by Mike Walsh
Heselden met the Rajas and reassured them that the case was not being sidelined. He told them he would do all in his power to ensure the murderers were brought to justice. The Raja family promised their support.
However, the Rajas were far from passive by nature. From then on, they bombarded Heselden with calls, asking what was happening and when an arrest would be made. They were a tenacious family. The traits that had enabled Mohammed to claw his way up to create a business had rubbed off on his children. All three of his daughters were lawyers and they were determined to see their father’s killers brought to justice.
Heselden decided on a change of strategy. Van Hoogstraten would be invited in for questioning. The Chief Inspector reasoned that the tycoon would expect to be questioned anyway, so an interview should not ring any extra alarm bells for him. They had nothing on him so the move was a gamble. It was merely a fishing expedition.
On 18 November Van Hoogstraten voluntarily walked into Hove police station for questioning. As usual he was punctual and politely greeted the detectives who were to interview him. Hugh Ellis and Chris Moore had expected him to come with his solicitor and were surprised that he turned up alone.
The detectives showed Van Hoogstraten through to a small room. They switched on the tape recorder and the interview began at eleven minutes past four. For the benefit of the tape, Ellis and Moore read Van Hoogstraten his rights and asked if everything was all right. He answered that everything was fine except that they had been given the broom cupboard. The three men laughed.
The detectives asked Van Hoogstraten about his business dealings with Raja. He told them he had first met Raja in the early eighties at property auctions. Their first business dealings had taken place around 1987 or 1988 when he sold Raja a terraced house in Chippenham Road, Maida Vale.
To help Raja complete the sale, Van Hoogstraten loaned him £30,000. He wanted to get rid of the property, otherwise he would not have done business with Raja at all. Van Hoogstraten said it was well known that Raja did not pay his debts and was hard up. After the property crash at the end of the 1980s Raja was ‘in a sinking ship’.
Disarmingly, Van Hoogstraten appeared happy to tell the detectives all about his commercial property dealings. He disliked doing business with Mohammed Raja, but got on better with his son Amjad, whom he helped out by asking him to manage some of his property lettings. He told how he gave Amjad houses that had what he called problem tenants. In return, he would split the profits when there were any.
All of this poured out almost unprompted. The tape kept running and the detectives listened.
Unbidden, Van Hoogstraten brought up what he saw as the crunch moment between himself and Raja. At auctions, Raja got carried away and bought properties for which he didn’t have the ready cash.
‘He would come running to whoever he could run to, and sometimes it was me,’ said Van Hoogstraten.
Sometimes things were so bad for Raja that his cheque for the deposit bounced. Van Hoogstraten helped him out. Either he himself or one of his companies bought the property for Raja. This gave Raja breathing space. He would then have anything from one to three months to come up with the balance. If he failed, Van Hoogstraten ended up with a property he usually didn’t want and that was that.
The picture Van Hoogstraten painted was of a rich, clever man helping out a poorer, not very clever one. ‘You know,’ he told Ellis and Moore, ‘he just didn’t have a clue, honestly. He used to buy unbelievable shit.’
Eventually Raja stopped paying money back. According to Van Hoogstraten, Raja owed money to several companies connected to him – Rarebargain, Robert Gates and Co, Unifox, Barnhill. And he owed money to Van Hoogstraten personally. The time came to repossess some Raja properties on which he had lent money.
This was Van Hoogstraten in full flood. For the two detectives seeing it for the first time, it was an experience. The millionaire liked nothing so much as a captive audience. The detectives were paid to listen. Even better, they were being paid by someone else.
With a dismissive wave of the hand, Van Hoogstraten said he viewed Raja’s allegations of fraud as ‘a source of amusement’. He said all he was doing was buying buildings from the receivers after they had been repossessed from Raja. It was ‘a joke’. Raja had already ceased to own the properties.
He laughed again. He was having a good time – the millionaire instructing a couple of mere detective constables on the ways of the rich.
Finally the bemused Ellis and Moore got their act together and asked about the disputed properties. On the first one, Van Hoogstraten said he had bought it for cash from Raja – so what was the problem? As for the next one, Raja had defrauded him in a double scam, raising a loan with him while also taking out a mortgage with someone else.
The air in the small room was getting murkier. The detectives moved to the alleged fraud. Raja had claimed Van Hoogstraten had fraudulently transferred ownership of the building to himself.
Van Hoogstraten batted this aside. He claimed that Raja’s answer to anything he didn’t like was to claim someone had forged his signature on a contract. The atmosphere was thicker now. Van Hoogstraten told how he sold another house to the Rajas and bought it back – or maybe it was the other way round, he couldn’t remember. The detectives were seeing less and less clearly now.
The conversation entered a truly surreal realm when Van Hoogstraten declared that when the money from Raja dried up it was funny.
Anyone who knew Van Hoogstraten knew there was one thing he never ever joked about – money. And now here he was, in a cramped little room in a police station, chewing the fat with two men who earned less between them in a year than he had been spending in a week. Van Hoogstraten had amassed his wealth because money was what mattered. After all, money was what had moved him to make many of his most memorable public utterances: Isn’t that what it’s all about? She was taking the piss. He deserved to have his bollocks chopped off. I’m not standing for it.
When the first tape began to spool out after forty minutes, the detectives asked Van Hoogstraten if he wanted a break. ‘No,’ he said, ‘put a new one on.’ Their guest was clearly staying.
When the new tape was running, Ellis enquired if Raja had ever asked him for a breakdown of whatever he thought Van Hoogstraten owed him. Van Hoogstraten said Raja had never asked him but he might have asked his solicitors. Ellis then asked if he had threatened Raja – had he said he was going to slap him? Van Hoogstraten laughed, saying that it was a joke. Had he called Raja a maggot? No, he hadn’t. ‘But it could be a very apt description of him … a maggot in our society.’
Ellis moved on to the next subject, the house in Brunswick Square. Was Hamdan fronting for Van Hoogstraten – did he have some control over the building? Absolutely none, which was a shame because ‘it must be worth half a million pounds’.
By now Ellis and Moore had learned a great deal more about the twists and turns of the property business than they had bargained for. As so many had found before, Van Hoogstraten is happy to chat away for hours. And he is never happier than when delivering a master class in investment to the uninitiated.
Ellis decided to wind things up.
By the way, he said, the murder had been on Crimewatch. Van Hoogstraten said he had seen it. He wanted to know if what was shown was what had actually happened.
Moore carefully gave a noncommittal answer. ‘They achieved what they wanted.’
Somehow the subject changed and Van Hoogstraten said that he had something to tell them he had never told anyone before.
One day Raja had arrived at his office with a bag full of grubby US banknotes, about $120,000 worth, that he wanted to pay him with. ‘Well,’ said Van Hoogstraten, ‘you know what’s going through your heads – the same as went through mine. I’m being set up here.
‘The next thing that’s going to happen is the door’s going to crash in and we’re going to get nicked for money laundering, drugs, all that.’
He got hold of
the bag and thrust it back to Raja. Took him by the scruff of the neck and booted him out.
Raja later explained to Van Hoogstraten that the money had been obtained from traditional Muslim bankers, who ran a system parallel to the Western banking system and known as Halawi banking.
The interviewee was playing with the minds of the listening detectives, fingering the dead man for serious crimes. If any of it were true, Raja could have been hit by all sorts of people.
Van Hoogstraten brought up the subject of Crimewatch once more. He was tickled by it. The way it was put in the papers, he said, it was obviously ‘a professional hit. Somebody’s gone and done him. But when you see it on the television, well, it’s a joke. That’s not a professional hit.’
DC Moore once again deflected the question. ‘They achieved their objective, didn’t they?’ The detectives next discussed the letters between Van Hoogstraten and Raja that had been found at the house in Sutton. Yes, Van Hoogstraten vaguely remembered them. Ellis suggested that the letters related to a recent allegation of fraud. Oh no, said Van Hoogstraten, the fraud allegation came much earlier.
It was a classic Van Hoogstraten moment. The disarming honesty. The unexpected swerve. Ellis decided to get to the heart of the matter. He told Van Hoogstraten that the fraud allegation could be a motive for the murder.
Van Hoogstraten replied that it would be ‘scraping the barrel’. ‘I mean, it’s ludicrous.’ With a derisory laugh, he asked: ‘Is that the high point of the case?’
Ellis asked bluntly: ‘Do you know where you were on 2 July 2002?’
‘Oh, just listen, just a minute – seeing that blinking Crimewatch, was I the one? Come off it!’ exclaimed Van Hoogstraten. He’d never had a gun in his life. One of his people would have a record of where he was. He’d get David Englehart or Andrew Emmanuel to tell them. Tie up the loose ends.
It was a blooming joke. ‘I shouldn’t be laughing, really, should I? Because at the end of the day, the poor guy’s dead.’
So did he have any ideas? It could only be drugs. ‘Drugs or someone he owes a lot of money to.’
By now Ellis wanted to end the interview. As a fishing expedition, it was getting nowhere.
But Van Hoogstraten had a question. ‘A couple of my girlfriends and other people that know about all this asked me about this Crimewatch thing. Is that what really happened?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ellis. This single word opened the first real dialogue of the interview. Until now, it had been a one-way street, with the millionaire giving tuition in property investment and moneylending.
‘Is that what goes on?’ he asked.
‘That was an accurate account of the incident.’ DC Moore was playing his straight bat.
‘But when they went there, how did they miss him the first time, then?’ asked Van Hoogstraten.
This was the moment that much much later rang bells for the two detectives. But it was the end of a long interview. Van Hoogstraten had said something that would eventually seem revealing about his knowledge of the murder. How did he know the first shot had missed? The Crimewatch reconstruction did not show a shot missing. For an hour and twenty minutes they’d been round the houses in the whirligig world of moneylending, freeholds, leaseholds. They failed to pick up on the question.
‘By this time we’d been trying to shut him up,’ says Ellis.
They wrapped up the interview at 5.32 pm. Van Hoogstraten walked back to the Courtlands Hotel.
As Ellis and Moore returned to London, it seemed their boss’s gamble had not paid off. But Van Hoogstraten’s curiosity about the Crimewatch report was like a little clock. Unseen, unheard, but ticking.
It was back to work as usual for the investigation team. They held a meeting to discuss the relative merits of all suspects. Using a system to award points for motive, opportunity and so on, suspects were put in order of preference. Those with the fewest points were dropped. Among them were women and any men outside an age band of twenty to fifty.
Several suspects remained. Detectives travelled to Liverpool to see a businessman that Raja had been in dispute with. He was ruled out. They went to Dagenham to see the two brothers he had had a spat with there. They, too, were dropped from the list.
It was decided to have a closer look at Michaal Hamdan. Amjad Raja told the police that after the murder, Hamdan had suggested to him that two people were likely suspects for killing his father: ‘Me and Van Hoogstraten, and I didn’t do it.’
The row over the flat at 6 Brunswick Square came under the spotlight. Michaal Hamdan was a perplexing figure. Was he his own man or was he a protective shield for Van Hoogstraten? The murder team found him difficult to work out. Amjad Raja thought that Hamdan was acting as a front for Van Hoogstraten, the real owner of the freehold. The team invited Hamdan in for questioning.
On 19 January 2000 Hamdan went to Chelsea police station, where he was met by Hugh Ellis. The conversation quickly got on to the subject of Brunswick Square. Was he fronting for Van Hoogstraten? He said he was not. It was his own property. He had been trying to buy the flat from Raja for ages to gain vacant possession. Around the time of the murder, he and Raja were close to a deal. The Lebanese claimed that the death of Raja scuppered that deal and left him back at square one.
The conversation moved on to Van Hoogstraten. To Ellis’s surprise, Hamdan began to bad-mouth his friend and then made a surprising offer. He could keep in touch and inform them about what Van Hoogstraten was doing and thinking.
It seemed that the police might now have an inside track on the tycoon … if Hamdan meant what he said.
In the meantime, the man who sold the Transit van used in the hit was helping police. He remembered that the man who bought it said he supported Leyton Orient. Police asked him to watch hours of video footage recorded by CCTV cameras at the team’s Brisbane Road ground to see if he could spot the buyer. They even took him to a match to scour the crowd. It was a long shot and produced nothing except eye strain.
In the spring of 2000 a £20,000 reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of the killer or killers. The Raja family put up £17,500 of it. Usually the offer of good reward money brings out whispers from the underworld. On this occasion there was nothing. Dick Heselden found the lack of new leads dispiriting.
‘Never had an award that size produced less information,’ he says. The team began to think the killers must have been brought in from abroad.
Hamdan’s offer of help was put into play on 10 April 2000. Hugh Ellis walked into Harrods department store in Knightsbridge to meet him for lunch. The detective was wearing a concealed microphone and a tape recorder was running in his inside pocket. As soon as they sat down to eat, Hamdan began to describe conversations he’d had with Van Hoogstraten about Raja. What he alleged seemed compelling to the detective. And Hamdan was willing to go further. He offered to have himself miked up by the police and then attempt to get his supposed friend to incriminate himself on tape.
Ellis was non-commital. Later, after he reported in at Shooter’s Hill, the murder team discussed Hamdan’s offer and his motives. Much hung on his story that he and Raja had been near to a deal over Palmeira Square. If that were true then it certainly wouldn’t have made sense for him to have Raja killed – Raja’s death would leave him as far away as ever from gaining vacant possession of the building. On the other hand, if he was lying about the deal, maybe he was lying about everything. Maybe he was himself behind the murder. What better cover than to frame Van Hoogstraten?
Raja’s papers didn’t provide an answer, but his son Amjad did. He confirmed that, in the weeks before his father was killed, he and Hamdan had been on the point of agreement. Hamdan, it seemed, was in the clear
But using him in an attempt, even if there was no basis for the thought that he might, to get Van Hoogstraten to incriminate himself might be self-defeating. If the police did mike him up it might well be seen as entrapment. Instead, they decided to try to keep meeting Hamdan, get everything they cou
ld out of him and persuade him to put it all down in a signed statement.
Meanwhile, at the murder HQ in Eltham, all energy was directed towards the search for accomplices who could have carried out the murder.
Knapp’s mobile phone records were checked. They were a revelation. During the weeks before the murder, Knapp and Croke spoke daily, sometimes even several times a day. On 2 July, the day of the murder, the calls stopped. The inquiry team deduced that Knapp was calling Croke to arrange for him and someone else, as yet unidentified, to do the hit.
For DCI Heselden, this was a much-needed breakthrough. ‘It seemed unusual to us that people would be in touch with each other two, three, four times a day, early in the morning, late at night, and then on the day of the murder the contact would stop.’
The investigation had a new momentum. Now the full weight of the investigation was on Croke. Detectives trawled for known villains connected to him in an attempt to find the other hit man. They found none. But they did come up with a link between Croke and the getaway van. This came about because the van had been spotted in Clacton.
Clacton-on-Sea, a down-at-heel Victorian resort in Essex. A great deal of time and manpower revealed that Croke’s ex-wife lived there. Surveillance revealed Croke was staying with her.
This was a breakthrough. And then calamity. Croke vanished.
He had been tipped off that the police were on to him. The tip-off came from the police themselves. Letters had been sent out to everyone wanted for the voluntary mass screening for DNA samples – the milkman, the postman and so on – and David Croke. Because of his association with Robert Knapp, his name was on the list.
The investigation team had no option but to write to all the known criminals on their list of suspects. Collecting DNA samples covertly by putting those with criminal form under surveillance and then picking up discarded cigarette ends or paper coffee cups for testing would be no good. Any such evidence would not be admissable in court. A direct approach was substituted. Old lags are often asked to account for themselves in serious crime investigations so that they might be eliminated from inquiries.