Hoogstraten: Rise and fall

And Mr H, as he calls himself, plays the good-looking bad guy.

Always dressed top-to-toe in black, his eyes hidden behind black shades with a beautiful girl draped over his arm, for more than 30 years the tough-talking tycoon has controlled a vast slum empire.

He manages his interests through a web of businesses, exercising power through fear with threats of violence against his vulnerable tenants by a squad of devoted henchmen.

Famously described by a judge in 1970 as a "self-imagined devil who thinks he is an emissary of Beelzebub", his blunt comments - calling evictions "fun", his tenants "scumbags" and most recently ramblers "riffraff" - have added to his carefully-crafted image.

But for someone who believes money can make a man untouchable by the law (he had £185 million at last count), he has spent a fair amount of his life on the wrong side of it.

After a life in the headlines Hoogstraten planned to retire quietly in his own private Xanadu, the fabulously elegant but still unfinished Hamilton Palace.

It is now more likely he will live out his autumn years in the equally impenetrable HMP Belmarsh.

It is 35 years since the son of a shipping agent, born on February 25, 1945, first hit the headlines when jailed for four years for organising a hand grenade attack on the home of a Rabbi whose son owed him money.

By then Hoogstraten, aged just 22 styled himself as Britain's youngest millionaire and already controlled hundreds of properties across the South-East with interests in the Bahamas and Zimbabwe.

His strictly Catholic father Marcel, aka Charles, worked for the Dutch East India Trading Company, escaping from France to England during the Nazi occupation of 1940. He met future wife Edna at a munitions factory in Bognor.

Nick and his two younger sisters grew up through the post-war depression in a modest home in Shoreham.

The young Nicholas showed early signs of the guile which became his trademark after his father gave him his valuable stamp collection.

He tells how he traded all the best stamps out of his friends' collections and set up a mail-order business, using money from his paper round to further his collection.

By 14 he was going to lessons at his Jesuit school in Worthing in a three-piece suit, carrying a copy of the FT to study his mining shares. He refused to go to certain classes, instead sitting alone in empty classrooms attending to his business.

As his firm began to take over the family home his father put his foot down. At 16 he was taken out of school and joined the merchant navy.

While overseas he saw how Florida was being developed. He went to the Bahamas and saw its potential.

Using money from his stamps, about £30,000, he bought several thousand acres. As land prices rocketed he sold up, netting him hundreds of thousands of pounds. He was out of the navy and home in a year.

Hoogstraten's property spree began during a chat with a friend whose father was putting a string of houses with sitting tenants up for sale, saying they were virtually worthless.

He bought the properties at auction and was soon buying up all the tenanted houses he could get his hands on, treating Hove as a real-life Monopoly board, though his tastes were always more Old Kent Road than Mayfair.

He would then set about forcing the tenants to leave, reselling the empty houses as vacant possession at a profit of about 150 per cent.

His strong-arm tactics became legendary. He would allow roofs to leak, encourage all-night parties, cut off power and even forcibly evict people, having their belongings smashed by his cronies.

One elderly couple who complained of litter in the garden of the house where they had lived for 32 years woke to find Hoogstraten had shipped in a mound of garbage and lorry loads of horse manure.

"It's great fun and there isn't a thing they can do about it," he told The Argus.

Within a few years he had 300 houses. Eventually his portfolio swelled to 2,000.

One scheme involved buying up entire streets, letting them fall in to disrepair, claiming government renovation grants and selling them, again at vast profit.

In 1963, aged 18, Hoogstraten spent £40,000 on mining claims and land in the southern African country Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) striking up a friendship with magnate Tiny Rowland of Lonrho.

He became a financial backer for the Zanu-PF party as it fought for the liberation from the colonial Government. Over the years he has contributed hundreds of thousands of pounds and in return his properties, which cover more than a quarter of a million acres, have remained untouched.

But in the recent fast-track "redistribution programme" three of his prime properties have been seized and others have been invaded.

It was also in the early Sixties that he made one of what he regards as his few mistakes. Offered the chance to back the nascent Rolling Stones he unsympathetically turned them down, because they were "a lot of scruffy urchins."

By the age of 22 he began building up a priceless collection of antique furniture, art and gold.

He was not shy about his wealth. It was the height of the swinging Sixties and Hoogstraten was buying four new suits a month, dressing like a dandy, being driven around in a chauffeur-driven Roller, hiring planes to go to Paris so he didn't have to sit with the "peasants" and throwing outrageous parties. Martinique, Monte Carlo and Cannes were his playgrounds.

As his fortune grew, he was more able to exercise the contempt in which he held 99 per cent of the human race and his fame turned to notoriety.

He said the majority of his tenants never heard a squeak out of him. But those who complained, "the scumbags", were given something to really complain about.

This heavy-handed treatment soon landed him in trouble with the law.

In 1967, living in Furze Hill, Hove, he was taken to court for calling a policeman a 'bastard'.

Even when jailed for four years in August 1968, for his part in the grenade attack, he kept his empire going from his cell in Wormwood Scrubs. Of the attack he told police: "I think it is marvellous, the bastard owed me money."

The judge described him as an arrogant, evil young man with an exaggerated sense of his own importance.

He was simultaneously sentenced for five years for housebreaking, larceny, burglary and receiving more than £7,000 worth of stolen property.

Minutes after his release in 1972 he was arrested and later jailed for 15 months for bribing a warder to smuggle luxuries into his cell.

When free once more, after a successful appeal, his first visit was to an accountant who, he believed, had stolen £14,000 from him while he was inside.

Hoogstraten and two men waited outside a bank in North Street. When the man came out he was bundled into the boot of a Rolls Royce and shipped off to France where he was forced to work off his debt in isolation, living off a diet of sardines for a year.

In 1971 one of Hoogstraten's finance companies bought High Cross, a sprawling Victorian mansion on an estate near Framfield, near Uckfield, for £200,000.

In 1973 he moved to Switzerland as a tax exile but spent most of his time in Paris.

In 1974 he was fined £3,000 for evicting a family from their home in Vere Road, Brighton, and smashing up their furniture and removing windows in what became known as the "Battle of Brighton".

In 1978 he was back in the headlines when a company of which he was director, Getherwell Finance Ltd, barricaded 12 elderly people in a nursing home, holding siege as they attempted to take possession.

His links to a web of companies are difficult to untangle, he uses at least 20 aliases including Paul Clark, Nicholas Hamilton and Nicholas Adolf von Hessen.

But in 1978 he surpassed himself. At a creditors' meeting he showed his contempt for the proceedings by appointing Snow White as liquidator of Getherwell, Grumpy, Bashful and Sleepy as members of the inspection committee and Donald Duck as trustee.

The following year he was bound over in sum of £500 to keep the peace after calling magistrates "trash".

In 1980 he added his name to the Guinness Book of Records, being served a £5.3 million bill for unpaid tax, the largest independent bill ever sent out by the Inland Revenue. It was paid in two years.

In 1982, in a Day in the Life-style diary piece, he told The Argus: "I have my own religion, power. I control the lives of hundreds of thousands of people just by making decisions about whether to buy or sell a business."

He was less forthcoming with ITV's veteran reporter Roger Cook, who was assaulted when he paid a visit to his office in First Avenue.

In 1983, High Cross, then worth £600,000, was accidentally burned down in a mystery fire. Days later, a Hoogstraten-owned house in Denmark Villas was set on fire after a gas pipe was severed. He blamed far-left anarchists.

It was in 1985 that Hoogstraten started work on his 'grand project', selling off 70 per cent of his properties just before the house-price crash.

Hamilton Palace - named after the capital of Bermuda where he made his first real money - was to be Hoogstraten's final resting place at a projected cost of £35 million.

The copper-domed Baroque mansion was conceived 15 years ago on the back of a napkin, taking in elements from Buckingham Palace and Versailles.

The first floor was to house his art and antiquities which includes the biggest private collection of artefacts relating to the history of slavery.

The east wing was to be set aside as a mausoleum. Upon his death, the entire building was to be sealed up so he could lie in state like some latter-day Pharoah, surrounded by Egyptian relics and other trinkets he had amassed to lie undisturbed for 5,000 years.

But, with the imposing bronze dome still surrounded by scaffolding, work has stopped at the house amid a dispute with the builders. Fifteen years on and many say Hoogstraten's Toad Hall is unlikely ever to be finished.

Away from the opulence of his own home it was business as usual for his long-suffering tenants.

Portland Gate, a tenement block in Portland Road, Hove became the subject of national scandal when featured on BBC documentary Panorama.

He owned a large stake in the block which was crumbling around the families who had bought flats there. It was deemed unfit for human habitation and eventually demolished.

His exotic private life mirrored his professional career. Proudly misogynistic, he has five children, four sons and a daughter aged four to 15, by three different African women.

Two are the same age because their mothers "overlapped".

They are all being privately educated, the eldest at Mowden in The Droveway, Hove.

In 1991 Hoogstraten was back in court, this time successfully battling to stop leaseholders of flats in Palmeira Square from buying their freehold. The residents were eventually landed with a crippling £200,000 bill for costs.

In 1992 Hoogstraten was linked, via a network of companies, to 11 Palmeira Avenue where five people died in a fire. Three jumped to their deaths because there was no fire escape.

He initially denied any connection with the building but, after an investigation by The Argus, admitted it was linked to him in "some way."

The deaths led to calls for the tightening up of a loophole allowing councils to enforce safety regulations are met in properties even where ownership is unclear.

In 1996 at a secret ceremony in Las Vegas he married Agnes Gnoumou, his "Queen of Africa" who he had met five years earlier in Cannes. Their relationship ended shortly after Agnes gave birth to their son Orrie.

In the mid-1990s Hoogstraten devoted himself to his palace, proudly showing queues of journalists around as its 3ft thick walls rose from 150ft-deep foundations. He appeared to have mellowed with age and self-knowledge, espousing the virtues of planting trees and quietly donating sums of money to various charities.

At the time he was living in a three-bedroom detached cottage back from the road on the main estate. An African girl in her 20s was his constant companion, sitting in on meetings reading the Beano.

Workers on the site were always surprised to see the multi-millionaire rolling up in an H-reg Audi or C-reg BMW instead of the Rolls-Royces of old.

Once every ten weeks he would fly out to Zimbabwe but as his land became overrun the trips stopped.

In 1998 the Ramblers' Association turned a row over a blocked footpath running past the High Cross estate into a cause celebre for the Right To Roam. A string of court battles followed which remain unresolved - the footpath remains blocked.

But the death of notorious slum landlord Mohammed Raja, 62, in July 1999 thrust Hoogstraten back into his more traditional place in the media spotlight.

Father-of-six Raja was found dead outside his Surrey home by his two teenage grandsons. He had gunshot and knife wounds.

Hoogstraten was arrested at his office in Courtlands Hotel, The Drive, Hove, by officers from the Metropolitan Police serious crime squad in July last year.

The pair had been rivals for many years. Raja had built up his bedsit empire after moving to England from Pakistan in the 1960s. When he left Brighton for Sutton in 1995 he left behind about 100 convictions for letting unfit properties.

One close associate, who had a bust-up with Hoogstraten several months ago, spoke for the many who anonymously helped contribute to this report.

He said: "At first I thought he was a sort of loveable rogue and that most of the stories about him had been exaggerated in the press. Now I just think he's a little s**t."