Hoogstraten letters insisted he was innocent

The multi-millionaire maintained he had nothing to do with the brutal slaying of Brighton landlord Mohammed Raja and that it was he who was the victim.

From the time he began his sentence, he said he would not have risked his fortune on a man he regarded as nothing more than "an amusement".

While locked away alongside murderers and rapists in a high security wing of Belmarsh Prison, Mr Hoogstraten studied the law obsessively in a bid to prove his innocence.

His tenacity paid off and he served just over a year of his original ten-year sentence.

He revealed his unshakeable belief his conviction was unsafe and that he would eventually be freed in a series of letters to Adam Trimingham, a reporter for The Argus.

In one, written in October 2002, he said: "No one who sat through the 'trial' and listened to all the evidence and legal arguments, especially those proceedings (40 per cent) in the absence of the jury, could possibly have concluded that I was guilty of anything.

"I do not, at this stage, intend to give details of the actual events that led up to the death of Mr Raja or of those responsible other than to say that the truth did not come out in front of the jury.

"The suggestion that I, with my resources, would send a pair of 'over the hill' heroine (sic) addicts, one of whom could be traced to me, to kill, or as it later became, to frighten Mr Raja, using a £400 beaten-up getaway van and a single barrel shotgun is a farce and such a farce that I never took the allegations seriously."

The series also revealed how Mr Hoogstraten was coping with life on the inside after being wrenched from his opulent and affluent lifestyle and contradicted Jeffrey Archer's controversial accounts of life at Belmarsh.

While Archer, who had been jailed at Belmarsh for perjury, claimed the food was intolerable and moaned about the staff, the regime, drug abusers and other prisoners at London's top security jail, Mr Hoogstraten said it was not too bad.

He pointed the finger of blame at everyone from the trial judge and the media to the police and even his first legal team.

He later sacked the team because he believed them to be incompetent and employed a new one headed by an Italian lawyer.

He wrote: "Anyway, fortunately, as it turns out, I do not need to proceed with five or six clear grounds of appeal because I have two 'killer' legal points (excuse the pun) which I will bring to your attention.

"In many cases I had to resort to applications and legal argument with the judge myself. I won on every point, which must tell us something.

"Another point which came as a surprise is that I've had several hundred letters of support from members of the public, and only two against, both from 'ramblers' who didn't give an address - that must indicate something."

Hoogstraten signed the six-page letter "Old Nick" in his distinctive sloping script. He wrote again barely two weeks later on October 14, 2002, while awaiting sentence.

He continued to pour scorn on his conviction and those who had helped put him away.

He said: "For this judge who made it his personal mission to get me convicted of anything and no matter what, it will be the worst day of his professional life - but he brought it all on himself and did not take heed of the words of Psalm 141 (the final section) which I referred to in court during my evidence.

"Psalm 54 is also entirely appropriate to my position in this matter. No, I have not become a religious nut in my 'old' age but the facts of the matter are that throughout this ordeal I have received help from a number of different and unexpected sources, including, divine.

"However, shortly after my conviction I was contacted by a crown court judge (and others) who told me that my conviction was not possible in law on the issue of 'joint enterprise' which I had not, at that stage, even considered because I knew that I was safe on the manslaughter alternative point.

"This judge also told me that he had reported the mistake which he said was a 'fatal misdirection and non- direction' by the judge on the matter.

"So there you are, and don't forget that you heard it here first."

Mr Hoogstraten described his life inside his cell, spending his days poring over legal documents while other prisoners watched television.

He said: "All the other lads have TV and radios but I don't as I'm not interested. I didn't have them outside so don't need them here.

"I spend most of my time on my own work or doing the legal work/assistance of some of the other lads.

"Sorry, I do check the stock market on the teletext two/three times a day!! That is on the communal television."

In another letter, Mr Hoogstraten criticised the Judge, Mr Justice Newman, and said: "Around legal circles word had got out that there were two major grounds for my conviction to be quashed and that he was required to issue a certificate for appeal, which, I now know, is the legal way that he admits his mistake and fast tracks it to the Court of Appeal.

"However, the pig-headed b*****d was not having any of it even though the prosecution did not oppose, which is very unusual.

"He then set out to invent an entirely new theory, unsupported by any evidence, that I sent those men to 'threaten to kill' Raja for the sole excuse of being able to give me ten years which is the maximum sentence for a threat to kill someone!"

Mr Hoogstraten later complained about a civil action being brought against him by the Raja family and hinted he had even more to say but could not until he was set free.

Once heralded as Britain's youngest millionaire, Mr Hoogstraten has never made any secret of his robust approach to business.

He appears to revel in his image as a ruthless operator.

In 1968, he was sentenced to four years in jail and went to Wormwood Scrubs after hiring others to firebomb the home of a business associate, a Jewish synagogue clergyman, who he claimed owed him money.

The judge in that trial described the young property tycoon as a "self-imagined emissary of Beelzebub".

Mr Hoogstraten himself once suggested the pursuit of wealth was "to separate oneself from the riffraff" and in his own terms he has been remarkably successful.

His fortune, sometimes estimated at £200 million, has won him a regular place in lists of Britain's wealthiest people.

He has homes in Barbados, St Lucia, Florida, Cannes and Zimbabwe.

His private life is closely guarded but he was born in 1946 as Nicholas Marcel Hoogstraten in Shoreham.

His grandfather was a major shareholder in the British East India Company but by the time he was born the family was no longer wealthy.

His father worked as a shipping agent, his mother was a housewife and he had two sisters and was educated at a Jesuit school.

From an early age he aspired to be what he calls a "quality person".

He left school at 16 and joined the Royal Navy and travelled the world.

Just a year later he sold his astutely acquired stamp collection for £1,000 and embarked on a business career, buying property in the Bahamas.

With the profits, he moved in to the British housing market, buying six properties in Notting Hill in west London before moving on to Brighton.

By the time he was 22, he was reputed to have had 350 properties in Sussex alone and to have become Britain's youngest millionaire.

He also gained a hard reputation and was accused of using strong-arm tactics against tenants of slum properties which he bought cheaply for redevelopment. Tenants he regarded as "filth".

In the Eighties, as the housing market boomed, he prospered, acquiring more than 2,000 properties.

By the Nineties he had sold 90 per cent of them, making massive profits and investing in other areas, including global mining.

In business he admits to having done "all sorts of things one shouldn't strictly do", but claims he was always justified.

He employed a complex web of companies to administer property.

In the early Eighties he restructured his affairs after the Inland Revenue presented him with a bill for £5.3 million.

Away from his business dealings he has fathered five children - four sons and a daughter - by three different mothers.

His views are notoriously robust and he once described his own politics as "to the right of Attila the Hun".

He was a great fan of Margaret Thatcher because she made him "proud to be English".

He has been a vocal supporter of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

Despite Mugabe's land seizure programme and attacks on white farmers, Mr Hoogstraten once claimed that Zimbabwe was the "safest and most civilised" country in Africa.

In recent years he developed a consuming obsession with "Hamilton Palace", his neo-classical, copper-domed mansion, which he named after Bermuda's capital.

Work began more than a decade ago on his estate near Uckfield.

At an estimated cost of £40 million, it was reportedly the most expensive private house built in Britain for a century.

It is bigger than Buckingham Palace and has Louis XV furniture, a Holbein painting, a 600ft art gallery and a mausoleum designed to hold Mr Hoogstraten's body after death for 5,000 years - the walls are 3ft thick.

In recent years he also fought a long-running campaign against the Ramblers' Association over a footpath which runs across the corner of the estate.

When he blocked the path with a shed, barbed wire and old fridges, it sparked 4,000 letters of protest.

In typical combative style, the tycoon refused to back down in the face of the ramblers' campaign and heaped abuse on them, calling them "riffraff", "perverts", "flashers", "the dirty mac brigade" and "the great unwashed".

In turn they branded him "the sad Citizen Kane of Sussex", conjuring up an image of a lonely figure incarcerated within his own personal Xanadu.

Additional reporting by Fay Millar