Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  He should have been at his most aware immediately after the letter episode. Instead he made the gaffe of the trial.

  He was talking about his tenants and a drug problem in Hove in the mid-eighties: ‘The police complained to me about a number of drug-related incidents. They were effectively trying to say a lot of these people were living in my properties. Eventually I had a meeting with someone high up in the police and I said: “I can deal with this.”’

  He did so by sending ‘hefty builders’ round to kick the drug addicts out. Sometimes that didn’t work. ‘On those occasions we sent in a couple of dogs.’ Obviously amused, he went on to describe how hippies had been forced to jump from second-floor windows to escape his Alsatians.

  Paul Cheston, the Evening Standard reporter whom Van Hoogstraten had assaulted in another courthouse fifteen years earlier, reckoned that this was the turning point in the trial. ‘It was a chilling moment. There was silence. It was as if at that moment the jury’s minds were changed, I think for ever. At the time I thought that if it wasn’t the beginning of the end for him it would take some very clever talk to take the image away of this man in black glorying in sending in the dogs.’

  There was more to come as Waters told the jury about Van Hoogstraten’s admissions on World in Action. The most damaging of those admissions amounted to just seven words: ‘I’m probably ruthless and I’m probably violent.’

  ‘You’re scraping the barrel,’ Van Hoogstraten sneered. ‘I was the subject of a programme put together by left-wing journalists who were trying to scupper the government’s intention of opening up the housing market. It was politically motivated.’

  Waters: ‘It was a programme made … with your co-operation?’

  Van Hoogstraten: ‘I was conned … these people are all bent. The media across the board is bent.’

  On the programme Van Hoogstraten had admitted kidnapping accountant David Harris and beating him up, spitting at Jackie Hope and having violent associates he could call on for work he would not talk about on television.

  If women jurors had been charmed in the early stages, they looked stony-faced now as he tried to explain and inadvertently revealed more and more about the workings of his mind.

  Yes, he had beaten Harris up after getting ‘very irate’ because the accountant had stolen from him. But that was fifteen years before the TV people came along. It was ‘a disgrace’ that they’d brought the Harris business up.

  Yes, he had spat in Jackie Hope’s face. But ‘she was a druggy. She was dressed in a long kaftan-type thing. She was a weirdo.’ And she wasn’t his tenant anyway.

  Yes, he had talked about violent associates he could call on. But he was a nightclub owner and, of course, he had to employ bouncers.

  Van Hoogstraten was blind to the effect his admissions were having. In his eyes most people would surely understand the victim of a theft beating the thief half to death. Most people would agree that the weirdo in the kaftan had been dealt with astutely. Most would accept that, of course, a nightclub owner must employ violent young men.

  Only one other person in Court Number One that day probably saw it his way: the adoring Caroline Williams, still an anxious daily spectator in the public gallery.

  After Van Hoogstraten finished giving evidence, a reporter who had quoted odds of 7 – 3 for acquittal reduced them to 6 – 4.

  Robert Knapp did not follow his old friend into the witness box. The evidence against him was minimal. If he’d been charged on his own, his case wouldn’t even have come to court. He said on being arrested that he had a complete answer but would keep it until later. In the end, however, he stayed silent.

  David Croke did take the stand. It was on 28 June, his sixtieth birthday. Bent, tired and beaten, he was a miserable figure. No one could have guessed that once he had been one of the deadliest bank robbers in the country or that his speciality had been tying mock bombs to bank managers’ wives. If Van Hoogstraten really did pay him to kill Mohammed Raja he couldn’t have known the state of the man.

  Croke said he had an alibi. He was at home. In the face of the DNA evidence it was anything but convincing.

  On 9 July the case for the defence concluded.

  Then the judge, summing up, produced a final surprise. Only two verdicts were possible for Knapp and Croke. Guilty or not guilty of murder. But there was another option in Van Hoogstraten’s case. If the jury decided that he had sent the two men to Mulgrave Road to frighten Mohammed Raja but not to do him serious injury, they could find him not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. No one had mentioned this possibility during the previous thirteen weeks of the trial.

  The jury were out for five days. On Friday 19 July the usher announced that they were ready to come back. Had they reached a unanimous verdict on Van Hoogstraten? No. Had they reached verdicts on Croke and Knapp? Yes. Guilty. Both of them.

  The judge sent the jurors home. They would return on Monday to try to reach a majority verdict on Van Hoogstraten. Over the weekend each of the twelve must have been thinking very hard. On Monday they were secretly bussed in for the last time to reconvene in the jury room at 10 am. They were out again, with their verdict, within forty-five minutes.

  It was the one morning in the whole trial that the Raja family were late in court. They more than anyone were convinced of Van Hoogstraten’s guilt and prayed for a guilty verdict. But they weren’t there to hear it. The foreman announced that they’d found Nicholas van Hoogstraten not guilty of murder but guilty of the manslaughter of Mohammed Raja. It was a majority verdict – eleven to one.

  The judge gave Robert Knapp and David Croke life. It was a formality. Croke wasn’t in court to hear the sentence. Knapp was. As he was taken down he turned to the jury and for the first time addressed them: ‘You have convicted an innocent man.’

  Van Hoogstraten was not sentenced that day. The judge announced that, having observed him for three months, he felt that a psychiatric report might serve the interests of justice. Pending that, he delayed sentencing until 2 October. But he warned that a life sentence was in his mind.

  The prisoners were taken down, and journalists streamed upstairs to the cafeteria, where the Raja family and the police staged a press conference. They were delighted to have some result but disappointed it wasn’t murder. In the cafeteria doorway Caroline Williams watched. She said nothing.

  Later, outside the Old Bailey, Caroline was on the outskirts of the crowd again, this time watching the TV cameras crowding round the Rajas. With her was another of the tycoon’s old lovers, Jennifer Prouse. When the cameras had had their fill of the Rajas, Caroline and Jennifer linked arms with Van Hoogstraten’s solicitor, one on each side of him, and walked away very slowly. Every film crew captured the moment. Every press photographer snapped it: two women, parading their defiance and their belief in Nicholas van Hoogstraten. And not one frame, not one shot was ever used. On the night of his conviction the world didn’t want to know about anyone who cared for the ‘devil’s landlord’.

  The next morning all that the press was interested in was the life of villainy of the man. Van Hoogstraten was accorded the kind of comments a mass murderer might expect. The Brighton Evening Argus devoted a supplement to him headlined ‘Goodbye … and good riddance’. The tabloids trumpeted the same feelings about Van Hoogstraten. The Sun’s headline called him ‘The Maniac in the Mink’.

  Life imprisonment was staring Van Hoogstraten in the face. Amongst the crime reporters who had followed the case through three gruelling months, the concensus was that the judge would impose the maximum sentence. For manslaughter, that meant life. The tycoon would be in his late 60s by the time he was released … if he lived that long. As it was, under the strain of the trial, he’d aged visibly. Over the months he seemed to have shrunk. The expensive business suits hung loosely on him and looked a size too big. He’d lost weight. His face too had changed. The prison pallor emphasised the deepening lines around those vulpine features. A friend would later confirm that, a
t the end of the trial, he was far from well.

  Yet, judging from the letters he wrote to the authors after the verdict, the inner man hadn’t changed. Ill or not, he was as buoyant and venomous as ever. He blamed everyone except himself for what had happened. In his first letter, responding to a request to visit him, he wrote, ‘I’m not sure that I should have any more to do with the media’ as it is mainly media lies and distortion that have got me convicted along with the bent judge and police “investigation” that allowed the real culprit to get away.’ Other letters were full of bile at the police, the lawyers, the Raja family and the judge. He was especially vitriolic about his highly respected lead counsel, Dick Ferguson, whose rows with him during the trial had become legend. The QC, he claimed, was incompetent and had been terrified of the judge.

  ‘So much for a reputation,’ he added. ‘I should have known better than have someone with a reputation. After all look at mine!’

  But, of course, Van Hoogstratan hadn’t given up.

  As his trial ended his fellow prisoners in Belmarsh high security prison in East London were agog over the story of how one of the biggest villains in the place had found a brilliant new lawyer who’d just saved him a cool £33 million. John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer was a heavy duty crook who was serving eight years for masterminding a massive timeshare fraud in Spain. He was facing seizure of his ill gotten goods – £33 million – when an Italian born avoccato, called Giovanni Di Stefano, began acting for him. The Italian discovered that the Crown Prosecution Service had slipped up in the seizure order. It had quoted the wrong law. A tiny mistake. But such is the demand for precision under British law that the order had to be revoked. Palmer kept that £33 million. Di Stefano was on the way to gaining a reputation in the underworld as a lawyer who could work miracles. He’d eventually become known as ‘the devil’s advocate’. Van Hoogstraten put in a call to him.

  Di Stefano would have appealed to the tycoon on several levels. Though raised and educated in England he was as unlike the bland lawyers who populate the English legal system as it’s possible to imagine. Small, dark, bald and intense, he always wore the obligatory dark pin-stripe suit and impenetrable dark glasses. He talked endlessly about himself in a cockney accent and made no secret of his past. He’d been involved in the MGM takeover scandal of 1990, and been the business partner and friend of one of the most notorious killers in the world – Arkan, the Serbian warlord.

  Van Hoogstraten signed up Di Stefano.

  The Italian was hardly on board when there was a ham-fisted move from the authorities. Two weeks before Van Hoogstraten was due to be sentenced, the Governor of Belmarsh stopped Di Stefano visiting him. The Italian demanded a judicial review of the Governor’s decision which meant an urgent hearing before a High Court judge. It was quickly over. Deaf to vague references about Di Stefano’s character and to doubts about his legal qualifications, Mr Justice Jackson ruled that under EU law, the tycoon could have whichever lawyer he liked. That specifically included Italian avoccatos.

  Whatever the Italian told Van Hoogstraten, the property magnate approached sentencing day in an optimistic frame of mind. He wrote to us claiming that the judge had misdirected the jury and the conviction would be overturned. He wrote that his enemies would all have ‘egg on their faces when my wrongful conviction is quashed shortly, as it will have to be.’ In an afterthought, Van Hoogstraten – who hates to be thought well of – crossed out ‘egg’ before ‘on their faces’ and substituted in capital letters ‘SHIT’.

  He also wrote to Mr Justice Newman. All that the judge revealed about the contents was that they were ‘characteristically forthright and direct’.

  He wrote to the prosecutor, David Waters QC, as well. It was, characteristically, an abusive letter, but the details weren’t released.

  As he awaited sentencing in October 2002 Van Hoogstraten parted company with his counsel, Richard Ferguson QC. Not, one imagines, amicably.

  Then he started work on his appeal. He also wrote a letter to Mr Justice Newman. All that the judge revealed about the contents was that they were ‘characteristically forthright and direct’.

  He wrote to the prosecutor, David Waters QC, as well. It was, characteristically, an abusive letter, but the details weren’t released.

  Sentencing was on 25 October.

  The judge had the reports of the two psychiatrists. He also himself observed Van Hoogstraten for three months in various moods and under pressure.

  He now summed up what he made of the man one newspaper had called the ‘most evil millionaire’ in the country.

  Van Hoogstraten, said the judge, was ‘almost self delusional’ and ‘incapable of accepting responsibility for anything’. He always believed that he was in the right and saw others as nonentities. His conduct was ‘appalling’ and provoked a similar reaction in others. Then he blamed them, seeing himself as the victim of their appalling conduct. ‘The cyclical pattern appears to be that he never accepts responsibility for anything he has done.’

  As Van Hoogstraten stood expressionless, the judge told him: ‘You are not a victim. You are more often than not the author of your own misfortunes… At some point you will have to face reality and face up to the responsibility you have from your position.’

  The judge announced that Van Hoogstraten’s womenfolk and children had written to him revealing that there was a generous side to the man. He didn’t say whether that weighed with him.

  He told the prisoner: ‘I sentence you on the basis that you were the instigator of a terrifying piece of intimidation which necessarily was designed to convey a threat to Mr Raja that he would be caused really serious bodily harm or killed unless he desisted from the fraud claim.’

  The sentence was ten years.

  As he heard the sentence, newspapers reported that Van Hoogstraten ‘smirked’. He did not. As sentence was passed he had his hands behind his back, clasping a pencil. It broke.

  There was one last piece of defiance. Van Hoogstraten was ordered to pay a third of the prosecution costs, or £120,000. Looking up at the judge, he snapped: ‘And you’re suggesting I’m not the victim, I suppose?’

  As far as the outside world was concerned that was the end of the story. Van Hoogstraten would, of course, appeal. But among hacks and lawyers at the Old Bailey the concensus was that he wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Van Hoogstraten’s letters, though, remained upbeat. ‘My leave to appeal will be granted shortly then the whole process starts to unravel,’ he wrote on 30 December 2002.

  The appeal was not his only concern. After his conviction the Raja family took up the fraud case which had begun the tragic saga.

  This fight resumed a mile away from the Old Bailey, in the Law Courts. and very quickly Van Hoogstraten began to get the worst of it. Ordered by the court to disclose his worldwide assets, the tycoon claimed that he wasn’t after all, mega rich. He didn’t own the palace and that fabulous art collection was no longer his. Indeed the man who only months before let the Old Bailey believe he was worth £500 million now claimed to be worth only a few million pounds.

  Judge Peter Smith, a no-nonsense, roly poly of a man with an Oliver Hardy moustache, made clear his disbelief. ‘Charade’ was one of the words he used to describe what he was hearing about the tycoon’s finances. He fined Van Hoogstraten £200,000 for defying the court and told him that £50,000 would be added for every week in which he didn’t come clean.

  That didn’t work and Judge Smith tightened the screws – or tried to. He ruled that because of Van Hoogstraten’s actions – his involvement in the killing and his failure to disclose – the tycoon had forfeited the right to a defence against the fraud claim. The Rajas had won. Van Hoogstraten must pay their £5 million.

  But it never happened. Everything began to change. Di Stefano had found the escape route Van Hoogstraten had prayed for.

  18

  FREEDOM

  Whether fate has taken a hand in Hoogstraten’s life is a moot point. If, as the ancie
nt Greeks believed, we are the playthings of the gods, then fate surely took a hand in Nicholas van Hoogstraten’s appeal against conviction.

  The appeal came about because the judge who presided over the murder trial was not originally booked for the hearing. As we have seen, the original judge, Michael Hyams, had excused himself from hearing the case because he had previously been threatened by van Hoogstraten during a civil case. His withdrawal was to have far-reaching consequences that no one could have foreseen at the time.

  The problem was his replacement’s summing-up to the jury. While reviewing the case against van Hoogstraten, Judge Newman failed to mention one vital piece of information. Describing the tragic events that unfolded on that morning in July in 1999 at the home of Mohammed Raja, Newman did not mention that the assailants had carried a gun.

  The judge’s omission quickly became a focus for Hoogstaten and his new defence team. Even before he was sentenced he’d concluded that his sentence would be quashed on grounds of misdirection of the jury. He told the authors so in a letter from prison. Showing all the old bounce, he wrote, ‘Don’t forget that you heard it here first. And you should know that I’m very seldom wrong and I’m certainly not wrong on this.’

  Thirty years earlier, Hoogstraten had successfully run his then much smaller empire from jail. Now he continued to run it through three people: the faithful Caroline Williams, the tough Greek Cypriot hotel owner, Andrew Emmanuel, and the secretive businessman David Martin. All kept their heads low, but the tycoon couldn’t stay out of the headlines. From prison, he was said to be masterminding a plan to sell Mig fighter planes to the Mugabe regime in his beloved Zimbabwe. Then he and di Stefano were linked to a scheme to house a thousand asylum seekers in an old aircraft carrier, to be moored off the Kent coast.

  The appeal began in the late spring of 2003 before Lord Justice Rose, Mr Justice McCombe and Mrs Justice Cox. It was time to see if Giovanni di Stefano’s skills were as considerable as he claimed. Of course, Mr Stefano did not cast his legal spells alone; other top legal minds were also employed. Chief among them was Peter Kelson QC, who had acted for that other di Stefano client, John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, when a court order confiscating his millions was rescinded.