Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  In the gallery Caroline Williams blew down a kiss. Van Hoogstraten grinned.

  His two co-defendants showed no emotion. The contrast between them and the elegant Van Hoogstraten was marked. The bespectacled Croke, deeply lined and weary, was wearing a sweater and looked like a harmless old man. Robert Knapp, tall, close-cropped and watchful, looked formidable. Dressed in a T-shirt, he stared unblinkingly at every journalist in the press box in turn. Some joked uneasily about it afterwards.

  Over the first two days Waters outlined the case against the accused. Van Hoogstraten, he said, had ordered ‘a contract murder’ because of ‘the problems and difficulties’ he had encountered with Raja. Waters related the alleged threats to Raja, the ‘maggot’ remark and the fears that Raja had expressed in the weeks before his death. He went though the links between Van Hoogstraten and Knapp, and between Knapp and Croke. Then the jury heard what happened on the day of the killing, the events in Mulgrave Road, the blood spot linking Croke to the crime, the burning of the van and the alleged visit by Croke and Knapp to the Tongs in Crayford.

  On the surface it all fitted together. In reality it was entirely circumstantial except for the blood spot, and even that was open to challenge. It emerged that the sample taken from the doorway at Mulgrave Road had been used up by prosecution scientists before defence experts were able to test it. In such circumstances the defence hoped that the DNA evidence might be ruled out as inadmissible later in the trial.

  The defence had a major fear too. Counsel dared not do anything that might lose what is known as their ‘shield’. This is the rule which prevents previous convictions being revealed to the jury except in special circumstances.

  This fear constrained defence lawyers at every step. They dared not question the truthfulness of any prosecution witness, knowing that Waters would immediately leap in and argue that as his witness’s character was under scrutiny, the past character of the defendants should be scrutinised too.

  The last thing the defence wanted was the jury to get an inkling that they were trying two professional armed robbers and a man who had had a friend’s home bombed. ‘Myself and Croke were advised by counsel from day one by all costs our “form” must not come in,’ Knapp explained in a letter after the trial.

  Knapp told us: ‘That is why all witnesses were stroked instead of bashed!’

  Waters’s first witness was the victim’s eighteen-year-old grandson, Rizvan Raja. He came into the witness box to relive that terrible morning: the bang that brought him and his brother down the stairs to find their grandfather bleeding and struggling with his assailants… Rizvan’s futile attempt to ring 999… and the moment when he saw his grandfather’s attempt to defend himself, vainly holding a knife as the gunman fired at him from point-blank range. ‘I just heard a loud bang and it hit my grandfather. He fell down and the gunman ran away.’

  The full brutality of the murder was brought home by pathologist Dr Richard Shephard. He told the court that Mohammed Raja had been shot in the eye and stabbed five times. Dr Shephard couldn’t say whether one of the stab wounds or the gunshot had killed him. Either would have done so.

  Up in the public gallery, sitting eight or nine feet away from Caroline Williams, Mohammed Raja’s three daughters and his elder brother listened. They would be there every day for three months, hearing every word.

  A procession of witnesses followed as Waters built up a picture of what had happened on the day of the murder. Defence counsel picked away at them and began to score.

  First the identification evidence began to wobble. One witness had picked Croke out of an identity parade. But all the others who had seen the hit men in Sutton that morning described them as being between eighteen and forty. Yet Croke and Knapp were in their fifties and Croke looked more like seventy.

  An E-fit poster compiled by police just after the murder was shown to the jury. It looked nothing like either of them.

  Then Doreen Tong came into the witness box and admitted that she couldn’t be sure that Croke and Knapp had visited her on the day of the murder. Her father’s work records seemed to show he couldn’t have been there to see them that day.

  It wasn’t going too well for the prosecution. Much depended on their four star witnesses. What Waters could not know was that three of them would not deliver.

  First came Amjad Raja, the murdered man’s youngest son. He had been part spectator, part participator in the legal battles with Van Hoogstraten. Over two days Amjad answered questions on his father’s relationship with Van Hoogstraten – the loans, the friendship, the souring of the relationship, the ‘fraud’, his father’s pursuit of Van Hoogstraten through the courts and the ‘we take thorns and we break them’ remark.

  Like his dead father, Amjad is a polite man who keeps his feelings to himself. But his bitterness towards Van Hoogstraten was clear to see. The tycoon, he said, was a loan shark who had demanded a down payment of £10,000 before he would even see Amjad. He was an arrogant man who behaved as if others were nothing. And he was, Amjad made clear, very dangerous. Once, when Amjad was having problems with a tenant, Van Hoogstraten had suggested Amjad ‘do him’ with a knife, then offered to do it himself when he said no.

  Amjad was pressed about his father’s other antagonists – notably Michaal Hamdan. He insisted that the row with Hamdan over the basement flat in Brunswick Square was near to a solution when his father was murdered. Amjad left no doubt that in his mind Van Hoogstraten alone could have ordered the killing. In the days just prior to the murder his father was on his guard. ‘He felt that Van Hoogstraten was going to take some sort of action against him, some sort of revenge… I was there the weekend before he died. He seemed quite upset, but he didn’t tell me why.’

  Amjad’s testimony was damaging to the defence but there was nothing concrete in it, no smoking gun. That was to be provided by the prosecution’s second star witness – the girl who only three weeks earlier had been sharing Van Hoogstraten’s bed, Tanaka Sali.

  Tanaka looked sensational as she arrived at the Old Bailey. A plain, dark-blue robe with a cowl enveloped her from head to toe. Only her wide-eyed face could be seen. No one could take their eyes off the tall, voluptuous young woman as she slipped past the dock containing her lover and into the witness box.

  She had come to give what’s called evidence voir dire. This is an ancient peculiarity of the judicial process which allows evidence to be tested in the absence of the jury. It helps the judge decide what can and can’t be admitted as evidence in the trial proper. It also shows the press what to expect later in open court – a taste of dramas yet to come.

  The witness box in Court Number One is an ordeal for anyone, let alone an eighteen-year-old. But not for Tanaka.

  This was no brainless bimbo. She thought a moment about every question and answered so lucidly the judge almost glowed.

  She told of her tempestuous relationship with Van Hoogstraten, how she’d come to England with him and of what she’d learned about him. She discovered that he was a man with no friends, just people who worked for him. She was at pains to make clear that she didn’t think him guilty of murder. But she related incidents that the prosecution claimed suggested otherwise.

  Mr Justice Newman was visibly impressed with Tanaka. She was told to come back in a week’s time to tell her story to the jury. Police and prosecution were elated. Hoogstraten’s ex mistress could be his downfall. Meanwhile someone else who’d once been close to the tycoon was called to give evidence against him: Tony Browne. The architect had fallen out with Van Hoogstraten.

  He told friends that he wasn’t going to kick his former client in the teeth, but he would tell what he knew. The police had high expectations. They thought he would lay bare Van Hoogstraten’s violence and his use of Knapp as an enforcer. Once he took the stand, however, they decided he was pulling his punches.

  The architect vividly described his experiences of the volatile Van Hoogstraten and recalled violent actions involving tenants. But when it c
ame to Knapp and the murder his answers were qualified. Yes, Bob Knapp was a menacing character who had acted as Van Hoogstraten’s ‘persuader’, but that was years ago. Latterly Knapp had become a junkie and Van Hoogstraten wanted nothing to do with him. Yes, Van Hoogstraten had ‘a spectacular falling out’ with another business associate and said ‘he was going to have him done, whatever done meant’, but then ‘he was going to have lots of people done’. And yes, Van Hoogstraten had talked about the murder of Mohammed Raja, but only after the event and then only to ask Browne what happened when police interviewed him about the killing.

  Waters, who had been expected to keep Browne on the stand for hours, abruptly stopped the questioning, and the witness was discharged. The architect, puzzled, said afterwards that he had always wondered whether what he knew would be more beneficial to the defence or to the prosecution.

  Worse was to come for the prosecution. It was now Tanaka’s turn to lay bare what she knew, but it didn’t happen. The day she was due to appear the court learned that she wanted to retract her statement. The judge had Tanaka brought up from Brighton so he could question her. Tanaka was transformed. Gone was the articulate, co-operative young woman in her long, sweeping robe. This Tanaka was a bolshie, monosyllabic teenager in jeans who didn’t want to say anything. She refused to take the oath but insisted that what she’d told the court a week before was untrue. The judge was openly furious. But Tanaka was immovable. The jury never even got to hear of her existence.

  A day after Tanaka’s retraction there was more bad news for the crown. Hamdan wasn’t budging from Beirut. Every day, Detective Inspector Andy Sladen phoned him, but Hamdan wouldn’t even agree to give evidence by video link, let alone fly back to give it in person. A desperate Waters pleaded with the judge to allow Hamdan’s statement to be read to the jury. The judge said ‘no’.

  It was the lowest moment in the trial for police and prosecution. Privately, one of the team admitted that the case might not even last beyond half time. In other words, it might be dismissed before the defence had even begun to present its case.

  As the prosecution limped on there were some consolations. One was the court’s decision to admit the results of the DNA tests. If it had been ruled out the entire case might have collapsed.

  Another boost for Waters was that the court looked likely to allow the jury to see some of the damaging admissions about the use of violence which the property magnate had made over the years, especially on the World in Action programme in 1988.

  The jury heard little of this. Instead of watching a drama unfold with advantage swinging this way then that, they kept being sent home. Days elapsed between one witness being cross-examined and the next. They didn’t know that Ferguson was continually having to ask for time to ‘take instructions’ from his client.

  So much time was lost the judge made the jury part-timers. He told them he would generally only expect them in the mornings. The afternoons he gave over to ‘consultations’ with clients, voir dire evidence and challenges in chambers. At one point when he once more had to send the jury home, he told them they could watch Italy in the World Cup on TV that afternoon.

  Among the press few believed the prosecution would now succeed. But the defence had a huge problem of its own – the ego of Nicholas van Hoogstraten. He was said to have overruled Ferguson time and again. In closed sessions, when his QC wanted him to wrap up, he would not. The cavernous corridors of the Old Bailey buzzed with rumours about the Ferguson – Van Hoogstraten relationship. It was said they were on screaming terms, and that both used the same four-letter word to describe each other. It was even rumoured that at one point Van Hoogstraten’s cheque had bounced and the QC had nearly quit.

  Ferguson opened the case for the defence on 10 June. The police, he said, had found no evidence against his client. It was guilt by association. As a motive for murder the Raja lawsuit was ‘scraping the barrel’. The consequences for Van Hoogstraten if he lost were trifling.

  As for Van Hoogstraten paying Knapp to do it: ‘Can you get your head round paying for a killing by instalments? Not only by instalments but paying by cheque.’ Another business contact of Raja’s had more reason to want him dead than Van Hoogstraten had.

  The jury now heard about Michaal Hamdan and how Raja had thwarted his plans to acquire the whole of the Palmeira Square property. Before he was killed a number of threats had been made to Raja, and Hamdan was behind them, said Ferguson.

  The nature of the killing alone showed that it couldn’t have been his client, said Ferguson. Van Hoogstraten was a man of means. ‘Do you not think that if he had wanted Mr Raja killed he would have had a vastly more sophisticated plan? This was a bungled farce, more like an attempted robbery than a contract killing.’

  It was going well for Van Hoogstraten. The consensus around the court was that at the end of the trial he and Knapp would probably be acquitted, although the blood spot would do for Croke.

  Then Van Hoogstraten made the most stupid move of his life. He couldn’t resist the temptation to give evidence in open court. Every one of his legal team urged him not to. Waters would get to him, needle him, make him lose control. He could lose everything. But the vanity and the mistrustfulness of the man prevailed. Only he could do justice to his own cause.

  He began well enough in the witness box, speaking quietly and switching on that charm that had worked so well on so many occasions. He referred to an episode in the past. As if in an afterthought, he added softly that, of course, the jury were all too young to remember. At that all six women on the jury looked at the handsome man on the stand and kept looking.

  He rubbished the idea that Raja’s fraud action was a motive for murder. Raja’s case against him was ‘laughable’. His diary entries showed that he called it the ‘Raja nonsense’. The money involved was peanuts.

  He bore no ill feelings towards the murdered man. ‘I don’t believe Mohammed and me ever had a cross word with each other. Hard as this may seem or sound like, my relationship with Mohammed basically stayed the same from the day I first clapped eyes on him.’

  What, Ferguson asked, had he to say to the allegations that he’d ordered the murder? Van Hoogstraten seemed almost overcome. He’d never been asked the question direct, he said.

  ‘Do you deny the allegations?’ his QC asked.

  ‘Absolutely, I have five children…’ His voice broke off. There were tears in his eyes.

  He told the court that if anyone did have a motive for the killing it was Michaal Hamdan, whose hopes of acquiring the Brunswick Square property in Hove had been thwarted by the murdered man. That building had been a ‘battleground’, he added. In his campaign to get possession of it the Lebanese had been involved in arson, vandalism, flooding and intimidation.

  As for himself, the picture Van Hoogstraten conveyed was of a much misunder-stood, misrepresented man.

  ‘You would agree that you are an astute businessman?’ said Waters.

  ‘No, because I’m standing here… I was quite a successful businessman, yes… It hasn’t been easy. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon. I haven’t had an easy life. Far from it.’

  He talked about his money.

  ‘Would you agree that money means a great deal to you?’ Waters asked.

  ‘It doesn’t mean much to me now… It used to when I was young and didn’t have any… It’s all relative really. Even if one has five hundred million it does not go very far.’

  He talked about his palace. So far it had cost between £25 and £28 million. It was his ‘pride and joy’. He pressed the judge to let him show the jury an aerial photograph of it.

  He talked about his generosity. In another emotional moment he said that Robert Knapp had only been allowed back to live on the High Cross estate through consideration for his infirm old mother.

  This led to the nitty-gritty. No, he hadn’t paid Knapp for a killing. The £7000 mentioned in his diary was loans.

  The Waters technique was to allow the man in the dock to
talk his head off and then switch abruptly to a more dangerous subject. The sign that he was getting down to business was a bend in his knees as, almost imperceptibly, he started to bounce in polite anticipation of blood. He drew some blood on Van Hoogstraten’s third day in the box.

  The tycoon was asked about his own remarks that Raja was ‘a maggot’ and that he’d give him ‘a slap’. Van Hoogstraten insisted that no threat was implied. He bore the Pakistani no ill will.

  ‘You’re lying, aren’t you?’ Waters said.

  The tycoon denied it. He was visibly irritated. No one talked to him like that.

  Waters continued, pressing Van Hoogstraten on his real feelings towards Raja. Bouncing perceptibly, he accused the man in the dock of being ‘desperately keen to pull the wool over the jury’s eyes’.

  Van Hoogstraten, goaded by the earlier digs from the prosecutor, exploded. Waters was trying to trick him.

  The judge intervened. He told the property magnate: ‘Mr Waters … has a job to do.’

  That night Van Hoogstraten realised the mistake he had made in insisting on taking the stand. In one more move that astonished everyone in court he wrote a long letter to the judge. It said that for the past twenty years he had led ‘a blameless life’. But he had been called a liar and dared not call witnesses in rebuttal for fear that his past record would be revealed. Waters was trying to trip and trap him. He demanded fair treatment and protection from Waters or he wouldn’t continue to answer questions.

  It was too late for second thoughts. The judge made that clear. Van Hoogstraten had to continue or the jury would be allowed to draw its own conclusions. The tycoon and Ferguson consulted. Van Hoogstraten would continue to face the music.