Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  A few days later—two hours before the six o’clock practice on Friday, November 3, to be exact—Attila appeared on the concourse level of Budapest’s Nyugati train station in a wig and a mascara mustache. If he was thinking of leaving town, he had plenty of good choices. Nyugati station, adjacent to the McDonald’s in which the ballroom chandelier he’d assembled with Egri’s wife hung from the ceiling, was one of the city’s biggest transportation centers.

  Attila walked along the line of shops toward a branch of his favorite travel agency, Budapest Tours. But he wasn’t there to buy a holiday package. He’d been drinking since he left Judit’s apartment and had become set on the idea of an afternoon robbery. He didn’t need an accomplice. Nor could he give a crap if it was rush hour.

  Situated in a row of similar travel-related businesses, impulse-buy shops, and newsstands, Budapest Tours was separated from the busy concourse by only a wall of clear Plexiglas. As Attila approached, he could see there were no other customers inside and only one female employee, seated behind a long counter. He stepped inside and commenced an inquiry about island excursions. As soon as the travel agent swiveled in search of a pamphlet, Attila pulled his pistol from his jacket pocket and held it close to his body. “Hand over the money and there won’t be any trouble,” he said with the impatient smile of someone explaining, for the last time, that he wanted a king-size bed and an ocean view. The agent’s response resembled that of a woman being robbed at gunpoint: she screamed. Attila grabbed her by the hair. She screamed louder.

  Attila looked over his shoulder at the concourse. A crowd of people was already gathering around the entrance. Right, here he was, then, in a bad wig and a spot of trouble. The only way out was through the door he’d entered. He let go of the woman’s hair and, without having collected a forint of the agency’s cash, charged the exit. Two men moved quickly to block him, and several others piled on, wrestling him to the ground just in front of the store. Someone kicked the gun out of his hand. Attila lay pinned on his back while all around him voices were yelling, “Police, police! Robbery, robbery!”

  Attila bucked his legs and twisted his torso, freeing his arms and allowing him to pop up like a break-dancer in the center of a captive concourse crowd. He couldn’t allow it to end there, steps from a bungled robbery, hostile faces leering. As hungry arms began swiping at him, he picked the spot where the smallest bodies stood, ducked his head, and barreled into them, making a few spins with his pointed elbows until there was space to run.

  A group gave chase, they would tell Major Lajos Varjú several minutes later, but the man had disappeared, up a stairway and into the dimming bustle of the oncoming night. There, on the ground in front of the travel agency, lay his Tokarev pistol. Lajos picked it up as if it were a dead fish and carried it back to headquarters to be traced and finger-printed.

  For the next several weeks, the UTE players noticed yet another oddity about their Panther. Normally he wouldn’t shut up. Now he wouldn’t say anything. Even to Bubu, he uttered only, “Never trust a woman.”

  There were three images Attila couldn’t get out of his head: Katalin giving his grandmother’s ring back to him in Csíkszereda; Judit’s mother’s pursed mug saying, “What do you know from meat?”; and one he had been trying to avoid for a long time: his mother’s naked body on the other side of that window back in Transylvania. On bad days there was his father, too—not the wrinkled version of the man who had offered him the Dacia but the one who was so sure he would “die a gray nobody.”

  If they didn’t think he was good enough, he would show them. It had always been just him against the world. No matter how far he traveled or which government was manipulating the truth, that much had never changed. So he wasn’t a socialite, maybe he’d never finished high school, perhaps he’d spent a year living in a horse paddock. But he was going to be a success. He had found something he was good at, and unlike hockey, it paid and paid well. Friday at the train station was an aberration; his head hadn’t been straight. Truth was, robbery was a job that played to all his strengths: strength, for one; agility; self-reliance; and the combination of perceptive facilities he’d been honing since childhood—the uncanny ability to assess his enemies, intuit their movements, and exploit their weaknesses. On top of that, as with everything he did, he held one very important wild card: he was going to work harder than anyone else would think possible.

  Attila bought a book about England’s infamous 1963 Great Train Robbery. Ronnie Biggs—one of the perpetrators, who’d made a jail-break after his arrest and was now living like a demigod in Brazil—became Attila’s new role model: defiant, unconquerable; a master of his craft. As a result, the super’s apartment at Villányi Street 112 underwent a major transformation. It was no longer the ramshackle home of an unpaid Transylvanian hockey goalie. It was now a secret headquarters and training center for a world-class criminal business enterprise. As such, it had to be kept spotlessly clean of any possible evidence linking its occupant to what he envisioned would be a long and brilliant career.

  The wads of money that had been piling up—so many small bills—inside Attila’s otherwise empty silverware drawer were redeposited, though certainly not at one of the local banks, forty of which were then under investigation for embezzlement and fraud. And since Attila surmised that countless other Budapest financial institutions would soon have their contents emptied onto his floor anyway, he created his own safe-deposit box, right in the kitchen: his oven. He pulled out the blackened grate and tucked in the stacks of bills and the gun he’d fleeced from the guard on whose foot his cousin László had collapsed. Then he returned the grate and placed a heavy goulash pot over it.

  Now that he’d turned pro, the 4 Tigers discount wig bin wasn’t going to cut it as his hair supplier. Attila visited a fashionable downtown boutique for some imported horsehair. “For my grandmother,” he told the saleswoman. He carefully taped each new wig, turned inside out, to the lining on the bottom of his mattress.

  He pared down his social life to occasional flirting with Éva, a redhaired woman who owned the car wash he frequented, or honking his horn at women at stoplights, with varied results. One morning a woman he’d plucked from an intersection woke up and went into his kitchen with a notion of baking a bread. “Don’t touch that,” Attila said, leaping from the pullout sofa just as she started preheating the oven. “The last time I used this,” he told her, pointing to his well-disguised safe, “the apartment almost blew up.” After she left, he unscrewed all of the oven’s knobs, hid them in the closet, and concocted the durable rejoinder that the damn flat had come like that but he didn’t cook much anyway.

  What did he care what they thought? He couldn’t expose himself to the hazards of having a woman around, and after his past experiences, he certainly wasn’t going to miss having a relationship. If he wanted sex, he could pay for it. And no more accomplices; that’s how the best were caught. He told Karcsi he was through with robbery.

  Several nights a week Attila donned one of his new Italian suits and silk ties, pulled on his favorite dark leather three-quarter-length jacket, and ventured out on the town. But whatever his destination, the purpose was only to kill time until the rest of the city went to sleep. Early in the morning, usually about two o’clock, he would throw a chip at the Las Vegas croupier or collect his clothes from a brothel floor and say he was finished for the night. In fact, his day was only beginning.

  When he got back out to his car, he fished a map and a phone book out of the trunk, and a half-size loose-leaf binder, like the one he used to count roulette numbers, from inside his coat pocket. Here was the mission: proceeding counterclockwise from southern Pest’s crime-ridden IX District, known as Little Chicago, he was going to scour every inch of the city’s twenty-three districts until his steno pad turned into an encyclopedia of Budapest’s financial institutions and their inherent weaknesses.

  Knuckles curled around the wheel of his new red Audi, Attila crawled along Budapest’s streets in co
ncentrated silence. Beams of white light from nightclub spotlights tunneled through the misty air. Along the Pest side of the Danube riverbank, a huge green and white neon sign atop a hundred-year-old neoclassical building flashed like a distress call the letters of the national bank. OTP… OTP… OTP. He was inside the gates of an amusement park shut down for the night.

  The first task was to locate each district’s police precinct. Then he tracked down every post office, travel agency, and bank he could find in the area, checking them off against the phone book. Next: the time trial. He pulled his car up as close as possible to the precinct station, hit the stopwatch on his Seiko wristwatch, and raced to the projected financial target as fast as he could, ignoring stoplights whenever possible. If it took less than two minutes to cover the distance, the site wasn’t likely to enter his catalog and did not merit more than a line. Most of the routes, however, took longer than that, and it was these worthy institutions that were allotted two full pages, front and back. On the left side of the entry’s first page, he drew a map of the streets and buildings in the immediate vicinity, noting the types of businesses that were on the street and their likely hours of operation. Then he got out of the car and wandered around the deserted streets, checking out back for an alternative exit or unapparent escape channel.

  The rest of the data had to be gathered during business hours. After the morning hockey practice and before a nap, Attila tried to visit at least two sites per day. He went inside, inquiring about a loan or buying stamps. Then while the information was fresh, he hurried out to a bench or back to the car to scribble everything down. Stars collided, snowstorms descended, world leaders clashed, and Attila Ambrus drew up his diagrams of bank interiors. Then he turned the page. On the back side of his blueprint, he listed the following data: number of doors and windows and their locations, same for the phones; whether or not there was a security camera or a security guard, and if the guard was armed; number of employees and the breakdown by gender; the time of his visit and the amount of customer traffic. He also wrote down the date so that he could allow at least six months between his scouting trip and his follow-up visit to ensure he would not be remembered. He stored the notebook in the oven with the cash and guns.

  On December 27, a week after Coach Pék’s UTE team hit the holiday break at 7–3–3 and just six weeks since Attila had doubled down on felonious living, he knocked off the travel agency down the street from his apartment that had conned him on the Tunisia package in March. He used one of his new wigs and added a pair of fake glasses to his disguise. Two minutes and forty seconds after yelling, “Robbery!”—twenty seconds under his new three-minute time limit—he was done.

  It was a small take, 407,000 forints ($4,400), and only the Kurír covered the robbery the following day (half a million worth of booty). But he was in for the long haul now and was satisfied just to be back in the game. He clipped the Kurír story and added it to a plastic bag archive in the bathroom that included stories of other notable crimes. One piece in his collection detailed the downfall of a Chinese bank robber who was caught after having dropped his wallet inside the bank. Every couple of weeks, Attila reviewed his material and the wisdom it offered (e.g., don’t ever bring ID to a gig).

  Attila’s two careers complemented each other nicely. Both physically and psychologically, he was in top condition. He could run for miles without tiring. He could do five hundred push-ups, a thousand leg-sits. His reflexes were worthy of his nickname, and his primary goal both as a goalie and a thief was the same: always be prepared for, or at least in the act of preparing for, anything. This made sleeping unlikely and even unauthorized. If only the building’s tenants could see their super at night, marching trancelike around his apartment to ingrain bank layouts into his head, then diving around the floor, role-playing heist scenarios.

  Attila’s steely cranium was deep in study mode for his first solo bank job on January 31, 1994, when UTE had a crucial, nationally televised game against FTC. The game took place on neutral ice in the hockey-obsessed town of Székesfehérvár, in the country’s central-western hills, halfway between Lake Balaton and Budapest. It was a classic Hungarian affair, so Attila had only himself to blame for not considering the possibility that in the second period Bubu would clobber an FTC star so fantastically that the player would remain unconscious even as he was put into an ambulance; a bench-clearing brawl would ensue; fans and players alike would begin tearing down the stadium boards and winging them at one another like gigantic Chinese throwing stars; another ambulance would be called to cart off a twelve-year-old boy, injured in the battle; and when the teams were ready to resume play again, Attila would be one of the few players left who had not been ejected or disabled. Thus, with few other options, Coach Pék presented his second-string goalie with a scenario for which Attila hadn’t prepared at all: he put Attila in the game.

  Under the circumstances, Attila performed admirably. He saved some good shots, just not enough of them. FTC scored the game’s two deciding goals against him, and UTE lost, 5–3. After the game, Coach Pék was livid. “I’m not saying I wasn’t throwing anything,” he told the daily newspaper Népszava regarding the hostilities that had broken out in the second period, “but I wasn’t the one who hit the boy.”

  Two days later Attila went through with his maiden solo bank robbery, but not before redoubling his preparatory efforts. He had been tweaked by the realization at the hockey game that he was not as omniscient as he’d presumed, and to augment his routine, he decided to revisit the particularly crucial process of site selection. The only way to know he was optimizing his chances was if he had a standardized method by which to compare the feasibility of his potential targets. Thus, he implemented a degree of difficulty rating system. Every financial institution in his book was assigned a score from 1 to 5: 1 being vegetable-fieldpillaging simple; 5, Great Train Robbery difficult. The scores were weighted heavily toward the number and accessibility of escape routes, which Attila delineated on each of his street schematics with a dotted line, noting their order of preference with a circled number. To score a 1 for difficulty, there had to be at least three flight options, a rarity. Aside from the odd post office, no bank in his book scored better than a 2, which was the rating of his inaugural solo effort—the Mór and Vidéke savings bank on a square in the central business district of Buda, just across the river from the Gothic-spired Parliament. It was a simple, medium-size bank; six or seven female employees; no guard; two equally opportune escape routes leading to public transportation; and a location blissfully situated on a traffic-snarled road far from the police precinct. Attila figured a businessman’s appearance was least likely to raise alarm and chose a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, a green sports coat over light shirt and black tie, and a pair of brown linen dress pants. He clipped one of his brown wigs into a conservative corporate-style cut.

  To make up for the absence of a door watcher, he had bought a sheet of cardboard and meticulously drawn in large shadowed block lettering closed for technical reasons, and below in smaller print, please excuse the inconvenience. He taped it to the door as he went in and pulled it back down when he left with a respectable 1.39 million forints ($12,900). Preparation was everything.

  Six weeks later, after another championshipless hockey season ended with his purchase of a black Mercedes coupe, Attila did a 3: the Bakonyvidéke Savings and Loan in southern Pest’s Little Chicago, where there was no guard but one male employee. Again, he went as a businessman, donning (along with a straight dark wig parted in the middle) a cream-colored blazer over a knit V-necked pullover and dark pants. But his appearance hardly mattered. It was about lunchtime when he arrived to find the bank’s chain-link front grating pulled halfway down. He ducked underneath it and got all the way behind the counter before encountering the staff, who were sitting around a back table, eating. The one male employee who’d caused the place to score a 3 was so frightened by the word rablás! (“robbery”) that he knocked his bowl of soup onto his hea
d trying to dive under the table. And for this Attila had been so nervous, he’d drunk himself silly at a pub across the street before feeling emboldened enough to strike. He’d forgotten to take his closed for technical reasons sign with him when he left, but the booty was a new personal record, 4.56 million forints ($42,600), enough to live on for at least a year. (HE’S GONE WITH 4 MILLION, read the headline in Esti Hírlap.)

  By July, he was ready to do a 5.

  Eleven

  The Old Street Pub was a basement dive with a small bar and three tables, situated on the corner of Ó Street and Hajós Street, five blocks from the city’s police headquarters at Deák Square. A little past noon on Thursday, July 21, Attila stepped in wearing a pasta-colored double-breasted suit, a short, curly brown wig, and a thick mascara mustache. He carried a hard dark leather briefcase. “Off work early,” he told the pub’s waitress, who took his order for a beer and a whiskey. On her way back with his drinks, the waitress noted that if she’d thought it odd that her only customer was wearing Ray-Bans inside her dark cellar, it was odder still that he was reading a newspaper upside down and had a wig hanging halfway off his head.

  On his first of many trips to the bathroom with stomach cramps, Attila ruefully fixed his hair and removed his sunglasses. Halfway through his fourth shot of Johnnie Walker, three uneventful hours later, he plunked down some banknotes and headed for the door, clutching his stomach with one hand and his briefcase in the other. “Halló,” his waitress called after him, meaning “good-bye” in Hungarian. “Szia,” he responded, meaning usually “hello” but also “good-bye” and, since he had mislaid his bearings, a safer choice.