PROFESSIONAL KILLERS (True Crime)

by Gordon Kerr

  His brother Dominic adds: ‘He’s a good Catholic.’ And Desmond says: ‘I am a Catholic. I don’t believe in a life for a life. I don’t believe in taking life.’

  Then the convicted armed robber laughs, adding with mock sincerity: ‘I’m sorry. I want to say sorry to everyone.’

  In the programme, Noonan goes on to boast chillingly about how he prevents witnesses from testifying against him. ‘The police pressurise key witnesses to tell lies about us. In the end they see sense and don’t come to court. Some can’t go to court because they haven’t got the bus fare. Some are deranged and delusioned because they are in the back of a trunk tied up! . . . That’s a joke, by the way,’ he adds. ‘No one wants to hurt us at the end of the day. And if they did, by God there would be some fireworks.’

  The programme would be aired four days later, but Desmond Noonan would not live long enough to see it. By the time his 15 minutes of fame arrived he was lying on a coroner’s slab, dead of stab wounds.

  Desmond Noonan, known to his friends as Dessie, was born in 1959 into a family where there would be 14 children in all, each bearing a name that began with the letter ‘D’. Home was the infamous Manchester suburb Moss Side, one of the city’s poorest areas, made up of row upon row of terrace housing and home to a large black community. In the 1980s and 1990s it was renowned for the large amount of crime and gang warfare that took place there and for serious rioting that would break out now and then. A lot of the crime involved Dessie Noonan and his two brothers, Dominic and Damian.

  Dessie began his criminal career as a bouncer on the doors of Manchester clubs in the early 1980s. His immense size and strength made him a good one, too, and he started to gain a reputation as a hard man. Before long, he was putting his own men on doors across the city and by the late 1980s, 80 per cent of the security of Manchester’s clubs and bars was under Noonan family control. Unfortunately, a 15-year stretch for taking part in a bank robbery put brother Dominic out of the picture for a while.

  Damian Noonan and another brother, Derek, started to forge links with other notable Manchester gangs such as the Cheetham Hill Crew, and in Moss Side Dessie was supplying the black gangs with guns and other weapons. He fancied spreading his wings a little, however, and began to forge strong links with gangs in other British cities, London, Newcastle and Liverpool. He was also involved with the IRA in Northern Ireland and the AFA, a militant anti-fascist organisation.

  In May 1988 he was convicted of perverting the course of justice and wounding. One charge involved ‘making threats of violence and death toward prosecution witnesses and relatives in an attempt to stop evidence being given at court’. The witnesses were, in fact, police officers.

  In 1991, the Noonans took control of organised crime in Manchester when rival gang leader Anthony Johnson, was murdered after taking part in a botched security van robbery. Known as White Tony because he was, bizarrely, the leader of a black drugs gang, he and three other men took around £360,000 from the van, but had to leave behind another million because they did not have sufficient transport to carry it away. It took police only a few hours to round up Johnson and his accomplices who took part in identity parades and were then released.

  All that was found of the stolen money was £120, discovered in the Wendy House of a relative of a man called Craig Bulger. Bulger was charged with dishonestly handling the cash, but was furious that he was not going to be paid what he was due. He went to Desmond Noonan demanding his share, £80,000. Noonan informed him that there was only £40,000 left. Bulger told Noonan he was going to complain to White Tony. This did not please Dessie at all, as White Tony had previously threatened some Noonan men with a shotgun in 1991 while they were working on the door of the Hacienda Club.

  A week later, Noonan was out driving one night with a man called Paul Flannery when he spied Anthony Johnstone, accompanied by an associate, Tony McKie, driving a white Ford Cosworth close to a pub called the Penny Black which Dessie part-owned. A gun was fired from Noonan’s car and Johnstone took off, trying to escape over a wall. He was shot in the back and fell backwards before being finished off on the ground.

  At the 1992 trial for Johnstone’s murder, Damien Noonan was cleared of any involvement in the killing and, following a retrial, in February 1993, Dessie and Derek were acquitted after the jury failed to reach a verdict. Interestingly, over the next few years Desmond Noonan faced a number of convictions over jury-tampering and witness-nobbling.

  By the mid-1990s Noonan was king of all he surveyed, a feared enforcer, with extensive links with the main players in Britain’s underworld and, naturally, he wanted it to remain that way. However, in 1995 he was convicted of brutally beating twin brothers who turned out to be London gangland figures trying to elbow their way into the lucrative Manchester guns and drugs scene. Noonan was described as behaving psychotically during the attack and pleaded guilty to violent disorder and causing grievous bodily harm. He was sentenced to two years and nine months in jail.

  By 2000 police estimated that the Noonans were connected to at least 25 gangland murders and countless robberies. They controlled security in cities the length and breadth of the United Kingdom and their criminal efforts were reckoned to have brought them earnings of at least eight million pounds.

  One-time Kray associate Curtis Warren, London gangster Dave Courtney and Newcastle’s crime supremo Paddy Conroy, all became involved with the Noonans in some way or another, showing the respect that they had accumulated and lending them even greater credibility. Dessie was connected to many leading IRA figures, especially Paddy Logan, a violent individual who once bit off the ear of an Ulster Loyalist at a press conference and who was later shot dead. It is rumoured, although it has never been proved, that, through those contacts, Dessie Noonan was involved in the bombing of Manchester city centre in 1996.

  Nothing is forever, however, and Dessie was an alcoholic by the time Dominic was released from prison in 2002 to assume leadership of the family’s activities. Then he was devastated when brother Damian was killed in a motorbike accident while on holiday in the Dominican Republic. As many as 18,000 people turned out for the funeral, one of the biggest gangland funerals ever staged in this country. Dessie fell to pieces, became addicted to crack cocaine and went into a deadly spiral.

  On the night of Friday, 18 March 2005, he had been drinking in the Parkside pub in the Wythenshawe area of Manchester. Around 11.30 p.m., his wife Sandra answered the phone. It was Dessie and he told her he had been stabbed and was in Merseybank Avenue in Chorlton. He asked her to get in the car and come and pick him up. When she got there, he was unconscious and she immediately dialled 999. It was too late, however. Dessie Noonan died of his wounds in the ambulance.

  His funeral was not quite as big as that of his brother Damian, but more than 5,000 local people turned up to watch his body arrive at Chorlton Church in a horse-drawn hearse. There were 40 limousines, 30 security men and a 25-piece, kilted pipe band. Out of ‘respect’ and for safety, motorways, businesses and two Manchester high schools were closed. As the priest spoke and the top-of-the-range ‘pieta’ coffin was lowered into the ground, Dominic’s mobile phone went off. It had also gone off while he was having a meeting with the undertaker; it was a death threat.

  Derek ‘Yardie’ McDuffus was sentenced to life imprisonment at Preston Crown Court for the murder of Desmond Noonan. It is believed that Noonan had been using his violent reputation and family connections to force local drug dealers to supply him with free drugs and McDuffus had objected. A fight ensued and he had stabbed Dessie and thrown him out into the street where he bled to death.

  Dominic said of his brother’s death: ‘Dessie was drunk at the time so we believe that someone took advantage of him. It was certainly not a robbery. He was a good lad. He helped a lot of people out. Everyone always turned to the Noonans to solve their problems. His death could be connected to a problem that he was involved in. Sandra is shocked. If people do not want to talk to the police then they can t
alk to us. He was a very funny guy and everyone is terribly upset. He was very well known and very well liked.’

  McDuffus languishes in solitary confinement for fear of retribution by the Noonan family.

  Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

  Nicholas Marcel Hoogstraten, aka Nicholas van Hoogstraten, was born in 1945 in the seaside town of Shoreham-by-Sea, on England’s south coast between Brighton and Worthing. He has been called by judges of various cases he has been involved in as a ‘bully’ and even a ‘self-styled emissary of Beelzebub’.

  His father was a shipping agent and he was educated at the local Jesuit school, leaving it at the age of 16 in 1962 to join the Royal Navy. Leaving the Navy after a year he launched his phenomenally successful business career as a property developer and landlord by selling his stamp collection for £1,000 and buying property in the Bahamas. He remains to this day an important philatelist. His own personal property portfolio, bought with some of his £500 million fortune, now boasts homes in Florida, St Lucia, Barbados, Cannes and Zimbabwe, a country he adores. In fact, he has described Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe as ‘100 per cent decent and incorruptible’, a view not held by very many people around the world. He is less happy with Mugabe these days as the President has seized his estates in Zimbabwe as part of his land distribution programme.

  Returning to Britain from his travels in the 1960s, van Hoogstraten began buying properties in Brighton and freeholds with sitting tenants in London’s Notting Hill Gate. He was able to evict these tenants and refurbish the properties, making a fortune in the process. By 1968 he was being lauded as Britain’s youngest millionaire, having built up a portfolio of some 300 properties. Nonetheless, controversy was never far away and he perhaps signalled what was to come when, aged 23, he spent four years in Wormwood Scrubs prison for ordering a grenade attack on the home of a Jewish clergyman, Reverend Braunstein, whose son owed him £2,000. In an interview in the Sunday Times, van Hoogstraten said: ‘He wasn’t a rabbi, he was only a cantor’.

  He went to jail again for handling stolen goods and was rearrested as he left Wormwood Scrubs and sentenced to another 15 months for bribing prison officers to bring him in luxuries. Freed on appeal, he was, later that year, fined for forcible entry and conspiracy to cause damage.

  By 1980 he was the owner and landlord of more than 2,000 properties. However, the property boom of the 1990s, coupled with a battle with the Inland Revenue – he went into the Guinness Book of Records for owing more money to the Inland Revenue, £5 million, than anyone in British history – persuaded him to sell the majority of his houses and put his money into other areas, including mining in Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

  In 1985 van Hoogstraten began the construction of Hamilton Palace, near Uckfield in East Sussex. This enormous neo-classical mansion was planned to be half a mile long and would be the biggest private house built in the 20th century. It was going to contain his collection of art and, in the east wing, a mausoleum for himself. The floors would be solid marble and the doors would be oak. Intricate detailing would add to the overblown extravagance of it all. Up to 2006 he had spent around £40 million and it was still a long way from completion.

  Van Hoogstraten has been engaged in a long-running feud with the Ramblers Association – he describes ramblers as ‘perverts’ and ‘the absolute scum of the earth’ – over a footpath that crosses Hamilton Palace’s land. For ten years he has padlocked gates, installed barbed wire and built across the path. He once snapped at a barrister representing the ramblers: ‘You dirty bastard, in due course, you are going to have it.’ He has never backed out of a fight, even at school, where he grabbed a chair-leg a nun was using to beat him and hit her with it. ‘She never tried again,’ he said.

  Meanwhile, work stopped on Hamilton Palace several years ago and it now stands, something of a ruin, with rain pouring through its copper-domed roof. Instead of being the greatest country house project of the 20th century, it has deteriorated into, as one of the builders employed on the site described it as, ‘the 20th century’s greatest folly’.

  Van Hoogstraten has always had a robust approach to doing business. A great fan of Margaret Thatcher – she made him ‘proud to be English’ – he believes in the survival of the fittest. He has been known to use dogs and enforcers to clear tenants out of his properties. He has even had staircases removed to chase them away. When a fire destroyed one of his houses, killing five people, he showed an especially callous disregard for them, describing them as ‘lowlife, drug dealers, drug takers and queers – scum’.

  Sixty-two-year-old father of six, Mohammed Raja was a slum landlord with a reputation for bad maintenance of his properties and more than 100 convictions against him for breaching regulations. He was born in Pakistan and moved to Brighton as a young man.

  Van Hoogstraten claimed that the feud between them had begun 16 years previously when he had loaned Raja more than a million pounds to buy properties. However, van Hoogstraten held on to the deeds. The slump in property prices in the early nineties rendered Raja unable to repay the loans and van Hoogstraten threatened to change the locks on the properties. He wrote to tenants claiming that Raja had been declared bankrupt and that rent should from now on be paid to him.

  In 1994 Raja began a civil action against van Hoogstraten, alleging that he had forged his signature on legal documents and accusing him of a breach of contract. In 1999 Raja escalated things, changing his case to one of alleged fraud. If the case was successful, van Hoogstraten would then face criminal proceedings and almost certainly go to prison for quite some time.

  Van Hoogstraten decided he wanted to teach the man he called ‘the Maggot’ a lesson. He had met a man called Robert Knapp in Gloucester Prison a number of years before. Knapp had become an associate of van Hoogstraten who called him ‘Uncle Bob’, and he was delegated to take care of Raja. Knapp took on another ex-con, David Croke, to help.

  Raja was well aware what he was dealing with, realising the danger of beginning proceedings against van Hoogstraten. Therefore, when his doorbell rang on the evening of 2 July at his home in Sutton, south London, he is likely to have picked up a knife on his way to answer it.

  Raja’s grandsons, upstairs at the time, reported later that they heard raised voices and then a loud bang. Running downstairs, they were horrified to find their grandfather covered in blood and in pain, clutching his chest. He shouted: ‘They are Hoogstraten’s men and they have hit me.’ In his delirious state he then addressed his mother, who had died 14 years earlier, saying: ‘Mum, they have hit me!’ He had been stabbed five times and shot in the face at very close range with a sawn-off shotgun by Knapp and Croke who had first appeared in Raja’s street disguised as gardeners.

  It did not take a genius to work out that van Hoogstraten might be behind the killing. He had, after all, allegedly told Raja’s son, Amjad: ‘Your dad is a maggot. He does not know what I am. We pick thorns who are a pain and we break them.’

  At the Old Bailey in July 2002, van Hoogstraten – in his words, ‘the richest man ever to be tried at the Old Bailey’ – claimed that, although he admitted he had wanted Raja harmed, he had not wanted Knapp and Croke to kill him; they had gone too far.

  The two men were found guilty of murder and, as he sentenced them to life, Mr Justice Newman said that they were ‘plainly very dangerous men indeed. It is the place of everyone to consider what brings men to take a sawn-off shotgun and a knife to an elderly man and, having stabbed him fatally, to shoot him in the head at a range of 6–12 inches. In this case, no remorse between the stabbing and the shooting, no hesitation, simply delay, simply to reload the shotgun. No holding back in the presence in the house of the grandsons, no apparent concern for the horror they had to witness, no remorse in this court, no motive to the killing, save one, greed, greed for some money or the receipt of favours.’

  In the case of van Hoogstraten, there were some strange goings-on. Firstly, another associate of his, Michael Hamdan, who was due to give evidence in the t
rial, fled to Lebanon, apparently in fear of his life. It had been Hamdan who had implicated van Hoogstraten in the murder but he claimed that van Hoogstraten had made it clear to him that he would never be able to give his evidence and, if he did, and van Hoogstraten did go to jail, Hamdan and his family would die. Naturally, van Hoogstraten denied it all.

  Then, Tanika Sali, van Hoogstraten’s girlfriend, refused to testify for the prosecution after saying she would. She retracted her police statements and, in spite of warnings about the consequences, would not say why she no longer wanted to go into the witness box. It was noticed when she arrived at the court, however, that she was wearing an expensive new outfit. She claimed friends had purchased it for her.

  Van Hoogstraten, dressed in expensive casual clothes, gave evidence for several days, during which he denied paying Knapp £7,000 to carry out the hit. He alleged that Hamdan was, himself, in dispute with Raja and was attempting to frame him for the killing. He admitted that he had a terrible temper and had threatened violence and even death in the past to people who had crossed him. He reminded the court that ‘there have been no dead bodies’. It emerged during the trial that, although he was a multi-millionaire, when police searched his home they found teabags drying on a draining board ready to be used again and testament to van Hoogstraten’s legendary meanness.

  It took the jury of six men and six women 37 hours and 49 minutes to reach a verdict, not of murder but of manslaughter, and by a verdict of 11 to one. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. In July 2003, however, he was given leave to appeal and his sentence was sensationally overturned due to a flaw in instructions to the jury during the trial.

  As soon as he emerged from prison, the Raja family mounted a civil action in which they were awarded £6 million. Naturally, he counter-sued and refused to divulge his assets. Anyway, by this time, he had set up trust funds for his five children who had basically become walking banks for him.