Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  Attila had never thought of himself as a politically minded person. But it was hard not to wonder what the $2 billion of U.S. corporate investment in Hungary, which the Hungarian government had touted as a triumph for its people, had done for him besides presenting the opportunity to bet the house on a round of roulette. In the neighborhood near the Las Vegas Casino, where Attila got his Opel waxed, the local mayor backed a foreign company’s $1.2 billion proposal to build an office tower with luxury shops and apartments that required knocking down part of the historic old Jewish Quarter and displacing thousands of people. “Why sell to foreign interests?” complained one resident at a raucous town hall meeting on the issue. “Local entrepreneurs should be given a fair chance.” Half of Attila’s teammates had resorted to setting up fictional international businesses just to get the tax breaks offered to foreign companies.

  To make matters worse, Hungary’s privatization process was beginning to look more like a crash course in cronyism and money laundering than an equal opportunity method of redistributing state-owned holdings into public hands. Valuable buildings and companies formerly owned by the communist state were being bestowed (for little or even nothing) on the ruling political party and its allies, after which they were sold for hundreds of millions of dollars—to yet another branch of the government. With that as the new prototype, some Hungarians began referring to the postcommunist era as szabad rablás, or “free robbery.” It was a term that had last been used in Hungary at the end of World War II to describe the Nazis’ pillaging of Budapest before the Russians chased them away. The gravity of those final bloody days of the war was far greater than the sinister but somehow weightless aura of nascent capitalism. But there was one distinct similarity: it was every man for himself. And that was a sentiment with which Attila Ambrus had always identified.

  During one of Attila’s late-evening/early-morning drives, a building on Hvösvölgyi Street up in the northern part of the city suddenly jumped out at him. It was an interesting edifice, he thought, and not only because it was a post office and he was veering into debt. It was also because the structure was located on the opposite side of the district from the police precinct station, a distance he discovered required three minutes and twelve seconds to cover going eighty miles per hour at 3:00 a.m. During heavy traffic times, it would take at least twice that long. Plus, when he popped in for a look at the place during business hours, twice, he saw only female employees, whom he imagined would be less fussy about unorthodox requests for withdrawal. This robbery business wasn’t going to be a regular thing, Attila rationalized; he just needed to get back on track so he and Karcsi could get their legitimate endeavors up and running. And his last gig had been so easy. He’d really have to screw up to get caught.

  Nine

  Police Headquarters

  Budapest

  March 14, 1993

  Major Lajos Varjú’s morning walk through the halls of the Budapest police headquarters—that is, when he didn’t wake up on the torn-up couch in his office—was like going through a surround-sound exhibit of modern Hungary. Up and down the main corridor, leading from the employees’ side entrance to the elevator, were the previous night’s roundups, scuffed-up, stinking, and handcuffed to anything nailed down. Hungary had the highest incarceration rate in Europe, as anyone who followed the Great Paprika Scare might deduce: when lead was discovered in a batch of paprika powder (a staple of the Hungarian diet), fifty-nine vegetable vendors were arrested with remarkable alacrity, thirty-nine of whom were prosecuted for a cornucopia of crimes that had nothing to do with the lead poisoning. Not surprisingly, human-rights advocates were taking a renewed interest in the Hungarian judicial system.

  Between 1991 and 1993, several hundred Hungarian cops were charged with crimes ranging from accepting bribes to running drug smuggling rings. The country’s second-highest ranking police official, General László Valenta, earned from his colleagues the nickname “The 12 Percent,” for the amount he was said to expect funneled into his pocket from every car, equipment, and construction contract he negotiated on behalf of the police department. And the Budapest police chief was reprimanded for “violating secret internal regulations” by the national police chief, who would himself soon be suspected by coworkers and the media of having ties to what had suddenly become Europe’s most volatile mafia scene.

  Hired in 1989, during Hungary’s retooling of its communist police department, Lajos Varjú had been around just long enough to be accepted by the remains of the old guard and not quite long enough to be fired by the new guard. He was outstanding in that he actually cared about fighting crime and, on occasion, could make his thirteen-man robbery squad believe it was capable of doing so.

  Lajos was what some in Eastern Europe might have called a cop’s cop in the same way that those in professional sports describe certain coaches as players’ coaches. Which is to say he loved to drink. Boxes of Gosser beer were kept under his desk. Some days on break, his whole team would fill a flask with whiskey and go down to the McDonald’s on the corner to see how many drinks they could put down over Big Macs and fries. (The record was fifteen shots and three beers.)

  The robbery department offices consisted of a ramshackle two-room command post decorated with a couple of desks, wooden chairs, a threadbare dark brown couch, and, taped to one wall, a rogues’ gallery of photographs and case files that Lajos’s team had little chance of solving. By American standards, it was News of the Weird fodder: a guy ripping off his mother’s Herend porcelain elephant, a gang of Gypsies smuggling restaurant napkins. Armed robbery was still rare, though in the past two months there had been two such incidents involving post offices. The second had occurred the previous afternoon.

  On every day but Sunday, Lajos held his group meetings at eight o’clock. On this Saturday, as usual, there was no one there to listen to him, so Lajos’s assembly took place only as an interior monologue. He slumped back in his chair and looked out at Planet of the Zorg, now crowned by an insistent royal blue TDK sign atop the nineteenth-century former City Hall.

  Around 8:30 Lajos’s men began to file in. There was Zoli, who was as big as a communist statue but ran on sight of a Chihuahua and was pass-out drunk after a single shot. Lajos Seres, the team’s crack crime analyst, was known as “Dance Instructor” because he taught ballet in his spare time and occasionally showed up for his police work in a tuxedo and top hat. “Bigfoot” was six feet seven and had kicks so big that he moved as swiftly and efficiently as an Ikarus bus. And then there was Lajos’s loyal stumplike sidekick, five feet three Tibor Vági, who had an unparalleled gift for rendering police cars utterly unusable, often through the misapplication of the gas pedal or emergency brake, and thus went by Egy Rakás Seggfej, or Mound of Asshead.

  Among the thirteen of them, they had less than twenty years of police experience, three going on fewer squad cars, four guns, and six Polaroid cartridges to last them another twelve months of crime scenes. The pay? Twelve thousand forints ($130) per month, about half a buck an hour. Some of Lajos’s charges kept pigs and chickens in the countryside to supplement their supper tables.

  By 8:45 Lajos’s men were fighting over chairs and spilling their coffee, half of them bogarting cigarettes, the other half complaining about the smoke. These were the usual signs that a meeting would soon come to order.

  “The next one to talk is going to be the doorman tomorrow,” Lajos said, prompting a break in the action.

  “Lali, do you have a cigarette?” Bigfoot asked.

  “No, I don’t have a cigarette,” Lajos said. “Mound just took my last one.”

  “Yeah,” Dance Instructor said. “Why don’t you get it from him? Or would it be too difficult for you to catch him?”

  “Let’s go,” Lajos said. “What does everyone have today?”

  The room went silent.

  “Does somebody want to tell me what’s going on?” Lajos said.

  “Have you read the papers?” Zoli asked.

  �
�I was here until two in the morning with this robbery,” Lajos said. “I didn’t have time to browse the news.”

  Someone handed up a copy of the popular tabloid Kurír, and the group braced for Lajos’s reaction.

  At the top of page three was the headline:

  NO TROUBLE, IT’S A BANK ROBBERY

  “What should a well-situated gentleman do in the early afternoon on a Friday,” the article began. “Naturally, he will supplement his monthly payments with a little private work.”

  Lajos didn’t have to read any further. The country’s cynicism had been ballooning, and with elections only a year away, the government had hired the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to try to repair its negative image. Unless his gang tripped over a clue quickly, Lajos would have to find something important to do outside the office on Monday morning when the police chief held his weekly department head meeting. The brass would not tolerate any bad press like this.

  Lajos didn’t get mad often, but when he did, he transformed the fifth floor of HQ into a well-lit haunted house: doors slammed shut and a domino chain of screams went off up and down the hall. Fortunately, it was Saturday and the only souls Lajos could incite were sitting in front of his face. He threw the newspaper down and stood up. “I want everyone on this case—now!” he shrieked. “I want this guy caught today!”

  All thirteen of Lajos’s men descended like cops on the post office site at Hvösvölgyi, in the western part of Buda, where the robbery had taken place. The office’s employees were summoned and reinterviewed. The thief had apparently come by taxi, during rush hour, and entered in sunglasses just before the office closed. He’d bought a lottery ticket and filled it out at the counter, apparently waiting until the other customers cleared out. Then he produced what one employee said appeared to be a gun from his coat pocket and shouted, “It’s a robbery! Everyone in the back. Chop chop.”

  Lajos compared the description of the perpetrator from this robbery with that of the one two months earlier at Villányi Street. The thief was described as “good looking,” “athletic,” “agile,” “disciplined,” “didn’t waste any movements,” “obviously wearing a wig,” and, oddly, “polite.” Most significantly, Lajos noted, witnesses from the Hvösvölgyi job said the man had gotten into the back by leaping up and grabbing the six-foot-high glass teller booth partition and hurtling himself over it like some kind of poleless Olympic vaulter.

  Lajos had a hunch. There was a military barracks down the block from the Hvösvölgyi Street post office that housed about fifty Hungarian servicemen. Lajos wanted them all checked out. Sure enough, one of them had failed to show up for work the previous day. His picture was collected and shown to the post office employees. “It’s him,” one of them affirmed. By nightfall, Csaba Bencík, a Hungarian border guard, was in custody.

  After reading his excellent review in Kurír, Attila got up off the bench next to his favorite newsstand and walked down to a travel agency near his apartment. It was time to book his first overseas trip. He could afford it. His three minutes of work at the post office had netted him 667,000 forints (or about $7,200), and now he was finally going to take Judit somewhere dreamy. The travel agent recommended the beautiful country of Tunisia. She had a special deluxe package for two she could offer. “Sold,” Attila said.

  Since he still didn’t have a passport, Attila got Egri to take him down to the visa office again. A week later he and Judit were flying to North Africa, an experience Attila found ill-defined by the movies he’d seen. His aircraft was in dire need of a paint job and reupholstering, and the stewardesses all had runs in their nylons. Attila felt sorry for them. Malév Hungarian Airlines, he thought, must be the Dacia of the sky. He chatted up the flight attendants and tipped them well after every drink order—the people’s money circulating back through the people’s hands.

  As for Tunisia, the ruins of Carthage were breathtaking. But so was the stench emanating from the city and the hellhole of a hotel he’d been swindled into believing was a deluxe accommodation. The bed was Flintstones hard, there was no TV, and the buffet food was inedible even to a fan of pig’s feet. Judit, who looked better than ever thanks to the thigh and butt work Attila had paid for, was aghast. After the second night, Attila paid to move them to the nicest hotel in the city, right on the beach, but even that was humiliating because he had to ask Judit to make the arrangements since he didn’t speak French, Arabic, or English. They played some tennis and went swimming in the ocean, but it wasn’t the romantic excursion he had envisioned. By the time they returned, Attila was more insecure about his relationship with Judit than ever. And, once again, he was almost broke.

  On his daily drive to the off-season training sessions at UTE, he began to notice a Budapest Tours travel agency, conveniently situated on a corner not far from the Újpest subway stop. He was still fuming about the Tunisia trip—and the travel agent who had clearly assumed he wouldn’t know the difference between deluxe and decrepit. After UTE’s morning weights session on May 3, Attila decided to stop in at the travel agency to inquire about trips to, say, Croatia. The only employee, a Ms. Csépai, handed him some predictably lovely brochures. “Thank you,” Attila said. “I’ll come back later after I talk to my girlfriend.”

  He left to make a few diagrams and returned a couple of hours later, unrecognizable as the customer who’d been in that morning. Another chump was in the midst of forking over a wad of cash—credit cards were still almost nonexistent in Hungary at the time—so Attila took a seat in an armchair and waited for him to leave. Once he did, Attila stood, pointed his little gun at Ms. Csépai, and more than evened his score with the travel industry. He left with 1.166 million forints ($12,500).

  “You asked to see us,” Mound of Asshead said, entering Lajos Varjú’s office with Zoli, Dance Instructor, and the department’s two newest members, Gábor “the Fat” Tamási and twenty-one-year-old rookie József Keszthelyi, the ice-blue-eyed lady killer.

  “Indeed,” Lajos said. He told them that after they’d all gone home the previous evening, he’d received a call from a certain Sándor Pintér, the national police commander and a towering figure in Hungary who was getting more press lately than he liked. Commander Pintér had a question for Lajos that sounded reasonable enough: How was it that a robbery of a travel agency could take place fifty-five yards from a police precinct station? The answer, Lajos learned, was that the precinct’s alarm call systems were not yet linked to Popeye’s pub, where the station house cops had apparently decided to hold their afternoon meetings. The authorities had become aware of the Budapest Tours robbery only when a Ms. Csépai sent a fax to police headquarters several hours later, informing Budapest’s finest that she still remained hopeful she could leave the office one day, though for the time being she remained locked inside.

  Mercifully, most of the media hadn’t gotten wind of the Popeye’s part, but Lajos’s favorite tabloid Kurír had the robbery covered.

  URI RABLÓ, or GENTLEMAN ROBBER, was the headline.

  According to the article, “the good-looking dandy” walked into the travel office and “haphazardly took out his revolver from his inside pocket. This was in reality a cigarette lighter, but the one-person staff saw some similarities and therefore quickly lifted both her arms in the air…. He almost unknowingly raked in the money… and then while wishing the office manager all the best and kissing her hand, he swiftly left the office.”

  It wasn’t a post office job, but Lajos could see that the robbery had all the markings of the other two recent hits his team had investigated. Similar body type, polite manner, cat-quick movements, a tiny fake-looking gun, and a proclivity for interning the employees. The perpetrator also hadn’t bothered to wear gloves, perhaps assuming, Lajos feared, that the robbery department’s crack staff wouldn’t be able to come up with a single fingerprint suitable for analysis. (Which, of course, it hadn’t.)

  “Did I say you could sit?” Lajos bellowed as his team began to settle into chairs. T
hey stood.

  It was time to shape this group up. Last week, Zoli, the 250-pound pansy, had to be carried back to HQ by two of his colleagues because he’d passed out from two glasses of champagne at a party down the street. What if Commander Pintér had walked into the robbery office the following morning, when Zoli was snoring away on a cot in the middle of the floor, wearing lipstick, high heels, and a garter belt on his head? What would Pintér say if he knew that Mound of Asshead had recently neglected to administer the parking brake on one of their only cars and that when he and Lajos finished an interrogation at a house on top of a hill, they had to dig the mangled vehicle out of a juniper bush at the bottom of the hill?

  “It’s time to get serious around here,” Lajos said. “I want a full analysis of this Batman. I want to know how he’s flying all over Budapest robbing, and we don’t know anything about him. If you don’t know how to do it, go rent some Columbo videos. And, Dance Instructor,” he said to his expertish crime analyzer, “do your thing.”

  Budapest wasn’t exactly New York City. Though the population had increased after World War II as communism created more jobs in the city than in the countryside, the majority of the capital’s 2 million denizens were people whose families had resided in and around Budapest for generations. Asking around in the right places was still the industry standard for finding someone.

  But when Lajos’s men tried their regular street sources, they came up empty. No one in Planet of the Zorg offered anything but amusingly accented drivel. Police sketches were made and published in the papers, but the facial descriptions were too varied. None of the sketches looked alike. Few tips came in; none checked out. Lajos was as frustrated as they all were. Instead of Batman, he began referring to the thief as the Lone Wolf, since he seemed to be working not only alone but in a vacuum.