Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  Dick Heselden now had a choice. He could go looking for Croke, arrest him and get a sample. Or he could wait for him to turn up. He chose the latter course. Croke’s name was put out on the Police National Computer as a suspect. All forces around the country were alerted that if they came across him to contact the Met.

  Then Knapp disappeared. He had been staying at his mother’s cottage on the High Cross estate. There had been a robbery from her garage. Some furniture belonging to Van Hoogstraten had been stolen. Van Hoogstraten blamed Knapp’s girlfriend.

  When Croke discovered he was a suspect, he could have called Robert Knapp, he called his old mate Robert Knapp. Cash from some tasty Van Hoogstraten furniture could have smoothed his way into hiding. The investigation team learned that Knapp had fled to Ireland.

  Knapp’s absence meant police could not take a sample of his DNA either. But his mother Sylvia still lived at High Cross. She agreed to be tested. While the police were at her cottage, Sylvia showed them the garage where the robbery had taken place. In the corner they spotted fertiliser bags of the same unusual make as the ones in the burned-out getaway van.

  A fingerprint check revealed Robert Knapp’s dabs on the bags. There were none on those in the van, but it was another little piece of the jigsaw.

  In October Croke was arrested in Lowestoft on a drugs charge. His car was stopped and police found heroin and amphetamines. Suffolk police immediately contacted the Met. A swab for DNA was taken and sent off to the Home Office forensic laboratory. Croke was released on bail.

  Four months went by, and the investigation was flagging. There were no new breakthroughs, no new connections being made, no new witnesses coming forward. On 23 February 2001 the post arrived mid-morning at Shooters Hill, as usual. It lay for a while before someone went through it. Among the letters was one from the forensic laboratory. And there it was – Croke’s DNA result. It matched the blood on the Rajas’ front door.

  The team were jubilant. It was their first big success.

  Andy Sladen explained how important it was: ‘If someone has stabbed you they’ve had to come very close to you to do it. That’s how we think the assailant was injured and then came to leave his blood on the leading edge of the front door in such a position that it could only have got there with the door open.’

  More than a year and a half had gone by since the murder of Mohammed Raja, and here at last was real evidence linking one of the suspects to the scene of the crime. ‘Whilst we’d never given up hope,’ says Heselden, ‘and whilst we were always confident, that was the breakthrough we had been waiting for.’

  Four days later detectives called at Croke’s new home in Bolney Road, Moulscombe, Brighton. They arrested him for the murder of Mohammed Raja. He was taken to Bexleyheath police station, where he denied ever having been in Sutton. When the DNA evidence linking him to the scene of the crime was put to him, Croke replied: ‘No comment.’

  It was now vital to discover Croke’s movements on the day of the murder. If Knapp had organised the hit, it was also important to discover his whereabouts. While they puzzled over that, Hugh Ellis sat down one day to check the accuracy of a transcript of his interview with Van Hoogstraten the previous November. Near the end, he read Van Hoogstraten asking: ‘How did they miss him the first time?’

  ‘Something just clicked,’ recalled Ellis. ‘I suddenly thought – how the hell did he know that, how did he know they’d missed with the first shot?’

  He could hardly wait to get the video tape of the Crimewatch programme and push it into a video player. To Ellis, the reconstruction suggested that the first shot had definitely hit Mohammed Raja. It showed the grandsons upstairs where they hear a bang like a gunshot. Raja is shown in the next set-up holding his side, shouting, ‘They’ve hit me.’

  The reconstruction is ambiguous. As the shot is only heard, the viewer can’t be certain that it has hit its mark. There is a degree of vagueness over just what has taken place. However, the more likely conclusion would be that the first shot had hit home.

  To the police, then, the man who always boasted that he was too smart to get caught had incriminated himself. In the interview he gave to World in Action in 1988 he had boasted about being so clever that he didn’t get caught any more.

  ‘One is clever enough to organise things to ensure that the chickens don’t come home to roost,’ he said.

  At last the chickens looked as if they might be coming home.

  Meanwhile Michaal Hamdan was making increasingly interesting accusations about Van Hoogstraten’s behaviour in the months before the murder. He still wouldn’t put them in a signed statement. Nevertheless Heseldon reckoned he now had enough to charge Van Hoogstraten with the murder of Mohammed Raja. But would a charge stick? The team at AMIT sought the views of lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service. Their opinion was not heartening.

  The CPS saw three problems. Firstly, there was no specific link between Van Hoogstraten and Croke. Secondly, Van Hoogstraten might be able explain his knowledge about the second shot. For example, he might have been told about how the murder really happened by a member of the Raja family or someone who knew them. Thirdly, Hamdan’s accusations were unsubstantiated and he was afraid to make a statement.

  It was a setback.

  Heselden decided to take the fight to Van Hoogstraten. They would arrest him and see what they might get out of him. If he had made one error, who knows, he might make others.

  On 16 July 2001 Hugh Ellis and two colleagues walked into the Courtlands Hotel in Brighton and asked for Van Hoogstraten. When he appeared, they arrested him in connection with the murder of Mohammed Raja. This time he did ask to call his solicitor. The police officers had a warrant to search Van Hoogstraten’s cottage at High Cross and they asked him to accompany them there.

  Van Hoogstraten watched while they searched. The main item of interest they found was his diary. After the search, the police drove him to Bexleyheath police station, where he spent the night in a cell.

  That evening the officers read the diary. They noticed several interesting entries. One was a meeting in 1998 with someone called Jim Croke. Could this have been David Croke? More importantly, there were several entries in 1999 listing loans to ‘Uncle Bob’. They added up to £7000.

  ‘He was saying he had almost nothing to do with him, hadn’t seen him hardly at all since he had come out of prison and wanted nothing to do with him,’ says Heselden. ‘Yet here he was making a number of substantial loans to Mr Knapp, and we also knew that Mr Knapp was living in a premises owned by Mr Van Hoogstraten rent free.’

  The next day Ellis and Detective Sergeant Chris Crowley questioned Van Hoogstraten in the presence of his solicitor, Danny Solomon.

  Van Hoogstraten said he had genuinely liked Raja. He was a ‘nuisance’, that was all. ‘There’s no big money involved in any of this. We’re talking about relative peanuts,’ he said. The litigation was worth only around ‘twenty or thirty grand … it’s not even a week’s pocket money’.

  But the police knew that, according to the Raja family, the disputed properties were now worth several million pounds. Ellis suggested that Raja’s allegations were the catalyst for Van Hoogstraten to arrange the murder.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Van Hoogstraten replied.

  He went on to say that Raja had been less than honest in his dealings with him.

  Ellis replied that he was not there to defend Raja. However, Raja’s actions had brought out what he called Van Hoogstraten’s ‘second character’.

  ‘Do you know Robert Knapp?’ Ellis asked.

  Van Hoogstraten replied that he did. He’d known him since about 1969. In 1979 Knapp’s parents had come to live on the High Cross estate and Knapp himself became the estate manager. He had a flat near the estate but in later years Van Hoogstraten really had nothing much to do with him because of a serious drug problem. He made some quite large loans to Knapp, but only out of friendship for his parents.

  Ellis asked if he knew David
Croke. Van Hoogstraten said no. Did he know anyone with the surname Croke? Again, he said he did not. Ellis suggested that he was involved in the murder, together with Knapp and Croke.

  Van Hoogstraten replied: ‘The idea horrifies me.’

  They took a short break. When they resumed, Ellis asked Van Hoogstraten about his first interview. How did he know that the murderers missed the first time?

  Van Hoogstraten answered that he knew that from watching the BBC Crimewatch programme: ‘’Cause we heard the bullet, heard the gun going off.’

  Ellis pressed him further. How did Van Hoogstraten know there had been two shots? Why did he suggest the first one had missed?

  Van Hoogstraten answered: ‘Because they shot him again. I couldn’t understand how if somebody’s opening a door and presumably the gunman’s standing there, how he couldn’t have hit him.’

  Ellis wanted to make certain that Van Hoogstraten’s knowledge could not have come from some other source than Crimewatch. He asked: ‘Which of your friends told you that they’d missed the first time, then?’

  ‘Nobody. I didn’t know anything about it,’ Van Hoogstraten replied.

  From this simple answer, the two detectives believed they had been told all they needed to know.

  Ellis asked Van Hoogstraten about Rizvan Raja’s evidence that his grandfather said he had been hit by Van Hoogstraten’s men: ‘Do you have any comment about that?’

  Van Hoogstraten remained silent.

  For the benefit of the tape recorder, Ellis said: ‘No comment.’

  Van Hoogstraten then said: ‘Well, I can’t possibly comment on it.’

  At the end of the interview the detectives told Van Hoogstraten he was going to be given bail. Then something happened that amazed them.

  ‘At that point when he knew he was being bailed from the police station,’ remembers Ellis, ‘he turned away and cried. I had to look at him twice to see if it was the same man that I had seen in these programmes, how he was portrayed on television.’

  Police continued to pursue the links between Robert Knapp and David Croke. Finally they had a success. Croke had used his credit card at a service station on the M25 near Crayford in Essex at 1.25 pm, four hours after the murder. Within minutes, Knapp made a call on his mobile telephone in the same area. So, on the day of the murder, both men were in or around Crayford.

  At first, detectives could not work out why the two men might have been there. Then they discovered that Knapp knew someone in Crayford. Her name was Doreen Tong and she was his heroin dealer. Doreen told police that she remembered Croke and Knapp visiting some time in the summer of 1999. They smelled of burning or smoke and Knapp had superficial burns. They said something about a job ‘gone wrong’.

  On 24 September 2001 Van Hoogstraten was called again to the police station in Hove. He gave the taxi driver a £50 note and told him to wait. He never came back. He had become the wealthiest man in Britain ever to be charged with murder.

  Unusually for a murder suspect, Van Hoogstraten was remanded on bail. It was set at £23 million. He provided £1 million in cash and the rest in various investments. Dick Heselden reckoned that Van Hoogstraten would never flee the country because of the potential harm to his business interests. Besides, if he did a runner, the state could always sequester all his assets.

  Three days after Van Hoogstraten was charged, word reached AMIT that Robert Knapp had returned from Ireland. He was arrested and charged with murder.

  The police had now charged Croke, Van Hoogstraten and Knapp. All three denied the charges. The case against Van Hoogstraten was thin, almost wholly circumstantial.

  Heselden still counted on Michaal Hamdan agreeing to testify. Hamdan remained reluctant until he discovered that Van Hoogstraten was about to find out what he had been saying about him.

  It was due to a legal process known as discovery. The prosecution lawyers had to provide the defence team with all relevant information. Hamdan’s claims had suddenly jumped into that category. Van Hoogstraten was going to claim in court that Hamdan had organised Raja’s murder. This meant that his defence team had the right to see everything the prosecution had on Hamdan.

  The Lebanese was horrified and scared. Hamdan agreed to make a statement. In return, he wanted protection. Heselden offered to put him on the witness protection scheme. When Hamdan learned that this would involve a false identity and a fictitious new life, he refused. He had too many business interests to look after.

  Then an unexpected witness appeared. A few weeks before the trial, the Brighton police called AMIT to say that they had a visitor with a black eye. It was Tanaka Sali. She explained that Van Hoogstraten had beaten her up because she had been seeing a younger man, a bouncer at a nightclub. Later she was to describe their fight in vivid terms: ‘…he just came to the bed shouting like, “You fucking bitch!” He grabbed me by the hair and he pulled me out of bed. He took off his slipper and he was whacking me in the face with it, and the slipper split. And he said: “You’re not to go anywhere, you bitch.” Then he left the room. Later on I went to my friend and she took me to the police station. And it just started from there, really, at the police station.’

  The investigation team wasted no time. They went to Brighton to question the teenager. She told them about life with the hugely jealous tycoon and about several potentially significant things he’d allegedly let drop in the months before the murder. She agreed to repeat them in court. The police were ecstatic. Here was a star witness.

  There was more good news too – Hamdan. He had at last given his crucial statement. It ran to 32 pages and covered everything he knew about Van Hoogstraten, from their first meeting to the tycoon’s attitude to Mohammed Raja. All that remained was for him to sign it … and agree to go into the witness box.

  However, the nearer the trial, the colder Hamdan’s feet. A week before the trial was about to start, a contact invited Mike Walsh to a mystery meeting at a hotel in Gloucester Road, South Kensington. When he arrived, the mystery turned out to be a very nervous Hamdan.

  For three hours Hamdan agonised about his statement and his safety. He wanted the police to give him twenty-four-hour protection – armed bodyguards, the lot. They had refused. It was too expensive. What should he do, he asked? What would happen if he did give evidence? What if his statement to the police disappeared?

  Over many bottles of Grolsch, Hamdan fretted away. He had not wanted to finger Van Hoogstraten. He expected what he had told the police to remain confidential. When he learned that the defence had a right to see his statement, he was horrified. The police had not treated him fairly, he complained.

  Two days later Hamdan agreed to meet Walsh again. At his flat in Mayfair, he produced a copy of his statement. They chatted about it. Then Hamdan said he was exhausted because of sex with a girl he had picked up a few days earlier. He went on to talk about Van Hoogstraten’s taste for teenage girls. Hamdan, paunchy and middle-aged, grimaced and shook his head with disapproval. The meeting was brought to a halt by the arrival of the girl he had been enthusing about. She looked about fifteen.

  The trial was set to start on 16 April 2002. That morning, Andy Sladen got another telephone call. It was Hamdan. His father had died and he had to go to Beirut immediately. The scene was set for the trial of Nicholas Van Hoogstraten to be played out at the Old Bailey … without the prosecution’s star witness.

  17

  THE RECKONING

  The trial of Nicholas van Hoogstraten and his two alleged hit men for the murder of Mohammed Raja was always going to be a major drama. Everyone knew that Van Hoogstraten would provide fireworks. But no one could anticipate the devastating impact the tycoon’s personality would have on the trial.

  The venue was Court Number One at the Central Criminal Court, where some of the most infamous criminals in history have faced justice. Normally the senior judge at the Old Bailey, Michael Hyams, would have presided. But a decade earlier, Judge Hyams had been threatened by an angry litigant, who called him a
‘bastard’ and promised to ‘get him … sooner or later’. The litigant making the threat – none other than Nicholas van Hoogstraten. That incident ruled him out. He could not try a man who had threatened him.

  Mr Justice Newman, next in seniority, took over. A tall, eagle-eyed man with a touch of Alastair Sim about him, Judge Newman would find his patience tested almost to breaking point by the accused. But only at the end would he reveal anything of his feelings.

  The Crown chose David Waters QC to prosecute. He was known for building cases meticulously, surrounding the accused with a slowly mounting wall of evidence until all avenues of escape were closed. A Pickwickian figure, Waters effected a gentle, enquiring smile, and prodded and prodded, then struck: ‘Er, Mr Van Hoogstraten, could you, therefore, help me with…?’

  Van Hoogstraten’s counsel was Richard Ferguson QC, an Irishman who was said to be one of the sharpest defence barristers at the bar. Physically he was the opposite to the wellfed Waters. A handsome, ruddy-faced six-footer, Ferguson gave his hobbies in Who’s Who as watching Arsenal and drinking Guinness. He had represented the Birmingham Six, Rosemary West and the Brighton bombers. ‘Dick Ferguson always has tricks up his sleeve,’ said a fellow barrister before the case.

  The trial opened on 16 April 2002. In some Old Bailey cases the accused are judged to be so dangerous that paramilitary police watch outside. Van Hoogstraten was not in that category. Even so, the authorities were taking no chances. The jury was to be bussed in and out from a secret rendezvous somewhere in London. Prosecution witnesses were given panic buttons. And, to his reported irritation, Mr Justice Newman was given armed protection.

  Every eye focused on Van Hoogstraten as he followed Robert Knapp and David Croke up from the cells and into the dock. In the press box journalists who knew him saw how much he had aged. The beautifully cut hair was still thick but turning grey. He looked as if he had shrunk a little. His skin was a greyish colour. But he was still the same Nicholas van Hoogstraten: expensive pinstripe suit, silk tie and matching handkerchief, gold wrist watch and menacing, slightly tinted glasses. As he stared at the judge, then glanced up at the public gallery, his look was as piercing as ever.