Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  They had observed the place three times in the past week. It sat in a crowd of stores on either side of the street—a fruit and vegetable grocery, a hairdresser, a copy place, a café, and a supermarket. The police station was at least three minutes away by car every time they clocked it.

  When they arrived at about 9:00 a.m., the street was still relatively quiet. It was Friday; Attila hoped people would be tired from the long week. He sure was.

  Attila had his raincoat draped over his arm, which Gabi knew meant that his gun was already in his hand. Attila entered first and quickly sized up the scene. The bank had a split-level layout: a wide, open staircase rose up from one side of the room. All told, he counted about fifteen people, employees and customers.

  When Gabi entered a few seconds later, Attila was already moving at the guard. Gabi positioned himself in front of the door, while Attila tossed his coat off his arm and attacked the unsuspecting security man, forcing him onto the floor. In seconds, Attila had taken possession of the guy’s small black Russian TT gun and turned toward the counters, shouting, “Bank robbery! Hands in the air!”

  There were so many customers that Gabi was worried some of them hadn’t heard Attila’s order. He fired a shot into the ceiling and yelled, “Everyone! On the floor!” Then he froze. He’d forgotten to spray the camera. He was already beyond the entranceway when he spun to find it staring straight down at his face. He pulled out his paint can and doused the lens.

  Meanwhile, Attila had his gun to the manager’s head. If she didn’t open the safe immediately, he said, he would shoot her. “I need another key from upstairs,” she told him calmly. He let her go.

  Gabi took a canvas bag from his pocket and tossed it over the counter so Attila could start on the drawers. Almost three minutes had passed by the time the manager reappeared with the key ring.

  “Time!” Gabi yelled as two women wandered through the front door behind him. “On the floor,” Gabi said, turning to face them and shaking the nose of his gun at the ground.

  Attila stood with the manager at the safe. She said the time lock was set for five minutes. “Open it now!” he yelled, then went back and finished clearing out the rest of the teller drawers.

  “Four minutes,” Gabi yelled. He was looking out the door. Was that a siren?

  Attila was back at the safe. He noticed a separate drawer on the top part of the cabinet vault with its own latch. He got the woman to open it. There looked to be at least 10 million forints ($43,000) inside. He stuffed it into Gabi’s duffel.

  “Five minutes,” Gabi called. “Five minutes! Five minutes!” Attila waited another minute until the next drawer opened, bagged the cash, then ran around to the front, where Gabi was nervously waiting. Before they could open the front door, the sound of the sirens was loud and clear.

  There was only one way out. They charged through the front door as a voice to their left shouted, “Freeze! Police!” They turned right, ran down the street, then bolted through the garden in back of the sixteenth-century domed brick Lukács bathhouse. They rounded the next corner, where Attila had left his cab. “We’re in a hurry,” Attila said as they climbed in and thrust their heads between their legs to stay out of view. “Take us to the HÉV station.” The driver pulled out into the traffic-logged street. After traveling only a few blocks, the sirens got noticeably louder. “We’ll get out here,” Attila said, throwing a 5,000-forint note ($21) at the driver and pushing Gabi out the left side. Attila’s muffled heartbeat pounded in his chest. It was good to be alive.

  Ahead of them was the flat cement Margit Bridge, which led straight into Pest just north of Parliament. They stormed down the stairs of the pedestrian concourse that ran beneath the bridge traffic, pulling off their wigs, hats, and outer layer of clothes and doing their best to shave off their mustaches with their Gillettes and saliva. When they came out on the south side of the bridge, sans disguises, the sirens sounded as though they were converging on them from every direction except for the river to their left.

  Heading south, Attila and Gabi made their way onto the river’s scenic jogging path, across from Parliament and the poor-man’s-Paris east Danube bank. Glancing over his right shoulder, Attila saw three cops trying to negotiate their way across the crowded boulevard that separated them. To Attila’s left was a twelve-foot drop toward the cement highway at the edge of the river. “We have to jump,” Attila yelled to Gabi; then he threw the bag over the edge, crouched, and jumped after it. He hit the cement hard, and a sting rang all the way up his spine. “Jump!” he yelled again to Gabi, but his partner didn’t appear.

  Two hours later, as the UTE-FTC game got under way at the UTE stadium, Attila was in his purple Opel Omega, speeding down country road E4 toward the Romanian border with the money, three guns, his robbery encyclopedia, and Don pacing back and forth in the backseat. As he passed the fragrant fertilizer plant outside the frozen Tisza River town of Szolnok, he heard on Hungarian radio: “UTE ice hockey player Gábor Orbán, son of coach George Orbán, has been arrested for robbery. Police are still searching for his accomplice.” According to the news, the robbers’ taxi driver, whose name also happened to be Orbán, was being questioned as a possible third accomplice.

  Attila jerked the wheel and peeled off the road into a gas station. Into the bathroom he went, carrying the most incriminating piece of evidence he owned: the notebook that had guided him through six years of robberies. Standing over the open toilet, he tore the book apart page by page, ripping each information-packed folio into confetti and flushing it into the sewers of the eastern Hungarian plain. Then he shuffled inside the station mart and bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker. He just needed a quick freshener. He was about sixty miles from the border with less than an hour to go before Gabi was allowed to spill the beans about his identity. Before getting back on the road, he stuffed the cash and all but one of the guns under some clothes in the bottom of a blue Budmil hiking backpack and stuck it in the trunk. The other gun he loaded and rammed into the shoulder holster beneath his shirt.

  Back at the UTE stadium, the game’s first period came to an end with an eruption in the stands caused not by fire, a hail of batteries, or the fact that UTE was actually leading FTC, 4–2. It spouted from the mouth of a balding radio journalist who was covering the event from the top of the bleachers while listening to a small transistor radio. He’d just heard a bulletin about the arrest on bank robbery charges of UTE forward Gábor Orbán, one of two UTE players that the reporter had noted earlier had failed to show for that afternoon’s game. The other was the wealthy goalie…. The man sprung from his press seat at the top of the metal bleachers and bounded toward the rink, shrieking out the scoop of his lifetime: “Attila Ambrus is the Whiskey Robber!” he cried. “Attila Ambrus is the Whiskey Robber!”

  One hundred fifty miles to the east, the flat, frozen fields of western Romania stretched out before Attila like a welcome mat. He checked the digital dashboard clock: 3:31 p.m. In approximately fifteen minutes it would be three hours since he last saw Gabi on the jogging path by the river. Attila pressed the gas pedal to the floor.

  At 3:40 p.m. he reached the multilane Ártánd checkpoint station at the Hungarian-Romanian border and picked an empty slot. He pulled his car to a stop in front of the guard and rolled down his window. “Jó napot,” he said, smiling. Good day.

  The guard bent down and glanced into the car at Attila and Don, and asked for Attila’s papers. Attila handed over his passport and car registration and reclined his seat while the guard took his information back to the booth. Inside the adjacent station, the fax machine was kicking up a document titled “Emergency National Search Warrant.”

  A few minutes later Attila watched the guard head back in his direction. Attila put a smile back on his face. “Step out of the car, please,” the guard said, as six marksmen with rifles crawled toward the car.

  third Period

  Twenty-six

  The thief had been in custody for a little over an hour when Moun
d of Asshead burst into the precinct house near the Danube River jogging path. So far, the cops who’d been questioning Gabi had succeeded only in getting him to ante up the name of a common rodent. “Patkány, patkány, patkány,” Gabi said like a broken record. Rat, rat, rat. He repeated the word for so long, you could almost count time by it, which, since there was no clock in sight, was precisely what Gabi was trying to do.

  Normally, the undersize Mound wasn’t much use as an intimidator of anything but inanimate objects. But the Whiskey Robber case had shaken something deep in his potbelly. To him, it was the reason his best friend, Lajos, had been driven from the force. And thus it was the root cause of an even more painful development: the ascension of the most condescending member of the robbery squad, József Keszthelyi, to robbery chief, even though Mound had been the longtime deputy and had more years on the job.

  Mound descended on the cell where Gabi was being held and asked the precinct cops to step out of his way. That was the moment at which two distinct versions of how Gabi came to cough up his own name, and then that of his accomplice, were born. One version, Mound’s, involves precision psychological pressure; the other, Gabi’s, entails a series of crushing body blows, which, since he was handcuffed, he was helpless to deflect.

  Either way, just under three hours after his capture, Gabi provided the details necessary to enable Lajos Varjú’s successor, József Keszthelyi, to become the first member of the robbery department to meet the Whiskey Robber. Like Gabi, Attila had given himself up without a fight. But Keszthelyi wasn’t taking any chances. When word came in from Ártánd that Attila was in custody, Keszthelyi ordered the border guards not to transport him from the premises. He wanted Attila handcuffed and put in the holding pen in the border station’s basement. He was coming to pick up the robber himself.

  When Keszthelyi pulled up to the border about 7:00 p.m., a television truck bearing the insignia of Hungary’s MTV broadcasting channel was already parked outside. Keszthelyi went inside, brushed past Kriminális reporter József Jónás, and bounded down the stairs to the station’s basement, where he found exactly what he hoped not to see in the holding pen: nothing. No Whiskey Robber, no guards, not even a note.

  Keszthelyi scrambled back outside. One of the border guards pointed him toward a cornfield behind the building, where the outline of two men was barely discernible in the early-evening light.

  Keszthelyi drew his Jericho pistol from his belt and began walking toward the figures, watching the steam from their breath waft into the January night. As he got closer, he could see they were both looking away in the direction of Romania. Then, without turning, one of the men called out to Keszthelyi. “Regards, Mayor,” the voice said. Keszthelyi stopped in his tracks as Attila looked back over his shoulder at the new robbery chief. It was then that Keszthelyi got his first look at the man the Budapest police had been chasing for just a week shy of six years. He was attached by a thick leash to a border guard, taking a leak in the field.

  When Attila finished urinating, Keszthelyi wordlessly herded him into the back of his car, along with the evidence the border guards had collected from Attila’s purple Opel: a Browning, a Parabellum, and a Tokarev pistol, 18 million forints ($77,000), a bottle of whiskey, and a Bernese mountain dog. After giving a short statement to the Kriminális reporter, he cuffed Attila’s hands to a metal bar in the backseat and took off for the Death Star.

  Back in Budapest, news of the Whiskey Robber’s capture had spread like syphilis, and reporters who had never covered hockey before were homing in on the UTE locker room like flies around an outhouse. After the radio reporter’s shrieks reached the bench at the end of the first period of the UTE-FTC showdown, the shaken UTE players gathered to discuss forfeiting the game. But they were ahead, 4–2, and without confirmation of the rumors about their teammates, they decided to continue. In the remaining two periods, UTE surrendered five unanswered goals and lost, 7–4. (They would also lose all twelve remaining games that season.) When the final horn sounded, the players tramped back to their smelly quarters in a stupor. Even Bubu, still a member of FTC, hypnotically followed his former UTE team-mates instead of going to the visitors’ changing room, where his clothes were hanging.

  The players sat mutely at their lockers. The information about their teammates—which judging by the number of reporters stationed conspicuously around the room appeared to be true—was difficult to digest. Hungary hadn’t had such a universally well regarded figure as the Whiskey Robber since anyone could remember. The hats, the wigs, the headlines, the demoralized officials, all that stunning criminal work—had it been the Chicky Panther all that time? And what about Gabi? On the one hand, the squirt had become even flashier than Attila with his cars and fancy house, and it was no secret that he experimented with expensive drugs. But donning police uniforms and robbing banks? He’d grown up in housing built by the OTP.

  Bubu was afraid, correctly, that Attila’s arrest meant he was already under suspicion of having been involved in the Whiskey Robber’s six-year spree. Zsolt Baróti, who’d just spent New Year’s with Attila, was sure the police had the wrong guys. No one with as much fame and money as the Whiskey Robber could possibly be as unhappy as Attila. Some of the other guys were stoked, though they weren’t about to admit it. The few who agreed to talk to the media expressed surprise.

  “He didn’t look like a gangster,” Kercs Árpád, an ex-captain of UTE who was at the stadium, told Mai Nap of Attila. “I’m shocked by the news, although I remember when he arrived to practice in an exquisite car, several people joked, ‘Look, the mafioso arrived.’ But I never thought he would rob banks.”

  “He stood out as a hardworking man,” the diminutive UTE manager Gustáv Bóta told Magyar Hírlap of his Panther. “If Attila Ambrus needs anything in prison, he can count on me.”

  On the opposite side of town, three robbery department detectives crashed through the door of the superintendent’s flat at Villányi Street 112. Only one item, found under the sink in the kitchen, was seized as evidence: a plastic bag stuffed with dozens of neatly clipped newspaper articles chronicling post office, travel agency, and bank robberies dating back to January 1993.

  Lajos Varjú was behind his desk at the Blue Moon, trying to go home for the night if only his phone would stop ringing. First it was Mound, relaying the news that the Whiskey Robber and his accomplice had been caught. Then it was a reporter from Mai Nap looking for a reaction. “Aren’t you bitter that you weren’t present at the arrest?” the reporter asked the former robbery chief, with tabloid tact.

  “To me, the police is in the past,” Lajos said, lying. “I’m happy for the success of my colleagues and I congratulate them.”

  Click.

  The elevator doors on the seventh floor of the Death Star opened just before midnight, spilling the contents everyone had been waiting hours to see and someone’s Bernese mountain dog.

  Keszthelyi and Attila confidently walked each other down the hall, stone-faced, the way men do when pretending not to want an audience. Attila, hands cuffed in front of his waist, walked ahead of the robbery chief. What did Keszthelyi care what his arrestee did? As soon as they reached the end of the hall, the Whiskey Robber’s show was over.

  Keszthelyi had already planned it out. On the ride back from the border, he hadn’t said one word to Attila, letting him boil in his own soup all the way to Budapest. Keszthelyi knew Mound had gotten only vague details related to seven or eight robberies out of George Orbán’s brother, but Keszthelyi wasn’t going to stop at that. Nor would he perform his interrogation in one of the closet-size one-way-mirrored rooms, where Gabi had been sweating until only an hour ago. Keszthelyi wanted everyone to watch him pick apart the Whiskey Robber. When he and Attila reached the open secretary’s station between his corner office and the conference room, the robbery chief directed Attila to sit down at the large triangular table as the detectives fanned into positions from which to observe.

  Everything was set for Keszth
elyi to begin when Attila committed yet another robbery. Before Keszthelyi could start, the Whiskey Robber turned his hazel eyes up to his captors and announced, “Gentleman, I have failed.” Then he asked for a map. If the moment had belonged to the robbery chief, it didn’t any longer. For the next sixteen hours, as Don bounded up and down the hallway, sniffing shoes, the police listened as Attila detailed all twenty-six of his robberies over the past six years as if he were delivering a keynote. Attila recounted in chronological order disguises, bank tellers, video cameras, escape routes, and the exact count of his bounties. Every couple of hours, Keszthelyi sent another member of the robbery department charging to the archive room to search for files that had been gathering dust for years. Not even the typist could keep up with Attila’s story. At 4:00 a.m. her hands cramped into bear claws and she had to be replaced.

  Attila was still going the following morning when the Hungarian media gathered on the main floor of the Death Star in the large auditorium normally reserved for conferences. Keszthelyi, who had gone downstairs to listen, looked on as the new Budapest police chief, Antal Kökényesi, announced that the dangerous serial robber known as the Whiskey Robber had been captured. Yes, he was the UTE hockey goalie known as the Chicky Panther. Yes, he had been part of the Interior Ministry’s team since 1988. Yes, his accomplice was George Orbán’s kid. No, not the Goal King, the other one. The thief had indeed confessed to several of the robberies, Kökényesi reported, though he could not give a number yet since it seemed to be increasing by the hour. Asked how many heists the police had physical evidence to prove were committed by the Whiskey Robber, Kökényesi glanced over at Keszthelyi, then back at the reporters in front of him. “Eight,” he muttered.