Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  A few of the customers nearby saw what was happening and screamed. Attila wheeled around and began to yell. “Bank robbery! Bank robbery! Everyone on the ground!”

  He couldn’t even see all the way to the other end of the room, but it appeared that the number of people inside had multiplied while he was at the front door. Including customers and employees, about forty people were inside the bank. “Bank robbery! Bank robbery!” Attila shouted again, running up and down the length of the cavernous space. He took an earpiece out of his pocket and put it in his ear, mumbling into it every few seconds so as to appear to be working as part of a team.

  When it seemed that everyone was quiet and on the floor, he went first to the two currency exchange booths on the side of the main hall for the foreign money. He took a plastic bag out of his duffel, leaving the bigger bag on the counter. Inside the duffel was one of Attila’s regular closed for technical reasons signs that he’d made for the occasion but had forgotten to hang when he went to the door with the teller.

  Attila started digging into the foreign-exchange desk’s loot. The drawers were full of piles of Italian lire and U.S. dollars and German marks, which he stuffed into the plastic bag. Afterward he ran to the main strip of tellers, yelling, “Money, money, money!”

  Though he was too drunk to realize it (and had no accomplice to warn him), he was working far more slowly than usual. The robbery was already thirteen minutes old. Sirens began sounding in the distance, but Attila knew that none of what he was doing mattered if he didn’t come away with at least 20 million forints ($86,000). Booth by booth he went, emptying the drawers, as the sound of sirens got louder.

  When Attila finally reached the front door, ready to run, sixteen minutes had gone by since he’d started the robbery. The police would have been inside the building already were it not for the fact that the first two cars responding to the call had gotten into separate accidents along the way, one of them flipping over as it turned the corner onto lli Street.

  Attila stood confusedly pulling at the handle on the front door, having forgotten the key was in his jacket pocket. Dozens of police units were careening down the street toward him. Hoppá, he kept saying. Hoppá! Uh-oh! As a forest of blue lights sprung up outside, Attila took out his gun and aimed it at the lock. He’d also forgotten about the back exit.

  “You are surrounded,” said a voice over a megaphone on top of one of the police cars. “Come out with your hands up.”

  Attila ignored the warning and began shooting at the lock on the door. The cops in front of the building responded by opening fire. At about the same time, Keszthelyi was pulling up at the scene half a block down the street. Hearing the gun battle, the robbery chief nervously tried to coax a group of onlookers back from what sounded like a gruesome firefight. He knew Attila had nothing to lose.

  Dazed, Attila saw his own blood dripping onto the carpet and turned away from the door, his gun empty. He walked back into the bank, which now seemed to resemble a morgue. Dozens of still, quiet bodies were sprawled out on the floor like a human shag rug.

  Half a mile away, Colonel Zsolt Bérdi was driving down lli Street on his way home from a soccer game with friends when he saw the blue glow looming ahead of him. He turned and headed down the street’s back alley to see what was happening.

  From what Attila could tell, he was only bleeding from bits of broken glass that had sliced his ear and hand. He was able to run, and he did. His hat and glasses flew off his head as he raced toward the bank’s back door that had escaped his mind earlier. It, too, was locked. He called out for the security guard but no one answered, so he went and sought out the old man, who was lying on the ground near his post. “Do you know who I am?” Attila asked him.

  “Of course,” Májor said.

  “Then unlock the back door for me now,” Attila said.

  They went to the back and Attila crashed through the exit into the alley. Outside, a voice on his right yelled, “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Attila took off the other way.

  As Attila ran down the alley, Keszthelyi and two dozen cops stormed into the bank from the front. Attila’s blood was all over the entrance floor. When the cops got inside the bank’s main atrium, forty sets of arms pointed up from the floor toward the back. Keszthelyi ran to the rear door, which was hanging open, just in time to see two of his guys dashing down the alley. He also saw Zsolt Bérdi’s Volkswagen.

  Keszthelyi assumed from the little pools of blood on the bank floor that Attila had been seriously wounded and wouldn’t get far. But he had to be sure, and with one call to the Death Star, Budapest was sealed shut again, along with the country’s borders.

  With the police on his trail, Attila sprinted through a parking lot and then across a busy boulevard, where an oncoming city bus swerved to avoid him. Then he turned down a side street and ducked underneath a parked car as several police units sped past. When he climbed back out, he saw that he was in front of a house. Not wanting to stay on the street, he headed for the backyard, which was separated by a tall chain-link fence. In his haste to get out of sight, he fell headfirst over the fence, breaking two of his fingers and knocking himself unconscious when he landed on the other side.

  All night, the police searched the streets but found no sign of Attila, who was passed out in a thicket of rosebushes three hundred yards from the bank.

  If there had ever been a worse morning at the Death Star, no one could remember it. The rookie cop who’d yelled for Attila to freeze at the bank’s back door and then didn’t fire a shot at him when Attila ran was publicly excoriated and demoted to a desk job. Keszthelyi was so enraged and incredulous that Attila could have gotten away without someone’s help that he told members of his team that he’d seen Bérdi’s car at the scene, insinuating that the investigative chief of the Gyorskocsi Street jail was in cahoots with the Whiskey Robber. When Bérdi got wind of Keszthelyi’s slight, he was so incensed that he decided to resign from the force. (the waterloo of the police, read the headline of the story about the fallout in Mai Nap two days later.)

  About noon, most of the city’s media outlets crammed into George Magyar’s law office for a hastily called press conference in which the Whiskey Robber’s lawyer announced that his client was responsible for the latest heist. And to prove it, he produced Attila’s homemade T-shirt, reading aloud the message Attila had written for the police—“Corrupt cops will never catch me”—which quickly became the newest slogan to be emblazoned upon Whiskey Robber T-shirts and websites.

  Keszthelyi was no longer sure about anything but this: he was in a race against time. Attila had taken a record 51 million forints ($220,000) from yesterday’s robbery. Wherever he was now, he wouldn’t be there for long.

  Attila didn’t have a chance to enjoy his latest publicity coup. After awakening in the rosebushes the night of the robbery, he stayed put until well after midnight, then picked his way through the neighborhood, unwittingly shedding banknotes along the way. He made it to Budapest’s national sports stadium, not far from the Keleti train station, where he slept for about an hour inside the shell of the stadium’s generator. When dawn arrived and he could see people out on the street, he wiped his bloodied face with saliva, shed his wrinkled sports jacket, and hurried to a nearby bus stop, where he caught a ride back to Domonkos’s apartment.

  Hungover and battered, he was having trouble seeing straight when he got home, so he lay down on the floor in what remained of his filthy disguise and didn’t wake up for twenty-four hours. The following afternoon, a Wednesday, two days after the robbery, he hobbled downstairs to the public phone on the ground floor to call Domonkos. Attila needed his Székely friend to go to Transylvania immediately to get him the best fake passport and identification papers money could buy.

  Funny, he couldn’t find his phone card.

  It took Keszthelyi’s team two days to trace the calls from Attila’s phone card, which they’d found in the lli Street bank, inside the bag of extra clothes Attila had forgotten on the
foreign-exchange counter.

  There were three calls on the card, all made on the day of the robbery. Two of them were to 107, the police emergency line. The first was made at 4:45 p.m., reporting a bomb threat to a building on the opposite side of town. Then at 4:49 p.m. there was another call, saying there was a drug deal taking place in a shopping mall parking lot, also across town from the lli Street bank. And earlier in the day one call was made to a mobile phone belonging to a Domonkos Kovács.

  Nine days later, on October 27, Domonkos returned from Transylvania. He was to meet Attila at the apartment at 6:00 p.m. It had turned out that he couldn’t get the documents on the spot, but they were being prepared. At 5:10 p.m. Domonkos was sitting in traffic near downtown Budapest when suddenly he found his homey Honda surrounded by police.

  Domonkos was arrested and put into a car headed for the Death Star. On the way there, he promised himself that no matter what the police did to him or how much they beat him, he wasn’t going to talk. But once he was set down in interrogation room 736, all Detective Keszthelyi wanted to know was how many ways there were to get into Domonkos’s apartment and how many guns Attila was keeping there. Upon realizing that the police already knew not only where he lived but that Attila was hiding there, the hulking Székely collapsed on the floor and began weeping.

  Back at the apartment, Attila was cooking Domonkos a thank-you dinner (beef tenderloin with paprika) and listening to Prime Minister Orbán on the radio, defending his Interior Minister Sándor Pintér against charges of involvement in the mafia-related oil frauds. As Attila turned toward the sink to wash a pot, he noticed something strange. The whole neighborhood had gone silent. There were no cars honking or trams squeaking, nothing but his own increasingly labored breathing.

  He crept to the window and looked out from behind the curtain. On the roof across the street, he could see the outline of several men. They were holding rifles trained at the apartment.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Coming,” Attila called, walking slowly back to the foyer. It had been a good run. But he wasn’t going to make it out of the country. The game was over. He pulled the door open to a hallway filled with black helmets and assault rifles sticking out from behind curved white police shields. Wearing only a pair of shorts, Attila raised his hands in the air for the first and last time.

  ONE LESS SMALL FISH, read the headline in Népszava.

  Thirty-two

  Attila’s trial did not get under way until eight months later, in June 2000. Until then he made only one public appearance, on December 1, 1999, before a military tribunal. He was called to testify in the government’s case against jail guards Károly Benk, János Vajda, and Krisztián Faragó, all accused of aiding Attila’s flight from the Gyorskocsi Street jail. When he took the stand, Attila told the court, “These guards had nothing to do with my escape…. The jail was total chaos. Once I was able to observe this, I realized it was the easiest thing in the world to walk out of that place.”

  Vajda and Faragó were found not guilty. But Károly Benk, who was not carrying the required alarm stick that morning—never mind his explanation that not enough of them existed to go around—was sentenced to five months in jail for negligence and was forced to forfeit his job, pension, and benefits.

  The newspapers and television networks were sated with Whiskey Robber stories provided exclusively by the police and corrections departments, detailing Attila’s meal schedule and living conditions at the Gyorskocsi Street jail. But little of what was published and broadcast was true. Attila was not even at Gyorskocsi. He was being held across the river in a government building near the Metropolitan Court, in a special all-glass cage built five years earlier for the country’s most notorious serial killer, Magda Marinkó, a convicted butcher of four. In order to reach Attila’s new residence, one had to pass like Maxwell Smart through thirteen steel doors, none of which would open until the previous one was sealed.

  Despite his hermetically sealed existence, Attila’s first couple of months of captivity were somewhat of a relief. He was mentally exhausted from his 109 days on the lam. But slowly his severe new environment became oppressive. He could not see out of his cell; the glass on all sides was a one-way mirror. A video camera and bright light shone on him twenty-four hours a day. He showered and ate all of his meals in the cell and was only occasionally permitted up to an hour of exercise in a small interior corridor. He passed the time by starting to write another book, picking up his story from his escape and detailing his three subsequent robberies, for which he had signed confessions. Often he had no idea what time or day it was.

  News of his capture had made headlines from Berlin to Perth and publications such as Time and Foreign Policy. But the only time Attila himself appeared in the media—even inside Hungary—was during an interview with the Hungarian television network TV2, which paid George Magyar an undisclosed sum for exclusive access. Seated in an unidentifiable white room in handcuffs and wearing a black shirt and silver tie (sent to him by Éva), Attila appeared at turns resigned, pensive, and angry. Asked about the conditions of his confinement, he said that he had almost suffocated to death recently when his cell filled with steam because the guards wouldn’t turn off his hot water after a shower. After the TV2 piece aired, the national prison commander banned all further media access to Attila, citing security reasons.

  In Attila’s absence, Magyar began making media appearances on his client’s behalf, with questionable benefit. Attila’s lawyer was already under investigation by the Budapest Chamber of Lawyers, the local bar association, for possible ethics violations stemming from his hand-delivering Attila’s homemade T-shirt to the police while Attila was still at large. And worse for Attila, Magyar’s new round of declarations that Attila’s confession was illegally extracted undermined his client’s most dearly held and publicly resonant virtue, his honesty.

  Attila, who had a small television in his cell and Éva and Zsuzsa working as his personal newspaper-delivery service, cringed every time he saw Magyar’s melodramatic promise to appeal any conviction “straight to Strasbourg.” He thought about firing Magyar but didn’t know where else he would turn with his court date looming. Meanwhile, the media slowly began to turn against Attila, asserting that his story was pure myth concocted by a greedy, opportunistic lawyer who represented a new breed of unscrupulous American-style “star attorneys,” or sztar ugyved. Some Hungarians began blaming the Whiskey Robber’s undue popularity on an amoral media, prompting several soul-searching articles in the newspapers. There was a clear sense of shame emerging that, however it had happened, the country had participated in making a criminal out to be one of the first modern international symbols of its culture.

  Sealed up inside the serial killer’s cell, Attila came to believe that his support had disappeared entirely, which was certainly not the case. For months after his arrest, a small shrine of whiskey bottles and roses sat on the sidewalk in front of Domonkos’s apartment building, the street-level wall of which bore the spray-painted sign: viszkis: 29; bm: 2, as if it were a final score for the ages. At the Vidám Theater downtown, yet another production featuring the Whiskey Robber opened, titled Everyone Must Resign. It starred Zsuzsa Csala, the most prominent of Attila’s supporters, playing the part of a bank teller dreaming of being robbed by “you superprince, Whiskey Robber.” Throughout the show’s sold-out run, from the fall of 1999 through the winter of 2000, Csala did not make it through a performance without having to pause during her big musical number to let the applause subside. And when a popular pro soccer coach was fired from the Hungarian ZTE team, supporters gathered at the team’s offices to protest, at one point reflexively breaking into a chant of “Attila Ambrus! Attila Ambrus!” In the hearts of many of his countrymen, the Whiskey Robber was alive and well.

  The prosecution ultimately charged Attila with sixty-five different counts of robbery (several of which were for taking guns from guards); “several” counts of attempted murder, for the occurrences at
Heltai Square, as well as at the final OTP robbery in which Attila had tried to shoot his way out the front door; and “thirty to forty” counts of “violations of personal freedom,” for holding people against their will. The total tab of the stolen money was 196 million forints, or approximately $840,000.

  To Magyar’s growing frustration, Attila refused to recant, or even repudiate, his confession. There would be no argument over the charges for the twenty-nine actual incidents of robbery Attila committed, nor the single failed attempt.

  For the purposes of the trial, the prosecutor’s office had combined Attila’s case with those against Gabi, János, Domonkos, and Karcsi. The only member of the band not represented at the prodigious Hapsburgera Budapest Metropolitan Courthouse was Attila’s cousin and first accomplice, László Veres, who had successfully remained hidden inside his small home in remote Fitód.

  The proceedings began in the first week of June 2000 and continued every Tuesday and Thursday beginning at 8:00 a.m. and followed the same routine: The four lesser known bandits were led in through a door on the right of the cavernous frescoed chamber and lined up shoulder to shoulder in the proscenium facing the long, dark oak bench. George Magyar and a gaggle of defense lawyers in long black robes streamed into a box on the right, while across the way in the opposite set of benches, prosecutor Ferenc Hoffer sauntered in, followed by an assistant carrying an overstuffed carton of papers. Then came Judge Magdolna Németh, the unflappable blond-haired, bespectacled woman who would decide the fate of the accused. When everyone was settled into place, a member of the Hungarian National Guard posted at the right-side door relayed word through a mouthpiece to a squadron of police, who sealed the small street outside that was lined with government office buildings. A few minutes later the oversize wooden door creaked open and in they came—one, two, three, four, five commandos preceding the Whiskey Robber into the room, two of them wearing ear-pieces and one leading Attila by a thick nylon leash that was latched to a metal belt around his waist.