Devilish tycoon who ruled with fear plotted rival's demise

LONDON - He had a £400 million ($1.3 billion) fortune, a £40 million country house and one of the world's most fabulous art collections.

But yesterday Nicholas van Hoogstraten spent the first night of what could be a life sentence in jail.

Seldom can someone have blown so much and attracted so little sympathy. He was a property tycoon who described his tenants as "filth", ramblers who strayed on to his land as "nosy perverts", and council house tenants as "worthless".

He cultivated an image of cold ruthlessness and violence, an image even police had begun to think made him invulnerable as two witnesses refused to give evidence against him.

But yesterday, after he was found guilty of the manslaughter of Mohammed Sabir Raja, a minor business rival who had had the audacity to sue him, it became clear that his absolute belief that he was above the law was wrong.

During his three-month trial, van Hoogstraten mocked the suggestion that he had paid two hitmen as little as £7000 in instalments and logged them in his diary simply to end a legal row with Raja.

Why, he asked the jury, his bottom lip often shaking melodramatically, should a multimillionaire throw away everything over a trivial piece of litigation that he could have written off against tax?

Raja, 62, was a property dealer on a much smaller scale than van Hoogstraten. They had many business dealings but fell out over property in the Brighton area, where van Hoogstraten had most of his portfolio.

Litigation dragged on, and at one point Raja made an allegation of fraud against the tycoon. On the morning of July 2, 1999, two men arrived at Raja's home in Sutton, Surrey, and shot and stabbed him in an attack witnessed by two of his grandsons.

Raja ran bleeding from room to room and shouted that his assailants were "van Hoogstraten's men" before he died.

The killers fled, setting fire to the van in which they arrived, and then vanished.

The jury cleared van Hoogstraten of murder, accepting that he wanted Raja, whom he described as a "maggot", harmed and had not intended his men to kill him.

His sentencing was adjourned to October pending a psychiatric report.

When the murder took place, van Hoogstraten was on his way to Gatwick Airport to catch a flight to the south of France.

Detectives linked him with his co-defendant, career criminal Robert Knapp, who was convicted last week with armed robber David Croke.

Knapp's mother lived in a cottage on the tycoon's estate in Uckfield, East Sussex, and the two men had spent time together in prison in 1968.

At the time, van Hoogstraten was serving four years for ordering a 2am hand-grenade attack on the Brighton home of the father of a business associate who owed him £2000.

Sentencing him, the judge said: "This young man is a self-imagined devil. He thinks he is an emissary of Beelzebub."

Van Hoogstraten, 57, was born in Shoreham, East Sussex. He began building his fortune at 17 after a stint in the Navy.

By the time he was 22, van Hoogstraten had built a portfolio of more than 300 properties in London and the Brighton and Hove areas, where he developed a reputation as a landlord to be feared.

He clawed his way to success by buying cheap properties with sitting tenants and then using enforcers to get them to leave, automatically increasing the properties' value.

A master at manipulating the legal system, he ran his business empire through a labyrinthine network of front companies and aliases. He has property and farms in the United States, France, the West Indies and Zimbabwe.

For a man worth so much, van Hoogstraten was also mean. He commonly reused teabags.

He has four sons and a daughter by three different mothers but has said he is making no provision for their future, arguing they should make their own way.

Instead, he has had a mausoleum built for himself for his body to lie "like the ancient pharoahs" inside Hamilton Palace, the £40 million mansion he has been constructing for almost a quarter of a century near Uckfield, East Sussex, some say to take his wealth with him when he goes.

Initially drawn on a napkin, it is the largest house built in Britain for a century, with a bigger frontage than Buckingham Palace. The walls are 1m thick and built to last 5000 years.

- AGENCIES