Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  But the ski holiday turned out to be unexpectedly fruitful. The weather was so frigid and relentlessly overcast that hardly anyone wanted to go outside, so Attila spent most of the days with the mountain to himself. By the end of the first afternoon, he was almost able to make it down the piste without turning. At night, he collapsed in exhaustion, curling up with Judit in the backroom pub and ordering his beers by metric length in waist-high beakers. Above them on the walls like cave art were dozens of bear, deer, and ram skins.

  The inn’s owner was a heavy, ruddy-faced man named Hansi, who liked to chat with his guests about their day, their favorite Heffeweisen, or the type of hooker they would like for the evening. Hansi, whose family—like many of Austria’s—had once lived in Hungarian-speaking regions before the post–World War I fire sale, spoke enough Hungarian to get by, and one night when Attila and Judit’s family were eating dinner he stopped by their table. By Attila’s deference to Judit’s parents on the Budapest small talk, Hansi guessed that he wasn’t part of the city clan. Hansi’s curiosity was piqued, and before the group finished dessert, he was tableside again.

  “So, where are you from?” he asked Attila.

  “Transylvania,” Attila replied, since Judit’s parents already knew and he sensed something in Hansi’s familiar peasant face and evident interest in him that seemed worthy of a powwow. Indeed, for the first time in Attila’s life, his birthplace couldn’t have been more auspicious. A short chuckle escaped Hansi’s lips as he glanced distractedly around the room, then swooped his large head toward Attila’s ear. “Can you get me some pelts?” he whispered in passable Hungarian.

  Attila looked up at the fur-covered walls and racked his mind for whom he might go to for such a thing. He came up with nothing except a vision of himself flush with deutsche marks. “Why not?” he said, securing the first business deal that would change his life.

  Seven

  UTE Stadium

  Budapest

  May 1991

  The apple red Opel Astra careened into the lot with a squeal. It slowed, then turned out again, making a tight loop around the parking area before pulling up next to the hollowed-out cement block that served as the stadium snack bar. A group of players—Bubu, Pék, Gábor Lantos, and some others—were enjoying a pre-practice feast of zsíroskenyér, or bread with fat, fifty forints, or three cents a slice, from the girl at the counter.

  The Opel didn’t look familiar, but the driver, the players soon noted with incredulity, did.

  “Hello, boys,” Attila said with a wide grin as he climbed out of the driver’s seat. “Don’t we have a practice to go to?”

  There were a number of responses such a comment could have elicited. The one that surfaced came in the form of a question.

  “What did you do, knock off a bank, Panther?” Bubu asked. Given that beneath Attila’s sweats was most likely someone else’s underwear, it didn’t seem an unreasonable query. But by 1991, Budapest had become a place where the fortunes of even a disgraced Zamboni driver could change overnight. The privatization process—by which everything from factories to hotels was dealt away to the best-bankrolled or most-connected bidder—was making multimillionaires of former apparatchiks. Minting was also available to anyone who had the sagacity to recognize a demand without a supply—be it for bananas, girls, leather, heroin, twentieth-century furniture and electronics, or maybe even Transylvanian animal pelts.

  The massive influx of Western capital had transformed Hungary into a remarkably fertile business center—as well as a magnificent dreg drain in continental Europe’s big sink. Budapest was full of crooks. Employment opportunities unheard of during the law-and-order days of communism were springing up everywhere, particularly in wholesale merchandising such as drug running, arms dealing, and car swiping. Pimping and prostitution was also a growth sector. And if you could make your cash here, you could launder it at any of the growing number of local banks conveniently unencumbered by any laws regulating the previously nonexistent financial service industry.

  Budapest’s reinvigorated underworld and its fast-growing tentacles were soon of enough concern to U.S. interests that each of the top American law enforcement officers made official visits to the Hungarian capital: CIA director William Webster, FBI director William Sessions, U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, and Drug Enforcement Agency director Robert Bonner all sampled the goulash. László Tonhauser, the unfortunate new head of Hungary’s organized crime division, explained to them his untenable predicament. “If I start to take out of circulation a couple of big entrepreneurs who are leaders of criminal gangs, I will be labeled anti-entrepreneurial,” he said.

  But ideology crisis was only the beginning of the problems for the Hungarian police. With the government wary of funding a police force previously viewed as the right arm of an oppressive state, the Interior Ministry, responsible for crime-fighting, was forced to subsidize its paltry budget by renting out its employees and sniffer dogs to private security companies. Some police precinct houses in Budapest couldn’t afford to pay for their electricity. There were only a few cars to go around, and none of them were as fast as the ones speeding away from crime scenes.

  Rather than stay on for approximately $100 a month, many of the more capable cops left the department for the private sector, leaving a remarkable group of individuals in charge of stemming the country’s unforeseen crime epidemic. The force was a farce. In 1990 alone, more than a thousand of Hungary’s cops were themselves arrested on corruption charges. The rest of the newly hired gang were merely incompetent, overmatched, or miserable.

  Lajos Varjú, a twenty-eight-year-old constable working the burgeoning pickpocket beat, would eventually, and somewhat unfairly, become famous for being all three. He was a short, thick, barrel-chested man with a black mustache, bushy eyebrows, and a shock of dark bangs that hung over his high forehead like a just-crashing wave. Though he laughed easily, Lajos was serious about his work and had the unpredictable intensity of someone who might perform an unexpectedly long Cossack dance at a wedding. In reality, he had no such physical abilities, but he was game enough to give anything a try. Why not? He’d grown up on a southern Hungarian horse farm, spent his post-high-school years hauling furniture around a warehouse, and after only a year in uniform was well on his way to becoming the highest-ranking detective in Budapest’s robbery department. He didn’t know how to be a cop, either.

  But Lajos had learned a lot in a short time just from observing the scene that unfolded daily in the park beneath the window of his fifth-floor office in Budapest’s downtown police headquarters. If you wanted bagmen who could collect unpaid loans, ferry prostitutes around town, or perform other sundry duties on short notice, you pulled your tinted-window vehicle up to the far side of the park in Erszébet Square, the 24-hour lawbreakers’ mini-mart. This dynamic establishment was staffed primarily by members of the new and bedraggled Csíkszereda mafia, fresh out of Transylvania and seemingly oblivious to the fact that they’d set up shop on the police headquarters’ front lawn. The group constituted one of the most unimpressive collections of small-time gangsters since Don Knotts and Tim Conway formed the Apple Dumpling Gang. Once, Lajos had to chase a guy he’d arrested earlier in the day back through the park, where the man was laboring to get away while still handcuffed to a metal bench he’d dragged out of the station house. Another arrestee was found by one of Lajos’s colleagues suspended Spiderman-style inside the police building’s heating ducts. The Erszébet Park gang was so bizarre that Lajos began calling the place Planet of the Zorg.

  None of it was what Lajos had expected to encounter in law enforcement from watching dubbed Columbo reruns. But if he thought any of it seemed strange, it was only because he had no inkling just how absurd a career in Hungarian law enforcement could get.

  The 850-mile pelt-smuggling route from eastern Transylvania to the Tyrolean mountains of Austria was fraught with potholed roads and corkscrew turns that would make even a donkey nauseous. Dominated by
stretches of unlit two-lane streets clinging to cliff overhangs and dotted with the occasional Gypsy selling pumpkins or, not infrequently, themselves, the pelt smugglers’ thruway was not to be confused with the autobahn. It was twenty-two hours of hell, done, in Attila’s case, in one uninterrupted charge, alone, without music, and with the thick stench of rotting flesh emanating from the trunk.

  Immediately upon returning from the ski trip to Hansi’s lodge, Attila had begun plotting such a trip home to Transylvania to find pelts. For starters, he needed a visa. He also would require a car.

  He had cobbled together enough money from his odd jobs and by borrowing from teammates to purchase a ten-year-old brown Russian Lada Samara for 100,000 forints ($1,400) from George Pék’s father, who ran the garage at the Interior Ministry. It would be arranged so that someone would forget to remove the Interior Ministry license plates from the vehicle, giving Attila a premium insurance policy against being pulled over by kickback-hunting traffic cops. Lesser strategists might also have recommended he learn to drive. But when the Romanian consulate’s approval for Attila’s travel visa came through, our man opted to set off for points east before someone levied another processing fee. He figured he would learn to drive as he went.

  The 450-mile ride to Csíkszereda took Attila ten hours, but not because he kept stalling at the traffic lights in Budapest. The big holdup was the line of horse carts moving like low-budget parade floats through the snowy mountain passes. When Attila finally got to his aunt and uncle’s apartment, they were so overjoyed he’d returned that they let him gobble down his food standing up without bothering him with any questions. At his request, they hadn’t told his father he was coming.

  Csíkszereda didn’t seem to Attila particularly different without Ceauescu. There were no Securitate marching around, of course, but the place looked as gloomy as ever. Romania’s economy was so bad that people were using their bank notes, or lei, as toilet paper, which they could no longer afford to buy. Just three streets away, Attila’s father sat jobless and alone over an empty pálinka bottle in his dark third-floor apartment, indifferent that the room’s only lightbulb had gone out hours earlier. Food was scarce and still strictly rationed. Attila’s uncle—who was making an unlivable pittance operating a crane at construction sites—put victuals on the table thanks to handouts from farmer friends. Needless to say, Uncle László had an interest in helping his nephew get his smuggling career off the ground. It was one of his contacts who sent them, on a snow-dusted January day, north over the hills to Csángóföld, in search of “Uncle Béla,” the pelt king.

  Split by roaring rivers and shaped by jagged cliffs on one side and rolling fields on another, Csángóföld is the Transylvania of Transylvania. It is so remote and untouched that livestock rule the roads and avuncular pelt monarchs can take hours even for locals to find. As Attila and László rode through the winding boulder-strewn byways and past the creekside wooden shack villages, they spun off down auxiliary routes to avoid pig and sheep flocks and passed carriages full of peasants whose language they could barely understand.

  The misturns and misunderstandings were to be expected. Much of Transylvania was so snow-saddled and inaccessible that over the centuries it had become, and has remained, something of a real-life Oz populated by little-known tribes: Saxons speaking German, Germans speaking Schwab, Gypsies speaking Roman (not to be confused with Romanian), Székelys speaking an ancient form of Hungarian, and Csángós speaking their own Hungarian-Romanian blend. To the rest of the world, they may as well have been vampires.

  Attila and László had at least one thing in common with Béla the Csángó pelt king. They were each from one of the two primary tribes of Hungarians still living in Transylvania: Béla’s Csángós, and the Székelys, from whom Attila and László descended. The similarities between the two groups, however, end there.

  The Székelys are the only tribe of Hungarians that traces its lineage all the way back to Attila the Hun, who conquered the Carpathian basin nearly five hundred years before Árpád’s ninth-century arrival. As the oldest known ancestors of the Hungarian people, the Székelys feel they played a special role in the country’s history that is too often over-looked. Imagine a Scotsman who is always carping about the unattributed inventions and contributions of his people (the kaleidoscope, the bicycle, the decimal point, the television… ). Multiply the Scot by a factor of ten and feed him fifteen pálinkas at a bar in Tomorrowland. That’s a Hungarian (the Rubik’s cube, 1956, nuclear fission, the carburetor, the croissant… ). Now consider that the Székelys are “the most Hungarian of Hungarians,” or a Hungarian squared. And it started with a tough from the fifth century named Attila, who achieved such renown that generations of Hungarian parents named their children after him and generations of English-speaking people incorrectly assumed that the Hungarian people are called the Hungarians after him. (Hungarian is actually derived from the Turkish word onogur, meaning ten tribes, close enough to the seven that Chief Árpád united to form Hungary; the Hungarians call themselves Magyars, or, in English, Men.) Even though Attila the Hun died a rather unglamorous death at forty-seven by nosebleed, his fearless warrior reputation was passed on to the Székelys and led to their all-important assignment by future Hungarian kings as the country’s border guards. In exchange for the Székelys’ courageous (and not altogether successful) service over several centuries of war, the Székely tribe was accorded special rights, such as tax exemption and, not infrequently, early and gruesome death.

  Battle losses in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries to the Mongolian Tatars and the Ottoman Turks nearly led to the extermination of the Székely nation, as the tribe was known. Then in 1764 the Hapsburgs swept through Transylvania, killing thousands of Székelys in a bloody nighttime attack. The remaining Székelys dispersed throughout the Carpathian basin, founding towns with such imposing names as God Help Us and God Receive Us. Along with folk music and woodcrafts, the fabled warrior tribe soon developed a line of memorable tombstone epitaphs, including “I’d rather be dead and lying down here than alive like you standing up there.”

  After Transylvania was turned over to Romania in 1920, a movement for Hungarian repatriation reignited Székely pride. A Székely national anthem was written, and the entire eastern part of Transylvania, including Csíkszereda, became and is still known as Székelyföld, or Székelyland. But the Székelys found they could only watch from the intricately carved woodwork as Romanian history books were rewritten to show that the Székelys were descendants not of Attila the Hun but of the early Romanians who had lived in the area in the second century, a view that supported Romania’s claim to Transylvania. A pleading 1940 essay “The Székleys Are Magyars” is a mere hint at the tribe’s desperation for recognition and Attila Ambrus’s heartache at being called a Romanian even in Hungary.

  The Csángós, on the other hand, had done everything in their power to remain hidden from the rest of the world. Few people, including the Csángós themselves, are positive of anything regarding their history, but the prevailing local wisdom is that they were originally Székelys who split from the tribe in the thirteenth century because of their unwillingness to fight against the Tatar invasion. Instead, they wandered away—or csatangol-ed—into the hills and forests beyond Székelyföld, where most of them now live in what has become known as Csángóföld.

  After sliding through snow and dung for hours and inquiring discreetly in their best Székely-inflected Hungarian Csángó dialect at places like the Vadász (Hunter) Bar, Attila and László arrived at last to the base of a large hill in the middle of Nowhere, Nowhere. A small wooden house stood on the side of the road, in front of which was a tall, lithe man doing nothing. Attila and László got out of the car and cautiously approached.

  “Are you Béla?” László asked.

  “No,” Béla said.

  “But we were told you were Béla,” Attila said.

  “No,” Béla said.

  “Do you know Béla?” László said.


  “No,” Béla said.

  “But you look like Béla,” Attila said.

  “No,” Béla said.

  “How would you know, if you don’t know him?” Attila said.

  “I said I don’t know him,” Béla said.

  “We know,” László said. “But how do you know what he looks like, then?”

  “I don’t,” Béla said.

  “Right, you already said that,” Attila said.

  “I did not,” Béla said.

  An ice-chilled wind was sucking away the day’s last light. Attila turned the conversation to the pan-Transylvania-accepted topic of pálinka, a sip of which he sorely needed. As chance would have it, the Csángó in question was carrying a flaskful in his jacket pocket. They drank as darkness began threatening and the last of the day’s hay-filled horse carts jerked over the bridge.

  “Hello, Béla,” two men yelled from the road.

  After a minute, Béla looked at his Székely visitors. “What do you want?” he said.

  “Szrme.” Pelts.

  Béla said nothing. He had recently returned from a freezing overnight excursion to his special spot in the woods. There, his regular three “chasers” had performed well, scaring an ark full of animals into the clearing over which Béla presided, rifle-sighted and ready, in a wooden fort built forty feet up a lone tree. Of course, it was illegal. But he was a damn good shot.

  Béla turned and started walking toward the steep snow-covered hill, past the small house, through a fence, over the blackening field, and toward a red barn Attila and László hadn’t noticed behind a shroud of spidery bare weeping ash. They followed.

  Béla threw the latch, sucked in a chestful of air, and pushed open the gate. Almost half a century in the business, and he still wasn’t used to the smell. Up and down both sides of the cavernous barn, hanging by their haunches on metal hooks, were about a dozen bears, wild boars, deer, rams, and badgers. It was like being backstage at The Lion King.