Nicholas van hoogstraten biography of abraham

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 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. 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, , 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.

This statement strengthened the idea that van hoogstraten was a mere theoretician and that his book had nothing to do with the reality of seventeenth-century.

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.