[3] In 2002, he was sentenced to 10 years for the manslaughter of a business rival; the verdict was overturned on appeal and he was subsequently released, but in 2005 he was ordered to pay the victim's family £6 million in a civil case.

A huge mansion, Hamilton Palace, near Uckfield in East Sussex, which Van Hoogstraten began building in the mid-1980s, remains unfinished and uninhabited.

[5][6] Hoogstraten was born in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, to Charles, a violent man who worked as a shipping agent importing meat from Argentina who was absent for long periods in South America,[5][3][7][a] and Edna Brookes, a housewife.

[9] Hoogstraten built up his capital through a loan sharking business based in towns along the south coast of England, where he would take property deeds as collateral.

By the age of 22, adding the "van" to his name at this stage,[8] he owned 350 properties in Sussex[10] and was reputedly Britain's youngest millionaire, although The Times in 1967 and 1972 referred to this status as being "self-styled".

Aged 22, he was convicted for paying a gang to throw a grenade[3] into the house of Rabbi Bernard Braunstein, a Brighton cantor on 12 November 1967.

[13] At a further appeal in 1970, the Lord Justice Wynn described Hoogstraten as "a sort of self-imagined devil who likes to think of himself as an emissary of Beelzebub".

[14] Van Hoogstraten said of the grenade attack in 2000: "It seems a bit distasteful to me now, but back then when I was young ... these weren't anarchists, they were businessmen, respectable people".

"[17][19] On the site of the former High Cross House, a former nursing home destroyed by a fire of unknown cause,[20] van Hoogstraten began constructing a private mansion he called Hamilton Palace, at Palehouse Common near Uckfield in East Sussex in the mid-1980s.

[5] The structure of the mansion and ancillary buildings was largely in place, but van Hoogstraten fell out with architect Anthony Browne in 2000[21] and the site remained unfinished.

[25] After six court cases, the right of way was finally cleared in 2003 with the removal of a pair of industrial refrigeration units, half-a-dozen concrete piles, barbed wire and other impediments.

[26] When neighbours called for the property to be used for the homeless in early 2016, van Hoogstraten said in a statement: "The 'homeless' – the majority of whom are so by their own volition or sheer laziness – are one of the filthiest burdens on the public purse today.

"[6] Some time in the early 1980s, Hoogstraten began a business relationship with Mohammed Sabir Raja, an immigrant from Pakistan who worked in Brighton as an estate agent and landlord.

Hoogstraten lent money to Raja at a lower rate than the banks, and the loans were not recorded on paper so as to avoid paying taxes.

In his summary to the jury, Judge Newman neglected to mention that one of the thugs who killed Raja possessed a sawn-off shotgun (a lethal weapon).

[30] In the early part of 2005, Hoogstraten's strategy of dispensing with his own legal Counsel and inexplicably mounting his own defence by acting in person, ignoring the Judge's advice to abandon such behaviour, led to the judgement on the 19 December 2005 in favour and for the family of Raja, in their civil action against van Hoogstraten and were awarded £6 million by Mr Justice Lightman, after the court found that on the balance of probabilities "that the recruitment of the two thugs was for the purpose of murdering Mr Raja and not merely to frighten, threaten or hurt him".

[32][33] Van Hoogstraten was not held guilty of Raja's murder or manslaughter under English criminal law, which requires a jury to be "certain so as to be sure of guilt" rather than operating on balance of probabilities.

[4][38] He was charged with violating the Censorship Act by possessing pornographic photographs;[39] women in "indecent poses", a proportion of which also featured van Hoogstraten himself.

[4] Van Hoogstraten has said he uses many pseudonyms to conceal his involvement in property dealings in apparent contravention of UK company directorship laws, He told The Independent on Sunday in 2000: "I've actually called myself, in the past, Yogi Bear.

"[16] Van Hoogstraten told Lynn Barber, writing for The Observer in 2006, that he pays for the education of three children in every school in Zimbabwe: "Actually, it doesn't cost a lot of money in real terms, but I've set up things like that that will continue".