Nasty Nick

Nicholas van Hoogstraten is having his photograph taken when I arrive, but exclaims when he sees me, 'Are you the writer? They usually send dolly birds - I'm glad they sent a mature one.'

I thought he was being sarcastic, but realised later he was perfectly sincere. He likes meeting people who remember London in the Sixties. We might even have met in the Sixties - he was an associate of Peter Rachman's and I went out with one of Rachman's circle - so we spent a nostalgic few minutes reminiscing about rent-collecting practices in St Stephen's Gardens, W11, which is where van Hoogstraten learned his landlord's trade.

'Call me Nick,' he tells me, but I don't actually want to be that chummy with the great intimidator, so I try to avoid calling him anything at all. Several people have told me I will be charmed by van Hoogstraten. I wouldn't say I was charmed, but he is certainly entertaining company when he isn't droning on about the iniquities of judges or how society is going to the dogs. He is intelligent and seems, if not exactly honest, keen to explain himself - he occasionally helps me with hints when I am slow on the uptake. He is also witty (if you don't mind macabre jokes about hitmen) and seems able to take jokes against himself. Though, of course, if I am shot dead on my doorstep, you will know that I was wrong.

I asked my usual precautionary question - whether he had ever sued anyone for libel? - and he said, 'No, never, and I've been called all sorts of things. I'm not bothered. In fact, it's good for business.'

Why good for business? To frighten people?

'Not to frighten them, but so I don't get my time wasted with arseholes. Because most people in business are not coming to do business, they're coming along to crook you, especially when you're rich - I'm serious. In fact, most people you meet in life are coming along to crook you. I don't know whether you've found that?'

Not at all.

'Well you've been lucky.'

We are talking in the lounge of the Courtlands Hotel, Hove, which has long been his headquarters in Brighton. It is the purest Fawlty Towers, a dingy warren of corridors and firedoors, repro furniture and cheapo light fittings. Unlike Fawlty Towers, however, it appears to have no guests. Instead, it has herds of burly young men in nylon shirts who periodically charge through the room talking loudly to each other. If they are waiters they don't show any inclination to wait. Perhaps they are his famous 'bodyguards', though they don't seem to treat van Hoogstraten with any sign of respect. It is the strangest (and coldest) hotel I have ever been in.

But, anyway, van Hoogstraten says, he no longer owns the Courtlands: 'I'm a squatter here.' All his assets were frozen when he was convicted of manslaughter in 2002. 'I've been living off £2,000 a week living expenses, and handouts from friends and relations. I'm serious.' He says he has to be nice to his children if he wants them to pay his bar bills. (Not that his bar bills would ever amount to much - he doesn't smoke, drink or take drugs and appears to live on weak tea. He drank several pots of it while I was with him without ever offering me any.) His children bought him a new car last year, but that was, he says, only because they were embarrassed by his turning up at their posh public school in a 10-year-old rustbucket.

'Without my knowledge they bought me this blinking flash bling-bling car, a Cadillac Escalade,' he grumbles. 'I've only used it eight or 10 times.'

He disapproves of such extravagance. 'I live like a church mouse. Always have done.'

Is that because he's mean?

'I'm not mean. I'm careful. I haven't got any... what's the word... vices. What would I need to pay out money for?'

Clothes? I suggested, trying not to stare at his too-tight shirt and ancient Cuban-heeled boots.

'This is a Gucci shirt - I didn't buy it. These are Versace trousers - I didn't buy them. I'm not wearing anything I bought myself, honestly.'

What about his watch? He takes it off to show me, a metal-bracelet Seiko. 'That's a £4 watch. Not to you - to you it's a £160 watch, but I bought 100 of them for £400 to give to my senior workers in Zimbabwe, so it cost four quid.'

I told him he was making me feel quite sorry for him, but he said: 'You don't have to feel sorry for me, because it's out of choice. I'm just not interested in spending money. I did all that when I was young, had flashy cars, flashy clothes.'

But what's the point of making money if you don't enjoy spending it?

'What! The point of making money is not to spend it! You ask anybody that's made any money. Why should you spend it when that money could make more money?'

However, he was very indignant that the police who searched his house said he was so mean he kept tea bags in order to re-use them. That is typical, he says, of the evil lies the police and media put about. The tea bags were on the draining board because the previous police made tea, but couldn't find the rubbish bin, and the reason they couldn't find it is because he doesn't have one - disgusting things, standing around breeding germs. This leads to a lengthy rant about the filthy habits of most people today, parents who let their kids run around with snotty noses and don't teach them how to wipe their bottoms properly with wet wipes. He taught his from a very early age.

I, meanwhile, am still mesmerised by the missing rubbish bin. So what does he do with his used tea bags?

'Take them out to the dustbin, of course.'

What - every time he makes a cup of tea?

'It's only out the back door.'

I think you're mad, I tell him.

'Well a lot of people think I'm mad,' he agrees.

One of the most conspicuous manifestations of his madness is Hamilton Palace, the vast pile he has been building near Uckfield in East Sussex for the past 20 years. He usually says he is building it as his mausoleum, that he will fill it with his art collection (currently in a duty-free warehouse in Switzerland) and then be buried in it. This is not the action of a church mouse - it seems more like an extravagance.

'Yes, that's a good word. I normally call it the hole in the ocean into which I throw my money. But you see, that has never been mine. I have never owned it at any time. So it's quite safe to show it.' This seems to confirm the local rumour that the Palace was always intended as a bolthole for his chum President Mugabe, but this is not a subject van Hoogstraten is prepared to discuss. At all events, work on the Palace seems to have stopped, though it is still heavily guarded by security men, presumably fighting off the ever-present threat of ramblers.

If van Hoogstraten sounds a bit mad on the subject of rubbish bins, he sounds completely deranged on the subject of ramblers - or, as he calls them, perverts, flashers, 'the dirty mac brigade'. They have the nerve to try and walk across his land: 'It's an outrage!' But it's a public footpath, I tell him, they have the right to walk there, it's the law of the land.

'We don't have to accept the law of the land, do we?'

You don't?

'Course I don't. Law of the land! Where does this law come from? Because these so-called public footpaths in inverted commas were for the serfs to walk from A to B. They weren't for the public. The public have never walked anywhere - they've had horses and cars and things. You don't think the lord of the manor walked along a footpath do you? Course not. They were just for the serfs. Remember that prior to 1700 and something, nobody had any rights here anyway, they were all slaves.'

Has he never ventured on a country walk himself?

'Course I have. But we walk down legal country lanes, or on public land. Why do people have to trespass on not just my land, but any private land? And what kind of people go rambling? Perverts.'

Would he call Janet Street-Porter, head of the Ramblers' Association, a pervert?

'She's a classic example! Look at that revolting property she built - it's a disgrace, a blot on the landscape. That's why she's a rambler. People who do that sort of thing don't have an eye for beauty, they don't respect people's property. The majority of people who go rambling don't have any good taste.'

His wealth, or lack of it, remains a mystery. In the Sixties he claimed to be Britain's youngest self-made millionaire, and even recently boasted of being worth half a billion. But now he says he's worth hardly anything. 'Personally, personally, not even £1m I would have thought. Nearly everything has been transferred into trusts.'

Who benefits from the trusts?

'Ah, well, that is not an easy thing to answer. One large section goes to a charitable organisation in Bermuda for the maintenance of historic monuments... [I must have smirked at this point because he added: 'Not something that you would approve of I'm sure.'] Another vast chunk of it goes with the Palace. More recently, there are trusts to continue various activities that I've got in Zimbabwe. I pay for the education of three children in every school [in the country], which is several thousand children. Actually, it doesn't cost a lot of money in real terms, but I've set up things like that that will continue.' (Nowadays, he is the biggest foreign investor in Zimbabwe, having first got involved at 19 when it was still Rhodesia and he bought an estate there, sight unseen, that turned out to include valuable mining rights. This led to a friendship with Tiny Rowland of Lonrho that seems to have been mutually beneficial.)

His children won't inherit on his death, because 'They've mostly got it all already.' He has five children ranging in age from eight to 20, by three different mothers, all black ('Once you've had black you never go back') and they all get along fine. I asked if it was like a harem, if he rotated his favours among the mothers, but he said no, he no longer has sexual relations with any of them, but they remain close and, 'of course, I've got girlfriends as well'. He is closer to one of the mothers (Caroline Williams) than the others - 'There's a pecking order' - but they are all friends and the children get along brilliantly. He, the mothers and the children always spend Christmas, birthdays and holidays together. If it weren't for the children, he would probably have relocated to Zimbabwe by now - 'I'm a bit disillusioned with this country,' he says.

Van Hoogstraten's own upbringing was strict, he says, under the iron hand of his mother, and his Jesuit school. His father was a shipping agent importing meat from Argentina and was often away in South America. Before that, he owned two businesses in France, but the government appropriated them during the war, and he spent four or five years fighting unsuccessfully for compensation. 'So that's when I learned, from a very very early age, don't put anything in your own name - hide it, stash it - because anything can happen anywhere in the world and you can lose what you've built up.'

I asked whether he had Jewish blood, but he said forcefully, 'No, definitely not - no Jewish, no Irish. A bit of Indian.' One of his ancestors, he says, worked for the Dutch East India Company and married a maharanee. 'That's why I've got Indian legs.' So saying, he starts rolling up his trouser leg to show me, but then suddenly stops and asks suspiciously: 'You're not going to print any of this are you?'

I might do. Why not?

'Because then people will think I'm even more mad. Madder than they already think.' So then he rolls his trouser leg down again, and I never do discover what Indian legs are. When I ask where he gets his obsession with money from, he says without hesitation, 'My mother.' She made him walk to the newsagent every day from the age of five to save a penny a week delivery charge on her newspapers. And he remembers her exclaiming over a neighbour who was buying a 2s 6d tie on the never-never which meant he had to pay three shillings in the end, and her saying, '"That's why they're tenants and we own our house. And they'll always be tenants." And, of course,' he adds solemnly, 'since then I've seen that she was 100 per cent correct.'

But, in the end, she taught him the value of money so well that they fell out over it. He started a postage-stamp business while he was still at school, but sometimes she wouldn't give him the money to buy a new issue and he really resented that. 'Oh it was a nightmare - I had to sign a document, I had to pay interest, I got strangled round the neck every time I needed £50 or £30.' He once said, 'I had to bash her around to get £100 out of her', though now he denies that he ever hit her. She died four years ago and he attended her funeral, but he hadn't spoken to her for decades. 'Did I ever make it up with her? The answer's no. I don't ever forgive or forget. It's a big mistake. If you forgive or forget the person will come back and hit you harder the next time.'

He left school at 16, joined the merchant navy and started buying land in the Bahamas which was then very cheap. At 18 he moved into Notting Hill Gate alongside Peter Rachman, buying houses very cheaply because they had rent-controlled tenants, but then 'persuading' the tenants to move. Favourite practices (that gave their name to Rachmanism) were removing roofs and staircases, or installing prostitutes to drive respectable tenants out. He later extended his property empire to Brighton, which is now his base in Britain.

Van Hoogstraten's first brush with the law came when he was 11, for stealing a typewriter according to the press, but he went ballistic when I said it. 'I'm sorry! It wasn't for stealing a typewriter, it was for receiving a stolen typewriter. I needed a typewriter for my business and I bought one off a schoolfriend - I paid him £6 and it was a £15 typewriter. So when he got caught stealing something else he said, "Oh, and I stole this typewriter and sold it to Nicky." It was a set-up. It was simply jealousy because I was already well off.'

The press are always misreporting things, he grumbles. For instance, they say that he was convicted in 1968 of firebombing a rabbi's house but: a) he wasn't a rabbi, he was only a cantor, b) it wasn't a firebomb it was only a hand-grenade, and c) he didn't lob the handgrenade personally, someone else did it. Whatever... it was enough to earn him a four-year sentence, and a further five years for receiving stolen silver which the police found in his house when they went to question him. Since then, there have been convictions for demanding money with menaces, forcible entry, bribing a prison officer, assault, contempt of court, though no further prison sentences until 2002 when he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years.

This case is currently in such a fluid legal position, I have to be careful what I say, but basically, on 2 July 1999 a businessman named Mohammed Sabir Raja, who was suing van Hoogstraten over a financial deal, answered his doorbell and was stabbed and then shot by two men in front of his grandchildren. Two career criminals - Robert Knapp and David Croke - were convicted of the killing and are currently serving life. But van Hoogstraten, who was charged with them, was acquitted of murder and convicted of manslaughter instead and given 10 years. He spent 13 months in Belmarsh before his lawyers successfully argued that the judge had misdirected the jury and he emerged a free man.

However, the Raja family have been tenacious in pursuing a civil case for damages and, just before Christmas, a judge ruled in their favour and said he was convinced that van Hoogstraten was responsible for the murder, not only on the balance of probabilities (the civil test), but beyond reasonable doubt (the criminal test) and ordered van Hoogstraten to pay the Rajas an immediate £500,000 interim payment. So has he paid it?

'Is that a joke?' he asks sharply. (He greets many of my questions with, 'Is that a joke?' and it gets a bit wearying saying over and over again, 'No, I'm not joking, I'm asking.')

Anyway, he says, he certainly has no intention of paying the Raja family because they already owe him £1.7m costs for previous cases that he won, and he is appealing against the judgment.

He is also planning to produce new forensic evidence that, he says, will show that the two hitmen - 'those muppets' - were wrongly convicted.

He claims he'd never even met one of them until they were in Belmarsh and this terrible wheezy old man, Mr Croke, doddered up to him and croaked, 'I'm your enforcer!'

Van Hoogstraten grumbles for what feels like several hours about the iniquity of his conviction and the recent civil judgment. It was all a stitch-up by corrupt police, corrupt lawyers and 'the Jewish fraternity' because 'the powers that be' are irritated by his support for President Mugabe. 'Nobody seriously believes that I was responsible for sending this pair of muppets round to do this guy in.'

Are you saying you didn't even send them to frighten him?

'You are joking, aren't you?'

No. I'm asking.

'He didn't even figure. If I had a list of 20 people I wanted something done to to teach them a lesson, he wouldn't even have been on it. That's how unimportant he was.'

Are you saying you have a list of people you want something done to?

'Obviously. But the point I'm making is that he wouldn't even be on it. See, that's the ridiculousness about this case.'

But you seem to be saying you would be prepared to use physical violence against some people?

'One does what has to be done. I'm in business.'

Business, with van Hoogstraten, seems to cover a multitude of sins. He is obviously a sharp businessman, but not, he says, a dodgy one.

'All my businesses, every business I've ever had, is totally legitimate. I've been investigated and investigated and investigated. That was the main reason why the Inland Revenue went for me in 1980, because they wanted to investigate how I'd accumulated such massive wealth. So they went into every single thing I'd done back to 1972, and I got a totally clean bill of health. Nobody has ever suggested that any of my money has been obtained illegally; there has never been the slightest suggestion of that.'

And yet his business methods seem to be, shall we say, unconventional. He said two years ago that, 'Of course I threaten tenants on a daily basis. It's perfectly legal.'

However, there are hints that he does sometimes worry about his sins. He was educated by Jesuits and, though no longer a practising Catholic, says he 'probably' believes in an afterlife.

'That's why I've planted so many trees - 3,000 in Sussex, and more in Zimbabwe. So when I get up there [Heaven] and they say, "You're not coming in here," I can pray in aid, "Well what about all the trees I planted? Thousands of them. Done my back in in the process." And that will swing it, won't it? I'll get let in. Well I think I will. Because all these things I am supposed to have done that are so bad, in reality I haven't done anything at all. It has all been conjured up over the years, mainly by the media.'

So why, given his hatred of the media and his utter contempt for public opinion, did he agree to give this interview?

'You must have caught me on a good day.'

I fervently hope I never meet him on a bad one.