Millionaire faces jail over contract killing

Published on Tuesday 23 July 2002 01:00

ONE of Britain’s richest - and most notorious - property tycoons was yesterday facing a life sentence after being convicted of killing a business rival who dared to challenge him.

Nicholas van Hoogstraten, 57, a ruthless businessman with a string of previous convictions, a man who considered himself above the law, hired two thugs to take revenge on father-of-six Mohammed Raja after he began legal action against him.

Yesterday, an Old Bailey jury decided that, although van Hoogstraten had wanted Mr Raja harmed, he had not ordered his murder. After eight days of deliberation, they found him not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter by a majority verdict of 11-1.

Retired businessman Mr Raja, 63, a former associate of van Hoogstraten’s, ignored his brutal reputation - he once ordered a business rival’s home to be firebombed while he slept with his wife and children - when he took legal action against him, alleging fraud.

But van Hoogstraten, who ruled his property empire through fear, decided to teach Mr Raja - a man he described as a "maggot" and a "thorn" that he would "break" - a lesson.

He asked Robert Knapp, an old friend and enforcer he met in prison and used to carry out his dirty work, to take care of it. But it went too far.

Instead, Knapp, 55, and another ex-convict, David Croke, 59, murdered Mr Raja in his home in Sutton, Surrey, in July 1999.

In a violent attack, which the judge said showed "no remorse", Mr Raja was stabbed repeatedly then shot in the face at point-blank range with a sawn-off shotgun in front of his teenage grandson, Rizvan.

As he lay dying, the court heard, Mr Raja, 63, gasped, in Punjabi: "These are Hoogstraten’s men. They’ve hit me, they’ve hit me."

Last week Knapp and Croke were convicted of Mr Raja’s murder.

Mr Justice Newman delayed sentencing van Hoogstraten until 2 October for psychiatric assessment. But he warned him: ‘I cannot exclude from my mind the possibility of a discretionary life sentence.’

The multi-millionaire, wearing a grey suit, blue shirt and tie, showed no emotion as the verdict was announced but blew a kiss at Caroline Williams, the mother of two of his children.

Mr Raja’s family, who embraced detectives following the verdict, welcomed the jury’s decision.

"He has destroyed our family and has taken away from us a wonderful father who would have done anything for his children," said Mr Amjad Raja, 41, his son. "This will never bring our father back, but justice has been done."

The crooked tycoon, who is worth an estimated 500 million, had lent Mr Raja hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy houses and used the property as collateral on the deal. They fell out and Mr Raja reported him to the police for forging documents and took him to court.

During the trial, which lasted three months, van Hoogstraten insisted he had nothing to do with the killing, describing Mr Raja’s law suit and police complaint as "laughable".

He ridiculed suggestions that he could have had someone assassinated for 6,000 to 7,000. The multi-millionaire told the jury there were a number of contract killers in Belmarsh prison, where he was being held in custody, who told him that the going rate was 20,000 to 25,000.

"To suggest anyone could get a contract hit for 6,000 to 7,000 is totally laughable. And it would be the first time in history when contract killing had been paid by staged payments."

Yesterday, Detective Inspector Andy Sladen said: "My experience of Mr van Hoogstraten is of a person of extreme arrogance. He thought he was above the law - today’s verdict shows he is not."

Both Croke and Knapp chose not to be in court for sentencing yesterday. The judge said that they were "very dangerous men" with "no motive to kill save greed".

In passing sentence, he said: "What brings men to take a sawn-off shotgun and a knife to an elderly man, and having stabbed him fatally, to shoot him in the head at a range of six to 12 inches?"

There was no remorse, he said, "between the stabbing and the shooting, simply delay sufficient to reload the shotgun. No holding back in the face of the presence in the house of the grandsons, no appearance of concern for the horrors they had to witness".

Neither, he said, did they show remorse in the court.

"Those who conduct themselves in this way do not just turn their back on society, they deliberately withdraw from it."

The judge added: "The jury have now heard the appalling records of these two men. Someone, at some stage, may have occasion to consider whether they should ever be released from the life sentence I impose on each of them."

Knapp and Croke, who disguised themselves as gardeners, in white boiler suits and gardening gloves, in order to gain access to Mr Raja’s home, had cased the area for weeks before the execution, the court heard. On the day of the killing, one of them also wore a false moustache and carried a garden fork to complete the disguise.

They turned up in a white Transit van with painted yellow wheels and the words "Thunderbird II" written on the windscreen.

When Mr Raja opened the door to his house, in Mulgrave Road, Sutton, they pushed him into the hallway and stabbed him five times in the chest. At the sound of a gun going off, his grandsons rushed downstairs, to find their grandfather holding his chest, which was covered in blood. He had been stabbed, but not yet shot as the first blast missed and entered the ceiling.

Rizvan rushed into the hall to see Knapp reloading the single-barrelled sawn-off shotgun. As he tried in vain to ring the police, he saw Knapp raise the shotgun and shoot his grandfather in the face. They doused the transit van in petrol and set it alight to cover their tracks.

Following the murder, Knapp instantly became a suspect because of his close association with van Hoogstraten. Later, a bloodstain on a door frame at the scene was found to be Knapp’s.

Croke came under the spotlight because of his friendship with Knapp. Compost in the back of the Transit van matched that found at Croke’s mother’s home on van Hoogstraten’s vast estate near Uckfield, East Sussex. The Transit had also been spotted at the Orchard Caravan Park at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, where Croke’s mother’s kept a mobile home. An eye witness picked out Croke as the man who drove the van away from the murder scene. As the killing was carried out, on July 2, van Hoogstraten was on his way to Gatwick to visit his properties in Nice. From there he flew to Zimbabwe for a three-week holiday.

The millionaire earned his fearsome reputation as a thuggish landlord when still in his twenties when he would turn up, dressed in a full-length fur coat, to intimidate his tenants, whom he described as "filth".

However, his intimidatory techniques did not stop at tenants. One prosecution witness, business associate Michaal Hamdan, fled to the Lebanon, allegedly fearing for his life, shortly before he was due to give evidence in van Hoogstraten’s trial. Hamdan had implicated him in the killing of Mr Raja, although the jury never heard full details of his allegations.

"He feared he was going to be murdered," said Detective Inspector Andrew Sladen.

Van Hoogstraten claimed Hamdan had tried to frame him in order to save his own skin. He alleged that Hamdan himself had a motive for getting rid of Mr Raja because of a dispute between them over a property in Hove.

The millionaire’s 18-year old girlfriend Tanika Sali also changed her mind about testifying as a prosecution witness, after telling the judge that her boyfriend had introduced Knapp as "my hitman". Although warned of the consequences and questioned at length by both the judge and prosecution counsel during legal argument in the jury’s absence, she declined to say why she refused to give evidence.

Mr Justice Newman referred Ms Sali’s actions to the Attorney General after she retracted her police statements and refused to go into the witness box.

Ms Sali turned up at court wearing an expensive new outfit which she maintained had been bought with a whip-round from friends.

The judge said when she had first appeared before him, she was a witness without guile, but had been transformed into a guarded witness - a witness with an agenda.

Van Hoogstraten, of Framfield, East Sussex, Croke and Knapp had all denied murder.

Van Hoogstraten will now spend the next few weeks in high-security Belmarsh jail in south London undergoing psychiatric assessment before learning of the years he must serve.

The hitmen: lives of crime may well be over

MR JUSTICE Newman, the judge, said careful consideration should be given as to whether the two hitmen should ever be released.

Robert Knapp, 55, of Abbeyfeale, Co Limerick, Ireland, first met van Hoogstraten in Long Lartin prison and soon became his enforcer.

Knapp got his first taste of life behind bars in 1974 when he was sentenced to five years for attempted robbery and possession of a sawn-off shotgun and a revolver without a licence.

In 1979, at Brighton Crown Court, he was given two years for theft of a cheque, forgery and jumping bail, and, at Kingston Crown Court, in 1980, three years for burglary.

In 1986, he returned to armed robbery; hi-jacking a post-office van in Norwich on 31 July of that year. He was arrested as a gang loaded 100,000 into a getaway car and was jailed for 13 years.

In 1995, he was given 12 years at the Old Bailey for a jewellery shop raid after his gang was ambushed by armed police. The men hijacked a police car but it was rammed and an officer was injured in the ensuing shoot-out.

Knapp served just four years and came out of jail in April 1999, three months before Mr Raja was shot dead.

David Croke, 59, of East Moulsecoomb, Brighton, who had just been released from a 23-year sentence before killing Mr Raja, made his first court appearance in 1977 before Stratford Magistrates for shop lifting, going equipped for theft and handling stolen goods. He received a three-month suspended sentence.

In May 1988, he was given a total of 23 years for four robberies. Croke’s armed gang grabbed 250,000 from one security van after beating and gagging the driver. A dummy bomb was strapped to a security-depot worker in another raid as Croke and two others fled with 90,000.

The same method was used to take 480,000 in a third raid and the gang staged a mock kidnap to take 283,000 in the final raid before they were arrested .

Croke’s sentence was cut to 20 years on appeal and he was released less than two months before Mr Raja was murdered.