'The emissary of Beelzebub'

As one of Britain's most reviled landlords, a vocal supporter of Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe, and the bane of UK ramblers, he has happily collected enemies as fast as he has houses.

He has even refused to speak to his own mother, describing her as "a miserable cow", and admitted to having hit a nun with a chair leg when he was at school.

Hoogstraten, a ruthless businessman, spent four years in Wormwood Scrubs in the Sixties after hiring thugs to throw a grenade into the home of a business associate - a Jewish synagogue clergyman who he claimed owed him money.

Ten years ago, when a fire broke out at one of his properties in Hove, he described the five people who died in the blaze as "lowlife, drug dealers, drug takers and queers - scum".

On another occasion he recalled how when US president John F Kennedy was shot in 1963 he felt "glad" because Kennedy had been "on an ego trip".

He has called tenants "filth" and people who live in council houses "worthless and lazy".

He began building Hamilton Palace, his neo-classical, copper-domed mansion, which he named after Bermuda's capital, more than a decade ago on his estate near Uckfield.

It is bigger than Buckingham Palace and has Louis XV furniture, a Holbein painting, a 600ft art gallery and a mausoleum designed to hold Hoogstraten's body for 5,000 years.

In recent years, he 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.

One council official said his officers were "scared to death" of Hoogstraten.

In typical combative style, the tycoon refused to back down in the face of the ramblers' campaign and heaped abuse on them, using epithets like "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.

An estimated wealth of £200 million sees him regularly featured in lists of Britain's wealthiest people. He has homes in Barbados, St Lucia, Florida, Cannes and Zimbabwe.

He was born in 1946 as plain Nicholas Marcel Hoogstraten - the "van" was added later - in Shoreham.

The future multi-millionaire's 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.

He was educated at a Jesuit school.

Recalling his experience there, he said: "One of the nuns tried to whack me with a chair-leg once. I grabbed it and hit her and she never tried again."

At 16 he joined the Royal Navy and travelled the world.

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 from that, he moved in to the British housing market, buying six properties in Notting Hill in 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.

But he also gained a sinister reputation, and was accused of using strong-arm tactics against tenants of slum properties which he bought cheaply for redevelopment.

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

By the 1990s he had sold 90 per cent of them, making massive profits, and investing in other areas, including global mining.

As his dark image grew, one newspaper described him as "the nastiest slum landlord of the post-Rachman era".

But Hoogstraten refused to accept that Rachman, with whom he had business dealings, was all bad and said stories about him were "out of all proportion".

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

Hoogstraten admits that in furthering his international business interests he bribed officials in Cuba. He also claims he can never go back to Nigeria because he flooded tin mines there.

As he clawed his way to multi-millionaire status, he fathered five children - four sons and a daughter - by three different mothers.

Until being charged with murder, and held in custody in the high-security Belmarsh prison in south London, he lived partly in Sussex and partly in Zimbabwe, where he has an estimated £30 million fortune based on mines and a million acres of farmland.

He once said: "I don't believe in democracy, I believe in rule by the fittest."

His views on women in society are equally old-fashioned.

He said: "I see more of traditional life and the way things should be in Africa - the system whereby the man is the boss is the way God made it."

Despite president Mugabe's land seizure programme and attacks on white farmers, he claimed that Zimbabwe was the "safest and most civilised" country in Africa and any violence was minor compared to that in Britain.

He says Mr Mugabe - to whose Zanu (PF) party he has donated money - is "100 per cent decent and incorruptible".