s well-known reputation as a forceful person not to be trifled with, who had a hobby of feuding with the Ramblers’ Association. Why should they have more?

  DC Ellis
travelled on to Brighton, hoping for better luck with the police there. The local CID were helpful and Ellis was soon looking through their intelligence file on Van Hoogstraten. The millionaire’s past was about to come back to haunt him.

  The file listed Van Hoogstraten’s various brushes with the law, including his prison sentence for the grenade attack on the Braunsteins. It also contained a list of people he knew. This was much more like it. Among the names Ellis wrote down was that of a career armed robber called Robert Knapp.

  It was late at night when Ellis returned to London, but the information he carried with him was to prove central to the investigation.

  Robert Knapp had a record stretching back twenty-five years or more. It included sentences for attempted robbery, for possession of a sawn-off shotgun and a revolver without a licence, another for theft, another for burglary and two very long stints for armed robbery.

  Knapp and Van Hoogstraten had remained in contact ever since they had first met in prison around thirty years before. Knapp had continued with his career as a heavy-duty gangster. His ‘previous’ was impressive. One of the investigating team later said of him: ‘Here was somebody who had some association with Van Hoogstraten and had a long history of criminality himself. He was clearly an individual who perhaps had the right frame of mind to carry out this type of offence.’

  The spectacular nature of one particular robbery told a great deal about Knapp’s character. This was the Putney jewellery shop raid in 1994. Knapp went armed with a handgun and his accomplice carried a shotgun. When they entered the shop, they fired into the ceiling, leaving staff under no illusions as to their intent.

  They fled with a large quantity of jewellery and ran slap into a reception party of armed police. There had been a tip-off and the Flying Squad was waiting. Faced by superior forces who had the drop on them, most robbers would have given themselves up. But not Knapp and his accomplice. They exchanged shots with the police and held them off long enough to form an escape plan. They made a dash under a hail of bullets to a police car and leapt in. They drove off, pursued by the outwitted and furious Flying Squad officers.