The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [57]
Perhaps I should let him paint his own portrait, for he’s not been shy of speaking up. On his upbringing: ‘My mother was just an object, something I inherited. She used to wind my father up by telling him what a bastard I was. The only relationship I had with her was: “Give me some money.”’ Or that of his own five children, by three different mothers (‘Once you’ve had black, you never go back’), none of whom were deemed suitable Mrs van H material (‘Do I look stupid?’). One of his broodmares said that when her waters broke on a valuable carpet, he ordered her to clean it immediately: ‘Of course. It was a blooming twelve thousand pound Persian silk carpet. When one owns art one has to be a custodian of it. She was only the carrier of my child. Anyway, the baby didn’t come for ages.’
His business methods are even less savoury. At its height, his empire included 2,000 properties, mainly in London and Brighton, and thousands of tenants, or ‘riff-raff’ as he preferred to call them. Evicting a tenant once, he allegedly assisted in hurling their furniture out of the window, describing it as ‘the best bit of fun I’ve had in ages’. Others were beaten up, or came home to find staircases and roofs removed: ‘That was just amusement,’ he explains. ‘Entertainment. Of course I threaten tenants on a daily basis. It’s perfectly legal; people have got to pay their rent.’ In 1968, he was imprisoned for ordering the firebombing of one of his tenants, a Jewish holy man. When he came out of prison, he allegedly kidnapped his own accountant, who he claimed had stolen £140,000 from him: ‘Look, I was justified. I took him to Paris and locked him in a property I own there for two years. I fed him on sardines and biscuits and he worked for me until he’d repaid the debt.’ The properties with which he was linked were often in a shocking state of disrepair. Five people died in an arson attack on a third-floor flat in Hove in 1992. There was no fire escape, a fact that the council had repeatedly reported, although they had found it nigh on impossible to prove actual ownership of the property, as, true to form, this was vested in a labyrinthine network of stooges and paper companies. He wasted no time in mourning the dead, however, describing them as ‘lowlife, drug dealers, drug takers and queers – scum’.
Previous convictions included demanding money with menaces, forcible entry, bribery, handling stolen goods, assault and contempt of court. In 2002, he was convicted of the manslaughter of a business associate, Mohammed Raja, who was stabbed and then shot in the face by hired hitmen in front of his grandchildren. He was sentenced to ten years, but freed on appeal after a year in Belmarsh. ‘Raja was nothing,’ he said then. ‘If I had a list of people I wanted executed that maggot wouldn’t even have figured.’ He was contemptuous of the dead man’s family for seeking compensation from him (‘They’re a bunch of shit-bags, they always were’), and the way that he had been brought to trial (‘The police and judiciary are dishonest and incompetent. They fitted me up. I had to keep my mouth shut during the trial but now I’m going to fuck the lot of them’).
In 1985, he began building a lavish mansion on a site he – or rather, an opaque network of companies – owned near Uckfield. The largest private house to be built in Britain in the twentieth century was to be his mausoleum and the home for his art collection. Rumours swirled that it was a retirement home for Robert Mugabe, whom Hoogstraten had described as ‘a hundred per cent decent and incorruptible’. Planning permission was only granted a decade later, not that such civic niceties ever made much difference to Hoogstraten. And as for a public footpath running through the estate, well, that was beyond irrelevant. He blocked it with a padlocked fence, two lines of barbed wire, a vast shed built right across it, and a stack of old refrigerator