In 1968 he began serving a four-year prison sentence for paying a gang to throw a grenade into the house of Bernard Braunstein, a Brighton rabbi. The rabbi's son, David Braunstein, allegedly owed van Hoogstraten £2,000 over a failed textile business (adjusted for inflation the figure would be much higher as "you could buy a house for that much").
At the trial the judge described van Hoogstraten as "a sort of self-imagined devil who thinks he is an emissary of Beelzebub."
